We were processing more refunds than revenue. Our Tableau dashboards broke because our revenue was negative. 14 years in the making was actually completely gone in 14 days. Wild.
Julia Hartz is co-founder and former CEO of Eventbrite. She helped turn a bootstrapped idea into a household brand through grit, vision, and relentless execution.
I wasn't thinking that in my life I would be part of starting a company. Certain people come together, call it fate, the universe. Those people may have complementary skill sets such that they're able to create something magical. Changing the company was a non-negotiable. We couldn't actually keep going. I started with a core question which was given what we know about this business, what would we do if we could do it all over again?
You said entrepreneurship is like it's kind of in your head. What did you mean by that? A lot of people feel ownership for a company, no matter what their title is. I realize that now more than ever. While it's incredibly valuable to have a founder running the company, you have to be leveling up every single day. What is like your top three pieces of advice for entrepreneurs tuning in right now who want to build a company as big as Eventbrite is? I can't stress enough the importance of...
Yeah, fam. What does it take to build a company for 20 years, take it public, watch it nearly disappear overnight, and still come out calling it the honor of your life? Few people can answer that question better than Julia Hartz, the co-founder and former CEO of Eventbrite, the world's largest and most trusted events marketplace. In this episode, we unpack how Julia built Eventbrite from scratch, led it through a crisis, and came out with a deeper understanding of what it really takes to build a company that can evolve beyond you. You'll hear the hard-earned lessons on leadership, culture, resilience, reinvention, and how to make tough decisions when everything is changing fast. If this is your first time here, welcome, and make sure you follow the show and come back every week for more conversations like this. Julia, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
I'm so excited for you to be here. I have been a longtime user of Eventbrite and what you've built is just so incredible. So, I'm just so excited to pick your brain and learn from you. And my first question is really about your character and like how you see yourself. So you went from working at the Ugly Mug when you were 14 years old to then creating Eventbrite, which you exited, you built into a huge company, sold billions of tickets. What's the through line from the girl who worked at the ugly mug at 14 to the woman who is sitting here today?
I think the through line is hard work and an attention to what others need. And I'll tell you a quick story that was pretty impactful at the ugly mug. So, the Ugly Mug was this craft coffee shop that opened in my hometown of Santa Cruz, California. It was the sort of the first of its kind. This guy came to town with this really fancy Italian manual espresso machine and a collection of ugly mugs. And I was the opening shift on the weekend. So, 5:00 a.m. on a Saturday was my gig. And there was a woman who would stand outside and wait for us to open. And she'd come in, she'd be the first to order her coffee. And no matter what I did to try to get her order right, she had a complaint. And she was vicious.
And I remember being so frustrated and downtrodden and coming home and talking to my mom and saying, 'I just can't make her happy.' And my mom said, 'You know, maybe you should try to strike up a conversation. Maybe she's lonely and she's looking for someone to talk to.' So, I stole my parents' Sunday paper the next day and took it in and put it on the counter and waited for her. And then I picked some random story out of the Santa Cruz Sentinel and started to get her to talk. And from that point forward, she was a totally different customer. And I feel like that through line for me has always been about learning through, you know, my mom, how to use our empathetic skills to understand what people want and then kind of at like a thread, you know, weaving that through everything that I do and then just really working hard. And I think part of what makes me me is that I have been working since I was a teenager with almost no gaps.
I love that. And I can't wait to talk to you about building company culture because I know that's so important to you and I know a lot of what you just talked about is probably ingrained in your strategy for building company culture. But before we get there, you've got four kids. You've called Eventbrite your fifth child...
And I know that you just recently, you know, exited, stepped down as CEO, which must have been a huge deal. So what does Eventbrite mean to you?
Well, you know, Eventbrite is 20 and that's a huge age. It's an age that many people are flying out of the coupe. And so I sort of feel like, you know, if I were to personify Eventbrite, I would say that I was one of three people that helped bring it to life.
You know, when Kevin and Renaud and I got together to start Eventbrite, we really were coming at it from such different perspectives and different points in our lives. I had just come from Hollywood where I'd been working in television development at FX and MTV and I came to it with this notion of, you know, people getting together in real life around things that they're really, really passionate about. It gives you an opportunity to create indelible memories. And I had been on a documentary show that we were piloting where we went around to different fandoms in the country and I'll never forget going to these meetups where I had no authority nor any clue what they were talking about or passionate about, but these were total strangers that were creating these unbelievable connections in real life. So, I thought there was something behind that. Kevin came to it from a serial entrepreneur's perspective where, you know, he had built a business in payments and microtransactions to help immigrants send money back to their families better, faster, cheaper than the incumbents. And so he was really excited about democratizing industry. And then our third co-founder Renaud, our CTO, really came to it from a place of turning passion into profit. During his off hours, he's a prolific photographer and he wanted to build a platform where people could share their skills and their passions but also make money doing that. And so I think that for us, it was definitely a classic startup story where we were in a windowless phone closet in a warehouse with no money and just bootstrapping this idea.
And I think we were really incredibly sure that we wanted to build something that brought people together in real life before, you know, we ever had to worry about not being together in real life. So we were prescient in that way.
So cool. There's so much to unpack there. I can't wait to hear about your bootstrapping, like your first two years and like the struggles and challenges and how it grew from there. When it comes to your company and you as an entrepreneur, you actually say that you're not a lemonade stand kid. You didn't start creating businesses. Your husband who was your co-founder Kevin, he was the serial entrepreneur. You were working in corporate and TV. And so how did you learn entrepreneurship and what do you have to say to the folks out there because this is an entrepreneurship show about being able to learn the skill of being an entrepreneur.
I think that the first thing is that you don't have to be born an entrepreneur. You don't have to fit the mold. I certainly didn't. I grew up in a small town. I was a ballerina. I worked hard. But also being a performer, you learn how to take feedback and make adjustments. But I wasn't thinking that in my life I would be part of starting a company and I just didn't know what I didn't know. I think we know so much more about entrepreneurship now 20 years later. But I think that you don't have to have started a company in college to be a successful entrepreneur by any means. I think what happens is that certain people come together, call it fate, the universe, and those people may have complementary skill sets such that they're able to create something magical. And for me, I'm really great at systems thinking and I'm really great at understanding what people want. And when I met Kevin and Saul, lived vicariously through him. We met at a wedding and were dating. So, you know, I feel like it opened my eyes to the world of tech and the world of entrepreneurship and what drew me in was the velocity. And I'll never forget that first day, you know, opening my laptop and thinking like what now? And I'll never forget that moment. And then understanding the immediate allure of building something from scratch. And for me, it connected the dots for me as to why I didn't love school because I love to learn by doing.
And so getting my hands dirty and diving into something I didn't understand and figuring it all out on the fly for the last 20 years. It's not like I woke up a month ago and went, 'Well, I've got it all figured out.' I think that's the best part of being an entrepreneur is not ever knowing and constantly learning and iterating and I mean that's just the best.
Yeah, it's so exciting. It's so stimulating every day where you just are like learning something new, solving problems.
So you started your career off in TV, right? And I'm always thinking about how skills that you gain in life, you always end up using the skills that you've acquired. And especially in today's world of AI and creator entrepreneurship being so popular, your unique skill set is just so important, it makes you uniquely you. It's how you differentiate against AI which can replicate a lot of tasks but it can't replicate your lived experience, right? So you being in TV and being a part of like hit shows like Jackass, how did that shape your skills as an entrepreneur, the opportunities you were able to see before everybody else was able to see it? What were the ways that it kind of inspired you to start Eventbrite?
Well, I had I think a very lucky and fortunate career in television in the span of only say five years. So it was a very short span of time between the time that I graduated to the time that I started Eventbrite at 25. But I was also interning throughout my entire college time. And so you know roughly nine years in Hollywood being able to see some of the absolute best content being made. My first internship was on the set of Friends. Then, you know, I did a few other internships to try to figure out what I wanted to do and just to learn and what I didn't want to do. And then I found MTV and I found this department. It was one of four series development departments at MTV. There were two on the west coast and two on the east coast. And I was an intern there when the Jackass team sent in their pilot.
I think that what I learned in that experience was how you can have an idea that is so groundbreaking and potent and clear. I mean, these guys were sure of what they wanted to do. The best part of working on that show were the weekly legal OSHA standards and practices conference call that we would have where I was on the creative side, but the guys would be in their space on a conference call and they would have to describe in great detail what they wanted to do. And they would fax over, you know, maybe four pages single line spaced of all of these ideas they had. And then the experts would have to go around and debate how they would actually be able to do these things. And, you know, it wasn't lost on us that we were sort of killing the magic as it were, as we were trying to recreate their ideas in a way that actually worked on cable. But that definitiveness of what they wanted to do was what I learned. Like never get in the way of a creative idea and always find ways to enable that. And then at FX, I again happen to just be in the right place at the right time when John Landgraf was just taking over. And I think that era of television is unparalleled. And I remember these meetings where I'd be almost a fly on the wall as the most junior person in the room listening to the creative depth of this team and what they eventually brought to air was such high quality. And that doesn't just happen.
Yeah. And I think we're creating content at an unprecedented rate and volume today. But when you really think about the things that are category defining, those tend to be things that have been getting worked out and worked on for many, many years.
Yeah, totally. I totally agree with that.
So, I know that you started Eventbrite in 2006 or so. What was the world like back then and what gap did you see that you wanted to fill?
Okay, so I always feel really old when I describe this because it's hard to believe, but there was really no self-service option to sell tickets to events. You had RSVP tools like Evite and you had large, you know, dinosaur incumbent solutions that were super expensive and practically on-prem. So we were the first open platform for anyone and some of the principles that we started with I think really defined what Eventbrite has become which is we wanted Eventbrite to be as easy to use as Gmail. So we would test our every feature on Kevin's father and he was like our biggest alpha tester. We wanted Eventbrite to be completely self-service and that's hard to do with a payments transaction platform. I mean we move billions of dollars in microtransactions. The average ticket price is less than $50 on Eventbrite and we're doing multiple billions of dollars a year. But we didn't want to make it so hard to sign up that you'd have this barrier. We wanted to lower all the barriers and so we created a platform that on the back end could do a lot of the heavy lifting and fraud detection but also on the front end it could be super simple. You just needed to set up your account and start selling tickets.
Then we also wanted to be horizontal. We did not want to specialize in any single vertical of event type and we also didn't want to just be in the US or in a few different countries. We launched on the PayPal API so that allowed us to be in like 180 countries from the beginning. And the final thing that we did I would say that was against the grain of common wisdom was we just undercut anyone else that was doing ticketing price-wise and we made free tickets free. So we only charged creators on the paid tickets that they were selling.
And those decisions in the early days was sort of like somewhat inconsequential because we were such a small company and we bootstrapped the company. So we sort of were just like, ah, what happens if you put a zero in the ticket price box? There's no fee. Okay, let's just do that. It'll really annoy our competitors.
Yeah. That ended up being such a huge part of the growth model of Eventbrite. So I think the moral of the story is like wherever you're starting now, in 5 years it'll feel like 20 years ago but you'll look back and go oh my gosh that was so provincial but also the decisions you're making now if they're strong and principled they will be the backbone of your company and of your culture really.
And so we were kind of the only game in town and we started to really see growth and traction in bloggers and tech bloggers in particular who were using Eventbrite for paid meetups.
And then I'll never forget the day we'd built this really kind of primitive map to show where the tickets were being sold on Eventbrite. It was a digital map, but it was on a screen in our tiny little office and it would show the logo of the event and where the ticket purchase was being made from. And I'll never forget when New York started to light up and that was the first time that we were sort of getting out of the Bay Area in our little bubble. And it was for speed dating events.
And I remember thinking like, oh wow, that's a totally different genre than tech meetups. There's probably a joke in there somewhere, but wow. And we were sort of off to the races at that point. So, we bootstrapped until we really had product market fit and then we raised at that point.
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There's so many lessons for entrepreneurs in what you just said. So you tried to make it super user friendly, as easy as Gmail. You had your husband's father testing it to make sure that even like an older person who wasn't tech-savvy would be able to buy tickets on your platform. You had this guiding principle to democratize events. And so that's why you decided on the zero fee also, right? So it was that core value that actually helped really spread Eventbrite by word of mouth. Like I remember hearing about it probably like 2010 I was having events on Eventbrite. I had a little blog and I was using it and like everybody knew about it and it was like this cool platform like you said that it was just free so there was no barriers. It was easy to just get hooked on it and then you became like the household name of community event ticketing and it was because you were putting community first not monetization first. So talk to us about the importance of finding product market fit.
Yeah. And how and when you decided like okay this is really sticking and working and then also like some of the thought behind like how to keep lowering those barriers to entry so that more people use it and spread it. You know, I think there's a lot of virtue in if you can being capital efficient. I think we're entering a period of time where that actually will be put to the test in a major way because while we're gaining massive efficiency and scale in creating new ideas. The cost to do it is so high right with GPU and that will come down over time but the compute is really a barrier.
We didn't have a lot of barrier. The only barrier we had was could we put food on our table and thankfully we figured out how to make do. But it allowed us to not be kind of distracted by maybe other people's agendas and then when we did raise our first round of institutional funding it was from Sequoia Capital. Roelof Botha was our earliest investor and board member for 14 years and we were really sure of the people we chose to be on this journey with us on the board investing in the company that they were value add and not value extracting in terms of their agendas or their ideas and that's totally possible.
I mean I think that oftentimes you hear the kind of age-old story of a board not being fully aligned behind the entrepreneur and they all have their own agendas and especially if things go well it's like everybody's got an agenda and I just don't think that has to be the case. I think if you really are thoughtful about the people that you bring into the fold and ask to put on your team's jersey like you can really get far and stay true to your principles.
But I think that the way that we built Eventbrite was this kind of perfect blend of who we were as founders. And I'm really proud of that because I think right around 2010 we were ready to go from a team like a two-pizza team to a full-fledged company. And I remember the 2006 vintage companies had all gone through either they hadn't made it or they'd all gone through hyper-growth challenges. And I remember thinking, 'Wow, this seems inevitable that we're going to lose our culture. Something's going to go wrong. We're going to scale too quickly and the wheels are going to kind of come off the bus.' And I remember thinking, well, I feel for this company as I feel for my own human child. We had a 2-year-old at that point. And I thought, there's this unconditional love that I have. So, I think what I'm going to do is die trying to make a great company alongside a successful business. And I think that commitment was really supported by Kevin and Renaud. And I think it made a huge difference and helped Eventbrite become what it is today. And obviously it tickles me, Pete, to hear you say it's a household name.
But I think it's like that didn't come easily and it didn't come from a way of we were sitting in a room going, 'How do we scale?' It was like very human.
Yeah. So let's dig deep on the company culture part because you've won like so many awards of having such a great company to work at. Talk to us about leading up to COVID what your company culture was like, what were some of the values that you were instilling. I know that you weren't the CEO I believe at that point or right before COVID you became CEO. So and you were really leading the culture and the people so talk to us about what were your strategy with that.
Yeah, well a few things. So Kevin was CEO for the first 10 years and then I was CEO for the second 10 years. I'm really proud of the fact that we're still married. That's not an easy feat. And we loved working together the first 10 years. It was phenomenal because we again are really complementary in our skill sets. So, we just divided and conquered.
He was like product and you were more people.
Yeah. I was marketing and customer service. He was product. And then as we scaled, I became more I guess culture and I don't know, my title was incredibly nebulous. It was president which I was sort of confused by but I would have been intern if I could have done that first.
When I took over it was like about a thousand times harder than I expected. You know he had made it look so easy and I to this day am not over the fact that he just didn't really tip his hand onto how challenging it is to be a CEO and how mental it is like the biggest challenge is yourself in your own head. He did it with such ease. And then the second thing was, you know, I thought of our culture as sort of like building Legos. You know, if you lay the right foundation, you can build a lot of different things on top of it. But sometimes you build a tower that's way too high, it falls over. And it's really about the other supporting Lego structures that you can actually have a culture that's sustainable.
But also can go through hard times. And so right when I took over as CEO, when I stepped in in 2016, it was like the good times were rolling. We were a private company eyeing an IPO about to acquire our largest competitor in music. Somebody had written an article about our company that said we were like the Disneyland of startups when you walked into our office. It's like everything I just... I definitely understand the art of energy and gathering and man like the minute I maybe perhaps felt like... I don't think I ever felt like we had it made. I think I'm always healthily paranoid but I mean that was like a very fleeting moment because we acquired this big competitor that was like oil and water culture-wise. I was completely naive and thinking that, you know, oh, we can just come together. It'll be kumbaya. Not that was not the case. It was incredibly difficult.
And then we prepared to go public. We went public and then we were like a new public company stumbling in the public markets, you know, trying to do a lot of things. And I kind of came into 2019 and then transitioning into 2020 feeling like we were spinning five plates with the right hand and like patting our stomachs with the left and it was just and like standing on one leg and it was a lot and we needed to simplify and we needed to focus and so 2020 was our focus year. It was just like we know what we need to do. We know how to get there. Let's stop doing all this other really cool bright shiny object stuff because we've really got to get back to basics.
And then March 4th of 2020 happened and it was just...
Yeah. So it felt like, you know, I think what people maybe don't know is like we weren't in great shape going into COVID. We had gone through a really tough year. Yeah. But we were stronger and leaner and fitter so to speak going into 2020 which actually helped us tremendously when we had to completely reset and reimagine the company. What was going through your mind and what were some of the things that were happening once events stopped and what did that mean for how you had to like think about your company, restructure your company, rethink company culture and also I know that you got a lot of scrutiny online for the layoffs and things. So talk to us about that.
Yeah, I mean, you know, certainly I have a lot of empathy for people who live in the future whose job it is to be futurists, especially when people are unwilling to believe them because that's only happened to me once. And we had the benefit of having been close to the head of the infectious disease department at UCSF, Joe DeRisi, who is a phenomenal scientist and public health expert. Having people around us who maybe are on the slightly more paranoid side, weren't sure exactly what was going to happen, but knew how we needed to handle it if it were the worst that we could possibly imagine. And it was the worst that we could possibly imagine.
And I have to say, Kevin was there for me the whole time. He dropped everything he was working on. And he has a sense of urgency and decisiveness that is second to none. So what I was thinking was this is going to be really bad and we need to move very quickly for a number of different reasons but not least of which to be able to help our creators rebuild their businesses.
Now, there was a moment of time about two months where our customers did not understand what we saw. And that was really hard because we had to make changes pretty immediately to help them save their businesses. And they didn't even, it's not that they didn't have the intelligence, but they just didn't have the information that we had.
There was like asymmetrical information and willingness to believe. Like they thought events were going to continue or this was temporary or something like that.
Everybody thought that, right? And it's not that we had like, you know, security level information. We just were listening to the worst case scenario and had wise people around us telling us there's no downside to believing the worst case scenario, especially when you're facing something that could be so crushing.
I mean, the whole basis of our business went away. Like, 14 years in the making was actually completely gone in 14 days. Wild. We were processing more refunds than revenue. Our Tableau dashboards broke because our revenue was negative and they hadn't accounted for that in the configuration.
And again, we had to be the bearer of bad news in such a critical time when everyone was so scared and confused anyways, but like never underestimate the human's ability to be optimistic, you know, and cling to hope and entrepreneurs. Yeah, we had to kind of be like, no, this is going to be bad. You need to not pay your vendors or your venue right now. You need to think about how you're going to refund your fans. You know, changing the company was a non-negotiable. We couldn't actually keep going the way that we were.
And I wanted our actions as it came to company to be really intentional and thoughtful. And I knew that we would have to change the size of the company during a really scary time. And so I started with a core question which was given what we know about this business what would we do if we could do it all over again? And I asked my team that and the executive team at the time was a mix of tenure people who'd been there from the beginning who had just arrived who had perspective from different companies.
And we wrote down a one-pager that basically described what we would do if we could do it all over again. And the punchline was we get to do it all over again if we make the right decisions here. So let's go do this. And we built the company to that model. And a lot of it was getting back to the basics. A lot of it was getting back to the core principles of the company. This is a tale as old as time. You scale. You let ambition take you into new areas. You get more complicated. You start bolting things on. We had a lot of cleanup to do. And so that's what we really focused on. But first, we had to throw away our product roadmap and just help our customers and help our creators figure out a pathway forward, which included online events, which included offering credits to their customers alongside refunds, which included how do you create community branding and togetherness in a time when everybody has to be apart. And that really took us through much of 2020.
Yeah. And COVID lasted a pretty long time. I remember really I started my business in 2020. It's really funny to think how 2020 was so detrimental to some businesses but then gave so much opportunity to other businesses. Like for me I had my podcast for a couple years and then I quit my job and started my social media podcast agency at a time where everybody wanted social and podcast. So it was like million dollars right away in revenue like before we even hit a year with my agency like it just took off and I was doing a ton of online events at that time like Clubhouse was really popular and just like all these sort of like webinar type events and I'm sure Eventbrite was supporting creators doing that. But now, fast forward 2026, everyone is like clamoring for these like in-person events and it's becoming more of a trend than ever. Even though there's so much opportunity online for creator entrepreneurs and making money online, there's also a lot of opportunity right now for live events. And I'd love to learn from you. What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the live event space? And why is it something that people who have a lot of followers, creator entrepreneurs, something that they should really think about?
Well, I mean, I would start from like kind of a heady place, which is, you know, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you have the physiological needs, so food, water, air, you have a need for security and shelter, and right above that, you have a need for connectedness. And the reason why I bring that up is not because it looks good on a strategy deck. It's really because in the span of 20 years, we have seen several technological advances and revolutions and pivot points that, you know, for all intents and purposes could have driven us farther away from being together in real life. And through all of those, whether it's social media, mobile phones, and how much content we're watching and scrolling through, virtual reality, global pandemic, now AI. It's all of these things have been enablers of bringing us together and also have driven up the premium value of live experiences.
People want to or can now find their people and find their niche online. It's incredibly accessible to find your people now, but it drives this desire to want to then meet them in the flesh. And I think there's a combination of a few things going on. One is the old adage of you don't know what you got till it's gone. And I would say for rich countries, the taking away of liberties and being able to be together momentarily or that stress that got put into the system of being together made people realize how important it is to be in real life.
And I also think about the story that happened on Eventbrite which was an incredible creator Radha Agrawal started a company called Daybreaker prior to COVID. They were doing early morning raves where, you know, total epic events where it's like 5:00 a.m. and it's sunset on the sun...
Had like coffee, kombucha, but just like total parties. And they were doing like a thousand people in multiple cities. COVID hits and they set up a studio kind of like this, you know, in New York, which is like total nightmare. And they start live streaming these Sunday morning dance parties. And within a few months, this had grown to a global party of over 100,000 people a week.
Of all ages, you know, people who just wanted to feel that connection and that magic and were like stuck at home with their kids. And it became this ritual and they became a totally different company out of COVID. So to your point, they built a multimedia platform and their business became massive. And I think that idea of accessibility and bringing these otherwise pretty exclusive events, you had to live in like a cool city and kind of be in the know, to the masses opened an opportunity and opened people's eyes to what could happen in the future.
