How a Crisis Turned Julia Hartz Into the CEO Eventbrite Needed

that I was the second youngest woman to take a company public. I was like the 21st founder CEO woman to take a company public.

The first word that just came to mind, I'll just be honest and say it, is terrifying. I don't think anyone ever feels ready for it.

Always, always, always, always stop and talk to your customers. Just stop what you're doing. Stop the strategy. Stop the execution. Stop the metrics and just have human conversations with your customers.

Hey, thanks for having me.

I am. You know, as you said that, I hated rollercoasters growing up, but now I love them.

Yeah.

I sure did.

Well, generally when I tell people that, I wait to see their response and then I either say I'm sorry or you're welcome.

All right. Thank you. That gives me direction. I was an intern. I think being there during that time was so incredible because I was an intern when the Jackass guys sent in their demo. I feel so lucky to have been there during that time because it was so unique and the vision they had was so specific. So I graduated college that year and I started working in that department, and so I got to see the first season and movie of Jackass developed and produced and executed. And, you know, I have to say, their vision throughout and their persistence for what they wanted to do and show on television was unparalleled, right? So it was an honor and a privilege.

That you're awesome.

Yeah. Well, you know, it was a confluence of our stories being woven together. So it was Kevin Hartz, my fiancé at the time, co-founder, husband, co-parent, life partner today. We're about to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary, which is incredible.

And he came from a background of having been one of the first investors in what became PayPal, and I think was really motivated by the idea of democratization. And I think that team, you know, lots been said about the PayPal mafia, but that team really brought something to consumers that we didn't have before, which was the ability to pay each other using online means. And what started as beaming money from PalmPilot to PalmPilot was then morphed into this merchant processing platform that turned anyone into a merchant. And that was such a, again, groundbreaking idea that allowed anyone to start businesses online. So with that, Kevin and his business partner Alan Braverman at the time had developed a bunch of what I would call sort of apps driven by the PayPal API to bring that democratization into other verticals. So, not unlike apps and sort of that wrap layer being built on top of foundational models today, one of them was event ticketing. Another one was subscription payments for Yahoo Groups, which Yahoo turned off right away. And then another one was international money transfer for immigrants to send money home to their families better, faster, cheaper than Western Union. That third one actually got traction and was funded by Sequoia Capital. So they had to turn their attention fully to that, and they let everything else just be in maintenance mode. When I came along, I'd come from a background—I was at FX Networks at the time. So I'd moved from MTV to FX Networks and I was working on a bunch of original content including Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me, The Shield. I mean, I was in the right place at the right time. I was so fortunate. But I also had been working on a show that was about fandoms that we were piloting with the documentarian Morgan Spurlock. And I'll never forget going to this really niche fandom meetup and being totally and completely overwhelmed and confused about the subject matter. But in the back of my head, I realized that there was this palpable energy and connection in the room of people getting together in real life. And it always stuck with me how incredible that was and how we were sort of trying to replicate that onscreen. It was really hard to do. And then our third co-founder, Renaud Visage, in addition to being an amazing engineer is also a prolific photographer. And I really think that his why was a curiosity around helping people turn passion into profit. So we all get together. That was not a short story, but long story short is about we all get together and the meaningful moment is that one of our earliest scaled customers was Michael Arrington and TechCrunch.

And it was Michael understanding that he had created content that people wanted to interact with, and they also wanted to interact with each other. And truly, this was our first inspiration, and we built the product to meet the needs of people like Michael. Now, I don't need to tell you that that's a really hard first customer to have. I mean, we had lots of other tech bloggers, but I would say that Michael stuck out as very unique in that, you know, he was willing to call us up and give us the feedback. And Kevin and I were the check-in desk for the first ever TechCrunch Disrupt. We had a guest list and we were checking people in and taking their feedback, and I've got the receipts and the pictures to prove it. But that was really what inspired us was this idea of democratizing an industry, making it possible for anyone to sell tickets to any kind of event, bringing people together through live experiences, and creating a new form of almost scaled content online that was bringing people offline and really into that space where they could create indelible memories and exchange that energy.

Are you calling me old?

Historian now.

You know, it's been 20 years since we started Eventbrite, and so that does make me old, by the way. That's just facts.

But I think that what has been most shocking to me has been the prevalence of or the premium to in-real-life events and experiences and connection. And, you know, in 20 years we've seen the rise of social media. We've seen the adoption of mobile. We've seen the advent of big data. We've pondered a world where we might be gathering virtually. We have endured a global pandemic. We are now on the precipice of, you know, this—I don't even know what words we're using to call it, but this really amazing, disruptive, and creative time. Every time, live experiences continue to be at the nucleus of what people want. And during COVID, there was a point about 14 days in when our company that was 14 years was essentially no longer in existence. We were processing more refunds than revenue. We had negative revenue such that all of our Tableau dashboards had broken because we hadn't contemplated going below the zero axis. And I thought, wow, what a—well, I thought a lot of things, but one thing I thought was what an interesting time to be living through a moment where it's such a black swan event that the entire basis of our business has disappeared seemingly overnight. And yet, even in that darkest moment, there was this light on in the back of my head like, don't forget that connectedness is in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's right there above physiological needs and security is the need to connect. And I think that is something that has really driven me. But again, I say it's the most shocking thing because, wow, there have been so many times when people have told me that live events are dying.

Yeah.

The first word that just came to mind, I'll just be honest and say it, is terrifying. It was not something that I don't think anyone ever feels ready for. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most first-time CEOs, and even second or third or fourth-time CEOs, are learning as they're building and sometimes just making it up as you go along. And I'll never forget one of our earliest investors, Roelof Botha, who served on our board for 14 years, said something to the effect of, "Be careful what you wish for." And I mean, there is quite literally besides my husband no other person on this planet, or my mom too, who is more supportive of me than Roelof. But I'll never forget those words because I'm like, oh my gosh, did I even wish for this? I'm not sure, you know. But going through the period of time from like 2016 to 2019 was definitely for me a mental game of like, what would Kevin do, and am I doing it right, and am I good enough? I don't think anyone's ready, but I was asking myself, am I ready? Am I prepared? And then COVID hit, and I had to leave all of that behind in order to—a, I was the best person to run the company through a crisis like that, and b, there was no time for me to be asking those questions anymore. So it was a gift in a way, to go through such a massive, unprecedented crisis. I got so tired of saying that word. I probably didn't say "unprecedented" for about two years after 2020. But, you know, I took over in 2016. We acquired our largest competitor in music, which is our largest category, in 2017. We went public in 2018, and 2019 was just about like growing pains and, after all of that change, figuring out how to move forward and scale and become lean and focused. And so we came into 2020 unwittingly prepared for a massive disruption.

One moment that comes back to me is I think it was around March 13th or 14th of 2020, and we had all vacated the office. We had this beautiful 50,000-square-foot office that was busting at the seams at that point. I remember there were lines for the bathroom, and that was like my biggest issue coming into 2020 was how we were going to build more potties. And I remember the day that we decided we should all go work from home, and I remember being the last person in the office. And that's something I think I learned from my father, who was a prolific manager, just to really—and he was in Vietnam, and so he embedded in me servant leadership. And so I was literally the last person. I was going around turning the lights off, and I never saw that office again. And I remember having this really heavy moment feeling like, wow, this is big. We met up on Zoom the next day and I remember seeing a lot of uncertain faces in my team, and people's kids were bouncing off the wall because they weren't in school, and dogs were coming in and out of the frame. And the first thing I said was, let's make a pact and a new cultural norm that we don't apologize for our kids or our dogs, because I'm pretty sure that's going to make it into their psyche and we don't want them to be going to therapy about that. That's going to be a lot more to deal with. So let's just stop apologizing and just play through. The second thing is—and it just kind of came out, I hadn't really planned to say it, but I said, given what you know about this business, what would you do if you could do it all over again? And I got people starting to talk and loosen up and get creative. And by the end of that meeting, we had a one-pager of what we would do differently if we could do it all over again. Because I think as companies scale and grow and teams grow, you inevitably acquire barnacles and you don't always slough those off on a regular basis. And I'm not even talking about team size; I'm talking about strategy. Egos get involved. You get kind of precious. There are sacred cows, all the things. And so we really got focused, and I was not surprised, but really pleased at how quickly we could identify the critical few things that we should really focus on. And then at the end of the meeting, I was like, well, let's go do that, because we're going to do it all over again. And I think that gave us direction and a North Star to be brave enough to go move forward and move forward quickly. We were completely restructured and reset in our strategy by April of 2020 and ready to endure a very long hardship. We knew it was going to be long. I can get into that later. But I think the things that I learned in that moment was: have the bravery to rethink the core concept; be okay with taking a really bold leap even in times of uncertainty; don't delude the idea of something being very, very bad just because it's scary; and plan for the worst.

I need a drink.

Me too. It's like 11:00 a.m. on a Friday.

I'm going to need to take you in the way-back machine, and you're going to have to trust me that I'm telling the truth because—

It's hard to believe, but when we started Eventbrite, we made the almost academic decision to bootstrap the company. So we used our own money to build the company, and we were fortunate to have money to put into the company. It was all of our money, so there was a big personal risk that we were taking in starting this company. And because it was our own money and we didn't have an infinite amount of it, we spent less than a quarter of a million dollars in the first two and a half years. And it was just the three co-founders. We didn't have money really to hire a team; we had a few maybe contractors. We also then raised an angel round from friends and family and early angel investors that bridged us to our first institutional fundraise. But when we decided that we were ready to go out and take money from a venture firm, it was really when we had traction, we had product-market fit, we had traction in our earliest categories, we had line of sight to scaling, and we were profitable. And we were so excited to go out and pitch to the world. And it was fall of 2008, and that couldn't have been a more terrible time to go out and pitch Eventbrite to the world. We met with 27 venture firms and we got 27 noes. Now, something that I think is brilliant about Kevin, who is as prolific of an angel investor as he is a startup founder, is that he's maybe the most transparent person I've ever met in my life, and has changed me as a person through that because we're sort of obscenely transparent in our lives with our family. And I think that is such a different mentality for people sometimes. So what I mean by this is he left our 2009 operating plan with every partner that we met with. And as we were getting these noes, we're like, okay, we'll come back and check in next year. 2009 ended up being an incredible year for us because we were set up well and we were so lean and efficient and operating out of necessity, but also because what ended up happening is that that kind of why for Renaud ended up coming true. People started, as they were losing their jobs through the financial crisis—talk about a time when the bottom fell out, like it really fell out—people started to teach classes to make money. They started to go to more networking events to find jobs. They started going out to be with one another, because during hard financial times people actually want to be out with each other. It was a time when people were drinking, so there was that.

And good for business. And we soared through 2009. So in Q4 of '09, we went back out to not all 27, but a select few, and showed them our results. And it was like this really surprising reaction to that, which was this novel idea that we would actually beat and exceed our plans that we had left them with, because so many businesses had to reset and rebase during that time. So we had more than a few offers and we knew that we would want to work with Sequoia again. They had funded Kevin's prior company, Xoom, and so we were thrilled to partner with them and that's when Roelof joined the board. But I do think that there is a lot of meaning in the hardship. And the reason why I started this story with "you're going to have to believe me" is it's just not the same anymore, and it hasn't been for a while, and I sound maybe curmudgeonly, but I think that's a shame.

And then once we had Sequoia on board, I have to say it was a lot easier to get Lee Fixel, Henry Ellenbogen, some of the most, again, important investors of our time to really back us and push us forward and help us scale to IPO.