Co-founder of Eventbrite, Eventbrite
Eventbrite CEO on getting involved with the Covid vaccine rollout
Julia Hartz, Eventbrite CEO and co-founder, joined "Squawk Box" on Friday to discuss. For access to live and exclusive video from ...
About Julia Hartz
Julia Hartz, co-founder and former CEO of Eventbrite, has been discussing her experience leading the company through the COVID-19 pandemic, which she described as a crisis that wiped out 14 years of work in 14 days. She stated that during the pandemic, Eventbrite was processing more refunds than revenue and had to turn off an advanced payouts program that creators relied on. Hartz has emphasized the importance of capital efficiency and treating customers as advocates as systems that helped the company persevere. She also noted that Eventbrite needed to become a private company again to invest in technical debt and take risks not suited to a public quarterly cadence. Hartz has also spoken about the company's 20th anniversary and its acquisition by Bending Spoons, saying she does not know what she will do next. She has discussed the importance of founders leveling up every day and the value of reinvention, citing examples such as a dance party company that pivoted during the pandemic. Hartz has stated that San Francisco is "back" and that betting against the city is a bad bet, and has expressed excitement about supporting more women to lead companies to IPO.
Transcript (8 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Narrator0:00
The pace of vaccinations is picking up. Eventbrite is a company at the center of the rollout. The ticketing company is now helping schedule appointments. Stocks at an all-time high on optimism of an economic recovery. The company recently reported quarterly results that pointed to a recovery in paid ticket volumes, although those levels obviously remain far below the previous year.
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Interviewer0:21
Joining us now, Eventbrite CEO and co-founder Julia Hartz. Julia, it's great to see you. And you just got to go into the actual chronology of events that happened that got you into the vaccination scheduling business. How did it happen?
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Julia Hartz0:40
Absolutely, thanks for having me this morning. You know, it really started at the beginning of the year. The stories started to unfold in Brevard County, Florida, where about a third of their residents — a population in that county of about half a million — a third of their residents are over 65. And they had their vaccinations, they were ready to go. They set up their registration site, and within 24 hours it had all crumbled. And the reason why is because the technology couldn't keep up with the demand. I mean, we're seeing ten to one demand to supply on vaccination registration appointments. And so someone on their team, I believe it was the social media director, said, 'Why don't we try Eventbrite?' They set up the site, they got it all the way up the chain of approvals in three hours, and they were up and running. And prior to that, they had long lines of their over 65 population standing in line outside waiting to get an appointment. So it was just a dire circumstance, and it came together in such a quick manner. Now, they didn't call us. Eventbrite is a self-service platform, right? So they just set it up and got going. We obviously started to see that and did everything we could to help them both streamline the process as well as disseminate the information to create clarity. And then it grew from there. We've seen over 39 states now using Eventbrite, almost 600,000 people accessing their vaccination registration appointment on the platform.
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Interviewer2:09
Amazing. The mother of invention — necessity, the mother of invention. They did it on their own, it wasn't even you, it was just your great platform. And then next thing you know, all these vaccines. That's so great. And the federal government took notice too and figured it out, I guess, right? But I wish they would just mimic how you do it instead of just outsourcing it to you. Whatever it takes, I guess.
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Julia Hartz2:34
Yeah, it's hard to actually build a platform that can withstand that type of search and demand. And so technically we can really meet that demand, and I think that's why people are choosing Eventbrite. It's also the ease of use. It's super simple to sign up. And so it took us some work on our end to make sure that we could support this use case. We needed to get that provisional approval from HHS, and so our team just ran at it because it's the right thing to do. You know, we're not profiting off this, but obviously the second order benefit is that the sooner we can get vaccinated, the sooner we can all get out to live gatherings. So it's so important.
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Interviewer3:14
Obviously you're not going to ever be a stay-at-home beneficiary necessarily, although I'm just wondering, did it give you time to do certain things at the company to prepare for reopening? And second, I'd like to hear whether you think things in Texas, Mississippi, even Connecticut — are they going too fast, or it can't come fast enough? For you, I'm sure you want it to be done safely, but it's important for your business that we get back to being able to do things like this.
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Julia Hartz3:48
That's right. You know, almost to the day a year ago, COVID impacted our business with the most devastating blow you could possibly imagine. Within two weeks, we were processing more refunds than revenue in the month. So that is just a catastrophic event in live gatherings, and the demand for event tickets completely dried up. So we had no moment to even think about it; we had to act. And we pivoted quickly. Within 30 days, we really set the company up to survive this period of time, however long it would last. We pivoted the strategy, we created a new cost structure, we really streamlined our operations so that we could get back to work to help creators. You know, we had almost a million creators use our platform last year. These are small businesses, these aren't big organizations that have a ton of free cash flow.
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Narrator4:48
Shepard Smith here. Thanks for watching CNBC on YouTube.