That was lightning in a bottle and I don't expect that it'll happen again.
Ticketing was that area that we honed in on. We underestimated how big the market would grow.
And I'm thinking, what if he's crazy?
Will AI be net positive or net negative for society? This is such an exciting period. We just have a very tough situation. Some days it feels like we are all racing as fast as we can to get that next check, to get that next round closed, to get that next tool in the hands of people that is literally going to make us extinct.
People see the headlines of like husband and wife event sold for, you know, $500 million.
Everything that we existed for stopped happening. It was very dramatic.
What was a moment where the lines blurred between quite literally lovers and business partners?
This is the very first episode that we've done where it's a microphone in my face. How exciting is that? What happened before? I'm trying to remember what it is. I am okay with it. Our previous episodes I we would call it like a show, like a produced show, okay, versus a podcast. Yeah. But now we're kind of veering towards the podcast cuz I get all these very smart people and accomplished people and then we'd cut this show down. We'd film them for 2 hours. We'd cut the show down and I'd have a 25 minute show and I like the episodes but it would be cutting out so much content. So now I want it to be more conversational and get more in depth. So and I feel like the mics give like a vibe. Yeah. As a host. So I like it.
But but let's start. So Julia Harts and Kevin Harts, we've talked about this. You you get your name confused with Kevin Hart. Kevin Hart a lot and that's a bummer. What? Or some or not a bummer. I don't know. How would you describe it?
Well, I mean the worst part uh is when you you know have like a a driver at the airport with a sign that says Kevin Hart and you're coming down, you know, the escalator or something and you see it and you realize that that driver thinks Kevin Hart is going to be his ride and he's so excited. He's so excited and then I have to go up go out there and ruin his day.
And then we we stand back like 10 ft uh my daughter and I and we just it's like we watch the crust fallen situation. We just die laughing. So we're very happy.
I love it. I want to know before you two met essentially like a quick spark notes. I don't know how to define spark notes, but a quick version of your story prior to meeting.
You're aging yourself with the spark notes and then I'm going to age myself and say that I think it's the modernday cliffotes, right? Yeah,
And now it's just AI. You just put text in AI and it it like summarizes it for you. Yeah.
So, I grew up in a small town called Santa Cruz, which is little little beach town um home of the Lost Boys. Okay. Movie uh and Jack O'Neal. And I went to college in Southern California, started working in Hollywood and uh met Kevin at a wedding. my my first boss at MTV married his classmate from Stanford. So, sort of like chics and geeks down the aisle and we bridged the gap. And
So, you were a TV producer.
I was I was in television development. Nice. I worked on Jackass. Uh, so this was like a nice moment in MTV. It was It was the beginning of the end. I was about to say that was the beginning of the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. So, I worked I worked in the group that discovered Jackass. I was actually an intern when they sent their pilot in and I got to be a part of that journey and it was incredible. And then I went on to FX and actually was there during the beginning of John Landraph's era which is you know really just this epic era of content um and creativity and I worked on The Shield and Rescue Me and um Niptuck and so
What Ryan Murphy's early work
Hot show. Yeah, I remember that.
So, I was very fortunate and yet also when I met Kevin, it became abundantly clear that my industry as I knew it was dying and the next era of innovation and prosper was about to happen in his industry. Well, I mean, at that time in the 2000s, that was, you know, when Keith Javeed and Steve started, uh, YouTube, uh, in the the mid 2000s and, you know, things were changing so dramatically and there was a lot of questions going on and of course, you know, like Hollywood has been inexlyably changed now. um content development, you know, the new studios, uh Amazon and Netflix, and um it's it's almost been entirely remade.
I want to know like how the impetus of you guys like deciding to work together. So, were you dating? Were you engaged? Were you already married? And then how did the idea of Eventbrite come about? And then on top of that, so I'm married. I don't know if I would be able to work in that capacity with my wife. I don't feel bad for saying that, but like I think that would probably be true for a lot of people. I work with my brother.
Um, and I love working with my brother, but I don't think I could work for my other work with my other brothers and um, and it does create like a super unique relationship
Because you're in this like mission together, but then you also have the relationship, for example, with my brother. I'm his brother and we're best friends in that sense. But I'm interested in how this all came about and how you started this and why like if you're dating or tell me. I mean I'm
I think we have a heart connection cuz you work with your sibling and I work with my wife Julia and you know that is a special relationship because it's only a very small minority. I don't know the percentages. Maybe someday they'll do some kind of DNA analysis and find there's some like connection genetic connection to who could actually work together. But it's a very small percentage of of founders that could actually work with their siblings or work with their spouses. Um, my parents I always say like would have strangled each other but they were married 50 years and you know the whole nine yards in terms of like reversing things now back to how we started. Um, you know, Julia when I met she was at MTV and I was working on a money remittance business called Zoom XOM. It's an adjunct to PayPal. We were the first developers on the PayPal API. And this I say this now because it's going to be important for Eventbrite. Zoom eventually went public in 2013 and was acquired by PayPal in 2015. But um you know that the company had worked out and we we saw kind of PayPal you know this is pre-stripe as a payments platform and we were looking at what other problem areas were there and uh ticketing was a fundamentally broken area and so you know ticketing was that area that that we honed in on. you know, when I had moved to the board of Zoom, um, you know, I now had time, free time to go and figure this out and start something new and Julia moved up to the Bay Area. We just gotten engaged and that's when we decided to start Eventbrite and pursue the ticketing market together.
Were you worried about it at all, like that it would that it would ruin the relationship if you pursued this together?
Here's my recollection. I was pretty burned out at the ripe age of 25 uh from the Hollywood thing and I just had this feeling like I was on the wrong side of the equation. Coming up to San Francisco, we'd take these walks on the weekend. Kevin had a loft in Soma and we'd walk down, you know, Fourth Street and he'd point out all these empty buildings and the companies that used to be in those buildings. There's weather.
This is after the crash. So this is the 2000s when you know in the 1990s you had this massive runup of of internet businesses. Sorry.
And so you he was like my little historian is showing guiding guiding me through what what did happen. And then I got a job offer from a startup cable network called Current TV that was just being started. Uh some of the people involved were like Al Gore and it was citizen journalism. And I thought like, okay, here we are. I'm parlaying my skills, you know, I grew up as a ballerina, so I'm like really good at like finding the goal and then going and doing it. I'm like, I'm parlaying my my skills into this new thing and it's in the Bay Area and we're engaged. We're going to start our life up here near our families.
Yeah, I think it was less actually. I think I was maybe making 80 and that was a lot. And I I uh I was offered 50. And I remember bringing that to Kevin and being like, "Do you think I should do it? I mean, it feels like I should just jump on this because that has all the things that I'm looking for." And he was like, "Time out." Like, and all I remember is him saying something like, "Sure, you could go work on someone else's startup and make way less than you're worth or and then that's where like for me the tape gets cut. Like I do not remember you pitching Eventbrite to me. I just remember the next scene is like I'm moving out of my 42nd floor window office in Sentry City which was Nakatomi Plaza and Die Hard. It was the it's the Fox Plaza building. And I'm driving up the coast and then quite literally with all my belongings, my brother was with me I think. And then the next day, we're literally pushing saw horses and plywood into a windowless phone closet in a warehouse in Pro Hill. And I'm thinking,
What if he's crazy? Like literally having a very delayed thought. We're already engaged. It would be very
How long day prior to this?
Two years, but it had been long distance. So we moved in together. We started Eventbrite together. We got married and we had our first baby. all within 18 months.
And you know, I had that fleeting thought of what if he's crazy and like I can definitely say he's definitely crazy, but there's like a good crazy and a bad crazy. And thankfully I found my partner in a good crazy and that's
No, but more you fall off onto good crazy. Yeah. Ultimately ends in a good place obviously. Um but we but we started Eventbrite in this tiny little literally we had this this free office space. The landlord gave us the the phone closet.
Well, he was he was our uh landlord when we started Zoom. Mark Pinkis, who started Tribe, was right next to us. And um what else was in there? A company called Trullia that merged with Zillow. Um Flickster. Flickster, which was early. I remember Flickster, right? Yeah. Yeah. It was a great group of founders and the the owner of the building was this amazing person. Um, and so he when we told him we were starting something new, he's like, "You've got to come into our building and gave us the space."
Did you all always want to be entrepreneurs? Sounds like you had more of like a it kind of came up and you were doing the the MTV and you were in content and production and then this kind of came up and you jumped into it. But did either of you have a feeling that you were gonna do your own thing one day and start a business and go do
I don't like when people say, "Oh, I just fell into it." because that's really um aggravating to hear from people who found success. Um
No, no, no. I'm just saying. So, I'm not going to say I'm not going to say, "Oh, I was just hanging out and Kevin kind of like forced me into it." Right. More so, I think that I I definitively did not think of myself as an entrepreneur. I was not the kid who had the lemonade stand growing up. I was a ballerina. I knew how to work hard, take direction, make adjustments, and go from there. So I have always thought of myself as a pretty good operator but I chose this obviously even though I can't remember the point at which I said yes. I chose to take the leap and see what was on the other side. I can tell you that if a person like me meets a person like him who ha who doesn't quite literally have the chip that says this may not work and he has this amazing way of sort of casually like dropping breadcrumbs you know like well we'll just try this and see what happens. It's like it's a magical combination and I don't think you have to be romantically involved. I think it can happen.
That's how my brother is with us. Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. It's like these these these complimentary skill sets.
Well, not the romantic part. Yeah. That's where I was where
We took 23 and me were actually siblings. It's like really awkward, you know. Um, no, but I think that that happened, but we both intentionally chose it and then and then through the hard work and the focus it worked out. But I think I don't your story is different because I do think that you had more of an entrepreneurial
I I mean I I did have more entrepreneurial actions in my past. Um, but I also grew up in a kind of waspy middle class area in in the Bay Area. Um,
Were they were your parents entrepreneurs?
No, not my dad is a retired attorney. My mom was in real estate uh commercial real estate and um and a tiger mom. So maybe that's part of it.
What's a tiger mom? A tiger mom is uh a mom that like stays on her children and ensures that they get into Harvard or Stanford or you know kind of rides them all through high school. I I I say that in a kind of negative tone because it's it's been negatively defined but you know my mom like guided me in a in a nice way towards achieving
Not negatively but do you view it as kind of like a oh I wish I had a little more freedom to
No, not at all. I it it I I had plenty of freedom. And I would also say though I wasn't like what I saw as like a typical founder like you know a you know with the PayPal example Max Lebchin is from the Ukraine and fled during Chernobyl if I remember the story correctly and came to Chicago and dumpster dived for computer parts and um you know then comes out to the west and meets Peter Teal and starts PayPal and the rest is history. Um and so you know maybe I have some degree of imposttor syndrome around it but um whether it was Zoom or whether it was Eventbrite I just had so much fun building and you know we were obsessed with the product we were obsessed with what we were doing and that's the the main part of it. It's like I can't believe you know I get to do this all the time and it was fun. Now there's always some difficult stages to it but uh it was an amazing experience.
Tell me about maybe like because I think on the headlines, right? Like people see the headlines of like husband and wife like is Eventbrite and sold for, you know, $500 million. Like it's like such a great headline and story. It really is. And congrats to you both on it. But uh but like what what was a moment where the lines blurred between like quite literally lovers and business partners where it was really difficult and you just mentioned where it was you had a a child, you started this company, you moved. Like those are major life milestones. So it's it would probably be difficult like emotionally just to go through all of this and then to go through all of it together while you have the mission of the company but then you also have the mission so to speak of a relationship. So how did the lines blur? Were there any experiences where you were worried it would all crumble?
We really uh very naturally embraced it having it all be a part of our lives. I mean, I think having finding that shared interest and passion around live experiences, you know, Kevin came to it from an idea of how to democratize an industry just that he'd done with with u money transfer and and really making something possible that wasn't possible before, better, faster, cheaper. me coming to it from an idea of almost an anthropological study around how people connect and and what happens when they're in these experiences and the analogy to it being like another media format. Um, and then our third co-founder who we have to mention because he's such a huge huge part of this, Rena V, our co-founding CTO, really having a passion around turning your talents and passion into profit. um which came to fruition during the first financial crisis because we we ran through that as well. I think that you you find this common ground and and we felt incred and do feel incredibly fortunate to be able to build a life around that. I mean our our people would always ask us how do you turn it off and finally I just started saying like we don't want to turn it off. It is such a an advantage to be able to go home and and have an idea and turn right to your co-founder and tell them that idea or to problem solve over dinner. You know, we had a core principle around outsourcing your non-core competencies. And because of that, we figured out how to really raise our first child as like she she deserved our full attention when we were not working on Eventbrite and when we were home and everything else needed to be done by other people, which actually was like an equal. you patch the outsource your non-core competencies comment.
That just means like, you know, if if laundry or uh shopping is not your core competency, send it out cleaning or
Uh you know, and and it's like an arbitrage of of value. You know, if you're worth x amount per hour, why work on things um that are much less than that? And if you can then outsource those, it gives you more time to focus on what you love to do and your where you're creating the most value as well as like your family and friends and so on. There's there's fun stuff. You don't have to quantify everything.
And it wasn't fancy. It was like, you know, just literally taking our laundry to like an outsourced place and and figuring out now we're like completely
We need to allocate our time appropriately for not just our family, but for our work, for ourselves.
Yeah. And we were really passionate about that because we wanted her to know that she was a core part of the team, but she also felt like she was a part and I'm talking about our daughter, she also felt like she was a part of Eventbrite. So if you asked our first two daughters what like you know like what their lives were like inevitably Eventbrite would come up all their best friends at Eventbrite would come up they came to the office all the time and we just built our lives and the company um in unison in unison and I think I think a lot of people overthink that and sort of fre like kind of uh stress themselves out over that notion but it was really sweet and productive and thoughtful and focused. I think the harder thing for us was when I took over as CEO and Kevin stepped back to focus on other things. That was the harder part for us because we were so used to working together for 10 years that the next 10 years of not working side by side literally nobody wanted to sit next to us. So we'd always be seat mate, you know, table mates in like the open floor plan. And uh that was really difficult and challenging.
But our game, our kind of game plan working side by side was a divide and conquer sort of strategy is like that there are areas that I would focus on like product and areas that Julia would focus on like finance and we had very strict rules of engagement that she was always the final say in in any area of of like finance. Um I could influence rules to not step on each other. my brother Chris and I, not to draw it back to me, but that was very important for us to like figure out what the roles were, how what do you need the clarity. Yeah. Otherwise, it's hard when you're so close with someone, it's hard to uh it's hard to sometimes not butt heads if you're either working on the same thing and you think one is right or one's wrong. And so, it's really important to get clear goals. Then that's a um but that's you know not doing that is one of these like major causes of startup death is when founders start when they haven't defined that and they start getting on top of each other and
And you know it melts down and a company kind of dissolves. Were there any experiences where it was just really difficult between the two of you? like truly husband and wife like man that's
Well I mean there were difficult experiences like um like co you know we're Eventbrite is a a live um experiences company and co came uh and we were I don't know at like a $5 billion GMV run rate um you know at at one instance and
You know that went down to to negative I mean it like you know we were just one of the most hits and you know in a world where there were a lot of companies doing quite well like Door Dash took off um and and others um they were almost like the opposite e-commerce and and things did quite well but um so we saw this and we hunkered down at our in our home office we had screens everywhere to you know keep track of what was happening all all around and you know we had a really kind of try to help our creators through this this moment because they're effectively SMBs, small businesses that were uh hosting live experiences and now they could host nothing.
It was sort of like having a child in the ICU during that period and it was about a 3-month really intense period of time and they were
You were the CEO at this time.
I was the CEO and it was a publicly traded company at this time since 2018. Since 2018. Yeah. And you know, I think um like we had some knockown dragout fights then, which is not emblematic of our relationship, but I think that intensity really did, you know, it was appropriate for the time because if we didn't move and move fast and move decisively through through some really hard decisions, Eventbrite wouldn't exist. I mean, for all intents and purposes, everything that we that we existed for stopped happening. It was not like it was very dramatic. We had built the company over 14 years had gotten to about five billion in in gross um ticket value and in 14 days we were doing negative revenue like sizable amounts because if you imagine practically the events that were on the platform were no longer happening and so people were asking for refunds but our creators had already paid the operational costs for the events. It was terrible. And so, you know, I think that we I I came home from shutting the office down, you know, when everybody went to go work from home and Kevin like surprised me by setting up this war room in our in our home office and it was so romantic, you know. I'm like, "Oh my god." Cuz there were two chairs. So, he was, you know, the chairman but like had a day job and he dropped everything and we were just sort of, you know, in our own very intense moment. Not unlike when you have a sick kid and you got to get to the bottom of what's happening and you need to like put your heads together. But it was intense for sure.
Yeah.
And you went through the financial crisis too with Eventbrite.
We did. That was less intense.
Did you have any difficulty as husband and wife like as a unit either with investors or with people that you were pitching or partnerships? Did anyone like take it less seriously or did that ever become a thing?
You mean as a couple? Like
Yeah. that, you know, like there were investors that would just tell you flat out like, "I'm not investing in a husband wife team. You two are just gonna bicker."
I mean, you had such a great way of of this is so Kevin, uh, we would go into fundraising when we finally did raise our first institutional round after we had bootstrapped and raised, you know, friends and family. you would go into a meeting and you'd start with that like we would open the meeting with we'd like to talk about how we work together and I mean now I feel like there are many great examples of couples who have co-ounded successful businesses and stayed together but then you had this sort of like trail of tears you know these horrific stories and so I thought what was so brilliant about Kevin and again it's so emblematic of his personalities he just went right at it and we gave a very straightforward answer and then we'd move on and it wasn't it never really became an issue.
Well, I had this mentor I have this mentor Pier Lemon and he was a chip guy. He created national semiconductor in like the ' 60s and then he was the first head of engineering at Cisco. Then he partnered with Don Valentine um at Sequoia. Um and he would talk to me about paro optimization. It's like kind of figuring out what your biggest problems were. Um, you know, and and in the chip design area, it's like you run all these tests. Is there, you know, is there a misalignment of the wafers? Is there too much um, you know, a certain impurity in the the the wafers? and you figure out which is causing the biggest problem and you force rank them and then go after the uh the biggest and then kind of test again and and that process like eventually delivers you to Nirvana. Just a very good way to do that and going into those board meetings would be like I loved like putting like the biggest problems of the company and the things that people were saying are happening in front of the board and and have them kind of help me uh work through them.
Yeah, I feel like radical transparency has been uh without the fancy titling has been a real core principle of Kevin's and I learned that from him. I mean, you know, it's uh it's an interesting thing to have someone that you love so much that you're part of all their parts of their lives, but also be your mentor. And so, you know, I was able to I'm not saying Kevin's old, but there is an age difference. And I was really a sponge learning a lot. And I feel like we handled our stuff like we never made the fact that we were married someone else's problem.
Is there anything that I was radically transparent about that you wish I wasn't
All the time? I was about to ask like how do you have a really difficult conversation where you almost don't want to you want to keep it like strictly about work versus you don't want to go into anything that would ruffle any feathers with respect to the romantic relationship.
Well, I was referring more to like you know like pimples and certain location of those.
She's getting your camera ready, you know.
Yeah. I think when you um when you work with someone like Kevin or you live with him, you start to embrace that level of transparency. And so for our family, there are no secrets.
There you go. It's just part of the
It's just you're just all out there. And it's kind of I mean to say that I've become a better person is an understatement just because I have learned to to try to care less about what people think, but also to just be honest and open. And it's really refreshing. And I think that's one of the principles of what makes Eventbrite such a great culture is that level of transparency, that understanding that you are going to know the truth. And if you if the truth isn't already out there, then Kevin Hartz is going to walk down the hall and like, you know, say it and it's like and it's not in a vicious way, not in a mean way, in a really just open matterof fact way.
I want to know about taking companies public. So Zoom went public and then Eventbrite went public.
Yes, Zoom went public on the NASDAQ. Okay. Um, and were you the CEO at the time or you I was not. John Coons was the CEO. I was on the board.
To my audience, why does one decide or a company, why does a company decide to go public?
A company decides to go public uh to give liquidity to the shareholders like that's the traditional reason. Um there are there are many other reasons. I I mean even part of that is like you can access different forms of financing, larger forms of financing through the the public markets. Um and I I always saw it as like a you know is like competing in the sunlight. Like there are so many uh companies in tech that have all these bad habits that they kind of do in the secrecy of being a kind of covered up private company that you never see. You know how they say sunlight is the best antiseptic? Like out in the public arena, um it really forces you to, you know, show show your best. Um your team is competing like in the out and open. Um and you know, that's that's a great feeling and that's a great thing to do. And you've seen that the biggest companies in the world have um you know progressed their way whether it's Nvidia uh it's long road in the public markets or um Amazon or or others uh the public markets were key to it also of course you know larger acquisitions and the like um you know Google would not have been able to acquire uh YouTube for example. What's the worst thing about having a public company? Being in leadership at a public company specifically usually with being the CEO of a publicly traded company? Like what's a what's a what's something that really grinded your gears?
Honestly, say the first things that came to mind. First one is the overhead cost of being a public company. When you're at a certain revenue threshold and valuation, it just starts to become egregious. I mean there's just generally speaking, you know, tens of millions of dollars that goes into the procedural regulatory compliance and frankly I find it very predatory for um you know all of these outside vendors to be uh preying upon a public company because you have to pay for these different services and you have to you literally have to do certain things to be a public company that cost a lot of money.
Can you explain some of them just because I'm one unaware of them too? I think it would be
I mean just like you know just the egregious audit bills because you could get sued if something were were incorrect. Being a public company it's a lot more uh expensive to get your you know compliance done. Yeah. Um
What were we we were like 24 25 million a year in the like hard cost then there's
