Julia Hartz: How To Survive When 14 Years Of Work Is Destroyed In 14 Days!

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.

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?

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

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.

My first born. Yeah.

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.

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.

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, totally. I totally agree with that.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

And now I think, you know, we have this almost like renaissance coming out of this pandemic. We've seen this before. So big massive pandemic and then this renaissance period of creativity and connection that I think is going to...

Breed a whole new generation of live experiences that kind of cross the transom of, you know, I'm a passive participant to I'm in the middle of this storyline.

And that's I think what people are looking for and we see it time and time again continue to reinvent itself and grow in strength.

Well, I think the authority on this in my opinion is a woman named Priya Parker. She wrote The Art of Gathering and she is, you know, I think one of the foremost experts on sort of social dynamics and how to create a memorable connection. And she's done this through, you know, conflict resolution but she actually like applies it to sort of any genre. And so I highly recommend checking out her work.

She's incredible. And she talks about generous authority of hosting and just the job of a host and how important that is. And I think so often we get to about 10 or 20% of what that role actually is. And I think the coolest events that I have found on the platform and otherwise have been experiences where the host, the creator is thinking from beginning to end about the experience of the guest or the fan or the participant and drawing them in in a way that is going to take them through the arc of a story or them through the arc of learning or them through the magic of connection. And they have that idea in their head through the eyes of their customer from beginning especially to end. And I love Priya so much because she kind of harps on this thing that I'm not great at, which is a great ending. Like I know how to begin a talk, a speech, an event, a party, a dinner. I know exactly how I want to give that opening toast or connection. And I'm terrible at how do you tie it in a bow? Like how do you create that magical end that everybody, because that's the last thing that people remember. So I mean, the best part about Eventbrite is that because we didn't predetermine what kind of event should use Eventbrite. Every single day we were seeing incredible concepts and formats that we'd never even thought of. And in that way we were able to be sort of micro trend forecasters of what's coming up. And I think recently I think book talk has like given way to just these incredibly immersive events around genres like romantic, you know, and like how you create these fully immersive experiences around one book series that just sort of grows and lives on and on and on and it's not your typical book talk. You know, I love a good book talk at a local bookshop but it's like more so actually bringing people into the full 360 view of an author's mind around a story that they created and how the fans of that can become a part in the story.

And it's just like that, I mean not to be cheesy but that is a tale as old as time. That is something that people really want.

When I think about the Eventbrite product and why it worked and why it became ubiquitous with live experiences, I think a lot of it was that we built it to melt into the background. We wanted our creators and their events and the people who gathered around that passion to be front and center. So all of our marketing, all of our storytelling was really around that. We started to become and evolve naturally from just a platform and like a utility into a marketplace when we realized that we could start to help creators find bigger audiences. And when we realized that people were coming to Eventbrite to find things to do because they realized that we had really niche content that they couldn't find on other platforms. So that evolution of a marketplace was really going on in parallel to the evolution of the Eventbrite culture. And I'll never forget when I took on the sort of self-anointed role of coming to the table of every major business decision, putting Brightlings, which is our cute little name, first, like their needs first, that I realized like great cultures are often just a manifestation of the people at the company at any given time. And because of that, cultures change, you know, they change through time because people come and go. I mean, being a founder and being a CEO, you have to be okay with people leaving you all the time. Sometimes they come back. And that was my favorite was a Brightling boomerang. But I thought like, you know, it's not about preserving a culture. We're not like a bug stuck in amber, you know? It's about creating something that's more like an amoeba that can travel through time and space but sustain itself and grow stronger over time. And one of the things that I thought was interesting is just that we measure certain parts of a culture to get some sort of finite metric about how we're doing. You know, most companies have something like Culture Amp that sends out surveys to their employees and you get these scores and you scrutinize the scores and you know you could cut the data a million different ways. Frankly, I always thought that was like a waste of time because I don't think we were asking the right questions and I think those, you know, it's sort of like a snapshot. I was never afraid of getting bad scores on that because if something hard was going on at the company, I would have expected the scores to be lower, you know, and I was also really mindful of the fact that you can't ever have the happiest culture. That's not possible. What I was striving to do was create the most sustainable culture and that our principles would sustain themselves, we could trust each other and that through hard times and good times there would be connection. And I think the most common thing that was said about Eventbrite in the employee experience was that people care for one another and that really matters I think a lot.

Well, I think being a CEO is a mind game first and foremost because a lot of people feel ownership for a company no matter what their title is. And I realize that now more than ever. Having the CEO title is this construct and I actually it's an interesting construct because I'm starting to wonder if it will be the title that we use in the future. But being the single point leader of any organization just creates this sort of headiness and I do think there are people who are trying to flatten the org and get away from it but ultimately there's always going to be that leader and I never took for granted the idea that because I was on the founding team I would be a good CEO. I think that's actually a huge misnomer and I think it's why some companies fail because the people who were there at the beginning who were brave enough to start the company are definitely not often the right people to run the company. And while it's incredibly valuable to have a founder running the company, you have to be leveling up every single day. I mean, literally every sometimes multiple times a day to be the person that's most deserving of that title.

I wasted so much time asking myself, what would Kevin do? I mean, he was right there, but I worried that I was not doing it anywhere as good as he was. And I really wish I could have all that time back. Because I just did it different, you know, and that's not better or worse. I think in some instances it was worse and in some instances it was better. Certainly, you know, table stakes are strategy, financials, ability to communicate a compelling vision. And I mean that was like, you know, I think what everybody needs to have. I think some of the things that I learned later after COVID made me leading through COVID made me stop asking myself what somebody else would do and start really getting behind what I knew we needed to do. I had a lot more conviction after that crisis. And COVID wasn't the first crisis. I mean, we had just kind of this rolling wave of crises after COVID. I think some of the skills that are underrated and under practiced is listening and seeking to understand. Often as a leader you are kind of asked implicitly and explicitly to know everything and to always have the right answer. And that is completely a garbage idea. Like if one person had all the right answers, this would be a really boring life. You know, the whole point of working on something together is to get the best ideas, to distill an amalgamation of the best ideas, to get diverse thinkers and people around a table problem solving toward a better outcome. And so I felt at first that I had to have all the right answers. And when I became more confident, I was able to say I don't have all the answers and I want to learn from different perspectives. And it wasn't that I wanted to be told what to do, but I actually wanted to take everybody's perspective, synthesize it, and make the call. And that's incredibly rewarding. But I think often what happens is we either just make believe that we have the right answer and we make a call or we have recency bias and we do what the last best idea was given to us, right? We listen to the last person and go, 'Okay, I'm going to do that.' Or, you know, we just seek to listen for bias of confirmation that we're right. And so I think getting to a place where you can say every day the right answer might not live in my head. It might live somewhere else. I'm going to go find it by practicing appreciative inquiry. I think that's like the next level and that is an evolved part of being an evolved leader. And then another part of it is, you know, being able to be corrected and change your mind and be okay with that and let people in on that without it becoming this sort of destabilizing moment. And I think the things that I wish I would have done better, I wish I would have taken more risks. I definitely think coming through COVID was such a harrowing journey and you know definitely took us holding hands and making a couple really hard moves and leaps that after that I became a little bit more protective of the company and I feel like I could have taken more risks. And another thing I could have done is been a bit tougher and I don't know if other people would agree with me on that but I feel like I have always been really in tune with what people are going through and what they're feeling. And that empathy can be ruinous sometimes because I can get really kind of I can revert to the mean of what I think a group of people are capable of and that's often undershooting the goal.

Yeah. Yeah. I do that sometimes too because it's like you just care so much about the people but ultimately the company should be the first priority. But there's probably some benefit in doing that as well because there's loyalty involved. And well, I think I learned this incredible lesson in the last hour of leading Eventbrite, so to speak, which was the last two years or so, I had been really sure of where we needed to be. And I had been almost like this white knuckle grip on the reins. And when we announced that we were selling the company, I really had this moment like I didn't know what I was doing because I had never done that before. So I was totally in new territory and I got this sense that everybody was just like immediately disconnected and detached. I remember like going onto a Zoom and it was like dead face everywhere and I'm like uh oh, you know, how are we going to operate over the next few months as we move to we need to go as a public company you have to go through regulatory and compliance and approval. And so I thought like oh gosh I got really really really low for like a night.

They weren't upset. I mean, my team are consummate professionals and they had, you know, known that we were going to be going private and they were really amazing. But I could just tell they were sort of they needed a beat a little bit longer than I needed and I was ready to get back to work and kind of like plow through this period of uncertainty. And I remember just feeling really down and dejected like, oh no, this is going to be a terrible few months. Like what have I done? And so I came back to them the next day and I was like, you know, I think this is how we should operate over the next few months. Do the right thing for the customer always. Do the right thing for each other. Always take care of one another and have fun and kind of like YOLO like we are not going to be together for that much longer because we knew the structure of the deal and what would happen post close. Oh my god like from that point forward I released the white knuckle grip and as it were I think somebody said you know it's like having a good hair day before you go to get a haircut. Every day something was going better than it was before up and to the right and it wasn't at first I thought like oh it's just people feeling kind of bittersweet about this and adjusting to it no it definitively giving people those pretty loose guard rails and being like just go do your best it was like actually better for the company and that was my last lesson. That's a pretty big one.

It's hard to tell. Well, I mean, I can only equate it to being postpartum in terms of any other like life experience that feels familiar where there's like a world of possibility in this new shiny thing of the future that you're excited about, but you also don't know which end is up and you're like totally confused about how time moves. I feel like, you know, for 20 years, I've had this singular focus. I really am not the type of person to have many different types of pursuits. I was like the Montreal, you know, in our family. It was like Eventbrite and my family and my friends. So, yeah, I definitely think that there's grief. I pre-grieved which was like probably my way of handling this. And I'm sure I need to go through this kind of hard moment of not immediately jumping into the next thing. And that was something that I knew in my gut and had been told about, I don't know, a million times from people once the news was public, like don't jump into something right away. And just taking the time to reflect. And then, you know, I think I really just want to help people and I know that I want to personally go back and learn from square one. Like that's so important to me. And so, you know, I don't know exactly what that is, but I'm being very intentional about how I build the next 20 years.

I never felt like I didn't have freedom is the thing. Like I always felt like how lucky am I to work on the thing that I feel most passionate about that I was able to help build that I was there when it was born and I was there when it flew the coop. And how lucky am I? I never ever felt burdened or obstructed or held back from being the leader of Eventbrite. I felt like what an honor and a privilege. So, you know, like that to me, yes, I went through what who am I going to be without it? This is my whole identity. Am I going to be irrelevant? Am I going to fall into a deep dark depression? I would say it's been about a month and I feel like there's a lot of opportunity. A lot has come my way which I feel really really grateful for but I know that I need to take my time and go slow and I have this like I don't know I have this passion around this idea of like in television you reset to one right when you're shooting a scene you go back to the beginning you do it again. I have this obsession with that concept I don't know what format it'll take but I do know that as I start to spend time with other people, incredible content creators like yourself and you know I'm lucky enough to be advising Sammy Cohen and people like her where I just feel like I now have the time to learn more and to support but I also just have this insatiable appetite of learning and rather than go off and be the sort of wise sage that knows everything I want to do the opposite.

I want to reset to one. I don't know what that means, but we'll see.

Yeah. I mean, when we took Eventbrite public in 2018, I was the 21st woman to found and lead the company into an IPO as CEO. Ever. That was like really sad to me. That was like really bittersweet to hear. I was like less stoked about that and more like the world. And I was the second youngest ever. And I was not that young. So you know I do reflect a lot on how I have made it happen and I think it's a confluence of factors that's incredibly personal but the thing that I see happening more often now than I experienced because I was pretty young when I had my first I was 28 so pretty young by modern times is that I didn't really overthink it. And I think now, like with science being where it is, thankfully, we have options to put off having kids for longer and later. And I think that's great, but it also kind of makes you overthink it. What I like to tell people, and I've had this conversation with so many women and men at Eventbrite. One of my favorite parts of building a company is being able to be in people's lives. We have, you know, I think over two dozen babies that were born to people who met at Eventbrite. So that I take that metric very seriously. But I always would say you got yourself here somehow. There were things that you were born with. There were things that you learned. There were challenges that you overcame. There were opportunities that you took. You are going to get to that next level which in your case is building a business and building a family with the exact same tactics. And it's certainly life-defining for sure but it also I used for me personally I thought of it as hey kid you're getting on my train and like you get on the train and we're going I'm not stopping the train to then divert a different way and I was so passionate about that and am so passionate about that with women in the workplace of let's go through all the ways in which you personally have gotten here because those are the things that you know and maybe you take it for granted and let's apply it to the future and that's how you're going to do it. And we became very specific and precise about our support of people building their families while working at Eventbrite to ensure that women had the highest degree of success possible in coming back and building their careers. And that to me was really important work that we did. You know, we didn't, yes, we won awards and whatnot, but I mean, we really didn't do it for that. We did it because it was the right thing to do and because Kevin and I had gone through the process of having a child and having a family and building a company, we had that empathy. And so I think that's going to be a really important part of the next era for you is really having confidence in your ability to figure it out because it's different for everybody and it's not easy, but it's certainly not impossible. And I think that the final thing I'll say because I have older kids now. I have older kids and younger kids. I have two cohorts of ages and I can say without a doubt it definitely takes a different level of engagement and parenting in different chapters of the child's life. And so you can it's not just one mode. You know, and I think that's like maybe something that people don't talk about that there are times when you can really lean in to one side or the other. And I would say I used to always get told this and I never believed it until I experienced it. Bigger kids, bigger problems. And so, you know, it's like as they get older, it definitely takes a lot more cognitively to guide a young adult through the world than a small child.

Oh, a thousand times. I mean, we really the last 10 years have been the most challenging for us because we haven't been working side by side. So while we both have this shared passion and unconditional love for Eventbrite, we weren't sitting side by side for the first 10 years and the second 10 talk about. I mean, it's amazing. So I would say do it if you can. I mean it's such a rewarding experience to be able to build something together and to have that shared experience and context and passion. And you know, I would say like if I had to place a bet, we likely are going to do something together again. Because we really enjoyed that bonding, right? And way of being side by side in something that's not just the kids or not just our personal lives, but something that you're building that's incredibly valuable.

Well, part of why we chose Bending Spoons, who acquired Eventbrite, is because they have a track record of applying, you know, cutting edge technology to consumer businesses to drive a better result for the customer. I think that they are misunderstood in the US. I think they're going to be an enormously successful company and I feel really strongly about the stewardship of them to Eventbrite because of how they think, how they've run the company and ultimately the kind of people they are because at the end of the day, you know, when it comes down to it, are they making the right decisions for people? They're constantly thinking about how to better the experience of the customer and how to put the customer in a better spot all the time. So that was really important to me as I was thinking through the set of options that we have. Also a company like Eventbrite is basically in a very very crowded space of companies that either have to completely disrupt themselves or they will be gone. And I wanted Eventbrite to be around longer than us. And I think that in order to drive longevity, you have to be really sure about this blank slate exercise because this is a re-imagination moment for most companies. Almost all Web 2.0 companies are absolutely facing this existential opportunity. And so I think one of the things just that I think is really important that may seem kind of silly is just I think the people who are leading companies need to be playing with AI every single day. Almost like as hobbyists and I just think that that is something that gets missed because people are either too busy doing their day job or they're reading about it as passive participants but they're not like setting up their OpenClaw. They're not, you know, using it in all these different ways, even if it's just in their personal life. I think just getting to be more fluent faster is really important. And the final thing I'll say is that I do think that there's a rate of change that outpaces humans' ability. And I think we have to be prepared to go back to the basics, you know, of human emotion, of human desire, of that Maslow's hierarchy of needs to come together and work together through this massive dislocation, change, and big uncertainty.

Because I think the legacy of what Eventbrite brings to the world is really important. Eventbrite's the largest platform of live experiences in the world. We are the second largest trafficked events site in the world. We are a place where niche is mass where people can find their identity, they can find their people, they can connect and they can create indelible memories. So, I know that may sound heady, but if not Eventbrite, then who? And Eventbrite, I know, is a place where everyone is included. And there's a way for the new stewards of Eventbrite to create something that is an order of magnitude larger than what we created. I'm so excited to see that because the world needs in-person live experiences now more than ever.

I can't stress enough the importance of capital efficiency. I think that it gives you freedom. It gives you options. It gives you power. You know, it's really important. And I actually was just listening to one of my business heroes, Ana Botín, who's the head of Santander, the largest bank in Europe. And I mean, she wakes up every day thinking about that. And they're an incredibly valuable company with over 180 million customers. And you know, she's obsessed with how to drive efficiency and make more money. And I think, you know, it's sometimes alluring to raise the big round and alluring to get the nice office and alluring to say that you've raised, you know, but that is all smoke and mirrors if you don't have a very very strong way to return on your invested capital.

I would say to take the exercise of a blank slate. If you're working on something or you're about to launch something, take a blank sheet of paper, physical paper out and draw the diagram of what would be a better version of that and constantly be thinking about how you can iterate even your best idea. Because right now every 6 hours things are changing. So I mean you know it's quite literally your idea yesterday can be made better today and I think just being willing to constantly iterate even your best ideas and ask yourself what would I do if I could do it all over again will yield a better probably bigger risk-taking approach. And I wish I would have done that even more often.

Wow. I think it is being this sounds so cliche but I really think it's about like genuine gratitude not forced gratitude but genuine gratitude and grounding in the thing that you know you are incredibly grateful for. And I think that's just different for everybody. And I think oftentimes people get confused or overly convoluted about what they should be grateful for. I think just having that simple knowledge, that knowingness of what you're grateful for and reminding yourself of that constantly is a really great way to see opportunity, to seek connection, to build resilience, and to find joy.

Well, I'm on Instagram, Julia Hartz, and then I'm also on LinkedIn.

Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Thank you.