Leading through radical change with Julia Hartz of Eventbrite

Back as the show’s first-ever ‘three-peat’ guest is Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. The events industry has been transformed by the past three years, giving Julia the opportunity to evolve Eventbrite to better serve its key customers — event creators. This week on How I Built This Lab, Julia goes back in time to review how she kept a ticketing service afloat when no one was buying tickets. Plus, thoughts on effective leadership from a public company CEO, and Julia’s tips for designing meetings that your colleagues actually want to go to. Be sure to listen to Eventbrite’s origin story https://art19.com/shows/831bd173-0992-41b7-b1eb-112db904d947/episodes/a0f2dd46-8439-4f2e-9e82-140570f0f3c4/embed told in February 2020, and Julia’s Resilience series dispatch https://art19.com/shows/831bd173-0992-41b7-b1eb-112db904d947/episodes/8f195f41-e426-42a5-ac5f-0e008c0df8cb/embed from July 2020. This episode was produced by Rommel Wood with music by Sam Paulson and Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research by Kerry Thompson. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. You can follow HIBT on X https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. This episode is brought to you in part by Canva, the easy-to-use online design platform for presentations, social posts, videos, websites, and more. Start designing today at Canva https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.canva.com/for-teams/features/brand/?utm_medium=display&utm_source=audio&utm_campaign=us_en_all_free_bra_consideration_2023wwydth2_na&utm_term=Wondery&utm_content=Broad__;!! Iwwt! QqxHLNtUdpIIxw_krrv7MGmnfzwbBOrZD_G9svhEPDTxFavPcc1bbAOKSfMgNFRuyum5kSUDDOm6HzG0$ – the home for every brand. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

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• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobilefuels.com for details. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. The pandemic nearly crushed the ticketing company Eventbrite. For nearly two years, people basically stopped going to events. And for Eventbrite's founder, Julia Hartz, the pandemic was the biggest test of her career, and that's an understatement. Julia was first on the show back in early 2020, right before COVID. And that episode is worth scrolling back to and checking out. It tells the entire story of how she built Eventbrite, and it's an amazing story. But today, you're going to hear the inside story of how Julia and her team saved the

• 5:52Guy Raz?

  company and how they're trying to position Eventbrite to grow and thrive in a cutthroat industry. But first, I asked her to recount what happened to the company as the pandemic hit.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Those early days I remember as being very dark. But very definitive. There was never a gray moment. I think so often we're faced with gray moments as leaders, especially these days, that was black and white. We went from, you know, record high ticket sales to negative revenue in 14 days. And something we had spent 14 years building was basically evaporated in the span of two weeks.

• 6:35Guy Raz?

  In April of that year, you had to lay off, and we talked about this a little bit, you had to lay off about half of your employees because you couldn't, I mean, there was no revenue coming in. There was nothing coming in.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:45Guy Raz?

  And you, at the time, you had about 1,100, 1,100 employees. I remember you saying, like, you know, you were, you'd been kind of nervous, which I thought was remarkable for you to just talk about. You'd been nervous to step in as CEO. By that point, you'd been CEO for almost four years, but you were still sort of quieting voices, doubting voices, self doubting voices in your head, which I think is very healthy, by the way. I think all CEOs have those voices, but very few of them acknowledge it. So now, you know, you're faced with massive challenge and test. So how did you, how did you do that? I just can't think of a blunt way to ask it.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I, what strikes me is that there's all sorts of different, there's a paradox in leadership of, of being decisive and being curious. And I really felt that I was in the middle of that during this time because the learnings were coming fast and they were coming in big waves. So the first thing that I did was tell the team to throw out the roadmap. There was not going to be business as usual in any area of our business in 2020 and probably for a few years after that.

• 8:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  And our creators, our customers, those who produce events, really did not know what was coming. And we almost had to be that, the canary to tell them what was happening.

• 8:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, what we, what we realized was that Our business was in great risk. Their businesses were in peril and we needed to work together to get through this. So, early on, we looked at ways that we could really support local organizers in keeping their communities together. And with the North Star of these are going to be the creators that would be rebuilding the creator economy, the live events economy that would bring communities back together. We kind of had an inkling of how important that would be, but really, we had no time to think about it. So, we started supporting them in hosting virtual events and that took off almost immediately.

• 9:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, I remember how quickly, obviously, live events turned into, were canceled or postponed and then, and then they turned into virtual events. We had two How I Built This live shows scheduled in March of 2020. One was in Seattle and one was in San Francisco. We'd obviously canceled those shows and, and then, pretty much by April, we came up with a, an entirely new live episode of the show that we would livestream.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  I mean, it was just complete insanity. So, we were just acting, acting, acting, deciding, acting, deciding, acting on this very, very short loop. But at the same time, everything stopped.

• 9:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  For about two to three weeks, there were no events happening. And that pause, Guy, was the silver lining for our business. We were forced to pause and reset.

• 9:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And what business gets to do that after 14 years and also a public company?

• 10:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  So, it really, that pause was so transformative because it allowed us to sit back and say,

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Given what we know about this business, what would we do if we could do it all over again?

• 10:19Guy Raz?

  How did you maintain optimism or did you not? Like when you, presumably you had to have all hands, town hall meetings with your employees. You had to be on that Zoom call. And your job as a leader is to be positive and to show confidence and optimism and to shield. I think maybe it's not the job of the CEO, but as a leader, I think in part it's to shield your team from the arrows that come your way.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  It turns out that I ended up being a great wartime CEO. And I think that's a skill set you probably don't know you have until you're in the middle of it. And I was able to compartmentalize the fear and the uncertainty with what we needed to do to be there for first and foremost, our creators and then our Brightlings, which is our Eventbrite team. So it was a shared experience together. And I just, I combined vulnerability and empathy with just almost like a mama bear quality of I'm not going to let this company fail. And so we're going to get through this one step at a time.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I think that's where my confidence was born as CEO, because it became very clear to me what we needed to do. And then the other, other thing I had in my corner was a fierce group of familiar advisors, but also people who I could just call. I mean, everybody wanted to know what was going on at Eventbrite. So I was able to access a lot of great guidance. And by and large, the most important guidance I got were from people like Henry Ellenbogen, who said, you know, cut costs and raise money now. Don't wait and be severe about it. And the second one was from Rulaf Bota, who said,

• 12:19Speaker 01

  We're not giving up now. This isn't how the story ends.

• 12:23Guy Raz?

  I should mention, both these are prominent investors.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And they knew us and they knew the business really well. And you never quite forget when someone says the right thing at the right time and you remember it.

• 12:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  You know, it's so important.

• 12:39Guy Raz?

  You mentioned this term wartime CEO, which I have mixed feelings about because obviously wartime is, you know, you think about Churchill, but it is true that it was a crisis. And crisis does tend to bring out the best in a lot of people because it forces you to focus on solving that one problem, like a war, right? Like Churchill had to solve the problem of being defeated and destroyed by the Nazis. And similarly, I think about like reporters, when I was a reporter, when I was covering wars, that was very easy to do, not easy, but it was easier to do great work because you're focused and you had to be determined and you had to move quickly. It's harder to do great work when like, you know, many years ago, I covered the Pentagon,

• 13:23Guy Raz?

  just like walking the halls of the Pentagon and trying to find a great story. So I wonder, you know, it sounds like you really rose to the occasion. How did you harness that intensity, that adrenaline, and continue that kind of way of thinking once this crisis ended?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Well, prior to COVID, I had spent a lot of energy trying to make other people happy. That was really what I believed to be my superpower, that I was empathetic and that I could bring happiness through the experience that people had on the platform and through the experience as a Brightling. But I was tying myself into knots, trying to make everyone else happy and losing the plot more often than I probably was willing to admit. So I dropped that premise completely and I focused on. Really five areas of of criticality for us. And the first two are the most important, which is the people. So it was, how do we show up for creators and help them maintain business continuity?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  And how do we help our own team figure out the refocusing, the reset, the reimagination, and the rebuilding that's going to happen? The third thing was raising money for the company, which was its own, you know, work stream.

• 14:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  And so I I focused on those three in particular.

• 14:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  I stopped trying to make people happy and I stopped worrying about if I was doing a good job or not.

• 14:53Guy Raz?

  So interesting. I I wonder how you, I mean, if, you know, revenue goes to zero, right? And then you have this virtual business that you start, but there's no, there was no way that was going to make up for the loss from live events, right? Because you guys got a fee on every ticket sold. I mean, you're a publicly traded company, right? I mean, going without any revenue for a long time, or significantly lower revenue for a long time is hard. How were you able to withstand that?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  So I haven't told this story yet. So I think I was waiting for this, for this moment. But when we talked in July of 2020, I think it was impossible for me to have the clarity that I have in hindsight now, three years later. Prior to COVID, things weren't going great at the company. We were a newly public company. We had acquired our largest competitor. We were buckling under the weight of that integration and migration and disappointing everyone.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  So COVID was kind of our, like, do sex amakina moment. Like, I feel like we were, you know, it was in a a moment of. Just like discovering what we needed to do and almost stopping, you know, decline that was happening. And we'd lost the thread on who's our most successful creator on the platform? Because Eventbrite is sort of like the everything platform, right? And we couldn't find that signal. And we found the signal right before COVID hit, which was that frequent creators, those who are coming to Eventbrite regardless of their

• 16:39Speaker 01

  category, geo size, but they were using the platform at least one time a month, they were a small portion of creators producing a big portion of revenue. And our product absolutely sucked for them. So that was the opportunity that we had just uncovered when COVID hit. And so beyond structurally changing the company, raising money to ensure that we'd have a balance sheet at the end of however long the recovery would take, we just completely reset what we were going to be coming out of the crisis.

• 17:18Guy Raz?

  So obviously, that was important, right? Focusing on that segment of your customers. But what about just keeping the business afloat when there was nothing coming in?

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So virtual events started to rise, but the money wasn't coming in. So we were in a, we had to bring it all the way back to the basics. We have an aligned strategy around where we see the greatest opportunity and actually who we think is going to bring back the events economy in a hyper local way. Let's go build the best product experience for them. And so we did a ton of foundational work in 2020. We ripped out a bunch of old tech. We rewired, you know, how Eventbrite works because we had built it to serve an event, but naturally not to serve the creator. So if you had many events, the Eventbrite product experience just broke down.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  And then we built out a three-year strategy, which we published to our board at the end of 2020. And we said, the most important thing that we can do for what we call a super creator, which is a frequent creator hosting at least one event a month, is we can help them find their audience and we can help them grow their audience. And no one's doing this at a scale that we can do it at for these mid-market events. You know, there's a lot to be said about large ticketed events like Taylor Swift.

• 18:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  And, you know, our lives are chained together and linked together through the ways in which we just get together. But the middle of that, if you imagine that a pyramid with the very top, the big stadiums and arenas, and the very bottom, how you interact with your friends and what barbecues you attend. The middle of that's a big, fat, ticketed matrix of events that exist on Eventbrite.

• 19:06Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  And it was really hard to find signal for local events, especially during recovery. So we decided to build that for our customers. And that's what we focused our strategy on. And that really helped us gain focus and momentum and be a part of the recovery, not just stand by and watch it happen.

• 19:28Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, more on how Julia kept her company going during the pandemic and how Eventbrite is changing and evolving to the shifting events market today. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 19:50Guy Raz?

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• 22:02Guy Raz?

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• 25:35Guy Raz?

  Hey, everyone. You know, every time I run into a How I Built This fan, the first thing they want to do is tell me about their favorite episode, which is so awesome. So now I want to share your favorite episode with the millions of people who listen to this show. Episodes they might not have heard or might want to hear again. So here's what I want you to do. Grab your smartphone and record a short memo, short, like less than 30 seconds, and tell us your name, where you live, and which episode is your favorite and why you loved it. So for example, I might say, hey, it's Guy Raz here in San Francisco, and my favorite episode of the show is the one about Hamdi, Lakaya, and Chabani, because I learned so much about how to just push through when nothing seems to

• 26:20Guy Raz?

  be working out. And it gave me a whole new perspective on being resilient. So that's it. Something like that, you know? And by the way, that's not my favorite episode. I love them all equally. Anyway, once you're done with the recording, email or message it to us at [email protected] and we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks in future episodes. Thanks so much. You guys are the best.

• 26:54Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. She was on the show back in early 2020 when we told the whole story of Eventbrite. And if you missed that, scroll back and check out that episode. It's really, really cool. And anyway, going back to this conversation, with the lack of live events in the early days of lockdown, Julia and her team used the hiatus to try and figure out how Eventbrite could better support event creators. And then, they waited.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Everybody talks about the crisis, but it's like there were about nine different crises in two and a half years. The last moment that COVID impacted our business was Omicron in very late 21, early 22. And even then, it felt almost surreal, right? Since then, we've seen consumer demand for gathering just go through the roof. Like, people have to be together in real life in order to thrive, and that is indispensable. So while we saw one of the craziest black swan events that I think has happened to

• 28:09Speaker 01

  a company, we also knew that the intrinsic need to be together and the way in which you make indelible memories would eventually prevail. It was just about when. So virtual events went from 1% of the events on Eventbrite to 90% of the events on Eventbrite, to now 10%. So that's sort of the curve. And that happened over a pretty long period of time. But once, once people started to get back together, you really saw it fall off in terms of, you know, people don't really want to sit on a Zoom at an event.

• 28:43Guy Raz?

  No, they don't. I mean, obviously, you could look at, presumably, you look at your, your P and L, you look at your balance sheet, and you're like, okay, we need to do this, this, this, and that. And we know that we'll be okay for three years based on the cash we have and on the, you know, if we can grow our business, our virtual business, and we'll get some cash coming in. But was there ever a moment where you thought, we might not actually survive this thing?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Thankfully, no. So when we, and that all came back to the decisions we made in March. So when we halved the company, which was so extreme, no one was doing that. And when we raised more than we needed, and this is where being a public company was a virtue, because we could raise convertible debt, which, you know, we raised two rounds in very favorable interest rate environments. We, we've barely touched that money. I mean, that was not something that we took lightly. It's expensive capital, even if it was at attractive rates. And, you know, I still run the company as if I'm writing the check out of my own bank account.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  So, um, so it was important for us to maintain that fiduciary responsibility and that conservativeness. But we also needed to shift into high gear at some point, not just be on maintenance mode. So when we went out to raise this capital, we got laughed out of the room several times on our recovery assumptions. So we were showing a base case, and then if we recover quicker case, and then a like terrible, terrible case. What it showed me is that you should always prepare for the worst.

• 30:26Guy Raz?

  Totally.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just like, what's the downside?

• 30:28Guy Raz?

  Prepare for the worst every time.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Every time.

• 30:30Guy Raz?

  And hope for the best.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  But when you can't even imagine the worst, it's a very interesting position to be in because we couldn't have tabletop exercised the COVID pandemic. I mean, anybody who's claiming now they did, I think is lying.

• 30:44Guy Raz?

  You cannot, yeah, you can't simulate that scenario because you wouldn't have imagined it.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Right, right. So it gave us, it gave us a new lease on life. We had this vision and we knew where we needed to focus.

• 30:56Guy Raz?

  So essentially before, and Eventbrite was really just a platform where people would sell tickets and then you would get a cut. And you're saying now it's more focused on a marketplace. And what you mean by that, I think, is that you go to Eventbrite, it knows where you are, right? Geolocates, and then it suggests events that are in your area.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. So. Eventbrite is the, I would say like the Etsy for live experiences. I, you know, I don't love referring to other companies.

• 31:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Is it a new way you would describe it now versus three years ago?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  No, not in the way of, in the way of inventory, but in the way that we are thinking about how we can help make creators more successful. What we've stepped into now is Eventbrite is a place where you go to market your events through our marketing tools, where you go to advertise your events through promoted listings, and Eventbrite is a place where you go to discover great things to do. And that relationship with the consumer as the customer is the biggest shift. And I'd say the big challenge ahead of us is that, you know, we're a ubiquitous logo on a ticket. If you go to New York and you ask 10 people on the street, seven of them will say, yeah, I know Eventbrite. Either they'll say, I buy tickets to it for my, you

• 32:13Speaker 01

  know, um, my pursuit or interest. I, I buy tickets to it for a school event. Um, I go to shows on Eventbrite. Or they'll say, oh my God, of course I know Eventbrite. I mean, let me show you the events that I go to, you know, and it's, it's really like your playlist of memories. If you ask the same 10 people, where do you start when you don't know what to do on a Thursday night? Definitely not seven of them are going to say Eventbrite.

• 32:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah, right. So in other words, I remember like 20 years ago when I went out, right? And I've got children and like, I go to sleep at eight. Um, but, but, but when I didn't do those things, um, I would open up the Washington City paper, or if I was in New York, the Village Voice, and you would look to see what was playing, what was going on. And essentially what you're saying is you are pushing to be that, that thing, that people would just have that page up. Oh, let's go to Eventbrite and see what's going on this weekend.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  And that's a big tall order because I would posit that no one has solved local event discovery.

• 33:22Guy Raz?

  Nobody has. It, it, no one has solved that problem. I think about this all the time.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:27Guy Raz?

  Like I, yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  And Eventbrite is going to solve that problem.

• 33:32Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  And I would say hell hath no fury like a company that has a new lease on life.

• 33:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  And can see the problem that still persists. And we believe it's our right to win because we're already powering the events you're looking for, right? And we have the knowledge of what's going on. And Eventbrite has that ubiquity and it has that trust because we've built it over the last decade and a half. I mean, in Silicon Valley, being an older company is sort of like being an older person. You like, you know, there's a little bit of like ego ageism that happens. I actually think it's a great virtue. We know.

• 34:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  A lot about live events through the lens of the hardest thing to do, which is ticketing. It's hard to make money in ticketing and it's even harder to make a profit. And guess what? We've done both.

• 34:23Guy Raz?

  Yep. I think the Etsy analogy is actually quite apt because Etsy is a space for create, you know, all kinds of crafts people and creators. Also, there are people who, you know, mass producing, but it is a trusted space. You know, like every time I'm scrambling to find like something for somebody, I'll go to Etsy.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:42Guy Raz?

  The problem is then I go down a rabbit hole and then I spent like six hours, six hours later, I'm like, I've been on Etsy for six hours. So, um, but, but actually like you can imagine, right? That if you can position your site as a place for, hey, you know, I want to learn about photography. I wonder if someone's teaching a course or, or if there's like a maker fair this weekend, or if there's just, I'm looking here in San Francisco, there's a dumplings festival coming up on the, so there are lots of things, but how do you do that? Like, do you do bus ads? Do you do social media campaign? It's a marketing challenge, right? To get the awareness out. How do you do that?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  So we do it through what I would say is like the pull and push mechanisms. We start with our first principle, which is our job to put the right event in front of the right consumer, at the right time, wherever they are. We're not building a closed walled garden.

• 35:34Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  You know, people who are interested in building audience are quite sophisticated in what kind of audience they want to build.

• 35:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  So when you're thinking about professional event producers and organizers, they know more about what they want to be crafting than we do. Our job is to make it better, faster, and more effective for them to do that through Eventbrite than they could do on their own. And so what we focus on is, um, is we just rolled out in the back half of 2022, the ability to buy an Eventbrite ad. So now you can promote your event in our highest trafficked surfaces, which is our homepage, our newsletter, our app. You can actually effectively buy clicks to your event. The second thing we did was we actually acquired a company in Q4 of 2020, if you can believe it.

• 36:23Guy Raz?

  It was a, it was a marketing company, right?

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They were our partner, Town Den, and they hung in there with us during COVID. And so we came together at the end of 2020. And in five months, we integrated the team and rolled out marketing tools called, we call it Eventbrite Boost to our customers. But effectively, what these marketing tools do is they aggregate the consumer data points on Eventbrite around a certain type of event, um, or a geography. And they help the event producer build a smarter audience for their advertising. Then through our favorite generative AI, we auto generate ads for them that then they can deploy onto platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram,

• 37:10Speaker 01

  wherever they want to reach more people. And the reason why it's better than DIY is because you're getting like a five to six return on advertising when you do that, five to six X, because we're able to help you build the creative, but then also. We're the first party transaction platform. So we're actually transacting the ticket.

• 37:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  So the creator doesn't have to wait and try to read the tea leaves as to what's happening in order to get that signal.

• 37:36Guy Raz?

  So let's talk about your revenue streams. I mean, primarily it's a cut of ticket sales, but then also advertising or boosting an event. What other ways are you looking at to build other streams of revenue?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Well, so 95% of the revenue comes from ticketing fees.

• 37:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  And over 80% of the time, those ticketing fees are actually paid for by the consumer. And Eventbrite's ticketing fees on average are $3.

• 38:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah, they're low.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  So when we're talking, like when we're talking ticketing and this is not the same thing. So we've built this business on that. What we've done now is we've brought all of that, you know, advertising and marketing goodness to the front door, literally yesterday. So this is, this is new news that anyone who's using Eventbrite has access to all of that tooling and advertising, marketing tooling and advertising for a small per event fee. So we're effectively introducing a two-sided marketplace fee, but I'm talking about like $10 an event.

• 38:43Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  For an event that's selling over 25 tickets. So we think this is a great way to balance out what we've built to help event creators drive audience as well as continue to keep those ticketing fees as low as possible because that's what really matters is the consumer being able to buy a ticket without, you know, getting gouged.

• 39:03Guy Raz?

  Julia, like many, many tech companies, you've also had some layoffs this year. And, you know, when we spoke in 2020 that, you know, you're running a publicly traded company, it is not necessarily the metric, but is one of several metrics, which is the stock price. Stock price is considerably lower than about a half as much as it was when we spoke in 2020. How do you, how does that weigh on you? I mean, do you feel, obviously you feel responsibility to shareholders, but sometimes there's not much you can do about a stock price.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  You know, it's one of those things that they don't tell you when you, when you become the CEO or when you take a company public. They don't tell you both sides of the equation, which is mostly what I heard when we were taking Eventbrite public was, well, first of all, don't go public from currently public.

• 39:54Guy Raz?

  Don't go public.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, public CEOs. And I decided I would never be that person to pass on that advice. But secondly, don't pay attention to the stock price. Just run the business.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the other side of that is when your employees' stock options are underwater, that's a problem. Meaning it puts a lot of morale pressure on. And while I don't believe in doing anything unnatural to solve for that, because we are all in this together and in the long run, we're growing the business. I do think it's something that can become a distraction.

• 40:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  So the way that I've, the way that I've approached it is to make sure that everybody has a level playing field on information. So we share quite a lot at Eventbrite. And then to explain the different stages of the stock as it changes. Does it get me down? Yeah, of course it does. I'm human. I mean, this is, you know, this is a really easy indicator of success. And I don't feel like it shows, you know? Great, I don't feel like I'm, I'm A+. But do I know that in the end, any given day will be a very small blip on the radar of a very valuable company that's growing up into the right? Yeah, so you know, I can't, there's no great answer,

• 41:14Speaker 01

  but you have to stay grounded and you can't let the stock market or the current stock price dictate what you do.

• 41:23Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break. But when we come back, more from Julia on what it takes to be a good leader in really difficult times. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 41:53Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Here's more from my conversation with Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz.

• 42:02Guy Raz?

  I want to ask you about employees because I know when we had you on the show, like you had free food for employees and a fitness center and a wellness stipend. And maybe you might still have some of that, but I'm assuming like many companies here in the Bay Area, you are at the very least hybrid and maybe some people are entirely remote. Tell me how you how you manage just the workforce, the employees. Like coming out of COVID, it's a different time. Employees made different demands and had different expectations. And with a tight labor market, they had a lot of power for the first time in a long time. So how did you kind of adjust and manage to both retain employees,

• 42:46Guy Raz?

  but also to keep expenses down?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Well, first, I think, starting from a principle of it's not an us against them mentality. We are a company that puts at the very center of its differentiation as an employer, the idea that you can come here and be the be the whole person you are and that you're cared for. So there's that was just innate in our culture. This has been an interesting evolution.

• 43:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  And there has been no easy answers. And so I sat back and watched a lot of companies make a lot of proclamations during COVID.

• 43:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  And I kept scratching my head because I sort of thought like, how the hell do you know how this ends up? Like,

• 43:32Guy Raz?

  Like companies that said, we're remote forever.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, on either side of the spectrum, right?

• 43:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  I have, I couldn't look anyone in the eye and say, I have seen the crystal ball. And after the last global pandemic, here's how we.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Worked. I mean, I have no idea how you would do that. So I didn't. I really like stepped away from that and said, okay, what do we know for right now? And we are making shorter term plans and giving people clarity where you could pick your path. You know, there was a point where like you, we were going to be hybrid. And then where we've arrived today is today, we are resetting as a remote first company. We are the best gathering company in the world. And when I say that, I mean, you are gathering for a virtual meeting. It is going to be an intentional, productive, thoughtful, great use of your time.

• 44:29Guy Raz?

  How do you do that? Tell me how you do that. Because a lot of, a lot of CEOs are saying to me, what, what are, what are you doing? How do you do, what are people doing? And I'm getting a lot of different, different examples. So you're the best gathering place company. Let's touch, just talk about virtually. What does that mean?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that means taking a step back periodically about once a quarter, we take a week to scrub the calendar of our regular, regularly scheduled programming and reassess why we meet and what the intention is. It means making leaders the best conveners. Now, I believe that the skill set that a great leader needs at the, at the very top of the list is the ability to bring people together thoughtfully with great intention and productively.

• 45:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But how do you make a meeting? Let's just say any meeting, right? Because I hate meetings. And I think a lot of meetings are a waste of time. And I think a lot of times, meetings that I'm asked to go to, I shouldn't be at. They're too long and there's just too much stuff that half the people that don't even need to know. I mean, I'm not saying, how did you solve this problem? Because I don't think you have, nobody has. Like, if somebody has, they're going to go to Stockholm and get the Nobel Prize, or whatever, Oslo, wherever they give that prize. How do you, how are you trying to tackle that problem? How are you making your company a better place to, to convene gatherings for employees?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Well, there's a way that you can do this through expectation setting and through, you know, supporting those expectations. So particularly for the meetings that you hate to go to, we're starting with cultural norms of make the main thing, the main thing.

• 46:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Actually, got that from Josh Silverman. I'll give him a shout out on that.

• 46:16Guy Raz?

  From Etsy. Yep. Yep.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  And then I think it's, it's, there has to be a very strong strategic map as to when people meet, to solve what problem, predominantly for the in-person gatherings, because having people fly all over the country or the world and meeting up at offsites, it's exhilarating, but it's also very costly. It's time consuming and it's taxing. And so what we're working on right now for next year is how do we build a system wherein you can anticipate as a Brightling, when you'll see your team and you know exactly what you're going to be achieving together.

• 46:57Guy Raz?

  You know, I've, we've been a remote team, all my teams on all my different shows, be, be even before COVID, just because you can work that way in, in, in what I do. And we communicate regularly and I talk to everybody pretty much every day because I'm tracking a recording or, um, so we were using video interfaces for a long time. You know, I've talked to a lot of, a lot of leaders now who are like, you know, it's challenging because when you aren't in an office, especially for younger, newer employees, it's hard for them to find mentors. I mean, if you're, if you're a 22-year-old joining Eventbrite out of college today and everybody around you is pretty much remote, it's different than when you started, you know, in your career. Cause you know, you worked for, in,

• 47:39Guy Raz?

  in the TV industry, right? You were working on Jackass and MTV shows and stuff.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  A lot to learn there. A lot to pick up.

• 47:45Guy Raz?

  Right? And you found some people who thought you were smart and interesting and they helped you. It's much harder now. So do you have any, any thoughts about how you actually develop talent from within when we're, we're, we're all, many of us are in a primarily remote. Or hybrid environment?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think if you flip it and you look at it from a blank slate opportunity perspective, rather than a recapturing of what was and what worked for us when we were we little pups. I tend to find that great things happen when you work on a multitude of different projects. And the advice that I give my niece, who just accepted her offer at Microsoft, she's going into a remote team. And my biggest advice is take every single project that comes your way. Like, just absolutely knock yourself out. Because the more that you're participating and the more that you're working on different types of projects, that is a, that's actually an opportunity we didn't get early in our careers.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  I was, you know, I was like copying VHS tapes as an intern for MTV.

• 48:52Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  But then also, leaders have to care about bringing on younger talent and mentoring them. And there's ways that you can do that remotely, that you actually couldn't do that if they were in, you know, an office in Spain and you were in an office in San Francisco.

• 49:07Guy Raz?

  Julia, the advice I got when I started my career 25 years ago was be the first one in and the last one out, which is a version of what you told your niece, right? And, and take on all the assignments that come your way. And I don't give that advice today because I, I worry that, that it doesn't resonate quite as well with younger folks. And like when, when you and I were starting our career, you'd be told, hey, leave your attitude, leave your baggage, leave your personal life at the door. Sorry if you're having a bad day, you know, at home, but like this is work. Bring your A game to work. That was just normal, par for the course. And that was the environment that many, many senior executives today and senior leaders in companies grew up with. But now it's different.

• 49:52Guy Raz?

  Now it's bring your whole self to work, including your challenges, including the other things. How do you, how do you approach it? How do you accommodate for that?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think about it as you don't have to trade one off for the other. And I want to build a company where you can both be cared for and feel the demands of opportunity. So compassionate and demanding is the paradox that I focus on a lot. And I think that it's, it's, I guess I find it's a fallacy that working hard and being fulfilled with accomplishment is antithetical to wellness. And, you know, I think burnout is real. And I think the mental health challenges that we faced during the COVID pandemic present an opportunity for us, an opportunity to have honest conversations,

• 50:42Speaker 01

  an opportunity to embed support into companies, which I think should be the case, and an opportunity to open up access to mental health support like we haven't had, you know, in our lifetimes, really. But I don't think work is the enemy.

• 50:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Like, I think being productive and being in community is the antidote to social isolation and mental health challenges.

• 51:07Guy Raz?

  What about politics? I mean, companies are, and maybe it's tapering off a little bit now, but for a while, they were really expected to take public political positions. Either you're in this camp or in that camp. And, and it became very challenging for companies that, you know, if they were neutral, that essentially they were not. They were, you know, consorting with the enemy or whatever. And, and this can have a massive impact on your business. You know, if, if, you know, look at Bud Light, right? Bud Light made a decision and had a huge impact on its business for all kinds of things. It just didn't, weren't an issue for corporations and companies and public companies a while ago. What do you do?

• 51:49Guy Raz?

  I mean, if there's a big issue, if there's a big, you know, I don't know, you know, something that happens in the United States. What's your position? Do you, as a leader in a company publicly make your views known? Or do you just say nothing?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  It's, it's been a journey, that's for sure. And I feel like there was a moment in time where I was sending an email every other week on an issue that was completely out of my control. And it started to feel personally incredibly inauthentic. Because there has to be space for CEOs to be human and to be learning and growing alongside everyone else. And I reject the notion that a CEO should be, you know, know all, be all. Like, that's, that's really dangerous, right? That's not good.

• 52:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  So I stepped back from that practice and I really focused on how can we get back to what Eventbrite can do to be a great company? Eventbrite can advocate for social connection through live experiences. That's right in our wheelhouse. And we can be an active participant in helping to relieve the impacts of social isolation. We stand for freedom of assembly. And that's a really important thing for people to understand when they join the company. And there are things that people aren't going to agree with on the platform.

• 53:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Where do you draw the line? I mean, presumably, you know, you would, if somebody wanted to have a drag event or something, no problem. But, but I'm assuming if somebody wanted to have like a, you know, a neo-Nazi rally, not, obviously, these are not comparable at all, but I'm just, just throwing two examples out. That's, that would not be allowed.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  You draw the line very carefully.

• 53:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  And you keep yourself grounded in

• 53:49Speaker 01

  First principles, what's really important for us is that the decisions we're making, we're making well-informed, well-intentioned, and without subjective bias. And so that's a tall order, right?

• 54:04Guy Raz?

  It is. I mean, do you, do you, do you, I mean, how do you decide? Do you have a team or do you do case by case or what?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  We do have a team. We have a team. We have a set of policies and we have a very, very strong operation. Most of the time, we're not dealing with anonymous online behavior. And when people get together, so I don't want to give the sense that like, this is a big problem. It's really not. It's, it's something that we have to deal with from time to time, but it's also a place where I think as an organization, we continue to grow and be curious about what it means to stand for freedom of assembly. And, you know, there's been a number of different challenges. Like 30 years from now, when I look back on Eventbrite, I want Eventbrite to be known as one of the best companies to work at, where you could do your best work, where

• 54:53Speaker 01

  you had one of your best managers or best leaders, and where you made a best friend. And underpinning all of that is, I think, how our walking the walk at Eventbrite is that we do the right thing. Sometimes it's extraordinarily difficult to do the right thing.

• 55:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  But I think if your orientation is toward that, then that's where the gravitational pull is going to take you.

• 55:15Guy Raz?

  Yep. Told me in 2020, you said, five years from now, so that would be 2025, so we're not there yet, but we're approaching. You said, I want to have slowed down, start to live in a more thoughtful mode, to have jumped off the merry-go-round and be less transactional about life and be really thoughtful about how we build the best product for event creators. I think that you are, given what you told me over the last, you know, the course of this conversation, I think you're on that, on that path. Is that, do you feel like you're, you're on that path?

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I do. I mean, I think. Getting back to the basics is an incredible exercise in discipline and focus, but also in realizing what's most important. And myself personally, making that shift from somebody who was trying to make everyone happy to really focusing and making the main thing, the main thing, and bringing people along to that vision has meant the difference between me feeling transactional and me feeling more grounded and thoughtful. So while I'm always in pursuit of using time to its nth degree most effective, I also have felt like I've been able to slow down because we have

• 56:27Speaker 01

  a plan and we're executing on it. And I can enjoy a bit more, you know, the things that might come up in the future. We didn't talk much about it, but I mean, I don't know about you, but the energy here is palpable around all the ways in which we can build, you know, great companies using AI.

• 56:45Guy Raz?

  AI, yeah, sure. I'm going to these events all the time and watching this happen in real time. It's really cool.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  It's exciting. I think it's a, I think it's a moment of growth that we've seen before. So if you've been around long enough in the Bay Area, you've, you can recognize the signs. But I think, I think this time it feels a little bit different because I, I don't think we knew what was gone, what we had lost until it was gone. And I think communing and building together, that's the best antidote, I think, to putting COVID in the rearview mirror.

• 57:16Guy Raz?

  Julia Hartz. Thanks so much.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Thanks, Guy.

• 57:23Guy Raz?

  That's Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode. And as always, it is free. This episode was produced by Rommel Wood with music composed by Sam Paulson and Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Kerry Thompson. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Niba Grant, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Alex Chung, Elaine Coats, Chris Messini, and Carla Estvez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.