A conversation with Julia Hartz & Ashwin Sreenivas

Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

To be completely honest, I had no idea it would be a 20-year journey. I was not a serial entrepreneur. I wasn't even an intended entrepreneur. I mean, I didn't grow up as the kid with the lemonade stand. I was a ballerina. I was ambitious, but I was really good at taking direction and making adjustments and figuring out how to please people. That was my superpower. And I met Kevin in 2003 at a wedding, and that kind of set my whole life off on another trajectory. I think this theme will come up a lot because it's related to Ashwin. He has that effect on people. And I had no idea at the age of 23 that I would have this whole incredible journey because of him. And I think what I've learned is that there are certain people who have this insatiable need to expand the world through their ideas.

And that don't have a chip that says in their brain that says this may not work out. They're eternally optimistic, and that typically is somewhat of a rough sketch of a serial entrepreneur, which is Kevin. I am someone who really thrives on the operational detail and rhythm and culture and community of a company. And so that's where he found his match in me, both from a life perspective and a professional perspective. I think about a lot because 20 years is a long time. That's sort of an era. It's more than a chapter. I think about a lot how I what advice I would give people today. And it's hard because I think that the longevity and lifespan of something is really hard to imagine when you're in the day-to-day firefighting, and especially today when you're in this hypergrowth kind of chaotic environment where it's almost like an arms race. It's a GPU arms race, it's a capital arms race, it's a lot of hype. And I think at the end of the day, the people who build sustaining, enduring, people-changing companies are thinking about more than just models and memory. I think they're thinking about the moments that matter in people's lives and how they can be a part of that for the long haul. And I'm really proud of what we built with Eventbrite because while it's not the biggest business, I wasn't super stoked about the exit, it means a lot to the world and I think it's in great hands to outlive us.

Yeah, I mean and we'll get to this, but I think you are one of the few people who really understands the power or the tow of Kevin because you are an entrepreneur that he really believes in and a founder that he's just been relentlessly supporting. And for everybody's context here, there's a line of Silicon Valley founders and companies that Julia and Kevin have been instrumental in creating and building and shaping big courses of their lives. This line would stretch down the block. I don't relate to that at all. I'm just to the side watching it. But I can say that there's been a very small number of entrepreneurs who have shown up at our house consistently and they're all really successful which is amazing. I think the hit rate is like natural selection. But I knew when I met you that you would be really successful at whatever you built. But it's an interesting thing because I haven't yet put my finger on exactly what makes those connections stick. But I was one of those people that Kevin found. It's a weird thing. Obviously we met under the auspices of a personal thing and fell in love, but I have experienced the same type of unbelievable support that helped me understand what my true capacity and potential could be. So I was in television to answer your question, developing shows like Jackass. You're welcome. And literally I was the intern at MTV when the Jackass guys sent in their demo. So I just had this incredibly fortunate experience to be on that wave and it was insane. Then I was at FX working on Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Rescue Me, this really great content and met Kevin and we fell in love and we were LA San Francisco long distance. I would come up and go to early PayPal parties at Peter Thiel's apartment and he would come down and go to the MTV movie awards. When it came time to figure out where we wanted to be based, I found a job working on a startup cable network in San Francisco called Current TV. It was Al Gore and Joel Hyatt starting this user-generated news network. I got an offer for $50,000, which was a big drop from my $80,000 salary. Kevin was like, 'Two quick things. One is this is never going to take off because let me show you this thing that my friend Joe's been building and it was YouTube, and two, you're worth way more than that. We could just start something and you could make literally no money and we could put all of our savings towards bootstrapping it and it could be terrible but it would be really fun.' I just totally blacked out at the point at which I said yes. So 20 something years later, I'm like, did I say yes? Next thing I know, I'm moving out of a beautiful window office in Century City into a windowless phone closet in Palo Alto with this guy who I'm like, 'Oh no, what if he's crazy?' And it turns out quite crazy, a great kind of crazy. In the first week of working on Eventbrite, I realized I solved the mystery of why I hated school: I hated being told what to do, but I loved learning by doing. I just fell in love with it in the first week, but I had no idea what we were doing at all.

We bootstrapped with our own money, less than a quarter of a million dollars over two years, and then went out to raise in fall 2008. We had 27 meetings and got 27 no's. Kevin kept leaving our 2009 plan with everyone. I said, 'Dude, we're facing the end of the world.' He said, 'Well, if we do, it'll be really impressive.' So we retrenched, raised money from family and friends. Our thesis was that Eventbrite would allow people to turn their passions into profit. That's exactly what happened in 2009. We had our best year. In Q4 2009, we went back to the same VCs and got multiple term sheets because no one else had met their plan. We went with Sequoia Capital again, and that stamp of approval made us a company others wanted to invest in. At that point, it became about not raising too much money.

Well, I would only correct Ashwin one thing. You said large public company. We were a tiny public company, but we were the second largest trafficked event site in the world and by an order of magnitude the largest self-service ticketing platform. In the public markets, we're very small. We had three things: we were good friends with the head of infectious disease at UCSF, Joe DeRisi, who gave us direct information. We had amazing wisdom around us to act fast and treat it as a real crisis. And we had each other. I remember coming home in the first week, and this was the black swan event for both Airbnb and Eventbrite. Our biggest personal holdings were in those companies. I was on the board of Four Seasons and UCSF, so we were surrounded by disaster. We treated it very seriously, which created an unintended rift with our customers because we had to call event producers and venue owners to stop paying suppliers and advance payments. It was very uncomfortable. The most romantic thing Kevin ever did was when I shut the office down. I was the last person out, and I came home to our entire home office turned into a war room with gaming monitors and two chairs. Kevin had dropped everything to be there for me. For the first 30 days, we were side by side saving the company. In 14 days, we produced more refunds than revenue, so we were in negative revenue territory. All our dashboards broke. We threw away our roadmap and built things to help creators stay in business. Many live venues are still struggling to come back.

Real life experiences, particularly curated moments together, are the only way to create indelible memories. Think about the last thing you read or watched that changed your life, and then think about your first concert. The difference is immense. I can tell you exactly what Janet Jackson sounded like, what the arena smelled like, how it felt in Vancouver in 1999. There's an undeniable quality about experiences that are not going to go away.

Technology enables experiences to be better. We lived through the rise of social. Eventbrite was built on the idea that events should be discoverable in organic search. Then Facebook became a top traffic driver, so we got the first events API key and built a seamless integration. Every time a new technology comes along—social, mobile, RFID, big data, VR, AI—people said it would kill live events. But technology has been a tailwind, not a replacement. I'm staunchly in the camp that you can't replace the indelible memory making with virtual reality. But AI will make event creation richer, better, and more accessible.

It still is. Eventbrite just renewed for another couple of years. I am no longer running it, so I'm the only part of this that doesn't. When you originally made the decision to put AI in front of your customers for customer support, what was surprising? Why did you decide to do it at that time?

Eventbrite serves a long tail of hundreds of thousands of creators. A lot of confusion happens when there's a problem. I wanted to inject intelligence into the layer where there's high anxiety. Event planning is one of the top five highest anxiety professions. I wanted to show up just in the nick of time and anticipate needs. I also wanted to help ticket buyers. For years, we sat in an awkward place not knowing basic event details. It wasn't about deflection; it was about anticipating social anxiety, especially post-COVID. COVID really messed up people's sense of going out. I had ulterior motives to introduce AI into the customer journey. There was a hard wall to climb internally, but then there was the added bonus of watching you build, Ashwin, knowing you're one of the most relentless people I've met.

Event tickets are one of the highest risk purchases because they're often non-cancellable and non-refundable, worth something one day and nothing the next. There's a pressure cooker high stakes decision making that leads to master procrastination.

I think it's a terrible thing. I really do. I don't envy founders today who have to go out and raise a bunch of money because they need to buy compute or they need to, but I think it's a terrible thing.

I know, they're in a capital arms race because for several different reasons, and I hate this because I know I sound like a cro-magnon. But there are so many human experiences you can liken to just a few principles. One is you don't know what you've got till it's gone. During COVID, for people who lived in areas where the world came to a slight end and then rebuilt itself, that very much impacted our business for the better. People really valued being together. But when the assumption is that money is falling from the trees, there's no way to imagine a world where something like COVID happens and takes out the whole basis of your business.