Leading through radical change with Julia Hartz of Eventbrite

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Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. The pandemic nearly crushed the ticketing company Eventbrite. For nearly 2 years, people basically stopped going to events. And for Eventbrite's founder, Julia Hartz, the pandemic was the biggest test of her career, and that's an understatement. Julia was first on the show back in early 2020, right before COVID, and that episode is worth scrolling back to and checking out. It tells the entire story of how she built Eventbrite, and it's an amazing story. But today, you're going to hear the inside story of how Julia and her team saved the company and how they're trying to position Eventbrite to grow and thrive in a cutthroat industry. But first, I asked her to recount what happened to the company as the pandemic hit.

In April of that year, you had to lay off about half of your employees because you couldn't, I mean, there was no revenue coming in. There was nothing coming in, right? And you at the time you had about 1,000 to 2,000 employees. I remember you saying like, you know, you'd been kind of nervous, which I thought was remarkable for you to just talk about. You'd been nervous to step in as CEO. By that point, you'd been CEO for almost four years, but you were still quieting voices, doubting voices, self-doubting voices in your head, which I think is very healthy. I think all CEOs have those voices, but very few of them acknowledge it. So now you're faced with a massive challenge and test. So, how did you do that? I just can't think of a blunter way to ask it.

Yeah. I mean I remember at how quickly obviously live events turned into were cancelled or postponed and then they turned into virtual events. We had two how I built this live shows scheduled in March of 2020. One was in Seattle, one was in San Francisco. We'd obviously cancel those shows and then pretty much by April we came up with an entirely new live episode of the show that we would live stream. I mean it was just complete insanity. So we were just acting, acting, acting, deciding, acting, deciding, acting on this very, very short loop. But at the same time, everything stopped.

How did you maintain optimism or did you not like when you you know presumably you had to have all hands town hall meetings with your employees. You to be on that Zoom call and your job as a leader is to be positive and to show confidence and optimism and to shield I think maybe it's not the job of the CEO but as a leader I think in part it's to shield your team from the arrows that come your way.

I should mention both these are prominent investors that you mentioned.

You mentioned this term wartime CEO which I have mixed feelings about because obviously wartime is you know you think like Churchill but it is true that it was a crisis and crisis does tend to bring out the best in a lot of people because it forces you to focus on solving that one problem like a war right like Churchill had to solve the problem of being defeated and destroyed by the Nazis. And similarly I think about reporters when I was a reporter covering wars that that was very easy to do not easy but it was easier to do great work because you're focused and you have to be determined and you have to move quickly. It's harder to do great work when like you know many years ago I covered the Pentagon just like walking the halls of the Pentagon and trying to find a great story. So I wonder you know it sounds like you really rose to the occasion. How did you harness that intensity, that adrenaline and continue that kind of way of thinking once this crisis ended?

It's so interesting. I wonder how you I mean if you know revenue goes to zero, right? And then you have this virtual business that you start, but there's no way that was going to make up for the loss from live events, right? Because you guys got a fee on every ticket sold. I mean, you're a publicly traded company, right? I mean going without any revenue for a long time or significantly lower revenue for a long time is hard. How were you able to withstand that?

So obviously that was important, right? Focusing on that segment of your customers, but what about just keeping the business afloat when there was nothing coming in?

We're going to take a quick break but when we come back more on how Julia kept her company going during the pandemic and how Eventbrite is changing and evolving to the shifting events market today. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. She was on the show back in early 2020 when we told the whole story of Eventbrite. And if you missed that, scroll back and check out that episode. It's really, really cool one. Anyway, going back to this conversation. With the lack of live events in the early days of lockdown, Julia and her team used the hiatus to try and figure out how Eventbrite could better support event creators and then they waited.

So virtual events went from 1% of the events on Eventbrite to 90% of the events on Eventbrite to now 10%. So that's sort of the curve and that happened over a pretty long period of time. But once people started to get back together, you really saw it fall off in terms of, you know, people don't really want to sit on a Zoom at an event.

I mean, obviously you could look at presumably you look at your P&L, you look at your balance sheet, and you're like, 'Okay, we need to do this, this, this, and that, and we know that we'll be okay for 3 years based on the cash we have.' and on the you know if we can grow our virtual business and we'll get some cash coming in. But was there ever a moment where you thought we might not actually survive this thing?

So essentially before hand Eventbrite was really just a platform where people would sell tickets and then you would get a cut and you're saying now it's more focused on a marketplace. And what you mean by that, I think, is that you go to Eventbrite, it knows where you are, right? Geolocates, and then it suggests events that are in your area.

Yeah. Right. So, in other words, I remember like 20 years ago when I went out, right, and I've got children and like I go to sleep at 8. Um but uh but when I didn't do those things um 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 thing that people would just have that page up. Oh, let's go to Eventbrite and see what's going on this weekend.

Nobody has it. No one has solved that problem. I think about this all the time.

Like I Yeah.

And I would say hell hath no fury like a company that has a new lease on life.

Yeah. I think the Etsy analogy is actually quite apt because Etsy is a space for create, you know, all kinds of crafts people and creators also. They're people who, you know, mass produce things. But it is a trusted space, you know, like every time I'm scrambling to find like something for somebody, I'll go to Etsy.

The problem is then I go down a rabbit hole and then I spent like six hours later I'm like I've been on Etsy for 6 hours.

Right?

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.

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?

And event price rates ticketing fees on average are $3.

So when we're talking about ticketing and this is not the same thing.

Julia, um, like many tech companies, you've also had some layoffs this year. And you know when we spoke in 2020 that 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 does that weigh on you? I mean do you feel obviously you feel responsibility to shareholders but sometimes there's not much you can do about a stock price. You know, it's one of those things that they don't tell 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

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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Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Here's more from my conversation with Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz. I want to ask you about employees because I know 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 and 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?

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. 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 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 because 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?

Yeah.

From Etsy. Yep. Yep.

You know, I've 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 and we communicate regularly and I talk to everybody pretty much every day because I'm tracking or 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.

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.

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, you know, an office in Spain and you were in an office in San Francisco. 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, you know, at home, but like this is work. Bring your A-game to work.' That was just normal, part of the course. And that was the environment that many senior executives today and senior leaders in companies grew up with. But now it's different. Now it's bring your whole self to work including your challenges, including other things. How do you approach it? How do you accommodate for that?

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. Either you're in this camp or in that camp. And it became very challenging for companies that if they were neutral that essentially they were not. They were consorting with the enemy or whatever and this can have a massive impact on your business. You know, look at Bud Light. Bud Light made a decision and it had a huge impact on its business for 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 something that happens in the United States. What's your position? Do you as a leader in a company publicly make your views known or do you just say nothing?

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 neo-Nazi rally, not obviously these are not comparable at all but I'm just throwing two examples out, that would not be allowed.

It is. I mean, how do you decide? Do you have a team or do you do case by case or what?

Yep. You told me in 2020, you said 5 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, started 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. Do you feel like you're on that path?

AI. Yeah. Sure. I'm going to these events all the time and watching this happen in real time. It's really cool.

Julia Hartz, thanks so much.

That'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 Romel Wood with music composed by Sam Pollson and Rene Araboui. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Carrie Thompson. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Neva Grant, Casey Herman, JC Howard, Sam Pollson, Alex Chung, Ela Coats, Chris Msini, and Carla Estz. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.