839 Julia Hartz: Co-Founder of Eventbrite

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5:07Kara Goldin:You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Golden Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Carol Golden Show. Today, I am so excited to have our next guest here with us here today, a fellow Bay Area founder, co-founder, Julia Hartz is the co-founder and now former CEO and executive chair of an incredible, incredible company that I'm sure you have used over the years.

6:05Kara Goldin:I certainly have called Eventbrite and the global platform that has transformed how millions of people create, discover, and experience live events. Julia's journey is one of vision, creativity, and deep belief in the power of human connection. And co-founding Eventbrite in 2006, she helped grow the company into one of the world's largest marketplaces for shared experiences. And what I love about Julia and her story is that she didn't just build a business, she built a movement around bringing people together. And boy, do we all need that today. So from her early days, from different industries to focusing on creating meaningful and real-world connections, I'm so proud of what she has done.

7:01Kara Goldin:And to me, she is one of the founders that I really look at and view as a mission-driven founder, entrepreneur who has built a company and now has sold that company. And I cannot wait to hear a lot more about it. So Julia Hartz, welcome to the Kara Golden Show. So excited you're here. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Very, very excited. So, okay. So you've helped build one of the world's most recognizable event platforms. Take me back to those early days, maybe also share what is Eventbrite for those who just don't really know what the company is. So Eventbrite is the largest platform for live experiences in the world, actually.

7:56So it, you know, we think about the events that you go to on a weekly basis, not just an annual basis, but the things that are in your community, like a book talk or a yoga class or a fun comedy sketch festival, those are all powered by Eventbrite. And, you know, I actually was thinking about this this morning, Cara, when I was in the shower about an early story that I think exemplifies the magic of being a founder and being an entrepreneur. It was back in 2010 or 2011. I marked this by pregnancies. I was pregnant, really early pregnant with our second daughter. And we had built a platform for self-service event ticketing that was starting to really scale.

8:48It was starting to reach into different event categories and different geos. And the great Ron Conway put us in touch with Will.i.am from Black Eyed Peas because they were going to play a free concert in Central Park. First time that they'd done this in about 30 years. And they were going, it was benefiting the Robin Hood foundation. And we had no business ticketing this event for a number of different reasons. But Will was so fed up with the incumbent ticketing providers and all of the ways in which they were being unfair to consumers that he wanted to give us a shot. And so he sort of pushed us into it.

9:38And, you know, we had to come up with a way to run a public lottery for the tickets. Millions and millions of people applied for tickets to this event. And then we also needed to build our own entry system to scan the tickets as people were coming in several different locations in Central Park. We are a team of maybe 50 people all in San Francisco. So we go out to New York. It's in the middle of the summer. And it is so, you know, the air is heavy. It's sweltering hot. We all have our cute little Eventbrite orange, you know, shirts on. I'm feeling incredibly nauseous, but no one could tell I was pregnant.

10:23And I'll never forget that day that we were setting up because we had engineers that were like, you know, basically like putting wiring things together to create these these this ingress system to get thousands and thousands of people into the event. We had worked so hard on this. There were tens of thousands of people, 60 ,000 who were going to come in and thousands of them were already lined up on either side of the park to get into the two entrance points. We were parked in a trailer on Central Park West and I'll never forget sitting in the trailer trying to get some relief from the heat. And one of our engineers is a pilot and he has this really sophisticated weather tracking system.

11:03And he was he was like glued to his computer. And I'm like, what's going on, Bob? And he's like, I think there's a massive storm coming and it looks like it's a thunderstorm and a lightning storm. And that's going to be really bad. So we're kind of sitting there. I look out the window and down Central Park West, it looks like the state puff marshmallow man is coming. Like it is just the most foreboding. And again, we're West Coasters. We have no idea what real weather is. This most foreboding system, like marching down Central Park West. So we started to get word that the city, it might have to call off the event, but they're not sure.

11:40So they want to let people in and then make the call. And we're like, okay. So we opened the gates and we're scanning people in and our system was working and people are like flowing through the gates. They've been standing there all day. I'm watching like, it's like a episode of Parks and Rec, Like the Central Park people don't mess around. So we've got all these things going on. And all of a sudden we hear over the radio, they're going to call it. It's like way too dangerous. Black Eyed Peas, remember, they have a huge setup. It's like all metal. You know, this was like during the like techno era of theirs.

12:13And we have to then egress everyone out of and rescan their tickets. So we do it twice. And it is chaos. Now it's starting to rain. Now we're starting to get the thunder. Now it's starting to look like a really bad movie. And I'll never forget about an hour later, we're sitting in a corner diner, soaked through and through, like so dejected, so bummed. And Kevin comes running in. Now, Kevin is my co-founder and my life partner. And he comes running in with a huge smile on his face. And I'm like, I think I'm eating pie. Like at this point, I'm just telling everyone I'm pregnant. I'm like, you guys, I can't handle this.

12:53I'm eating pie. And I'm like, what are you smiling about? And he's like, it worked. Like, we got all those people in and we got 7 ,000 people in in 15 minutes. Imagine when we do it again, it's gonna be even better. And I'll never forget thinking in that moment, wow, there is this like eternal optimistic spirit of an entrepreneur that is, it's unflappable. And I just remember thinking like, you are absolutely insane, but that's so awesome. that that's your overriding thought in this moment. So that's one of the best lessons I ever learned. And when I actually knew how different Kevin and I were because I am like a realist, optimist, operational person.

13:39So I was thinking about like, how do we do this again? Will we even be able to do this again? We did it again. It was amazing success, but never again, man.

13:49Kara Goldin:Oh God, that sounds crazy. Well, events in Central Park, we've done a few, and it really is a big undertaking. Like, you have to take a few days to just breathe after dealing with it, because it's... I've never met more intense people than Parks and Rec at Central Park. I've never in my life. Not since then, and I don't think ever. They are a special breed. I remember we did the Revlon breast cancer run in Central Park. And it was absolutely nutty. And the rules and the entrances and it was, yeah, it was quite a bit, but a lot of fun. So I'm so curious. So you came from MTV and FX. You didn't come from StubHub or a Ticketmaster or even Live Nation, right?

14:47Kara Goldin:I mean, MTV kind of related. But where did this idea really come from to actually start? I mean, really, you're a community, but your story mentions you really were talking about tickets, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that it really helped that we weren't from the industry. I, you know, have obviously hired many people from the industry, have worked and had colleagues, you know, across different companies from the industry. And I could say without a doubt, it was it was a I think the the beginner's mindset and sort of being naive and idealistic is definitely the way to go when you're starting a company in a space that has, you know, incumbency and expectation.

15:32And. Kevin really came up with the idea of democratizing different industries using consumer payment processing, and I'll kind of explain. So he was fortunate enough to be a seed investor in what became PayPal. He actually invested in something called Confinity Labs, which was beaming money between Palm Pilots. This is like, I don't even know if listeners know what Palm Pilots are. They're the precursor to, you know, our smart computing devices that we are now addicted to. But through that, he was able to really understand the power of democratization when you make anyone a merchant. Right. Prior to PayPal, you couldn't really transfer money very easily at all.

16:17And then, you know, he built a company called Zoom, X-O-O-M, based on the PayPal platform using the APIs. And it was meant to help immigrants send money back to their families better, faster, cheaper than Western Union. The crazy part about that is that they launched it post 9-11. Now, being able to send microtransaction payments across border and internationally post 9-11 took an act of God. It took it took it took a crazy. And so they scaled that, it went public, and funny enough, PayPal bought it, and it's the cornerstone of their international business today. Coming out of that, Kevin was setting his sights on what next, what else could we democratize using the power of turning every single person into a merchant.

17:06And live experiences and ticketing seemed like this passion that hadn't been touched since Fred Rosen and what became Ticketmaster. We decided to take that on. And the genesis of it was really building something that was as easy to use as Gmail. That was our North Star in terms of what we wanted the product to feel like. And then I came to this idea with my own kind of blueprint of having seen some pretty unique communities gathering around niche topics and really feeling the energy of those people in a room where I didn't understand what they were so excited about. And they'd never met before, but they were instantly bonded.

17:51And that was through a documentary series that I had been a part of researching for FX that, you know, it just happened upon these fandoms. So I was thinking about the whole idea through that lens. Like, what if you could bring people together more often? And that's where our mission of bring the world together through live experiences came from. And then Renaud, our third co-founder, is also a prolific photographer. And I think part of what drove him toward this idea and what he added to the mission was what if you could turn your passion into profit by teaching others what you know? And what if we could use Eventbrite to help entrepreneurs and just enthusiasts be able to create community around something they were passionate about, which actually came to life during the first financial crisis in 2008 when we needed to really like, you know, lean into that.

18:43And people actually started to use the platform more to do that. So he had the right hunch. So we all kind of came at it from these different angles. And I think each angle made Eventbrite stronger and made it what it was. it wasn't just a ticketing platform. It wasn't just a payment processor. It wasn't just a way for people to market their skills. It really was an amalgamation of everything that we wanted. And then underpinning that was the idea that humans need to gather. And it's only in real life do we create indelible memories.

19:16Kara Goldin:Totally, totally agree. So Eventbrite scaled to millions of events globally. Did that happen overnight? Or was there a period of time, you mentioned the Central Park Will.i.am experience, but like that first year, what did the company look like as you were starting to put the foundation down and grow it and really understand who this consumer wanted you to be? I think that circa 2006 vintage companies had a great benefit, which was that scale wasn't expected from day one. And we had time and space to hone our craft, to iterate our product, to build community. We bootstrapped the company. So that was a a very intentional decision that Kevin made because he had to raise so much money with Zoom right out of the gates because in order to be a payment transmitter, you have to have a lot of money in your bank account and also to pass the regulatory hurdles.

20:28So we wanted to take a much simpler path. We wanted to bootstrap the company and really just build it really methodically. we started with customers in our backyards. We were alive almost right away. We didn't like, we weren't in stealth mode. We weren't like, you know, polishing this gem. We really put something that was quite crappy out there and it was adopted by tech bloggers. So we went to like the Michael Arringtons of the world and we said, you know, we'll handle your ticketing for the meetups you're having and we'll check people in at your conference if you'll use Eventbrite and give us feedback.

21:03And I mean, there's no better beta testers than tech bloggers who are like incredibly, you know, snarky and high demanding. And so we really leaned into that and built this product that eventually met the needs of that group. But then from there, what we did was sort of against the grain of like, I guess, how of the advice that we were being given. One is that we did not just focus on one category. From there, really, once we had a product that could work, we opened it up to any kind of event. And that was really because we had a hunch that if we wanted to democratize something, we needed to make it available to anyone.

21:44And we could possibly see new trends emerge if anybody was able to use Eventbrite. So we actually really pushed the envelope of self-service and open. You could just sign up using a password and an email and start collecting money right away and selling tickets. And that was sort of unheard of back then. But we had the payment expertise to do that. And so on the back end, we were working really hard to mitigate fraud and to, you know, and to make sure bad actors weren't coming into the system. But it was incredibly low friction to get started. And then the second thing is that we didn't focus on just one country.

22:25So we didn't like box ourselves into just the U.S. or to, you know, a certain country. We really wanted it to be open worldwide. And that allowed us the PayPal API when we first started allowed us to do that and to collect money in 180 different countries. And that also similarly cultivated opportunity for us. And then what we would do is we would just go find those pockets of opportunity and capitalize on them quickly. And that's what actually helped us scale, you know, pretty quickly right out of the gates. I mean, it was always up and to the right.

22:58Kara Goldin:Did you do a lot of advertising? Because I really never saw advertising, yet it just really seemed like a word-of-mouth opportunity. Here's what happened. We realized almost right off the bat that an event page would be user-generated content that Google would love. And so we spent a lot of time making sure that whatever you did to the page, it would always be superior SEO ranking. To the point where I'll never forget, one of our first non-tech customers was running speed dating in New York. And she was not technically savvy, but she had this big speed dating business. And she would call me and scream at me because I was the marketing department.

23:48So I found the customers and then I was the customer service department. And then I'm like, you know, serving the customers. And she would scream at me because our event pages, her events on Eventbrite were ranking higher in Google organic search than her own website. And I'll never forget feeling so excited about that because I figured out SEO, but also helping her like regain her her rankings. It was like only only the right thing to do, you know, make the customer happy. But so so really organic traffic was like our biggest lever of growth. And we figured out how to grow Eventbrite with the growth of our customers.

24:30Our monetization model was always a ticket per paid, a fee per paid ticket. And I'll never forget the day that somebody put a zero in the ticket box. And we were like, oh, there's a fee on a free ticket. What should we do? And the conversation was about three and a half minutes. It was like, well, free events is still events. And that will get Eventbrite out more and faster. And we don't really need to make money on those. And it probably will really piss off our competitors because we'll undercut them because they were all charging like subscription fees or something for free events. To this day, two-thirds of the volume of Eventbrite is free.

25:14It doesn't matter. Like so many times somebody tried to kill that, you know? Some smart person who went to business school came into Eventbrite or like an outside consultant and was like, you should charge for your free events. And then I finally let down my guard one time and it was a disaster. And like the whole point is that you really should think about those viral loops and not take them for granted. And yes, of course, they're changing and morphing now. But always take advantage of a pathway to grow with your customers. And that's what really helped us grow. Kara, we spend less than$10 million on paid marketing.

25:51I mean, it's phenomenal, right? So what came next was social, and we jumped on that immediately. I mean, we saw Facebook start to come into our top 10 traffic drivers of traffic, and we went right after it. We were trying to figure out what people were doing. And we figured out that creators were taking their event details from Eventbrite. They were copying and pasting them into Facebook. This is like 2008. And then they were linking back to Eventbrite to sell the tickets. So we took that data straight to Facebook. We met with their team. Dave Morin is now a dear friend of ours, but was the first he launched the developer platform for Facebook.

26:34And we said, hey, look, this is really interesting. People are trying to get their events into Facebook. what can we do? And he just handed us the events API. And so we built a way to just push with one button to push your event to Facebook and then come back to Eventbrite to buy the tickets. And then eventually you could buy the tickets on the Facebook newsfeed without leaving. And it would still record in Eventbrite. And we were the merchant transaction record. That was huge for us. I mean, that was tens of millions of dollars of revenue. And that was because we were so quick to follow on our user behavior and also to be open and share.

27:12I mean, you know, some people would be like, I don't want to show Facebook because they might try to get and they they did like 17 rounds of trying to build Facebook events, you know, and like, we always we always were a part of it. We always were partners. So it was never feeling like, wow, they're going to kill us. So interesting. Maybe I was naive. I don't know.

27:31Kara Goldin:No, I think that sounds right. I mean, I've looked at your business over the years, and I think it's brilliant in that you have partnered so much, and people are willing to say Eventbrite, right? And not just individuals, but also companies like a Facebook or others that are out there as well. What is the craziest event that you've seen posted on your platform? Oh, I mean, anything you can imagine. Like, it's sort of like, you know, we would have these, we would have these competitions of, you know, try to think of an event that's not on Eventbrite. It is quite literally like the Bubba Gump shrimp of events.

28:21And that's part of the magic is that, you know, it's, it's rental car rally instead of gumball rally where you're renting cars and you're and you're driving them across the country and you're trying, you know, it's it's it's like, you know, chugging a beer and running a 10K like things that people shouldn't do. It's these niche, you know, ways in which people want to connect like a recent one is book talk and romanticcy and that whole genre and the way that it comes to life in an experience. We did this pop-up based on what we'd learned about about romanticism. And it was like phenomenal. I mean, it was such a great event.