Leading through radical change with Julia Hartz of Eventbrite

28:38And Eventbrite is a place where you go to discover great things to do. And that relationship with the consumer as the customer is the biggest shift. And I'd say the big challenge ahead of us is that we're a ubiquitous logo on a ticket. If you go to New York and you ask 10 people on the street, seven of them will say, yeah, I know Eventbrite. Either they'll say, I buy tickets to it for my pursuit or interest. I buy tickets to it for a school event. I go to shows on Eventbrite. Or they'll say, oh, my God, of course I know Eventbrite. I mean, let me show you the events that I go to. And it's really like your playlist of memories.

29:19If you ask the same 10 people, where do you start when you don't know what to do on a Thursday night? Definitely not seven of them are going to say Eventbrite. Yeah, right. So in other words, I remember like 20 years ago when I went out, right? Now I've got children and like I go to sleep at 8. Right. But but but when I didn't do those things, I would open up the Washington City paper or if I was in New York, the Village Voice and you would look to see what was playing, what was going on. And essentially what you're saying is you are pushing to be that that thing that people would just have that page up.

29:58Oh, let's go to Eventbrite and see what's going on. Yes. Yes. And that's a big, tall order, because I would posit that no one. has solved local event discovery. Nobody has. No one has solved that problem. I think about this all the time. Yes. Like, yeah. And Eventbrite is going to solve that problem. And I would say hell hath no fury like a company that has a new lease on life and can see the problem that still persists. and we believe it's our right to win because we're already powering the events you're looking for, right? And we have the knowledge of what's going on and Eventbrite has that ubiquity and it has that trust because we've built it over the last decade and a half.

30:52I mean, in Silicon Valley, being an older company is sort of like being an older person. You like, you know, there's a little bit of like ego ageism that happens. I actually think it's a great virtue. We know a lot about live events through the lens of the hardest thing to do, which is ticketing. It's hard to make money in ticketing, and it's even harder to make a profit. And guess what? We've done both. Yeah. I think the Etsy analogy is actually quite apt because Etsy is a space for all kinds of craftspeople and creators also. There are people who are mass producing. But it is a trusted space.

31:26You know, like every time I'm scrambling to find something for somebody, I'll go to Etsy. Yeah. The problem is that I go down a rabbit hole and then I spent like six hours, six hours later, I'm like, I've been on Etsy for six hours. So but but actually, like you can imagine, right, that if you can position your site as a place for, hey, you know, I want to learn about photography. I wonder if someone's teaching a course or or if there's like a maker affair this weekend or if there's just I'm looking here in San Francisco, there's a dumplings festival coming up on. So there are lots of things. But how do you do that?

32:00Like, do you do bus ads? Do you do social media campaign? It's a marketing challenge, right, to get the awareness out. How do you do that? So we do it through what I would say is like the pull and push mechanisms. We start with our first principle, which is our job to put the right event in front of the right consumer at the right time, wherever they are. We're not building a closed walled garden. Right. You know, people who are interested in building audience are quite sophisticated in what kind of audience they want to build. Yeah. So when you're thinking about professional event producers and organizers, they know more about what they want to be crafting than we do.

32:39Our job is to make it better, faster and more effective for them to do that through Eventbrite than they could do on their own. And so what we focus on is we just rolled out in the back half of 2022 the ability to buy an Eventbrite ad. So now you can promote your event in our highest trafficked surfaces, which is our homepage, our newsletter, our app. You can actually effectively buy clicks to your event. The second thing we did was we actually acquired a company in Q4 of 2020, if you can believe it. It was a marketing company, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were our partner, Tonedin, and they hung in there with us during COVID.

33:20And so we came together at the end of 2020. And in five months, we integrated the team and rolled out marketing tools called Eventbrite Boost to our customers. But effectively, what these marketing tools do is they aggregate the consumer data points on Eventbrite around a certain type of event or a geography. and they help the event producer build a smarter audience for their advertising. Then through our favorite generative AI, we auto-generate ads for them that then they can deploy onto platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever they want to reach more people. And the reason why it's better than DIY is because you're getting like a five to six return on advertising when you do that, five to six X, because we're able to help you build the creative, but then also we're the first party transaction platforms.

34:16So we're actually transacting the ticket. So the creator doesn't have to wait and try to read the tea leaves as to what's happening in order to get that signal. So let's talk about your revenue streams. I mean, primarily it's a cut of ticket sales, but then also advertising or boosting an event, what other ways are you looking at to build other streams of revenue? Well, so 95 % of the revenue comes from ticketing fees. And over 80 % of the time, those ticketing fees are actually paid for by the consumer. And Eventbrite's ticketing fees on average are$3. Yeah, they're low. So when we're talking ticketing, this is not the same thing.

35:00So we've built this business on that. What we've done now is we've brought all of that, you know, advertising and marketing goodness to the front door literally yesterday. So this is new news that anyone who's using Eventbrite has access to all of that tooling and advertising, marketing tooling and advertising for a small per event fee. So we're effectively introducing a two-sided marketplace fee, But I'm talking about like$10 an event for an event that's selling over 25 tickets. So we think this is a great way to balance out what we've built to help event creators drive audience, as well as continue to keep those ticketing fees as low as possible.

35:45Because that's what really matters is the consumer being able to buy a ticket without, you know, getting gouged. Julia, like many, many tech companies, you've also had some layoffs this year. And, you know, when we spoke in 2020 that, you know, you're running a publicly traded company, it is not necessarily the metric, but is one of several metrics, which is the stock price. stock price is considerably lower than about half as much as it was when we spoke in 2020. How do you how does that weigh on you? I mean, do you feel obviously feel responsibility to shareholders, but sometimes there's not much you can do about a stock price.

36:25You know, it's one of those things that they don't tell you when you when you become the CEO, or when you take a company public, they don't tell you both sides of the equation, which is mostly what I heard when we were taking Eventbrite public was, well, first of all, don't go public from currently public. Yeah, public CEOs. And I decided I would never be that person to pass on that advice. But secondly, don't pay attention to the stock price. Just run the business. Yeah. The other side of that is when your employees' stock options are underwater, matter, that's a problem, meaning it puts a lot of morale pressure on.

37:06And while I don't believe in doing anything unnatural to solve for that because we are all in this together and in the long run, we're growing the business, I do think it's something that can become a distraction. So the way that I've approached it is to make sure that everybody has a level playing field on information. So we share quite a lot at Eventbrite. And then to explain the different stages of the stock as it changes. Does it get me down? Yeah, of course it does. I'm human. I mean, this is a really easy indicator of success and I don't feel like it shows. Great. I don't feel like I'm A plus.

37:49But do I know that in the end, any given day will be a very small blip on the radar of a very valuable company that's growing up into the right? Yeah. So, you know, there's no great answer, but you have to stay grounded. And you can't let the stock market or the current stock price dictate what you do. We're going to take another quick break. But when we come back, more from Julia on what it takes to be a good leader in really difficult times. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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40:41welcome back to how i built this lab i'm guy ross here's more for my conversation with eventbrite co-founder and ceo julia hartz i want to ask you about employees because i know So when we had you on the show, like you had free food for employees and a fitness center and a wellness stipend, and maybe you might still have some of that. But I'm assuming like many companies here in the Bay Area, you are at the very least hybrid. And maybe some people are entirely remote. Tell me how you manage just the workforce, the employees. Like coming out of COVID, it's a different time. Employees made different demands and had different expectations.

41:23And with a tight labor market, they had a lot of power for the first time in a long time. So how did you kind of adjust and manage to both retain employees but also to keep expenses down? Well, first, I think starting from a principle of it's not an us against them mentality. And we are a company that puts at the very center of its differentiation as an employer, the idea that you can come here and be the be the whole person you are and that you're cared for. So there's that was just innate in our culture. This has been an interesting evolution. Yeah. And there has been no easy answers. And so I sat back and watched a lot of companies make a lot of proclamations during COVID.

42:12And I kept scratching my head because I sort of thought like, how the hell do you know how this ends up? Like companies that said, we're remote forever. Yeah, on either side of the spectrum, right? Yeah. I couldn't look anyone in the eye and say, I have seen the crystal ball. and after the last global pandemic, here's how we worked. I mean, I have no idea how you would do that. So I didn't. I really like stepped away from that and said, okay, what do we know for right now? And we are making shorter term plans and giving people clarity where you could pick your path. There was a point where we were gonna be hybrid and then where we've arrived today is today we are resetting as a remote first company.

43:04We are the best gathering company in the world. And when I say that, I mean, you are gathering for a virtual meeting. It is going to be an intentional, productive, thoughtful, great use of your time. How do you do that? Tell me how you do that. Because a lot of CEOs are saying to me, what are you doing? How do you do, what are people doing? And I'm getting a lot of different examples. So you're the best gathering place company. Let's just talk about virtually. What does that mean? Yeah. So that means taking a step back periodically about once a quarter, we take a week to scrub the calendar of our regularly scheduled programming and reassess why we meet and what the intention is.

43:52It means making leaders the best conveners. Now I believe that the skill set that a great leader needs at the very top of the list is the ability to bring people together thoughtfully with great intention and productively. Yeah. But how do you make a meeting? Let's just say any meeting, right? Because I hate meetings. And I think a lot of meetings are a waste of time. And I think a lot of times meetings that I'm asked to go to, I shouldn't be at. They're too long and there's just too much stuff that half the people there don't even need to know. I mean, I'm not saying how did you solve this problem?

44:30Because I don't think you have. Nobody has. Like if somebody has, they're going to go to Stockholm and get the Nobel Prize or whatever, Oslo, wherever they give that prize. How are you trying to tackle that problem? How are you making your company a better place to convene gatherings for employees? Well, there's a way that you can do this through expectation setting and through supporting those expectations. So particularly for the meetings that you hate to go to, we're starting with cultural norms of make the main thing the main thing. Yeah. Actually got that from Josh Silverman. I'll give him a shout out on that.

45:04From Etsy. Yep. Yep. And then I think it's it's there has to be a very strong strategic map as to when people meet to solve what problem. Predominantly for the in-person gatherings, because having people fly all over the country or the world and meeting up at offsites, it's exhilarating, but it's also very costly. It's time consuming and it's taxing. And so what we're working on right now for next year is how do we build a system wherein you can anticipate as a Breitling when you'll see your team and you know exactly what you're going to be achieving together? You know, we've been a remote team, all my teams on all my different shows, even before COVID, just because you can work that way in what I do.

45:54And we communicate regularly. And I talk to everybody pretty much every day because I'm tracking a recording or so we were using video interfaces for a long time. You know, I've talked to a lot of leaders now who are like, you know, it's challenging because when you aren't in an office, especially for younger, newer employees, it's hard for them to find mentors. I mean, if you're a 22-year-old joining Eventbrite out of college today and everybody around you is pretty much remote, it's different than when you started, you know, in your career because, you know, you worked in the TV industry, right?

46:28You were working on Jackass and MTV shows and stuff. A lot to learn there. A lot to pick up. Right? And you found some people who thought you were smart and interesting and they helped you. It's much harder now. So do you have any thoughts about how you actually develop talent from within when we're all, many of us are in a primarily remote or hybrid environment? Yeah, I mean, I think if you flip it and you look at it from a blank slate opportunity perspective rather than a recapturing of what was and what worked for us when we were wee little pups. I tend to find that great things happen when you work on a multitude of different projects.

47:11And the advice that I give my niece who just accepted her offer at Microsoft, she's going into a remote team. And my biggest advice is take every single project that comes your way. Like just absolutely knock yourself out. Because the more that you're participating and the more that you're working on different types of projects, that's actually an opportunity we didn't get early in our careers. I was like copying VHS tapes as an intern for MTV. But then also leaders have to care about bringing on younger talent and mentoring them. And there's ways that you can do that remotely that you actually couldn't do that if they were in an office in Spain and you were in an office in San Francisco.

47:54out. Julia, the advice I got when I started my career 25 years ago was be the first one in and the last one out, which is a version of what you told your niece, right? And take on all the assignments that come your way. And I don't give that advice today because I worry that it doesn't resonate quite as well with younger folks. And like when you and I were starting our career, you'd be told, hey, leave your attitude, leave your baggage, leave your personal life at the door. Sorry if you're having a bad day at home, but this is work. Bring your A game to work. That was just normal, par for the course.

48:31And that was the environment that many, many senior executives today and senior leaders in companies grew up with. But now it's different. Now it's bringing your whole self to work, including your challenges, including other things. How do you approach it? How do you accommodate for that? Yeah, I mean, I think about it as you don't have to trade one off for the other. And I want to build a company where you can both be cared for and feel the demands of opportunity. So compassionate and demanding is the paradox that I focus on a lot. And I think that it's, I guess I find it's a fallacy that working hard and being fulfilled with accomplishment is antithetical to wellness.

49:18And I think burnout is real. And I think the mental health challenges that we face during the COVID pandemic present an opportunity for us, an opportunity to have honest conversations, an opportunity to embed support into companies, which I think should be the case, and an opportunity to open up access to mental health support like we haven't had, you know, in our lifetimes, really. But I don't think work is the enemy. Like I think being productive and being in community is the antidote to social isolation and mental health challenges. What about politics? I mean, companies are and maybe it's tapering off a little bit now, but for a while they were really expected to take public political positions.

50:06Either you're in this camp or in that camp. and it became very challenging for companies that, you know, if they were neutral, that essentially they were not. They were, you know, consorting with the enemy or whatever. And this can have a massive impact on your business. You know, if, you know, look at Bud Light, right? Bud Light made a decision and had a huge impact on its business. All kinds of things that just weren't an issue for corporations and companies and public companies a while ago. What do you do? I mean, if there's a big issue, if there's a big, you know, I don't know, you know, something that happens in the United States, what's your position?

50:46Do you as a leader in a company publicly make your views known or do you just say nothing? It's been a journey, that's for sure. And I feel like there was a moment in time where I was sending an email every other week on an issue that was completely out of my control. And it started to feel personally incredibly inauthentic because there has to be space for CEOs to be human and to be learning and growing alongside everyone else. And I reject the notion that a CEO should be, you know, know-all, be-all. Yeah. Like that's really dangerous, right? That's not good. Yeah. So I stepped back from that practice and I really focused on how can we get back to what Eventbrite can do to be a great company.

51:39Eventbrite can advocate for social connection through live experiences. That's right in our wheelhouse. And we can be an active participant in helping to relieve the impacts of social isolation. We stand for freedom of assembly. And that's a really important thing for people to understand when they join the company. And there are things that people aren't going to agree with on the platform. Yeah. Where do you draw the line? I mean, presumably, you know, you would if somebody wanted to have a drag event or something, no problem. But I'm assuming if somebody wanted to have like a, you know, a neo-Nazi rally, not obviously these are not comparable at all, but I'm just just throwing two examples out.

52:26That's that would not be allowed. You draw the line very carefully. And you keep yourself grounded in first principles. What's really important for us is that the decisions we're making, we're making well-informed, well-intentioned, and without subjective bias. And so that's a tall order, right? It is. I mean, how do you decide? Do you have a team or do you do case by case or what? We do have a team. We have a team. We have a set of policies and we have a very, very strong operation. Most of the time, we're not dealing with anonymous online behavior when people get together. So I don't want to give the sense that like this is a big problem.

53:14It's really not. It's something that we have to deal with from time to time, but it's also a place where I think as an organization, we continue to grow and be curious about what it means to stand for freedom of assembly. And, you know, there's been a number of different challenges. like 30 years from now, when I look back on Eventbrite, I want Eventbrite to be known as one of the best companies to work at, where you could do your best work, where you had one of your best managers or best leaders, and where you made a best friend. And underpinning all of that is, I think, how our walking the walk at Eventbrite is that we do the right thing.

53:55Sometimes it's extraordinarily difficult to do the right thing. But I think if your orientation is toward that, then that's where the gravitational pull is going to take you. Yep. Told me in 2020, you said five years from now, so that would be 2025. So we're not there yet, but we're approaching. You said, I want to have slowed down, start to live in a more thoughtful mode to have jumped off the merry-go-round and be less transactional about life and be really thoughtful about how we build the best product for event creators. I think that you are, given what you told me over the course of this conversation, I think you're on that path.

54:28Do you feel like you're on that path? Yeah. Yeah, I do. I mean, I think getting back to the basics is an incredible exercise in discipline and focus, but also in realizing what's most important. and myself personally making that shift from somebody who was trying to make everyone happy to really focusing and making the main thing the main thing and bringing people along to that vision has meant the difference between me feeling transactional and me feeling more grounded and thoughtful so while I'm always in pursuit of using time to its nth degree most effective, I also have felt like I've been able to slow down because we have a plan and we're executing on it.

55:17And I can enjoy a bit more, you know, the things that might come up in the future. We didn't talk much about it, but I mean, I don't know about you, but the energy here is palpable around all the ways in which we can build, you know, great companies using AI. AI. Yeah, sure. I'm going to these events all the time and watching this happen in real time. It's really cool. It's exciting. I think it's a moment of growth that we've seen before. So if you've been around long enough in the Bay Area, you can recognize the signs. But I think this time it feels a little bit different because I don't think we knew what was gone, what we had lost until it was gone.

55:55And I think communing and building together, that's the best antidote, I think, to putting COVID in the rearview mirror. Julia Hartz, thanks so much. Thanks, Guy.

56:11That's Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode. And as always, it is free. This episode was produced by Rommel Wood with music composed by Sam Paulson and Rumtin Arablui. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Kerry Thompson. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Neva Grant, Casey Herman, JC Howard, Sam Paulson, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.

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