CEO Series: Julia Hartz, Eventbrite

Julia (Hook):

When we think about the early days of Eventbrite and we think about Eventbrite as the startup going back in time, back in 2008. I'll never forget we had no team. It was really just us. And we spoke at a university, and Kevin gave this talk about the startup environment and what kind of organism you need to be to survive the startup environment.

And we used all these different examples like Netflix and PayPal and even Bebo. And when we are looking back at these notes, we realized that Eventbrite has actually grown into a company that can fit a lot of these examples.

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Julia Hartz is co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite, the world’s largest ticketing platform which powers millions of events around the globe each year, driving millions of revenue.t $326.1 million in 2023 to be exact. She took the company public as the CEO but not long after, was almost wiped out in something her business plan did not account for— a global pandemic that put a halt on IRL events - which Eventbrite was built for.

And yet somehow, Eventbrite sustains today and continues to grow as a public listed company.

This is why she is next in the BillionDollarMoves CEO series.

Let’s get into it.

#1 KEY TAKEAWAY ONE: Sometimes you need to just trust the flow of life

Now this is a personal one in Julia’s life but I thought a pretty important takeaway. Careers come and go; but the most important investment you can make, is that of a true partner.

So what many may not know is that Julia Hartz wasn’t always destined for the tech world. In fact, she started her career in TV, working on shows like The Shield and Nip/Tuck. But after meeting her future husband Kevin at a wedding, she realized this was a bet she wanted to take — moving to San Francisco, where her career took an unexpected turn.

Julia:

So these two particular people who were getting married had been really big brother and big sister figures in my life, and so I was tapped to deliver. An excerpt from Corinthians at the altar. And I did not grow up in a church. I do not know the Bible. So there I'm a little bit all around anxious about this particular wedding.

And I got to the church, and I realized that I didn't bring a copy of the excerpt. I wasn't sure if it was at the altar. And so I thought, like, okay, I've just said at the end of the pew. So I went to the end of a pew and I asked this guy to move over so that I could sit at the end.

And I was sitting there pretty stressed out, and this guy started striking up a conversation with me. And that was that. And then I went up to the altar and thankfully my reading was there, and I got through it and it came back and I was so relieved. And this guy turned to me and goes, you're amazing.

I'm so proud of you. And then we're finally sort of focusing on him and being like, okay, what is going on? You know, like he's just so friendly and not creepy friendly, like earnestly just so friendly, but didn't even know his name. And so, he introduced himself as Kevin. And I remember standing on the steps of the church after the ceremony, and, you know, we were throwing race at the bride and groom, and they were running down the stairs, and I saw him across the way and I thought, oh, I'll never see him again.

And we were standing on the lawn at the reception, and he brought me over a drink. And then I realized like, oh, no, I'm not actually going to get rid of this guy tonight. Like, this is, you know, this isn't like, just a fleeting thing. And that was it. I mean, that literally was it. Kevin and I have been together ever since.

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To be clear, Kevin wasn’t a nobody, and by then had already a lot of experience in the startup world by this point and actually had invested in PayPal’s seed round in 1999.

So when Julia got a lowball job offer to work for a company in SF, it’s not surprising that Kevin convinced her to start a company with him instead:

Julia:

I was offered a, you know, middle management position on the founding team, and then I got the offer. And, you know, the numbers that I remember, roughly speaking, are I was making $80,000 at Fox, and they offered me $50,000 in annual salary to join. And I brought the offer to Kevin to get his opinion. And he just, I think, saw an opening.

I'm not sure how calculated he was in this, but he just said, you know, you could go work on someone else's startup and make less than your worth for sure. Or you could build something with me and, you know, make no money. But at least it's our own. And, you know, we could even invest our own money in bootstrapping something.

And I just I really don't know why or how that sounded more compelling. But I do think the genesis of why Kevin was so convincing there is because his optimism was contagious. And I thought, why not?

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By 2006, Julia, Kevin, and their co-founder Renaud Visage launched Eventbrite, a self-service ticketing platform aimed at democratizing live events.

But where did the idea come from?

Julia:

I saw the writing on the wall, the ad model in TV was broken..

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The idea for Eventbrite was inspired by a mix of personal experience and a gap that Julia and Kevin saw in the market.

Julia:

So basically, there was this big void in the market. You know, either you were using checks and cash collected at the door and tracking your attendees on maybe Excel spreadsheets or by hand, or you were using really expensive kind of dinosaur software on the enterprise side, and there was no consumer friendly platform in between that could both give you the tools to be able to create and promote and manage your event ticketing.

I started digging through the old archives of the customer inquiries that had been coming in around this, this ticketing kind of freeware ticketing app that, that Allen and Kevin had had built, sort of along the same time that they were toying around with what became zoom, all based on the PayPal platform. Right? All built sort of powered by the PayPal API.

And so that's quite literally how that Eventbrite was born, was just looking at what is the problem that these people have, and how can we build technology to help them become more successful. So Eventbrite is a self-service platform that focuses on helping event creators save time and reach a larger audience for their event.

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While they now had a clearer idea for the company, Julia and Kevin knew they needed technical help to build the platform.

In the fall of 2005, they found it in Renaud Visage, who would become their co-founder and CTO just as he was leaving his previous company and moving to France.

But the 1/3 remote team worked well:

Julia would respond to customers and learn about them.

Julia:

Renaud came at it from. He's a world renowned photographer, as was his father, and he came at it from could we help people turn their passion into profit? Which we honestly didn't know would be so big when the recession hit. So that was a weird, sort of fortuitous thing. And then Kevin came at it from micro-transactions and being able to to power these transactions in an economical fashion so that you could democratize an industry.

So, yeah, for him, it was always the big bad gorilla. That's like stealing money from innocent people through their exorbitant fees. How could we come in and disrupt those industries by democratizing it?

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Kevin, leveraging his experience in startups, took on the role of CEO, while Julia initially served as President. In early 2006, they officially launched Eventbrite.

Their business model was straightforward: they earned 2.5% plus 99 cents for every paid ticket, while allowing free events to be hosted without charge. This approach encouraged organizers to widely share the platform.

But there was not a lack of challenges along the way, which brings me to takeaway two

#2 Key Takeaway: Stay focused through the abundance of opportunities

Some of the obstacles Julia and Kevin faced in the beginning were—and apparently still remain an obstacle—is focus.

Julia:

When I became CEO in 2016, at that price, revenue model was a per ticket transaction fee that was charged just for paid tickets. Free events or free tickets were free because we'd been so focused on democratization and enablement, we were almost a victim of our own success, which was we had the widest range of customer segments you could imagine, and the issue was that our one size fits all product and pricing was really sort of getting lost in the noise.

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To address this, they worked closely with their early customers.

Julia:

When we first started Eventbrite, we built the product hand in hand with our earliest users. And those early adopters were mainly tech bloggers who are using the platform to host meetups. And part of that process was creating a very sort of tight feedback loop with literally the most critical people you could possibly have using your product. 

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And lo and behold, one of those early customers was TechCrunch.

Julia:

What began as TechCrunch meetups, evolved into the first TechCrunch Disrupt conference. And what a watershed moment that was for us, to be supporting an event, at that point was a small conference, but it felt huge.

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They were building a self-service product, paying close attention to what type of events were being ticketed through their platform.

And while tech bloggers were some of the early adopters, Eventbrite had a broad appeal.

When Julia and Kevin saw someone was using it for a speed dating event, they knew they could expand to many different categories:

Julia:

But that’s kind of when the light bulb went on for us: oh wow, we really could create a platform that was fully inclusive of all different categories of events.

Because you really can’t get farther away from tech meetups than speed dating. There is a different expectation from those creators, and also a different way of using technology.

That was really helpful to start expanding our functionality, and the way we thought about building for different types of people.

#3 KEY TAKEAWAY THREE: Know your nutrients

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Now, ladies and gents. We need a notebook at this point because, pun intended. This key takeaway is power packed. Now, by early 2009, Eventbrite had been rejected by nearly every venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. The economic downturn had hit hard, leaving co-founders Julia, Kevin Hartz, and Renaud Visage with a tough decision: either give up or continue bootstrapping as the only three employees, just as they had for the past two years on less than $250,000.

Boy, do we all know how that feels. They ultimately chose to persevere. The things have since improved and the company has experienced rapid growth. The founding team emerged from that period with a strong commitment to efficiency, a cautious mindset, and a strategy to turn their competitive strengths into lasting advantages.

Which brings me to KNOW YOUR NUTRIENTS.

The chief metaphor Julia and Kevin use to describe building a company is designing an organism. This has defined their approach to growing and nurturing ticketing startup Eventbrite. If you look at it this way, they say, you’re much more likely to create something that can adapt to shifting environments and survive without micromanagement. Like any organism, a startup will die if it can’t properly identify and leverage nutrients.

1 - Your First Customers

In the beginning, Eventbrite had no team, no product, and no revenue. They had to build momentum from scratch, and it all started with acquiring customers. Julia took the lead on marketing, customer service, and finance, while Kevin focused entirely on product development. This allowed them to create a seamless feedback loop, quickly adapting the platform based on customer input. To find their initial customers, they began right in their local community— a skillset that Julia had been honing in her early years, where she had started out working as a waitress at a cafe called The Ugly Mug.

Julia:

I worked on the weekends and at a local coffee shop called The Ugly Mug,

There was a woman who would show up before we opened, and we opened at like 5:30 a.m. or something crazy, and she would stand outside and she'd wait for me to open the door and she'd stomp in, and I would make her drink, and she would be unhappy about it every single weekend.

And it took me about five months to realize that she just wanted someone to talk to.

It's not about the latte. You know, you with those people, you're like, wait, they need someone to talk to, and they're not upset about you or it or it's about something else, right? So you got to kind of like, put it into context.

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This listening ability translated well in listening to her early adopters.

Julia:

We had to find our first sort of early adopter group. Thankfully, that group lived in our backyard. They were tech bloggers, and so by staying close to our customers and really building a relationship from the beginning again, I was the customer service department. I literally was answering customer service emails from the labor and delivery room when we had our first child.

And that, the story goes, they had to take the computer away from me.

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As she said, your customers are your lifeline. They give you direct feedback to build in real-time and allow you to future-cast what they will need as you grow.

2–Capital (and Not Using It)

Kevin:

If we talked about customers, as you know, I would put them as like the high protein, the most nutritious form of it. Capital is kind of like the sugar.

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At his previous startup, Xoom, Kevin experienced constant challenges from fraud attacks and unexpected hurdles, which put them in a tough spot when raising capital. Learning from this, he approached Eventbrite with a focus on capital efficiency, determined to raise funds only when necessary. “There’s that saying, capital is available when you don’t need it, and when you do, it’s nowhere to be found. So, we built Eventbrite to operate without needing it,” he recalls. This strategy paid off during the market downturn when many investors declined to back them. Although it was disheartening, it wasn’t the end.

Kevin:

In early 2009, at a point where you just said, well, let's just put our heads down and build the business, we took on a little, bridge money and lo and behold, the business had taken off. And I really think that that was because we focused around being customer centric those previous two years. And saw the business really blossom in 2009 versus most others.

And all these companies that had become loaded with, with capital and relying on capital had failed. And we culminated 2009 with Sequoia Capital investing $6.5 million at the end of that year.

3 – Talent as fuel

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By its third year, Eventbrite’s team grew to 15 members, transforming the company. Before that, the founders could only concentrate on product and customer needs. Adding fresh talent expanded their capabilities significantly. Two key factors contributed to this success: knowing where to find the right people (what they call Britelings) and dedicating a founder to focus solely on talent.

Julia:

2006, founding a company and placing it in San Francisco was actually contrarian. The conventional wisdom was that you place your company down here near Stanford. We felt sort of this inherent pull towards San Francisco, a to be contrarian and B to be near, what is crucial and what is the lifeline to our business, which are live experiences.

So San Francisco, being a very culturally dense metro, is a great place for us to be, to be very close to our subject matter. But what we found was that once we got started and once we were able to access talent who wanted to be part of our vision, who were sold on that vision of bringing the world together through live experiences.

That was really a turning point for Eventbrite, because it became abundantly clear to Kevin and I that we weren't just looking to build something and flip it, or to create just the best business model for, for revenue sake, but really to create an amazing company. And so the nutrition of talent is very, very, very really understanding where you can access talent is extremely important.

And we actually took a bet on San Francisco. But I think that as we look at where the trends have taken us and now how, you know, abundant the talent is here, but how fierce the competition is to get talent. We understand that we were right. And saying that talent is a crucial nutrient for the startup organism.

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This shift in focus towards building a sustainable company, fueled by passionate talent, marked a turning point for Eventbrite. Julia, who had transitioned her role to focus on talent, emphasized the importance of human resources as a competitive advantage. She stresses that startups should view talent as a key asset, just as they would technology or business strategy. This early commitment to cultivating a people-centric company became a game changer for their growth.

#4 KEY TAKEAWAY 4: FIND THE RIGHT HABITAT

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When the Hartzes and Renaud first started formulating Eventbrite, they took a long look at the existing ticketing market. Immediately, they spied the opportunity to democratize and disrupt. The incumbents were providing poor customer service, charging high fees, and weren't innovating.

Julia:

To us, that was sort of a green light in terms of opportunity. But we could have just gone after Ticketmaster. We could have just said, we're going to disrupt Ticketmaster and we're going to take their market share. Thankfully, we thought better of that and had a hunch that there might be this gap between people who were using Excel spreadsheet, email and paper checks to run their event or collecting cash at the door.

And Beyonce and Jay-Z at AT&T Park. Turns out there is a huge gap. And this, what we call the long tail of ticketing, is enormous.

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They were able to list a number of events that weren’t currently ticketed but could be: cooking classes, yoga seminars, food and wine festivals, etc. But at the beginning they didn’t know how many categories would be interested in the platform. Their answer was to let their customers tell them. Many of the events that popped up were small and not exactly glamorous, but they boosted the numbers.

As Julia says, “We didn't try to go deep into one category or one geography or one size of event. We let it just organically evolve.”

#5 KEY TAKEAWAY FIVE: CULTIVATE HEALTHY PARANOIA

Julia:

I think that healthier, productive paranoia is incredibly important to setting yourself up to endure extreme seasonality by building Eventbrite in an efficient way, because we didn't really have much money to spend thinking about ways in which we could build this, lean Startup has actually set us up for success.

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Julia and Kevin Hartz learned early on that maintaining a "healthy, productive paranoia" was crucial for ensuring Eventbrite’s survival during both prosperous and challenging times. By anticipating potential downturns and adopting a lean, capital-efficient mindset, they built a business that could withstand financial scarcity. 

This mindset allowed them to navigate the economic collapse in 2009 and 2010, turning a dire situation into an opportunity as more people used the platform to create their own income streams. Kevin explains that paranoia should not be about fear but about ensuring adaptability and options in various environments. Instead of relying solely on future capital raises, Eventbrite focused on efficiency to have backup plans and avoid vulnerability when the market dried up.

BONUS: ADAPT OR DIE

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Now here's the bonus key takeaway that I thought was worth putting in here. Adapt or die, which carries on from the healthy paranoia.

Eventbrite’s journey is marked by constant adaptation to unexpected challenges and opportunities. Initially designed to cater to paying enterprises, the company saw an unanticipated rise in free event usage, which at first concerned the founders. However, they quickly adapted by recognizing that these free events were fueling awareness and growth. This shift, along with the decision to open up Eventbrite’s API to developers, allowed the platform to grow exponentially by letting others build niche tools. The company's flexibility in responding to market shifts, such as adopting a mobile-first approach, and its openness to disrupting its own model, created a foundation for long-term success. As Kevin and Julia emphasized, relentless evolution is crucial, with complacency equating to death in the fast-

Kevin:

For example, if you put down a $0 value ticket you can host as an organizer, you can host a free event. And that was almost an accident. We didn't intend to set out to build a free event functionality. We wanted to have the option of having that free registration type, and lo and behold, people started publishing free events and they published them in a far greater number and percentage than then, actually the paid events and, our initial, you know, we were kind of aghast, like, they can't do this. They're using our product and we're not being paid.

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Originally, Eventbrite’s founders had envisioned the company as a platform for enterprises and organizations to host paid events. However, once the product was in use, it became clear that the platform had the potential to serve a much broader consumer base.

As they analyzed the growing user-generated content, the team quickly saw significant advantages. Each event page created by users was indexed by search engines like Google, increasing the visibility of Eventbrite across the web. According to Kevin Hartz, this free user activity played a vital role in the company’s growth. The more free events users created, the stronger the "virtuous cycle" became, with increased traffic leading to further platform adoption.

A key performance indicator that stood out was the transition of attendees into paid organizers, which significantly reduced the company's user acquisition costs. Instead of spending heavily on marketing, Eventbrite was able to reallocate those funds toward engineering, improving their product, and delivering exceptional customer support. This efficiency allowed them to innovate faster while maintaining high-quality service.

The team embraced a philosophy of constant evolution, recognizing that staying stagnant in such a fast-paced environment would mean certain failure. In a further adaptive move, the company opened up its API, empowering thousands of developers to create specialized features that Eventbrite itself did not plan to build. Julia Hartz noted that this approach helped users fully leverage the platform, driving ticket sales and event promotion. As a result, in one year alone, Eventbrite hosted 1.1 million events, two-thirds of which were free. The remaining paid events generated over $1.1 billion in ticket sales, with events taking place in more than 190 countries globally.

This extraordinary growth made the founders realize the immense potential for Eventbrite to become a worldwide marketplace for live experiences.

As Julia explained, the company’s team of 450 employees across eight offices worldwide is now striving to cement Eventbrite as the go-to platform for discovering live events. And I think it's achieved that.

Here are some actionable questions for you:

1. How can you trust the process of your life and allow space for new opportunities to emerge? Are you taking a step back from the grind and the day to day to allow things to be, evolve?
2. On focus: when you drown out the noise, who is your most important customer? What is this customer telling you to focus on; and how can this be a catapult for more?
3. On relentless focus on the customer: Remember “it’s not about the latte”? Just like Julia’s grumpy customer in Ugly Mug at 5am, ask: Are you deeply in tune with your customers' needs and challenges? How can you better serve them to create long-term loyalty and value?
4. Knowing your nutrients well: How agile is your organization? Are you able to pivot quickly in response to market changes? What processes can you implement to enhance your company’s agility?
5. On resilience: How do you maintain focus on your long-term vision during times of crisis? What steps can you take to ensure your company emerges stronger from challenges?

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What steps can you take to ensure your company emerges stronger from challenges? And with that, ladies and gents, I hear my little puppy Tilly barking. I have to go. But I hope that you've learned a bunch, as I have from Julia Harts and her journey, and I'm so excited for the next decade of the work. 

Remember they started in 2006. It is 2024. They've been at this for almost 20 years. Hard to believe, but that is the journey of a startup. So with that, have a great week ahead and I'll see you again next week.