Advice Line with Julia Hartz of Eventbrite
Today’s callers: Mia from Germany wants to know how to balance her pottery business between an online shop and a YouTube channel. Then, Jen from Connecticut is looking for ways to reach more families with her print magazine for tweens and teens. And Anagha from California wonders how to convince people to embrace the time required for her globally-inspired baking kits.
Plus, Julia reflects on Eventbrite’s recent acquisition announcement, and how in-person events can help brands and creators build community in today’s digital world.
Thank you to the founders of Pottery to the People, Anyway Magazine, and Aunty Misri for being a part of our show.
If you’d like to be featured on a future Advice Line episode—where Guy and former show guests take questions from early-stage founders—leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and a specific question you’d like answered. Send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com or call 1-800-433-1298.
And be sure to listen to Eventbrite’s founding story as told by Julia on the show in 2020.
This episode was produced by Chris Maccini with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Cena Loffredo.
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Leading through radical change with Julia Hartz of Eventbrite
Back as the show’s first-ever ‘three-peat’ guest is Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. The events industry has been transformed by the past three years, giving Julia the opportunity to evolve Eventbrite to better serve its key customers — event creators.
This week on How I Built This Lab, Julia goes back in time to review how she kept a ticketing service afloat when no one was buying tickets. Plus, thoughts on effective leadership from a public company CEO, and Julia’s tips for designing meetings that your colleagues actually want to go to.
Be sure to listen to Eventbrite’s origin story told in February 2020, and Julia’s Resilience series dispatch from July 2020.
This episode was produced by Rommel Wood with music by Sam Paulson and Ramtin Arablouei.
It was edited by John Isabella with research by Kerry Thompson. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray.
You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at hibt@id.wondery.com.
This episode is brought to you in part by Canva, the easy-to-use online design platform for presentations, social posts, videos, websites, and more. Start designing today at Canva – the home for every brand.
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Eventbrite (with Julia & Kevin Hartz)
We're joined by two very special guests, Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz and her cofounder, spouse and Eventbrite Chairman Kevin Hartz, to tell their story of building Eventbrite together (along with their lives and family) from the PayPal diaspora to bootstrapped business, unicorn status, IPO and now starting all over again in the wake of COVID with both a tragedy and a huge new opportunity in front of them as public company.
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New! We're codifying our own Playbook notes and takeaways from each episode, and posting them here in the show notes and on our website. You can read them below or at: www.acquired.fm/episodes/eventbrite
Playbook
Seeing the next technology wave before others do is rare. It provides a roadmap for what to build and invest in if you're willing to bet on that knowledge. Kevin worked at Silicon Graphics in the mid 90's. This led him to realize that internet services like PayPal, YouTube, and many others would be possible long before others (similar to Don Valentine realizing computers would penetrate every industry from his time at Fairchild).
PayPal and its subsequent "mafia" was successful in part because of rapid experimentation. They observed what got used by customers and then doubled down. PayPal's "core" use case on eBay started as an experiment. International money transfer (Xoom) and event ticketing (Eventbrite) also initially started as experiments on the PayPal API before the eBay acquisition — and went on to become large companies.
Julia, Kevin, and their cofounder Renaud had a prototype of Eventbrite running and serving customers even before starting the company — which gave them the confidence to do what seemed crazy on paper, but was actually "de-risked": start a company as an engaged couple, have a remote technical cofounder, bootstrap for 2 years after being turned down by VCs, etc.
When a company is experiencing explosive growth, they often need to leave other huge opportunities on the table. PayPal knew international remittances could be huge, but didn't build it internally because of the need to focus on eBay merchants.
The TAM for bringing an offline behavior offline is often WAY bigger than anything you can calculate beforehand. The range and size of what were previously niche or impossible use cases will often expand dramatically with easy-to-use online tools. This is especially true in long-tail use cases that can only be aggregated by self-serve internet-based software. One early encouraging sign for Eventbrite was its use to host speed dating events in New York. Before Eventbrite, it was nearly impossible to organize, promote, and charge for something like that. Now, organizers could suddenly become entrepreneurs and make real money hosting events like this. Most VCs ignored or were confused by this data (~"Call us when you attack Ticketmaster."), but they missed that it unlocked a massive new market which previously operated only through word-of-mouth and cash transactions (if at all).
All three major dislocations of the 21st century — the tech bubble bursting in 2001, the financial crisis in 2008, and now COVID in 2020 — have only accelerated offline behaviors to online. COVID is unlocking a new wave of online event entrepreneurs for Eventbrite in the same way the financial crisis unlocked a wave of in-person event entrepreneurs in 2008-10.
Starting with just one niche can be incredibly powerful; often your customers will then lead you to more. Before the speed-dating in New York (which was fully inbound), Eventbrite was used to organize tech meetups in the then-smaller tech community in SF. It was even used for the first TechCrunch Disrupt!
Too much capital (and too little accountability) can hurt a company much more than help it. Capital covers up problems, distracts focus from customers, and leads to poor resource allocation. Kevin: "The periods where we had raised the most money privately were the hardest and most difficult for me, because we were really fighting this gravity of overspending and creating inefficiency. And it took us away from our roots as a capital-efficient, highly-effective perpetual motion machine [that we'd had as a bootstrapped company]."
Being a public company not only instills more capital allocation discipline, but can ALSO afford a degree of financial flexibility that just isn't possible as a private company. Within weeks of COVID hitting, Eventbrite dramatically shrunk the size and scope of the company AND raised $375m in new capital from new and longterm shareholders. Both actions would have been difficult to impossible as a private company with a static valuation (and associated anti-dilution, ratchet terms, etc) that no longer reflected the reality of the current situation.
How I Built Resilience: Live with Julia Hartz
Founder Julia Hartz is reckoning with COVID-19's impact on the live events industry, which uses her company, Eventbrite, to sell tickets and market events. While her users are quickly pivoting to virtual events, Julia has been making tough decisions, which include laying off 45 percent of her staff. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Eventbrite: Julia Hartz
In the early 2000s, Julia Hartz was helping develop TV shows for MTV and FX Networks, and seemed headed for a promising career in television. All of that changed in 2003 when she went to a wedding and found herself sitting next to a serial entrepreneur named Kevin. They started dating, and Julia eventually quit her job and joined Kevin in the Bay Area. In 2006 they married, and co-founded the online ticketing service Eventbrite out of a warehouse closet. 14 years after launch, Eventbrite is a publicly-traded company with 1,100 employees and offices around the world. PLUS in our post-script "How You Built That," Tomo Delaney describes how raising two picky eaters led him to create Noshi For Kids; brightly colored fruit puree that kids can paint with.
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Let your customers be your scouts, w/Eventbrite's Julia Hartz
That constant roar of customer feedback? Be thankful for it. It holds all the secrets to your success, if you learn how to read the signs. Listen to what users say, sure. But also watch what they do and interpret what they need. Eventbrite's Julia Hartz embodies this principle. She believes passionately in learning from her customers, and has made rapid response to user feedback the driving force behind Eventbrite’s strategy — as it grew from a simple ticketing app to a full-service platform for event creators, offering everything from ticket sales to custom RFID readers.
Read a transcript of this interview at: https://mastersofscale.com/julia-hartz-let-your-customers-be-your-scouts/
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20VC: Eventbrite Founder, Julia Hartz on The Lessons Learned Scaling Eventbrite to Unicorn Valuation & $3Bn in Gross Ticket Sales
Julia Hartz is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Eventbrite, the unicorn startup that is the world's largest event technology platform, powering over 2 million events around the world each year. They have raised over $330m from some of the greats of industry including Roelof Botha @ Sequoia Capital, Jeff Clavier @ SoftTech, David Saks, Bebo's Michael Birch, Tiger Global and many more. Under Julia's leadership, she has taken Eventbrite to become the world's largest event technology platform and has received multiple accolades for workplace culture, being named the best place to work in SF for 7 years running. Personally, Julia has won numerous awards including Fortune's 40 Under 40, Inc's 35 Under 35 and Most Powerful Female Entrepreneurs.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Julia came to found Eventbrite with her husband Kevin from a small apartment in Potrero Hill and turned it into the unicorn it is today?
2.) How did Julia and Kevin meet? What was the meet-cute? How did that translate into the founding of Eventbrite? How did Julia think about partnering with her fiancee at the time, as a business partner? What made it also a great business partnership?
3.) Why does Julia believe that creating a company is like creating a family? How has Julia seen herself scale as CEO of the company, with the immense scaling and growth of the firm? What have been the challenges and how did she overcome them?
4.) What does Julia believe are the requirements for successful CEO transition? How can this be managed correctly both internally and externally? What other elements made last year a particularly momentus year for change at Eventbrite?
5.) How does Julia think about balancing the immediate elements of the present day with the long-term vision for the roadmap? What is the right mindset to adopt? How does one look to prevent "Innovators Dilemma"? How does Julia split her time?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Julia's Fave Book: Overwhelmed
Julia's Fave Blog: The Skimm
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Julia on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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