Well, we have a really exciting panel this morning to kick off Inc. Founders House. And I'm delighted to have on stage with me Ben Van Leeuwen, who's the co-founder and CEO of Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, which is the premium brand that's grown from a single New York City food truck into nearly 100 scoop shops nationwide, plus a booming grocery business. And there's some more new stuff on the way, which we'll talk about in a minute. And then Julia Hartz is the co-founder, CEO, let's put a pin in that, and executive chair of Eventbrite, the global events platform powering millions of experiences in nearly 180 countries and serving more than 90 million monthly users. And one of the things that's really exciting about this panel, and we're here to talk about pivots, but both of these companies have some pretty interesting news right now. So Ben, I'm going to start with you. What's new coming up next week at Van Leeuwen?
So we're launching our first product line extension in the history of the company. So in almost 20 years, on March 18th in Wynwood, Miami, the newest Van Leeuwen store that's opening will have Van Leeuwen frozen yogurt. And we're very, very excited about this. From a business standpoint, aside from it being a delicious product that we've done the Van Leeuwen way, we found that the frozen yogurt customer comes much more frequently than the ice cream customer. We've also seen that frozen yogurt is highly cyclical. So you've seen big booms in it and then tons of stores closing over the last like 40 years. So what we're doing is rolling frozen yogurt out into a large percentage of our fleet. So, we'll still have the entire Van Leeuwen ice cream offering. This super high-fat, high egg, incredibly luxurious, decadent ice cream, but also this product that you really can eat more. I love ice cream. I love the most decadent desserts, but since we added frozen yogurt, popped it up in our innovation kitchen in Brooklyn, I'm eating it like every day.
Amazing. Amazing. And I should say your co-founder is here as well, right?
Yes. Laura is here filming. Hi, Laura.
I love that you're bringing back Fro Yo.
Very exciting.
Yeah. And Julia, you've been announcing some big news. Why don't you share that with the crowd?
Well, you said CEO, but today is the first day that I'm not actually. So, I'm unbridled, unhinged, and we don't know what's going to happen. Thank you. And the wonderful woman who made me look beautiful is here and also a founder. After 20 years of building Eventbrite, we announced and closed the acquisition of Eventbrite by Bending Spoons and I don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. And I don't have to worry about people judging me about what I'm saying in the front row because I'm not... you can't tell me what to do anymore.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but you are one of the few female founders to bring a company through IPO and then have this exit. Now, that's like a pretty rare accomplishment.
Yeah. I mean, when we went public, the New York Stock Exchange, I think they were trying to be really kind and they said, 'We just went through all the archives of the bell ringing photos and we can't find a photo that has this many women on the podium.' And I looked around. I'm like, 'This is just our team. It's not like we brought up extra women, you know.' And then the trader, Peter, who opened the stock, who's just a legend, he goes, 'I've never seen so many kids on the trading floor.' And I'm like, 'This is just our families.' So I felt like in that moment it was bittersweet. This was 2018, but somebody gave me the stat that there had only been about 21 women who had founded and led their company to an IPO. So I am so excited to now support and make sure that number grows by an order of magnitude over the next 10 years.
So that can be your day two. Day two. Well, thank you guys for being here. As I said, we're talking about pivots and I'm curious in the history of Van Leeuwen, for example, as you've grown from a food truck, a good friend of ours was a food truck warrior with you in New York when that was first happening, Kenny Laauo, through to having retail, having retail through COVID which I imagine was a thing, and now going into fro yo but also expanding internationally which is a big step for a company like yours. Talk about the pivots and which was the first big pivot and how did you tackle it?
So our vision was to have thousands of ice cream trucks all over the United States. Year two, we had built six trucks and a small storefront became available in our neighborhood in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Because of the convenience of the location, we said, 'Let's open an ice cream shop.' Within two hours of opening that shop, we kind of decided, 'We're never building another truck.' The shops did more revenue. They were always in the same place. They always had water. They always had power. And nobody hassled you for being near their business. So that was the first pivot and it really changed the business. We have 103 corporate-owned scoop shops in the US. Today we are working on getting 500 stores open in Korea. Korea will be probably bigger than the US within five years. But the second pivot is what we are about to do. And honestly guys, it's something that scares me. I'm nervous. I'm anxious. I'm excited. But adding frozen yogurt to the stores was never part of the plan. But because of a lot of factors, some that we know, some that we don't, there is a decline in consumption of really decadent desserts. Is it GLP-1s? Is it the proliferation of information about healthy eating on social media? I'm not sure. So, as I was saying before, we see this incredible frequency in frozen yogurt, three, four times a week versus three, four times a year for ice cream. So, this is a new pivot where we're saying we are Van Leeuwen ice cream, but we're also Van Leeuwen frozen dessert. So, we're going to add frozen yogurt with these incredible toppings where we apply the same sourcing ethos. So, Bronte pistachios blended with the kataifi, sort of our own version of the Dubai chocolate and put this in all of the stores. And it's necessary for us to do right now because competition-wise there are frozen yogurt chains all over the world expanding more rapidly than anything in frozen dessert has ever expanded because of that customer frequency. So, we want to capture that. But more importantly, from the empathetic, putting ourselves in our guest shoes, we want to sort of meet them where they are. They want the frozen yogurt. I was in my East Village store in New York City the other night. There are these three women in their mid-20s and I said, 'Hey, can I ask you some questions? I'll give you some gift certificates.' And I said, 'What would you think about us adding frozen yogurt?' And they said, 'We love frozen yogurt.' And I said, 'How long have you been coming to Van Leeuwen?' 'We're huge fans. We've been coming for 10 years.' 'How often do you come?' 'Maybe once every couple months.' 'How often do you get frozen yogurt?' 'Two or three times a week.' So that moment, that one anecdote, and sometimes our team of incredibly hardworking, many of whom are MBAs, say, 'We need the data. We need the data.' But other times I'm like, to me, that one anecdote and then looking at the lines at frozen yogurt shops is kind of enough data.
I have a product idea for you, just a little bit of an addition. Because I'm not 20. I'm in my mid-40s and I feel like you could crack open my demo if you made a creatine and clear protein topping, you know, because that's what we're doing now. And so I feel like if you could make that happen.
Yeah. Just some sort of sprinkle.
We just R&D'd our first 21 gram protein per serving, six grams of sugar, but no fake sugar. No monk fruit ice cream. We don't know if we're going to sell it.
Yeah, it's good. You're going to license the IP for it also, right?
Yes. I'm just going to be a great customer.
Yeah. So Julia, talk about Eventbrite and when you build a digital platform like that which grows and has network effects, I imagine there are all kinds of ways in which user behavior begins to shift your perception of the business and where the opportunity is. So, how did Eventbrite sort of evolve over time and what were some of the big pivots that you recall as being really dramatic or interesting?
Yeah, our first customer was actually Michael Arrington who started TechCrunch way, way, way back and he and others like him were content creators that were hosting meetups. So we're basically right back where we started. And they wanted a way to monetize these meetups and so we created a product that would help them do that but in a way that was as easy as using Gmail and that was like our core vision of the product. But the broader vision was that we wanted to bring the world together through live experiences and we wanted to make it possible for anyone to sell tickets to any event. And it's an interesting time and I can speak so freely about this, that we just had the Live Nation settlement, number like 10, with the Department of Justice around ticketing and the access to events and we were really early in thinking about how could you break down those barriers to actually make it possible for anyone to go to any kind of event that they love to attend but also to help people be successful in monetizing their passion, their skill on the creator side. And so when we built for that initial customer, it was basically the best customer to choose because, I'm trying to think of the analog for you. It would maybe be building for me because I know exactly what I want and I have a lot of product requests. But it was amazing for us because we could be in this sort of iterative virtuous cycle with people who are not only using the product but also criticizing the product to us privately and publicly and then building strength from there. And so we just went right in through that door. The way that we knew that we had something was when we actually started to track events that were not related to Tech Meetup. We had this really kind of rudimentary map that would show us where tickets were being sold to what kind of events and where in the world. And it was New York speed dating events, the like seventh coming of speed dating. This was three cycles ago where I knew we had something that people would use because it was a totally different audience. We can make lots of jokes about how those two have converged, but it was a completely different audience back then. And that's when we kind of knew that we had a product that people would use across multiple genres of events and all over.
Well, one thing I want to ask about is what seems so interesting about Eventbrite as a business is that it's hyper-local and yet has this global reach. And so how do you think about that from, we're dealing with the San Francisco tech community and like how do they all get to the meetup to actually, this is a business with great breadth.
