Eventbrite (with Julia & Kevin Hartz)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/42a35e519e54742a

You guys are probably getting annoyed because we should get started, huh?
No, I mean I think we have enough tape here of just breakfast sandwich conversation that that can be the episode. Good. I hope you really go there.
Welcome to season seven, episode two of Acquired.
the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts.
Today we come to you with the long overdue story of Eventbrite.
This is, of course, a fascinating one right now, an events company during a global pandemic with minimal human contact and
and nearly all in person gatherings having been cancelled.
And while it's interesting to dive into how Eventbrite is problem solving in this era
The history of the company is unique and something that we haven't

A husband wife founding team.
We're in the unique position to be joined by CEO Julia Hartz and her co-founder and husband Kevin.
who was also the longtime CEO and is now chairman.
Rather than the full blow by blow of the company,
We're gonna zoom in on a few key moments together with them.
The two thousand six founding and how deeply intertwine the company is with Kevin and Julia as a couple and as a family.
twenty eighteen, when Julia led the company through IPO,
and how they are managing and streamlining the business today through the coronavirus.
We will also be continuing our discussion on the LP show with Kevin on his new secret until last week project.
A two hundred million dollar special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC,
that he has launched. Yeah, we're gonna go deep on this potentially revolutionary way to go public that is now hot off the presses officially endorsed by the anti-IPO crusader himself.
Bill Girley.
We'll also talk with Kevin about why everyone seems to be rushing to raise these things right now, how they fit into the last decade of staying private longer, and how he believes it's truly in the spirit of Silicon Valley to leverage old mechanisms like this to unlock new innovation.
I'm pumped.
As always, if you want to listen to that or any of the LP episodes, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquire.fm slash LP.
Now, just one announcement from us this time before diving in.
We read every single survey response, which thank you for all of your thoughtful feedback.
And we learn that the number one way that
All of you found out about the show was word of mouth.
From a friend or from a colleague.
Now this is a gift, because of course who doesn't love organic growth? Uh but are also partially a curse since it it actually makes it hard for us to repeat. So we have a favor to ask today and
to pick your favorite episode and share it with a friend or on social media to help our little experiment of seeing if we can move the needle just by asking.
We've also heard that a bunch of you have started discussion groups within your company Slack with your colleagues, which was just a fun pattern to see among uh all the survey responses. So anyway, that's our one ask today. No Slack, podcast, reviews, feedback, any of that. Just pick an episode, share it, say why you love it.
And thank you.
All right listeners.
Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Lagora.
The agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.
Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is gonna completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Ligora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?
So the founders did exactly what great founders do.
operate with obsessive customer focus.
They embedded inside a massive law firm for months.
They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.
And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legor's Bet Here is interesting, since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work.
and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.
And they recently launched Lagora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.
And Legora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting.
The early Lagora numbers essentially
speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from twelve hundred legal teams in fifty countries.
And crazily, they went from one million
To a hundred million in AR.

Eighteen months.

truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.
Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client.
If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company,
You can learn more at Lagora.com slash acquired
And just tell'em that Ben and David sent you.
Well, David, I think it's time to dive in with
Kevin and Julia on Eventbrite.
Indeed. And I don't think
Certainly not on this show have we ever had a
company that is so
Tied in with the personal history of the founders, uh, which we will get into.
In just a second, but
Before we talk about
You guys, Kevin and Julia, together.
Let's talk about your backgrounds beforehand,'cause they were pretty different, right? Maybe Kevin, we can start with you, since you're you know the more traditional Silicon Valley uh background, original PayPal Mafia member.
How did you end up
Getting into entrepreneurship in your first company with Connect Group.
Well, to start out with, I do need to give a shout out to Ben and David because authentically
The Pinterest breakdown. It was an excellent podcast. If you haven't listened to it, you need to
Uh having
seen and and been
kind of on the periphery of spectator, I had the good fortune of being a seed investor in Pinterest.
It's it's an excellent breakdown, the best I've I've heard to date. So thank you on that. Thank you. Yeah, it's a rare opportunity where we get to have uh listeners on the show. And so it's super fun to have you on.
Well I I don't know if I would have to
joined the show had I not heard that.
Uh, and I remember working out, listening to it last summer, going, Wow.
Th yes, that's correct. They got it right. They got it right, good insight.
So very well done.
I'll talk a bit about my background. How far back do you want me to go? We'll be done in four hours. I think maybe most interesting.
Is
Like you were part of this time.
At Stanford and all these
People who came out of it that
Shaped so much of Silicon Valley.
What was that moment like for you and how you
And this group of people became part of Silicon Valley in the early days. So I had the good fortune of meeting Peter Thiel.
Also Keith Reboys I was undergraduate, Peter was
A graduate student at the law school.
And we were involved in student politics together, and believe it or not, there was a mutual degree of respect for one another.
even though we were on different sides of the political aisle, it was a time when there was healthy discourse back and forth and we wish that
uh would be more of the case today, but I got to know Peter and
uh he's just a phenomenally brilliant
non conventional.
thinker is uh one of a kind
Um, we're lucky to have him in the valley and
After that period at Sanford.
uh we reconnected in in the late nineties and
You went to law school was an attorney.
uh had then traded derivatives and
quickly figured out that was not for him.
And came out and we reconnected.
uh he joined up with Max Lepchin, which
Brought in the UIUC mafia, the University of Illinois, another
great diaspora of great engineers, which you know, Mark Andreessen was part of that as well. So there's this
Deep interconnectedness and And you had ended up at Silicon Graphics, right?
Uh well I I did start out at it's Silicon Graphics. Uh it was
a kind of Google at its time, most people
are too young to remember it. It's it's embarrassing, but it they made these very powerful graphics work stations that
For me, it was a chance to look into the future. You had
Uh.
super fast processor, you had the bandwidth on campus.
on the uh Silken Graphics campus, which is now the the Google Plex, funny enough.
So you got to see video, you got to see graphics, you got to look into
What the future would be like in five to ten years.
And that was very important.
um view of how to look ahead.
And think ahead it has influenced me.
And that second component.
As we talk about the
People.
Paypal diaspora or PayPal Mafia was
just how strong that talent was. So it was
Peter on the Stanford side.
It was Max Lepchin on that University of Illinois side, and each of them were a magnet to
The talent that came on.
Rule off both uh
uh now running the North American um venture fund.
Uh he is uh phenomenal investor. Keith Rebois uh now over at Fun Founders Fund again with this
tight relationships uh in that sinew that that exists there.
Is sinew the right word?
If so, it's the first time that word's been used on the show.
you know, like sinewy like cartilage or it is Reed Hoffman.
Down here is.
linked in in an extraordinary
thinker in person.
It is Elon Musk.
So this was
A chance to say here's a bet on people.
I had the good fortune to get involved as an investor in PayPal before they launched.
This was
Pre merger with uh with Elon's company.
Yes, at the time that
PayPal merged with X dot com
It was often running inexpensive.
current mode which is online payments and
This first integration
And it was an informal integration with
uh eBay w was their first vertical. So
Peter was in the team were working on mobile security.
They were back at the time when it was
Uh the palm pilot.
Yeah, infrared money transfer. That's correct.
And what they found is that
uh infrared money transfer had to be done physically.
Uh, and they found they were very observant. And I think that's a thing to think about as a founder, is that
You want to try a lot of different experiments and you want to watch and see.
What happens when you are
when your product's to market and where it gets used. So what happened is that the
Accounts were based on email.
They were
then figuring out that there are ways for merchant to transfer money online and it quickly
spread to eBay where w it was the leading at the time e commerce marketplace site.
uh where the merchants found this great way to get paid immediately, which was non obvious at the time and and kinda crazy.
And Kevin, you when you say you were an investor pre launch, how did that sort of come to be? Did did
Peter bring you into it, or how did that opportunity sort of present itself?
We met down at uh restaurant
called Hobies right off.
campus for brunch. Yeah, of course. And uh
You know, I had the good fortune of kind of a quick flip
It was almost this Y C like business where we were
We were actually providing
Internet access to hotels
We had incorporated in April.
And we were acquired in October and it wasn't
anything like a life changing amount of money, but it was
Uh.
And this is Connect Group.
Uh that that was Connect Roop, that's correct. And it was acquired by a company called
Large net.
Uh which
Way back when was the way to get movies on demand. Uh yeah, N sixty four controller that had the games baked in.
That's right. In fact in the uh basement of a h hotel they used to have these
First VHS and then D V D banks.
uh to actually serve up the film. So that's
How pre
uh data in internet uh that it actually was
And they looked towards internet connectivity as the way
uh to offer a second product alongside
Weren't your parents upset that you'd taken the earnings from that acquisition and
put it all into an investment. I'm sure they imagined at that point you would
use it to put a down on a house and settle down and
Well, it's a great point that Julia raises.
It's important to do exactly opposite of what your parents say.
So are my parents all along the way were just thought I was insane what was she doing. Uh and why this is important for founders is that
when you're doing something kind of contrarian that is against the grain
your parents want you to do something safe. They want you to be a banker or a lawyer or a doctor. And so doing back then this internet y stuff
was considered you know really weird
and a way to throw away your career.
And so my parents all along the way.
Even after Julie and I started Eventbrite, they still thought we were crazy.

I think that's a fairly common theme among
great founders, even when it's sort of reached escape velocity, I think parents often uh it's like a five year lag on skepticism. That's a great way to phrase it. Maybe it's a KPI is that you have your growth KPIs, your year over year growth
your key performance indicators of other methods of growth of the business, but um that notion that your parents are still disgusted and dismayed and embarrassed.
Uh is something to track on a monthly basis. Like a parental NPS. And but you want it to be lower because you want them to be detractors. R exactly. That's a good idea.
Wow, like Kevin, we could we could do a whole sort of valley history thing here. Bring us through selling a company to PayPal and then take us all the way up to starting Eventbrite, and then I wanna get Ju's side of the starting eventbrite story.
Well early on, like Silicon Graphics, I think Julia was still in elementary school.
Uh she was uh a ballerina.
And so I'd I'd rather not do this side by side comparison. I think that's very important not to do. Ten years between us.
It's like a whole generation.
And it gets smaller and smaller with every year that goes by. Yeah. Like eventually someone's gonna ask who is ten years older, and then the agreement is that I can kill him.
All right. Well now that's uh now that's recorded. Yeah. Uh it is on the record.
So
As we understand the history at least.
You know
PayPal in those early days pre
acquisition by eBay.
There was a lot of stuff going on, like lots of great ideas, obviously tons of companies that got spun out.
But there were a few ideas that
Got left on the cutting room floor.
That PayPal would do.
one of those ideas was international money transfer.
That you would obviously pick up the mantle with Zoom.
If we have our history right, there was also an events idea that maybe uh got left on the cutting room floor, but we'll save that for
How did Zoom then
X O O M.
come out of your experience there.
Well, I see that you both have done your homework extremely well.
What had happened is that uh a fellow named Dave McClure
had joined
David Sachs's group. David is an extraordinary product person and
uh now runs a venture fund.
out uh here in the valley.
Called Craft Ventures. He's a great investor and and a great product person, but Dave was running product.
at the time at PayPal
We had discussed
Well, you're uh a payments platform, you're not just a payments company.
And just like the great companies of the time and and into the future, when you have a platform, you build an API.
Uh, so this is kind of pre stripe sort of things and Dave McClure
uh join and we
turned out to be the first developers on it. And we kicked around a lot of different ideas, including ticketing. But what we honed in on, and that was in discussions with uh Rulov and with Peter.
was this money remittance thing. They said that if we
uh we're doing uh merchant processing at at the scale that we're we're achieving right now. We've gotta focus ourselves
uh we would be going after this big
lumbering incumbent that charges these egregious rates.
Called Western Union.
And this was a kind of missionary zeal for us because it was a way to help
uh immigrants send money back to their families.
kind of faster, better, and cheaper than the incumbents, the money grams and western unions out there.
And so you started that on the PayPal API. Was it a separate company from the start or did it get started sort of within PayPal and then you s sort of spun it out? How did that work?
I would
say I was never part of the PayPal Mafia. I wasn't uh
A team member there.
I foolishly turned down advances to join the company.
But
I had PayPal FOMO.
When they open the API and
So that
We could be the first builders on top of that.
We incorporated and built this entity and
Roloff and Peter had agreed to fund us off to be the first investors and
you you know, invest five hundred K off the PayPal balance sheet. But we were foiled because
After PayPal went public, it was quickly acquired.
uh Make Whitman and the team came in and acquired the business and the deal was off.
So we had launched, we were sending money to the Dominican Repubblic.
And m we started to go out and fundraise and
The venture capitalists at the time just thought we were
Crazy
Insane things like immigrants can't send money. Leave it to VCs to just say stupid non sequitur things like that. In insane, you know, and and that's the whole point of venture and to have these types of misconceptions.
Uh Peter Thiel
exited as the deal closed and he wrote our first check for five hundred K
uh in the business was off and running. We had really bootstrapped it and we were able to show good unit economics and along the way
Roloff was had joined Sequoia soon after.
And was watching us as well.
And I think we were his
First investment maybe.
I think the second one. Yeah, it's either you or YouTube, but
Okay, so this is the perfect point. So all this you're spinning up Zoom.
Starting to go out and raise money.
You go down to Santa Barbara.
For a wedding. Correct. What happens at this wedding.
Dun This is where I wanna bring Julia into the story. So
Julia, I think we should talk about your background before this too, but just for the continuity's sake, take it forward from this wedding.
So it was May.
May twenty fourth. Come on.

Nate.
May twenty fourth, two thousand three, I could never forget.
That date. Until just now.
And my first
Boss at MTV.
Jennifer Saltz Gibber.
was marrying
Kevin's classmate.
From Stanford.
Dan Levy.
And
I had heard
sort of about Kevin, but
We hadn't met.
And I ran into the church.
Pretty late before the ceremony.
And I was
a reader in the wedding, so I had to sit on the edge.

Best way to do.
A wedding because then you don't have to, you know, be in the wedding party, but you still get
Yeah, the place of honor. I was winning. Yes. And so I needed to sit on the edge. So I I I kinda ditched my MTB.
friends to go sit where I could access the podium and I asked
A guy and a bunch of
you know, maybe his friends to to move over.
And so I shoved me over.
Yeah, I've been shoving you ever since.
He started talking to me and I was pretty nervous because I didn't know if the poem was up on the podium.

And I was twenty three, so maybe you know, I was a pretty mature twenty three, but I didn't bring the poem with me.
So I was ruminating on that, and this guy was just chatting me up. And then I thought, well
You know, everybody at this wedding's really old, so he's probably married or something.
And then I went and did the did the reading.
Poem was at the podium.
And came back and he said
You did awesome. I'm so proud of you.
I'm like
Who is this guy?
Well she really did. She has a natural presence that uh
has been important in building the culture at Eventbrite.
through, you know, in our second decade now.
So that it was it. That was it.
One line.
And I was
I was caught.
And uh I remember looking at him across the
the stairs when every you know, when we were all clapping and the bride and the groom were running out and I thought
Hey.
A great guy. I'll probably never see him again.
Because the wedding was massive. I mean these are two
wonderful people who have huge families and huge sets of friends who are just like those people. Like they connect everyone.
So
We went to the reception and I was standing with the my colleagues from MTV and we were talking about you know the ceremony and all of a sudden
My current boss
kinda gave me a weird look and I turn around and there's Kevin
standing there like uh really sweet. It wasn't cheesy, it was sort of like a sweep.
With a whole tray of drinks.
And he's like
Hey, do you guys want drinks?
Like, okay, I'm not gonna I'm g I'm gonna see this guy again.
I'm I'm a full service investor. Uh that's that's the type of investor I am. I'll
Bring uh founder's drinks. He knows a good deal when he sees it. So that sounds weird. Yeah. So Julia
You know, you mentioned MTV there.
Let's talk about your background before
this day and what would become of entbre.
You weren't part of the PayPal Mafia. It was pretty different. But you did grow up also in the Bay Area.
You end up
Working at MTV, you're one of the team that
puts Jackass on the air, which thank you, by the way, that was like my
afternoons growing up in Pennsylvania, uh by the T V. How did you end up
With a pretty huge amount of
Responsibility like really quickly
in your career at this big network at the time. Well, I wouldn't overstate it, David. I would say that I was coming up in my career from a very junior place. I got my foot in the door really early on.
um by interning during college so I had two
Paying jobs.
And
a full time internship for most of my time
at Pepperdine and I was taking my classes at night.
So my friends joke still that they used to call me grandma because
You know, I wasn't around a lot and I went to bed early.
But I was able to really identify what I wanted to do in
Hollywood pretty early on, and so I went straight from graduation into an assistant role.
in this series development department at MTV. And what I loved about it was that it was a blend of
creative and content and business. It's effectively being a V C for the network, right? So you listen to pitches and you
um make some bets and then eventually you get to you know you see it invest and then you get to IPO.
I was so fortunate because I was an intern when the Jackass team sent their demo tape in
And this was the pre streaming era. This was early two thousands in Hollywood.
Um you could tell nothing like this at the time. Yeah, you could tell that disruption was coming, but it was really sort of coming from content, not from
Technology. So seeing something like that
was pretty incredible. And this was maybe the second dawn of reality television. I was working in the with the team that brought Real World and Road Rules
Two audiences. So that was really sort of one of the first
big franchises and then this came along it was just really different and the other series development team was working on the Jessica Simpson show. So we were like this couldn't be more different. You know, and there's a little bit of inner competition between the between the teams and so we um we went for it. And huge praise to MTV for doing that. I think
We saw it from seed to IPO. I was I was on the team.
when it debuted and then eventually we produced a movie.
And the best parts of working on that show
By and large, were the weekly
standards and practices, legal and OSHA calls that we did. And it was one big call where the guys would be on speakerphone.
And they would have facts. I mean, again, I'm dating
Do they they would fax?
through these like one
Single spaced line.
pages of just ideas that they wanted to do.
And then everyone had to go around and talk about how we could possibly do that on cable television. And it was I mean, it was it was real special.
Now, I mean I haven't gone back and watched
Rewatch Jackass. I I probably should have been prep for this episode, but it probably is so tame, right? All this would be on YouTube and it would be, you know
David Dobrik and all the tic tac, you know, houses and kids doing all this stuff.
And now it's just part of the mainstream, but like this was
Which is the beginning.
This was for YouTube because I remember Kevin showing me the first YouTube video.
What was like a
Yeah, man, I'm gonna mess it up. I feel like it was like a cat at a zoo or something. It was like a it was short, it was like fifteen seconds. It was Javid Crim who I went on um with Keith for to invest with a few years. Like the three of us he'd invested in
uh Airbnb and and a few others uh to name but Javid
There were three co founders of YouTube and Jab had left fairly early on.
But the the very first video was Javid in front of an elephant making some commentary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, we are on we are on the mother of all dead but okay, so
So on the back of this though, you y you guys start dating after the wedding
You're thinking about coming back up to the Bay Area, you're thinking about getting engaged. You get hooked up with
The current T V folks and
A lot of listeners probably don't remember this, but Current TV was like a big startup. The screensavers. There was a m amazing program. Al Gore was one of the co-founders and it was gonna be Well, in a lot of ways, it probably was like a the wrong vision of YouTube.
But you get connected with them. You end up getting a
job offer to join as part of the founding team of current TV, right? And come back to the Bay Area. Are you thinking you're gonna take this?

Absolutely. I mean I you know, up until meeting Kevin I had
you know, set my sights on something, achieved it, set my sights on something, achieved it, just was very linear.
And I thought
you know, at the time I was at FX Networks, I'd moved on to
A new new opportunity and was working with the kings of content.
So there was really no reason why I should have left. However
Spending two years going back and forth between San Francisco and LA really showed me
the stark differences between
what was happening in Silicon Valley during that Renaissance period and what was happening in Hollywood.
And they were two diametrically opposed stories.
You know, now they've they've
merged into one, but there was no Netflix or Amazon or Apple. There were you know, it was uh obviously there was, but they weren't into content creation and
Yeah.
I would
Absorb a lot from Kevin and
figured out that even though I grew up near Silicon Valley in a small beach town called Santa Cruz,
I had no idea what was going on. I sort of missed the the boom and the bust.
And I was learning from Kevin that, you know, there's there's a place where you can go and create ideas and move really quickly and velocity has always been
an attribute that I've prioritize that I really value. So
I sort of felt like I was
I was in the wrong industry.
But because I was such a, you know, kind of
uh in a way a rule follower. I thought well
You're like the organization kid, right? Yeah, exactly. I'll I'll move to San Francisco. My parents, you know, my family and very close to my family, so that'll be great. We got engaged, so that was sort of the impetus of okay, okay, we're gonna move forward with life here.
And I will find a job where my skill set matches, but it also has influence from tech. And so
I I got this offer and it was super low. I mean it wasn't going to be a senior member of the team because again, I'm still only five years into my work career. Like w you know, so
I was gonna be like a mid level executive on the startup team.
And
I was going to take it.
And I paused.
Long enough.
To double check with Kevin if I should
Go for it.
And Kevin just seized on that moment. And I think I don't even know if you knew what you were doing, but he basically interrupted the entire thing.
Kevin, t tell us the story here.
Well, I'll I'll take it from the wedding. I think there's something uh important to that is that
I sat next to Julia
at at the ceremony
And
You spoke and she had this beauty and poise.
and very articulate and you could see the intelligence there.
And then after the ceremony we were talking and
I find out she tells me she's working on the show Jackass and
you ha she had me a jackass. Like uh it it was the perfect person, uh the perfect person for me and at at that point I knew that it would be a lifelong uh relationship.
You were ready to write the term sheet.
But it's I was ready to hand over that term sheet right there. That's a great analysis. Sign sealed and delivered.
Uh so how long before you got engaged? Like how long were you actually dating
I mean, you tell this amazing story of sort of
Um this love at first sight, you know, how how long did you sort of test it out before you're like, we should definitely get engaged? Well, we met May twenty fourth, two thousand and three.
Uh we got engaged on april twenty ninth.
Two thousand and five.
And we were married June third, two thousand six. Now I've
given away every old password.
But then
Uh, but thank God we all use one password now. Yeah.
applications like one password, I just absolutely adore. That's amazing. I'm not an investor in one password, by the way. I I it's another company I have a company crush on. We're gonna we're gonna wait for it. They're they're an incredible company. They just raised their first round after twelve or fifteen years. It's uh it's uh definitely one to be on the show. Yeah.
Alright, we're talking about you two getting engaged. Can we stop talking about startup financing for a moment? Kevin read me Pablo Naruda on a beach and then proposed to me.
I love it.
So I was referring to an offer to start a company, a counter offer.
To current T V.
Well it's the job of a startup
founder to find great great talent, uh, no matter where it is. And so uh I happen to be living with an engaged
To this potential co founder with massive potential.
And just got a lowball offer. And who just gotten a lowball offer and I could see I could
sees and have one of these magical experiences where we're not just
we wouldn't just be married, but we would also
Be able to work together.
It was a wonderful thing where we got to spend twenty four seven together. So it seemed very magical. And uh I'd capture this talent.
Along with our third co founder, Renaud Vassage, who always gets left out because
Everyone wants to
Talk about the couple and the poor Renault who was
a technical mastermind
behind event right
Just there's
always behind the scenes so a shout out to Renault for his amazing contribution
Still working out of Emperorite.
Absolutely. Just like you. Just like all of us.
You uh took my job. I would have been still out of Empire had she not taken my CO job, but that's uh she kicked me up to this
um chairman position where you really have no idea what I'm supposed to do as a chairman, um, except for sound important. And it certainly does.
All right, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta.
AI has scrambled the whole security picture.
It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done.
But in an AI first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.
Yep, your risk surface changes every week now.
A vendor turns on an AI feature or someone writes in a new model without telling IT
And your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit.
Banta's own research found that around seventy percent of companies have this
quote unquote shadow AI running with no security review at all.
Right.
And that's where Vanta comes in.
They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap.
And the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent.
Think of it as a GRSC engineer, that's governance, risk, and compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep.
It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half.
In half.
Which is exactly why more than sixteen thousand companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake.
All stay audit ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor.
Every AI tool.
The whole environment.
And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust.
We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years.
So you can get$100 off vanta at vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A.com slash acquired for a thousand dollars off.
And just tell'em.
That Ben and David sent you.
The company proposal
Did you have the idea, you know, ticketing was something that
You had talked about with the PayPal team on the PayPal API. Was it Ventbreight in your mind as
as you were thinking about this or was it like nope, we're gonna jump in together and we're gonna figure something out.
Just us and and then we'll we'll come to the idea.
Well the thesis always was is
There's this conventional thought in the valley that
PayPal was this parasite on eBay.
But it turned out to be the other way around, um well I wouldn't call eBay a parasite. It turned out to be that that was simply
PayPal the the this payment platforms
First vertical.
And our thesis was that PayPal would open up this API
What they called it it uh and there was this directive at PayPal to
you know, before it was acquired to find non
Ebay.
growth in merchants.
And so bringing PayPal into
Money remittance was one mechanism to distribute
But also we saw this broken
messed up, still messed up industry of ticketing.
uh that really needed a lot of help. So we wanted to build these verticals on top of PayPal.
I was once told to
Why are you building these pimples on the ass?
Of PayPal.
But that's really how all industries start. Th there is an API, there's a platform.
And this payments OS would power so many
uh great businesses and who would think that today
PayPal doing three quarters of a trillion dollars in payments volume or where stripe is.
It's absolutely extraordinary, and so
You know, we were fortunate to see that thesis come true.

In this moment where Kevin comes to you and says, Wait, wait, wait, no, that offer's not only too low, but you should be betting on yourself instead of accepting little money from a a job. Take little money, but all the upside for yourself and let's do something together. W was this idea there? What did that sort of
come out in the coming weeks or months.
It was there. I mean we had talked about it and I remember when you were you were still actually at Zoom for a little bit before you transitioned out and
I would
um log into the customer support.
Q.
For what was then called Molley Guard.
And ha was essentially the prototype that you guys had built, or I don't know if you'd call it that, but it was the early product.
And people were using it.
And they were using it largely for either free events or you know small ticket events.
But there was a customer support queue.
that had been kept going and nobody was answering it. So I just went in and started investigating who these people were
What they were doing.
And meanwhile, I had no idea.
What
what this was going to be like. This was I was not, you know, the kid with the lemonade stand. So
I I didn't know sort of I if I would make a great entrepreneur, but I did know that I love to learn by doing.
So I really hated sitting in a classroom, but I I loved my internships.
and that I could bring some yin to Kevin's Yang. You know, we we found Renault a couple months in
But
It was just truly mom and pop, and
We moved in together and we found uh space in Petrero Hill.
which was in an old warehouse building and the landlord was a a good friend, good family friend, and he gave us a phone closet.
To start in.
And so we put saw horses and plywood desks.
And that was like two days after you came to drive with me up from LA. So it was a whirlwind. The one thing I could say there are a lot of
complimentary attributes skills that we have, but then there are these really big overlaps and one of them is we like to move quickly. So it was just like boom boom boom. And I remember pushing a sawhorse behind Kevin thinking like
I hope he's not totally nuts. We hadn't gotten married yet, so I'm kinda like
Uh there's a little bit of me that's gonna reserve some, you know, skepticism that
But the thing that I remember about that time there's a lot that I don't, but it's the thing that I do remember is just this overwhelming sense of optimism.
And I think serial entrepreneurs
are a little nuts.
Because I think that they miss that chip in their brain.
That says this might not happen.
Uh this may might not work out. And and so Kevin's
Just
Insatiable
appetite for taking risks and seeing the opportunities and then how hard he works. I mean he gets more done in a day than most
high performing people get done in a week.
It was just like we were off to the races, and so
I think it just
happened really quickly and we never looked back and we never considered another idea.
A funny story though, you know, I don't know if you guys know.
Is that
We were allowed to be in the building
for free for a short period of time.
If we told
Other entrepreneurs about the building. You found some pretty good ones, right?
We found some great ones. Ah, you guys do know the story. You're so well well researched. But we ended up in the in the span of a year
collecting basically twelve other startup teams.
And we were all in one space.
And Trippet was one of them. Trippet, Flickster, Trulia was in the building.
Um Zinga started technically in the same space.
Box bee
Um Yeah, I mean just those companies alone Tripit became part of Concur and uh
Zinga the lesson is is when
The team just receives checks.
Uh so they were getting paid with checks through the mail for installs.
And and so um who was it just And Andrew Trader was just opening checks all day. Yeah, so his job he had a a desk full of checks and was opening them up.
And whenever you see that, I've learned as an investor, invest in that company. There's a rumor that Don Valentine went down to
uh Cisco when it was just the husband and wife and maybe a few others
And uh he was trying to understand what this router thing is, but then he walked into the back
And there was a fax machine where orders were just
coming in, you know, all the time.
And he asked the the operator of the fax machine or the person that received the orders, like is this always the case? You know, the response was yes, this is I can't keep up with it. Like, look at this big stack of paper.
that that becomes a very clear in and simple investment thesis.
Now there's not too many checks these days, uh, but I think the equivalent is maybe the your stripe account or stripe account or something of the the the like. Okay, so this is this is perfect because
So you start all this like you would think
You guys are both hyper networked at this point.
You know, rule off his
Partner at Sequoia.
You'd think you'd just like oh, obviously you raised money from your network and you know, Peter and all that.
But you didn't. Like you took a totally different path. And I think this is really interesting. Like And you were saying
People are already using this. You already had transactions happening.
For two years basically. It was just you guys and Renault and
You were building this with your own capital
Bootstrapping, not taking salaries, and just building
The business.
Why did you decide to do that?
Well
Zoom uh
XOM, the remittance business had been
In exercise and dilution, we had to take a lot of capital
we had an excessive amount of fraud that we had a first fight off and then develop
systems and algorithms to
you know stop that
mm remittance licenses were very expensive.
Uh so it was a
a fairly capital intensive business and
And while we we we were very happy with where the business has grown and
And the outcome there
It was an exercise in in over dilution.
And in the second go around
I guess the third if you consider
Connect group and this go around
We really wanted to polish the product. It was
it it didn't require a lot of infrastructure, it was just the three of us. So for a long time
I mean I think close to two years.
We just wanted to get product market fit.
Build this business. So
you know, Julia would respond to customers and learn about them and
We would talk. I I would
work on the product design and hand'em over to Renault who would code. And he spent most of his year
In Paris actually. So we were
uh one third remote team at the time.
And he would work because of the eight hour difference. He would crank away while we slept and we

And there'd be all these new features and and attributes pushed.
And then we would just wash, rinse, and repeat.
And we really
Feel and I feel strongly that that's the right way to build a company.
that's capital can be a good thing, but a lot of times financing
really hinders companies that it
gets one focused on the wrong things, it doesn't
really focus you on what's most important and that's your customer.
So we
uh spent a few years doing this. The other side was this
Nobody wanted to invest in us.
Uh they were.
thinking what is this uh strange business of
These not large
concert events, but everything under the sun that
our creators, our event holders and merchants, we're
We're publishing.
We use EventPray for our all of our
Acquired events.
It's awesome, but this is not
What people are
thinking about at the time, right? Like so there's Ticketmaster.
And then there's you guys have talked about this.
People were collecting checks at the door for everything below uh, you know, arena sized venue.
How quickly did you identify that that gap, like forget the arenas, but there is this whole sea of
Micro event entrepreneurs, essentially that
Don't have tools. Was that the vision in the beginning?

It it was. I mean our hypothesis was that there were far more people trying to sell tickets to events than you know anybody had ever sized because it was o offline.
and that the, you know, kind of fatty middle between, you know, the top of the pyramid being large arenas and the bottom being backyard barbecues and birthday parties
Та те вод би з рили річ.
interesting middle layer that was global. And if we could build something with a self service ethos that could
you know, meet the basic needs of
as many different types of event creators as possible.
That would continue to grow volume and scale and give us optionality in the future.
And so we just
Focused on building a great product.
But I think from a customer standpoint
For the first year or so
Ar earliest adopters were tech bloggers.
And people in that community
who were hosting in person events with their readers. So we were the ticketing platform for the first tech crunch disrupt, and literally we printed out a guest list and showed up and checked people in at the door. Um, have the pictures to prove it. Then I remember about a year in
We started to see
speed dating on the east coast.
pop up and in particular there was a a customer
who ran uh an event called Red Carpet Speed Dating.
And that started to flourish. And so we started to see the maps light up. We would um
And you weren't like marketing in New York at this point in time. This was
Just organic adoption. Yes.
Yes. Yeah. I mean it was it was just word of mouth. It was people buying tickets to other events. It was SEO. So very early on we
figured out that every event listing would be user generated content and so we could help
all of those pages get highly indexed and
You know and so it was all these sort of
Organic
means and when that started happening it felt like okay maybe there's a there there because tech bloggers and speed dating those are two really different categories
No jokes.
But they are different categories. And I think that we thought, wow, m maybe there's there's something there. And then because we are integrated with PayPal.
We started seeing overseas transactions and events being published and
It was just all it all sort of grew together.
It took us a while to convince people that the market was big.
Like that was probably one of our biggest
challenges when we when we eventually did go out to raise money. So yeah, what what scale did you guys build the business to
over those two years before you before you raised money. It was uh tens of millions of
But we've called
GTS gross ticket sales.
And
In a age of today, like
If you had
A few hundred thousand in in G M V Series B. You're raising yeah, you're way off to the races.
And we we were saying like look at this, like look at this usage.
It's in incredible, and again this organic nature it was
When you have three people, by the way, I'll go back to your earlier question and
this two years of just soul development.
You try to make everything so efficient and effectively build a perpetual motion machine, meaning
You know, you're you have this almost deist
Theory.
of company building where you can create something
Uh, just as this
religious theory says that God created the universe and put all these laws of physics in motion and now it just operates
We wanted to build
a platform that did that. We wanted to
To put something in motion.
And we would have
Creators are merchants.
Find the business.
Publish on on event pride, sell tickets.
hold their events and
the attendees would learn about
event right and some of them
Would convert uh to creators or merchants.
And you'd wash, rinse, repeat again. And so you saw this snowball effect happening and then we just
We experiment on it. We found all these experiments of these new things called Facebook and Twitter.
And how they could actually
amplifier platform and we would just kind of ride each wave
And and that was the real magic of what we were doing.
And it was Sequoia Capital and Rulof again.
identifying that we were really seeing that lift and
We received our series term sheet at the end of
Two thousand and nine.
Nine.

So that to me sounds like a whole year between when you
said, Hey, our two years of bootstrapping are behind us, we want to raise money. And then when you actually did raise money,
Am I off there or did that take a really long time? We weren't fundraising the entire year, but we did go out towards the end of two thousand eight. It was the fall of two thousand eight.
And I don't know if you you two young chaps are old enough, but it was a tough it was a tough time for the economy. The sky was falling. Oh my gosh, I bet.
We met with twenty seven venture firms and we received twenty seven no's.
We did raise the C fund if you remember we began in earnest in two thousand six, and so
a big portion of the seed fund was our own money. Um so we rolled some of those
PayPal
Proceeds and
So so we raised a couple hundred thousand in
in a seed in a friends and family round, Jeff Clavier.
uh was an early supporter of the Birches. Michael and Sochi Birch were a husband and wife team that we admired so much that had a
Phenomenal outcome.
uh selling a business to AOL
And we went on
our kind of merry way of building and then
You saw the two thousand eight, two taus nine economic collapse, the housing bubble burst.
And we were thinking, Oh, we're gonna really be in trouble here.
But what you see in these massive dislocations is that
There's this movement online that
the world figures out that that it's far more efficient to use a service like Eventbrite than a traditional
um manner of doing that. And we see that today. It's a very important lesson as we see this dislocation that's happened due to COVID.
And you see the future come faster.
Whether it's Zoom conferencing
Whether it's food and grocery delivery with instacart and door dash.
uh this is an extraordinary phenomenon and it's also a ch an opportunity
for new players to
out hustle even more so the incumbents. We saw a lot of flipping happen of
Leadership where
old media still had
A strong foothold.
Or
real estate practices of the past have a strong foothold and then a lot of these marketplaces
became more much more prominent and gained market leadership or truly a
uh which we had the opportunity to to write the first check into uh became
uh market leaders in the space and surpassed
They're offline equivalents.
So we have this section of the show called the playbook, and rather than waiting for it later I wanna pull forward a
A bullet point here and
I think it really gets to why the perception of
eventbrite was that you didn't have a large market by VCs at first because
Julia, as you said
It was a shadow market. It was largely offline transactions. And so there was no good way to see that there was a large opportunity here.
But the internet
Creates.
the opportunity for niches to individually be large. And so this whole long tail of creators that otherwise didn't have tooling and were thus collecting checks at the door or not having an events because it was too high of a friction thing.
this basically unlocked new value for that massive long tail of I think you have something close to a million creators in twenty nineteen using Eventbrite. And and I think that if you would have told me in two thousand eight that, you know, a decade from now there will be one million appreciated events using
just this one company's tool set. It frankly seems ludicrous. Now it seems obvious, but then you could you could totally see how you'd have to be Julia and Kevin Hartz, the crazy people who think this is actually gonna happen for that
To to believe it.
Well, this is why we wanted to be on the acquired podcast and now we because you understand you actually do your homework.
And you have a sophisticated understanding.
of the intricacies of this you're like the stratetry of
uh podcast and we also are gonna try to recruit you during the you two during this this show
Uh you know, given that.
Well thank you.
Just briefly on Tam.
So with Zoom, um the remittance business, it was very simple to calculate TAM. Every
central bank in every country recorded remittan in.
So we could go to Sequoia and just say, This is a massive market and we'll take
a couple percentage of that.
And look, we have a multi billion dollar business opportunity.
as our total addressable market, but that was so hard.
That was very hard for Airbnb in the early days.
Then how large is this
creationist market that that uh Ben described here.
So I always struggled with
Trying to go through TAM.
At some point when we did have some money we would try to
uh find consultants to help us and
it just was imp impossible to try to peg down every one of these categories and this creationist notion. It's somewhat of a fruitless exercise. I don't know if that's gonna be too no controversial. But I I think like for something that is
is like Vemprite, where you have a platform
That enables
An activity that is
The human experience.
I I still to this day think it's just
It's not helpful. I mean there is some data that we can use to understand in which geo
Are certain categories
a big opportunity, but there's nothing that comes close to the data that we have from what's going on.
At any given moment on the platform.
And that's not gonna be picked up in a study. That's that's
That's ours. You know, and so it's uh it gives us such a a clear indication of where we should
Focus our efforts whether it's
building product or go to market.
You know, I think Kevin's thesis was that you you really focus on making it
friction free
and you you give the tools that the people need to be successful and then
you know, the product that they love and then you give them service that makes them feel loved.
And then you keep building that. And today we're sitting on a lot of interesting data that's actionable, not just not just for us as a business, but actually for our customers.
you know, we can turn that data around, give them
content and actionable insights on how they can grow their businesses
And I think one of the misnomers about Eventbrite is that it's for
you know, informal gatherings. These are small businesses and professionals. We're not used for R S V P events like Backyard Barbecues. It's actually a bad product for that. It's really for professional
Take it in advance.
But I think that
It's interesting because when we were out fundraising that first time there was this
persistent question.
Just like you ne maybe never would have thought that bringing craft fairs online would be a big business.
Our story
is somewhat similar to an Etsy as well, where you see this extraordinary long tail
emerge and come to the platform and then all of a sudden you start creating market.
Because you're bringing people from the offline to the online
And you're also helping people become more
successful and build their businesses on the platform.
I think that an inherent
driver of our business has been that need for humans to gather.
And that has been more powerful than than ever.
A second component has been that as
uh traditional media like magazines, there are all these hobbyist magazines in different areas as that declined
the live experience grew.
Yeah, so
magazines that were from train
collectors to
Home and garden their
revenue, their income started to grow in.
in offline events and they really leaned into that.
Uh and and so that was this
kind of crossing of
of moving from the print and
um media world to the offline and gathering world that became so visceral and powerful. And then you had social media, which
became about your experience, not
the things that you owned. So just as
your feed is is more representative of you. You want to do interesting things and be in interesting places and you can influence others. That's what Eventbrite was all about in those
beautiful, exciting experiences and the thing you were doing became this broadcast mechanism.
uh to display what you were about and who you are, whether it's a triathlon.
Or whether it's attending a craft beer festival.
That's awesome.
All right listeners.
Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow.
If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is uh no longer the hard part.
Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making.
AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risk
Are real.
Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why Service Now built the AI control tower.
Yep, AI control tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with
Any AI, not just theirs.
Every device on your network, every permission across every system.
Every AI agent visible and secure in one place.
And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than twenty years building the operational backbone of the enterprise, the workflows, governance, approval, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security. ServiceNow
already runs more than a hundred billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than eighty five percent of the Fortune five hundred. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates.
And in a future, that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is.
Who's managing them all? So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely, at scale.
Go check out service now.com slash acquired and tell'em that Ben and David sent you.
Well, listeners, as you know, normally in the acquired format, we would take you blow by blow all the way up through sort of how the company became what it became today. But since we have Julia and Kevin here, there's a few key moments that we want to sort of fast forward to and talk through with them. So we've
talked through this sort of two thousand eight, two thousand nine time frame where they had mostly bootstrapped it. Once they started raising money, frankly, they raised a lot of money. So Sequoia came in, did that series C, then they raised twenty million, then fifty, then sixty, then sixty, then a hundred and thirty. I mean we we got
This company became very well capitalized. It was growing very quickly. It was a part of this stay private longer ethos that was really dominating the twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen stretch of of technology companies. And I want to talk about two things with with you, Julia and Kevin.
One
Why stay private longer? And and had did you think about IPOing sooner and
And then the second thing is a question for you, Julia.
Where
You formally became the CEO I think in early twenty eighteen.
kick Kevin to the curb and said, Look, you know, I've been operating this company, you know, with you and now it's time to
time to be the CEO and uh Kevin, you you went and and spent some time at Founders Fund and obviously now starting a SPAC that we'll we'll uh we'll talk about here shortly. But Julia, I wanna hear about the road show process. I wanna I wanna kinda dive into what it was like to take a company public.
Well the only thing that I would
Just attempt to correct, which I'm a bit fearful to do because again, I think you've done such great work is
We weren't opposed to going public.
I I think yes, we we stayed
Private.
pretty long, but I think that we always had an idea of Eventbrite being a public company.
I think that being in the public markets
Sheds light on your business.
Light is a great antiseptic.
And a great way to be a
lean and
Thoughtful and
high performant company.
And so
It was all part of the
of the plan, frankly. And you know
sort of one thing led to another. We acquired a big company. I think that the timing was really about what we had set for ourselves as
This is the threshold of revenue, this is the threshold of profitability, this is what we wanna see in the business, and then and then we'll consider going public. And we did. And we decided in January of twenty eighteen that we would be
Going into high gear on the IPO process, and it took
Roughly nine months, which I always like to joke, I could make a human in nine months, and it was a long process. Most of the work you do to get ready for an IPO, you do it well before you actually are in the IPO process.
But the IPO process itself
It's this sort of cookie cutter, you have a plan, there's a gant chart, and you go through the steps, and there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen and
I enjoyed it because
I figured that if we were gonna dedicate nine months and
you know, countless hours and our hours are
money that time cost something.
That we would
get the most out of it because the opportunity lost in focusing on this, I wanted the focus to actually yield something that was greater than than that opportunity that we lost. So so we focused on two things. One was
Мейкін шор.
that our our public debut was rooted in the the creators, our customers, and their stories. That we put them front and center and that we actually used them
Q
Get investors
really on board and understanding our business.
And that worked really well. I mean it was a risk because I would go into these meetings and I'd start telling stories and I'm like, Oh my God, somebody's gonna tell me to stop and walk out and
It it worked. It was like a light switch would go on and you could see it and the person say, Oh, you're not.
live Nation ticket master. You're not like the next, you know, this or the next that.
So that worked really well. And the second thing was that I wanted it to be a process that would just inherently make us
better at operating. And so
you know, we really leaned on that process to help clean up some of the stuff that had been ha accumulating. There's barnacles after, you know, ten years and and I wanted it to be
Ah, something that
You know, we felt like was really additive.
to the company.
and to who we were as a business. And so we
landed on September and all along so one thing that I think
maybe you guys don't know about me, is that when I make a plan
That's the plan.
So I decided that since Kevin's birthday is on September eighteenth and Roloff's birthday is on September 19th, that obviously we'd be going public that week. And um, you know like when you do a remodel and you tell the team, I have a really big event coming up.
And so you gotta get it done for that.
This was like that emotional push that everybody needed because
It was not obvious this was
You know, in order to land our date, we had to
Get on the road show right after Labor Day.
And pass
Over and through two high holidays. It was a rare year where the high holidays were falling right in the center of our road show.
And then we had a ton of competition. In September of two thousand eighteen, a lot of companies were going public. So actually you guys were at the forefront. I mean, Uber wasn't public yet, Lyft wasn't public yet. The floodgates were just opening of all these companies like you guys that had been in the private market so long were just about to flip over. That's right.
And actually our opening bell day got stolen from us.
So this is a part of the story that not many people know. Um I won't mention
the the company, but if you do your homework you'll know.
What was the date? The sev September seventeenth or eighteenth?
We ended up going public on the twenty I thought it was the nineteenth, which was your birthday. No, we ended up going public on the twentieth.
And it was the market high day.
We ended up going on a great day. At any rate, we le we stopped the landing.
But the road show itself was insane. So George Lee from Goldman Sachs
Was one of the lead bankers, and he said that in twenty five years.
He had never seen this many travel mishaps.
happened to one company during the road show. I mean when we took off
For
Ar first day.
We flew across the country.
There was a hurricane.
On the east coast.
That
Pilot tells us he needs to land the plane.
And
I innocently ask for
Well, are we close to New York?
Yeah.
And I realized we are in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
Which is
The home of the Little League Hall of Fame.
Actually the birthplace of our CFO, which was so insane. I mean sort of nonchalantly mentioned it when we were landing and I'm thinking, Well, we're gonna have to call your mom because we have to spend the night here.
But then we realized we had to start at six A. M.
To train the sales force and to get going. And it was a Friday, so we didn't so this is training
the banker sales force to go and advocate on your behalf to their
really important meetings. So going to each bank, we worked with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, um, and we were supported by Allen and company, but we went to Goldman and JP
To get their sales force trained up.
And then we had our first day of
Full meetings in New York.
And
We couldn't.
sacrifice that day because it was a Friday, and if we missed that day, we'd blow our entire schedule.
So we end up landing
And it's like dark clouds and rain and crazy and I'm still
You know, I'm from California, I'm still thinking, Well, it just must be a hop, skip, and a jump. Like we must be over the hill from New York or something.
Well, anyways, uh long story short, they bring around a
Minivan.
And
George Lee
Drives us
Through the poconos.
Four and a half hours.
To New York City.
And along the way we stop at Friendlies, which is a place I've never been to because I'm from California.
We I had my first and only Fribble. Yes. And we made a music video.
Which um
Is in the vault.
And Well, I see I keep hearing all these trials and difficult challenges the Roadshows having
And then I'm getting these lip dub videos back with
Bankers on the hood of the car dancing and I'm saying like what is going on? Is this really a road show? I like to make lemonade and a lemon. Yeah, well I like I like a good adventure, you know, and so we ended up making it, but we pulled in at like midnight.
drove into New York blasting
Billy Joel.
You know, and just
New York state of mind, just getting I mean, just in it.
It was epic.
But then
So many things like that happened.
That when I think about doing the Road Show now on Zoom
We really missed the timing on that because
Uh watching Kevin do his IPO the other day I was like
Oh my gosh, so much money saved, so much brain damage saved.
But you know, you didn't get to make a a music video in the poconos.
And we didn't get a uh donut wall on the New York Stock Exchange floor.
Which was uh provided and became
the most memorable thing that our two daughters
only remember is that there was a donut wall. They didn't care about this thing going public.
They just wanted a donut wall. Well they made you a donut wall. They did make me a donut wall for the spec.
My pew. Just to make sure I understand, Kevin, you weren't there for the road show presentations for Eventbrite, Julia. That was just you leading it as as Kevin. He ended up meeting up with us the day before pricing, which was his birthday.
So we all arrive in New York, we meet up with Kevin, we're all exhausted, we celebrate his birthday.
That was really fun. And then
But were tired, so it was just dinner.
A Road Show is really the CEO and the CFO.
I'm again just the chairman. I don't know what I do.
I'm just like along for the ride and I get to watch
This incredible team do these incredible things.
So I I was there along for the leg in D C, but
toured around or met with some
people I knew in in D C while you did in in Baltimore where you did all the hard work. Oh, I remember that.
So then we we rang the bell and it was
I think about it differently now.
But back then I had an idea that this was not an ending, it was beginning. You know, it's the starting line. And to be working on something for twelve years and have this be the starting line
Was pretty overwhelming, but that day was so special because we had
all of our family there. So there were eighteen family members from our nuclear family. It felt like our wedding. We were all downtown together and we had our executive team
our first ten
Employees
and a handful of customers who had participating in in the road show in the video and and the marketing materials.
And
I remember two things vividly. One was that
President of the New York Stock Exchange, Stacey Cunningham, said that they had looked through the archives and
And had not yet found a picture of that many.
women executives on the podium.
That was just our executive team. We weren't like filling the rafters with women.
And then the second thing was um that Pete from Citadel, our our market maker, our opener, he said
I he'd never seen that many children on them on the floor. And it was just it wasn't even like we told everybody to bring their kids, it was just people brought their families. It it was such a special day and there's kids running everywhere, of course. I felt a bittersweet moment because I was I think the second
female founder to have gone public in a really long time and the second youngest. Second youngest. Something that made me feel
Honored but also a little sad.
The road show
Is it
process where bankers are evaluating someone's decade of hard work in a split second decision. So lots of heuristics are being used. People are looking at the same set of financials that they're very used to looking at. They're getting often caught up in the hype.
And
They're usually used to seeing
male CEOs of these high growth, especially founder CEOs of these high growth companies.
What was that like being one of the few women who led that process? Well they they largely kept their cool, but we didn't see we actually didn't see one woman on the on the road to we saw one actually sorry, we saw one.
And I'm
dear friends with her. So um that's Anne Marie from Capital. So I think uh you know, she was a friendly, but um and she doesn't typically cover companies of our size. So
There were zero women. And that wasn't a surprise to me. I you know, because we've done the testing the waters and you know, I
we knew a lot of investors, we had long term relationships thanks to Alan and company and
You know, so it it it wasn't a surprise, but I do think that when I reflect on it.
I'm very fortunate to have
Allies around me. You know, it's it's it's I think working with Kevin has helped me understand that there's even just the smallest sort of act of support.
From men in power to
Two women can just
like be the fuel that they need to run through any, you know, wall or and so I just I felt that. I felt like I had, you know, people like um George Lee and Noah Wintraub and Ian Smith and Harry Wagner around me and these are like these are these are like my tribe. Rule off. And it was just it it was just and so
It's not foreign for me to be the only woman, but yes, we did not see
None of my gender on on that trip. So
Ben just to make a clarification.
When you're on a road show
uh it's actually not bankers you're meeting with, you're meeting with portfolio managers of long only funds.
each portfolio manager manages a big pool of capital. It's kind of like

and there's a lead portfolio manager that makes a decision that yes or no decision to put an order in
Um so just to uh just to clarify there. And then two things
Just to add is that
At the time
Really, it was clear to me that
the student had become the master and that it was time for Julia to take my place and
Thank God there's now a a great CEO in the seat.
The second thing I'll also point out is that
During the periods that we had raised the most money privately were the hardest and most difficult periods for me and
Because we were really fighting.
this gravity of over spending and creating inefficiency.
And it took us away from our roots.
as a capital efficient
Um highly effective perpetual motion machine. And that's really what's driven
our desire and drove our desire and drove our ethos to be out in the public market sooner and really learn great practices of capital allocation. But that begins at the earliest stage.
as a founder is you might have a big balance sheet, but you've got to discipline yourself to put that money to work in the right way of finding great people.
Not over hiring, not making
Giving everyone the chance to be a manager.
uh en these are these are the real reasons why
Yeah.
ills of private capital have been so difficult.
With the soft banks and others.
It sounds like you're preaching, you know, the outsiders gospel, the great book about capital allocation and and CEOs and management. But um
As we were preparing for this, it seems like
You know, obviously a lot has happened in the world and to you guys since your IPO, you know, recording here in August twenty twenty in COVID times.
Founders were afraid to go public before because the mantra was like
public markets are so short term focused, you know, it's the private markets that are long term that are gonna stick with you. But like
You guys have found some amazingly
Supportive shareholders and new investors.
As a public company
Through
You know, the
crisis and tragedy that is Covid that has obviously hugely impacted event rate.
You raise two hundred and twenty five million dollars as a public company.
How have you found this whole experience?
And I just wanna throw uh sort of some numbers out there so listeners get a shape of the impact here,'cause I I think it's worth having sort of a third party throw that out. So Eventbrite was doing something like
eighty million bucks a quarter in I think net revenue for several quarters leading up until obviously Q2.
Which of course then
drops precipitously. It's a in person, primarily in person event business, where around half of which the revenue comes from these sort of like self-organized, mid size, self-serve events. And so you see that eighty million number drop to like
eight million in that quarter. So like imagine your business taking this ninety percent haircut.
And then
Like
Julia, I think turning it back to you, this question of like, so what do you do?
And how do you figure out how to
Build the war chest and play offense from there. What happened on really early March, I would even point it to March fifth.
was one of the most extraordinary
impacts on a business
I had ever seen in
My whole career.
There was just nothing like the onset of ковід, and it came fast and quickly.
to a live entertainment and ticketing business.
They've also served small businesses.
So it was this.
double witching this um
Incredible.
uh tidal wave of
damage to the business to
This triad of
Our company and its
In our hard working team members
our attendees
And our our creators
uh as well as uh the investors in the business.
So
It really was we'd almost been in a
you know position that that the sun was shining
When you look back at everything else compared to what happened in March.
We had a phenomenal January and February.
uh it was uh record the business was humming along
And then March came.
And our
for over four and a half billion in gross ticket sales that we achieved last
uh in two taus nineteen last year
uh went actually in March to zero and actually negative.
uh where you had more refunds than you did ticket sales and that's unprecedented.
You just don't see a business come to a grinding halt.
Even step back.
And what Julia and her team did during that period.
It was
uh it's still the greatest comeback story I've seen in the making.
I
Joke that uh
Ben Horowitz's experience and the hard things about the hard things isn't hold a candle.
to Julia in her team story. Um I shouldn't say that because I won't get invited to a summer barbecue anymore. I'm sorry, Ben.
But I will just let maybe Julia talk about what it was like in the trenches during that ninety days.
And how she
Short up the balance sheet.
uh how to go through some very extremely painful
decisions in
really capitalized the balance sheet.
So this business can endure for the long term.
I'll save you on the Ben thing. I actually went back and read some of the parts that I had highlighted from that book, The Hard Things About Hard Things, and I think two things resonate with me now more than ever. And one is embrace the struggle.
And not try to avoid
The really difficult things and get right to the hardest thing.
And two is see the silver lining in the worst case scenario.
you go through different scenario planning exercises as a public company. You have to like
do these tabletop exercises. And I remember thinking in the second week of March
Tabletop my ass. Like this is there is no tabletop exercise that can actually
prepares for this and it was the biggest
crisis in the worst case scenario that you could ever imagine because the basis of our business
That we
I for for all intents and purposes felt was just inherent to human experience.
was going away.
And
We were the tip of the spear and so we were the first affected. We obviously weren't the only affected, but being in that
Sort of front pack.
There were benefits to to being in that front pack because we were, you know, moving quickly and immediately not only taking care of our people, so so I
First, I had to focus on the people because we needed to get everybody prepared to work from home. Part of that was a conversation I had with with
Eric at Zoom, who said that despite what they build, they were a work from office culture and he was moving everybody to work from home so that they could get
conditioned as they were gonna be, you know, taking on these massive challenges.
Julia, I'm curious.
How do you think about the things that were unique to Eventbrite about this and the path going forward?
Well, I think when you have such a massive business disruption
There are a few key things that you have to get right.
in order to make it through that eye of the storm. And we were immediately
in the sort of fog of of
what felt like war because our revenue went from a hundred percent
To zero percent in the m in a matter of of
Two weeks. And we were
We you know huddled together.
immediately created a strategy that would lead us through
to where we needed to be as a company, not a strategy of how are we gonna get through this crisis.
As much as a as what would we do if we could do it all over again.
And asking ourselves that question allowed us to f narrow our focus because we knew we had to. We couldn't be doing everything we were we were doing pre Covid.
in the middle of this crisis and still make it through.
So we
immediately made a cut that was that was deep and it was painful and
It was
A cut that we may not just
just for cost cutting sake, but actually to prepare the company to narrow its focus.
А про вас це стратегії у вас вери клір.
An incredibly vibrant
self sign on channel that grows faster and has a stronger gross margin than our sales channel.
We have а self-service platform.
That really doesn't need someone to be
You know
Провадим хай тач
Human service.
So we had to rethink a bit about how we would how our go to market would work, but that wasn't our biggest our biggest problem. Our biggest problem was how we were gonna get through to the other side.
sales channel, just to clarify the make sure I understand, that's like
when you go and you sign a big customer like a multi thousand person music festival and you enter a more complex sort of financial arrangement and you change the cash flow dynamics and they're assigned a headcount.
And you work out a special deal for refunds, like e each one of those is like a unique special child, more so than just, Hey, Ben and David are hosting an acquired meetup.
That's right.
So we saw the first
day of impact of Covid in early March and in early April we
Downsize the company by forty five percent.
And we
effectively removed over a hundred million dollars from our operating expenses.
On May eleventh, we announced our earnings along with our financing.
And on June twelfth we raised the second part of our financing through a public market convert, which was
sort of a a part of the original plan and just moving at that fast pace allowed us to
D
stronger in in this moment. And you know, I can't help but look at all the opportunities that have have emerged from this time because now we're a smaller team, we're focused on doing less
We're able to
pivot our attention to helping small businesses survive this moment. Then we we really focused on what could our product do to help our creator survive this time.
And you know
Online events
is something that we've served since the beginning of time. You don't have to have an in person event to use event brand.
We're really the front door and the platform, the operating system for any type of event.
So immediately we started to see creators and especially the ones that internally we call super creators who are frequent creators, they're small businesses, they're entrepreneurs.
They started to pivot their events online.
We saw Zoom become a highly searched term on the site, so that's when I reached out directly to them. And a few weeks ago we announced our integration with Zoom in a native app. Th there were these moments and these opportunities that
continue to play out as we help our customers not only now
survive, but then thrive into this new world because things aren't going to be the same in the future. And we it's our job to really prepare them for
Any scenario and to help rebuild the live experience economy.
Being a public company through all that.
W have you been in any way?
Held back by that, accelerated.
Would it have been different if you were still private?
I think it would have been harder if we were private.
I think that being a public company and having, you know, consistency of reporting and having some really dedicated long term shareholders as well as new interested investors, it gave us the opportunity to to really play offense, as you say. And you know, we ended up raising three hundred and seventy five million in total. So
We now are on the other side of this with a clear direction.
A small, vibrant, mighty team. Um a smaller, rather, not small, but smaller, uh focus team. And we're doing
everything in our power to help our customers during this time and it's
It's really core to who we are. It's building a stronger platform. It's creating a superior product experience. It's helping them reach broader audiences through their online events. It's you know thinking about how we are going to be a better company going forward. I mean there's really it's sort of like a near death experience and a new lease on life.
And you know, we we needed the financial security to be able to to get through this point.
But I think that that as a you know public company we were able to access the public markets for part of our financing.
That was possible because we were a public company.
All right, listeners.
Now is a great time to talk about one of our
Favorite companies, Statseg.
Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI powered experiences at scale.
Yeah.
In the
crazy speed of today's AI world. Shipping fast is just table stakes now.
It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly.
The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers.
And how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next.
This is where StatsIG comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved.
So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started.
Now on the grading.
Well, as as you both know, the way that we we finish these episodes is with a grade
Dave and I have gone back and forth on like how on earth will we do that for this episode? So what I wanna do with both of you is
What's the scenario where five years from now we look back and say
A plus between product and strategy decisions, like what could be the A plus outcome from this. The A plus outcome.
Is the silver lining of being able to
Dramatically focus the business on the core of the business.
And so often time
In expansive growth companies
Your
Placing a lot of investment bets in a lot of different areas and sometimes getting ahead of yourself.
So the A plus scenario would be really focusing back to the core that the
really grew event right made it great.
in moving the world
uh even faster towards the self service ethos and building a better product about that that
Right now.
music venues have been by far the hardest hit. If you look at
uh some of the ticketing competitors in
In those spaces.
They're accustomed to
very manual.
And
horrible platforms that require a lot of people
human software of sorts. And now to be able to make it so simple for a venue
uh a venue that
doesn't have the balance sheet and resources to be able to do this in an automated way.
into accept this just as
you know, companies accepted Salesforce or HubSpot or these other platforms, this really paves the way to the future.
It also
retirees the incumbents in the same way that you saw
uh just the inefficient businesses disappear
during you know the the two thousand crisis
the dot com bus during the
A housing crisis
Where it's actually an opportunity to gain market share.
and come out a real leader with a much sharper focus.
That's the A plus scenario.
Yeah.
Julia, what do you think?
I I think that the A Plus scenario is
You know
looking back at this time and having it be this this incredible moment of uh you know rocket shift
A ventright is
even more ubiquitous in live experiences than we are today.
and, you know, extraordinarily valuable
On our
our product thesis and on our, you know, company ethos. I'd be remiss to not say that the people who helped Event Bright through this
period of time on our team are heroes.
And you know, yes, Kevin and I are founders and we were in the trenches and working together and that was really special.
and the people who have, you know, worked tirelessly beside us make Eventbrite a great company. So I think when I think of A plus, I think of great business growth, clear market leadership.
Sky's the limit on valuation and
A team that is the best in the business, and and a company that I really feel proud of.
Helping to be a part of, helping to shape.
On the L P show we had Nick Konas from Tac on
The story and opportunity is so similar between your two companies. You know, this this awful thing happened took your businesses to zero.
But there's this opportunity.
to serve your customers even better set up for the future and take
Take huge share from the incumbents. And
I I've never felt more fired up, to be honest. I'm it's it's like day one and you know, it's it's so exciting and I leap out of bed in the morning because it's not now about
You know, are are we gonna make it through this? It's about how do you take advantage of every single day and how what are you gonna do with this opportunity? And so that's just that to me feels
Like I'm back in two thousand twelve again. It's it's really energizing.
Well that's a great
Great place to leave it. Julia and Kevin, where can listeners get in touch and uh what is the best way for anyone of acquired listeners to help Eventbrite right now?
I can be reached at Julia at eventbrite dot com.
And Kevin at eventbrite dot com.
I'm a terrible sales person, so
I'm not gonna pitch event pride. I think it's
hosting an online event, being back out there when
Uh our events are backing together.
being a patron of the arts and local community

uh the analogy that we see over in history of the nineteen eighteen
Pandemic when
Following that um horrible time period where millions of people lost their lives
People were back out in force and you had the Roaring Twenties and this almost hedonistic period, but you had also uh this jazz and the arts and all emerge in this period that people wanted to be back together and gather.
as innate b being a human.
Could have said any better.
Well listeners, that is it for this episode. If you aren't subscribed and you like what you hear, you should.
And remember from the top of the show, our one call to action this episode. Share your favorite episode with a friend, co-worker.
Or on social media.

And now as we wind down this event bright episode, we will be keeping the party going with Kevin to dive into his latest venture, a spAC, uh that he
I believe has IPO'd by the time we uh we release this, um, and is personally sponsoring to take some Unicorn or Unicorn like company.
public here in the in the very near future. So if you aren't already a limited partner, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquire.fm slash LP and all new listeners get a seven day free trial. Subscribing gets you access to the LP show where we dive deeper into the fundamentals of company building and investing.
In addition to our monthly LP calls where we talk with folks directly on Zoom, answer QA, and of course
Our book club.
N L Ps
We'll see you to talk spacs with Kevin on the other side.