Julia Hartz: How to Build, Scale, and Exit a Billion-Dollar Startup From Scratch | Entrepreneurship | E398

A small town ballerina with no business background, Julia Hartz had no guarantee that Eventbrite would work. What began as a bootstrapped startup she co-founded became a 20-year journey full of challenges, including a crisis like no other: COVID, wiping out the events industry almost overnight. But each challenge sharpened her leadership skills, and Julia ultimately turned Eventbrite into the powerhouse it is today before exiting on her own terms. In this episode, Julia shares how these moments shaped her leadership and taught her how to build, scale, and evolve a meaningful business, even when it costs you everything. In this episode, Hala and Julia will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:08) Julia’s Empathy-Driven Founder Mindset (04:46) Launching a Startup Without a Business Background (14:14) Co-Founding Eventbrite: Spotting the Gap in 2006 (25:23) Leading Through Crisis and Change (35:18) The Return of Live Events (44:04) Building a Company Culture That Evolves (48:24) CEO Mindset and Underrated Leadership Skills (1:04:48) Balancing Family and Entrepreneurship (1:11:02) Leadership Advice in the AI Era Julia Hartz is the co-founder and former CEO of Eventbrite, one of the world's leading platforms for live events. She co-founded Eventbrite in 2006 with her husband Kevin Hartz and Renaud Visage, later becoming the sole CEO in 2016 and leading the company through its 2018 IPO. Eventbrite entered a new chapter in December 2025 when Bending Spoons announced a $500 million all-cash acquisition, which closed in March 2026, taking Eventbrite private. Sponsored By: Huel - Get over $50 in savings with the Discovery Bundle from Huel. Use my exclusive code YAP15 for 15% off at huel.com/yap15. Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Quo - Run your business communications the smart way. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting Fabric - Protect your family with term life insurance from Fabric by Gerber Life. Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com/profiting ZocDoc - Stop putting off those doctors’ appointments. Find and instantly book a doctor you love today at Zocdoc.com/PROFITING Blinkist - Turn the world’s best nonfiction books into quick 15-minute reads or listens. Grab your free trial plus an exclusive 30% discount at blinkist.com/profiting Remitly - Transfer money internationally with Remitly, with no hidden fees. Use code BUSINESS to get a $100 bonus after you send $300 or more. New customers only. Prolon - Reset and rejuvenate your body with Prolon’s five-day plant-based fasting mimicking program. Go to ProlonLife.com/PROFITING for 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program. Resources Mentioned: Julia’s Instagram: instagram.com/juliahartz Julia’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/juliahartz The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker: bit.ly/PP-TAOG Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Passive Income, Online Business, Solopreneur, Networking

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

• 0:00Hala Taha?

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• 0:45Hala Taha?

  See their website for important safety information. AG1 Next Gen supports your nutritional foundation with vitamins, minerals, pre- and probiotics, and superfoods. Go to drinkag1.com/profitting and get a free immune support bundle with your first subscription order. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngandprofiting.com/deals.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  We were processing more refunds than revenue. Our Tableau dashboards broke because our revenue was negative. 14 years in the making was actually completely gone in 14 days.

• 1:20Hala Taha?

  Wild.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Julia Hartz is co-founder and former CEO of Eventbrite. She helped turn a bootstrapped idea into a household brand through grit, vision, and relentless execution.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  I wasn't thinking that in my life I would be part of starting a company. Certain people come together, call it fate, the universe. Those people may have complementary skill sets such that they're able to create something magical. Changing the company was a non-negotiable. We couldn't actually keep going. I started with a core question, which was, given what we know about this business, what would we do if we could do it all over again?

• 2:01Hala Taha?

  You said entrepreneurship is like, it's kind of in your head. What did you mean by that?

• 2:04Speaker 01

  A lot of people feel ownership for a company, no matter what their title is. I realize that now more than ever. While it's incredibly valuable to have a founder running the company, you have to be leveling up every single day.

• 2:18Hala Taha?

  What is like your top three pieces of advice for entrepreneurs tuning in right now who want to build a company as big as Eventbrite is?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  I can't stress enough the importance of

• 2:32Hala Taha?

  yeah, fam, what does it take to build a company for 20 years? Take it public, watch it nearly disappear overnight, and still come out calling it the honor of your life? Few people can answer that question better than Julia Hartz, the co-founder and former CEO of Eventbrite, the world's largest and most trusted events marketplace. In this episode, we unpack how Julia built Eventbrite from scratch, led it through a crisis, and came out with a deeper understanding of what it really takes to build a company that can evolve beyond you. You'll hear the hard-earned lessons on leadership, culture, resilience, reinvention, and how to make tough decisions when everything is changing fast. If this is your first time here, welcome. And make sure you follow the show and come back every week for more conversations like this.

• 3:18Hala Taha?

  Julia, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

• 3:23Hala Taha?

  I'm so excited for you to be here. I have been a longtime user of Eventbrite, and what you've built is just so incredible. So I'm just so excited to pick your brain and learn from you. And my first question is really about your character and like how you see yourself. So you went from working at The Ugly Mug when you were 14 years old to then creating Eventbrite, which you exited, you built into a huge company, sold billions of tickets. What's the through line from the girl who worked at The Ugly Mug at 14 to the woman who is sitting here today?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I think the through line is hard work and an attention to what others need. And I'll tell you a quick story that was pretty impactful at the Ugly Mug. So the Ugly Mug was this craft coffee shop that opened in my hometown of Santa Cruz, California. It was sort of the first of its kind. This guy came to town with this really fancy Italian manual espresso machine and a collection of ugly mugs. And I was the opening shift on the weekend, so 5:00 AM on a Saturday was my gig. And there was a woman who would stand outside, wait for us to open. And she'd come in, she'd be the first to order her coffee.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  And no matter what I did to try to get her order right, she had a complaint and she was vicious. And I remember being so frustrated and downtrodden and coming home and talking to my mom and saying, I just can't make her happy. And my mom said, you know, maybe you should try to strike up a conversation. Maybe she's lonely and she's looking for someone to talk to. So I stole my parents' Sunday paper the next day and took it in and put it on the counter and waited for her. And then I picked some random story out of the Santa Cruz Sentinel and started to get her to talk. And from that point forward, she was a totally different customer. And I feel like that through line for me has always been about learning through, you know, my mom,

• 5:27Speaker 01

  how to use our empathetic skills to understand what people want. And then, and then kind of like a thread, you know, weaving that through everything that I do. And then just really working hard. And I think part of what makes me me is that I have been working since I was a teenager with almost no gaps.

• 5:45Hala Taha?

  I love that. And I can't wait to talk to you about building company culture because I know that's so important to you. And I know a lot of what you just talked about is probably ingrained in your strategy for building company culture. But before we get there, you've got four kids. You've called Eventbrite, your fifth child.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  My first born, yeah.

• 6:03Hala Taha?

  And I know that you just recently, you know, exited, stepped down as CEO, which must have been a huge deal. So what does Eventbrite mean to you?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Well, you know, Eventbrite is 20, and that's a huge age. It's an age that many people are flying out of the coop. And so I sort of feel like, you know, if I were to personify Eventbrite, I would say that I was one of three people that helped bring it to life. You know, when Kevin and Renaud and I got together to start Eventbrite, we really were coming at it from such different perspectives and different points in our lives. I had just come from Hollywood, where I'd been working in television development at FX and MTV. And I came to it with this notion of, you know, people getting together in real life around things that they're really, really passionate about have...

• 6:57Speaker 01

  It gives you an opportunity to create indelible memories. And I had been on a documentary show that we were piloting, where we went around to different fandoms in the country. And I'll never forget going to these meetups where I had no authority nor any clue what they were talking about or passionate about. But these were total strangers that were creating these unbelievable connections in real life. So I thought there was something behind that. Kevin came to it from a serial entrepreneur's perspective, where, you know, he had built a business in payments and microtransactions to help immigrants send money back to their families better, faster, cheaper than the incumbents. And so he was really excited about democratizing industry.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  And then our third co-founder Renaud, our CTO, really came to it from a place of turning passion into profit. He, during, you know, his off-hours is a prolific photographer. And he wanted to build a platform where people could share their skills and their passions, but also make money doing that. And so I think that for us, you know, it was definitely a classic startup story, where we were in a windowless phone closet in a warehouse with no money and just bootstrapping this idea. And I think we were really incredibly sure that we wanted to build something that brought people together in real life. Before, you know, we ever had to worry about not being together in real life. So we were pressing it.

• 8:27Hala Taha?

  That's so cool. There's so much to unpack there. I can't wait to hear about your like, you know, your first two years and like the struggles and challenges and how it grew from there. When it comes to your company and you as an entrepreneur, you actually say that you're not a lemonade stand kid. You didn't, you didn't start creating businesses. Your husband, who is your co-founder, Kevin, he was, you know, the serial entrepreneur. You were working in corporate and TV. And so how did you learn entrepreneurship? And what do you have to say to the folks out there? Because this is an entrepreneurship show about being able to learn the skill of being an entrepreneur?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I think that the first thing is that you don't have to be born an entrepreneur. You don't have to fit the mold. I certainly didn't. I grew up in a small town. I was a ballerina. I worked hard. But also, being a performer, you learn how to take feedback and make adjustments. But I, I, I wasn't thinking that in my life, I would be part of starting a company. And I just didn't know what I didn't know. I think we know so much more about entrepreneurship now, 20 years later. But I think that, you know, you don't have to have started a company in college to be a successful entrepreneur

• 9:44Speaker 01

  by any means. I think what happens is that certain people come together, call it fate, you know, the universe. And those people may have complementary skillsets such that they're able to create something magical. And for me, I'm really great at systems thinking, and I'm really great at, at understanding what people want. And when I met Kevin and saw, you know, lived vicariously through him, we, we met at a wedding and, and we're, we're dating. So, you know, I feel like it opened my eyes to the world of tech and

• 10:25Speaker 01

  the world of entrepreneurship. And that what drew me in was the velocity. And I'll never forget. That first day, you know, opening my laptop and thinking like, what now? And I'll never forget that moment. And then understanding the immediate allure of building something from scratch. And for me, it connected the dots for me as to why I didn't love school. Because I love to learn by doing.

• 10:54Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  And so getting my hands dirty and diving into something I didn't understand and figuring it all out on the fly for the last 20 years. It's not like I woke up a month ago and went, well, I've got it all figured out. I think that's the best part of being an entrepreneur.

• 11:10Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Is, is not ever knowing and constantly learning and iterating. And I mean, that's just, that's the best.

• 11:19Hala Taha?

  Yeah, it's so exciting. It's, it's so stimulating every day where you just are like learning something new, solving problems. So you started your career off in TV.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:32Hala Taha?

  And I'm always thinking about how skills that you gain in life, you always end up using the skills that you've acquired. And especially in today's world of AI and creator entrepreneurship being so popular, your unique skill set is just like so important. Like it makes it uniquely you. It's how you differentiate against AI, which can replicate a lot of tasks, but it can't replicate your lived experience.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:00Hala Taha?

  So you being in TV and being a part of like hit shows like Jackass, how did that shape your skills as an entrepreneur? The, the opportunities you were able to see before everybody else was able to see it? What were the ways that it kind of inspired you to start Eventbrite?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Well, I had, I think, a very lucky and fortunate career in television in the span of only, say, five years. So it was a very short span of time between the time that I graduated to the time that I started Eventbrite at 25.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  But I was also interning throughout my entire college time. And so, you know, roughly nine years in Hollywood, being able to see some of the absolute best content being made. My first internship was on the set of Friends. Then, you know, I did a few other internships to try to figure out what I wanted to do and just to learn and what I didn't want to do. And then I, and then I found MTV and I found this, this department. It was one of four series development departments at MTV. There were two on the West Coast and two on the East Coast. And I was an intern there when the Jackass team sent in their pilot.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  I think that what I learned in that experience was how you can have a, an idea that is so groundbreaking and potent and clear. I mean, these guys were sure of what they wanted to do. The best part of working on that show were the weekly legal OSHA standards and practices conference call that we would have where I was on the creative side, but the guys would be, you know, in their space on a conference call and they would have to describe in great detail what they wanted to do. And they would, this totally dates me, but they would fax over,

• 13:59Speaker 01

  you know, maybe four pages, single line spaced of all of these ideas they had. And then the experts would have to go around and debate how they would actually be able to do these things. And, you know, it wasn't lost on us that we were sort of killing the magic as it were, you know, as we, as we were trying to recreate their ideas in a way that actually worked on, on cable. But, but that definitiveness of what they wanted to do was what I learned, like never get in the way of a creative idea and always find ways to enable that. And then at FX, I again happened to just be in the right place at the right time when John Landgraf

• 14:37Speaker 01

  was just taking over. And I think that era of television is unparalleled. And I, you know, it's a long time ago, but I remember these meetings where I'd be almost a fly on the walls, the, as the most junior person in the room, listening to the creative depth of this team and what they eventually brought to air was such high quality. And, you know, that doesn't just happen. And I think we're creating content at an unprecedented rate and volume today. But when you really think about the things that are category defining, those tend to be things that have been getting worked out and worked on for many, many years.

• 15:22Hala Taha?

  Yeah, totally. I totally agree with that. So I know that you started Eventbrite in 2006 or so.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:29Hala Taha?

  What was the world like back then? And what gap did you see that you wanted to fill?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so I always feel really old when I describe this because it's hard to believe, but there was really no self-service option to sell tickets to events. You had RSVP tools like Evite and you had large, you know, dinosaur incumbent solutions that were super expensive and practically on-prem. Uh, so we were the first open platform for anyone. And some of the principles that we started with, I think, really defined what Eventbrite has become, which is we wanted Eventbrite to be as easy to use as Gmail.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  So we would test our every feature on Kevin's father. And he was like our biggest tester. Uh, we would, we wanted Eventbrite to be completely self-service. And that's hard to do with a payments transaction platform. And we move billions of dollars in microtransactions. The average ticket price is less than $50 on Eventbrite, and we're doing multiple billions of dollars a year. But we didn't want to make it so hard to sign up that, you know, you'd have this barrier. We wanted to lower all the barriers. And so we created a platform that on the backend could do a lot of the heavy lifting

• 16:59Speaker 01

  and fraud detection, but also on the front end, it could be super simple. You just needed to set up your account and start selling tickets. Then we also wanted to be horizontal. We did not want to specialize in any single vertical of event and we, type of event. And we also didn't want to just be in the US or in, you know, a few different, uh, different countries. We, uh, launched on the PayPal API. So that allowed us to be in like 180 countries from the beginning. And the final thing that, that, you know, that we did, I would say that was against the grain of, of common wisdom was we just undercut anyone else that was doing ticketing

• 17:38Speaker 01

  price wise. And we made free tickets free. So we only charged creators on the paid tickets that they were selling. And those decisions in the early days, well, sort of like somewhat inconsequential because we were such a small company and we bootstrapped the company. So we sort of were just like, ah, what happens if you put a zero in the ticket price box? There's no fee. Okay. Let's just do that. It'll like really annoy our competitors.

• 18:07Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  That ended up being such a huge part of the growth model of Eventbrite. So I think the, I think the moral of the story is like, wherever you're starting, now, now in five years, it'll feel like 20 years ago, but you'll look back and go, oh my gosh, that was so provincial. But also the decisions you're making now, if they're, if they're strong and principled, they will be the backbone of your company and of your culture, really. And so we were kind of the only game in town and we started to really see growth and traction in bloggers and tech bloggers in particular, who were using Eventbrite for paid meetups.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  And then I'll never forget the day we'd built this, this really kind of, you know, primitive map to show where the tickets were being sold on Eventbrite. It was a digital map, but it would, it would, it was on a screen in our tiny little office and it would show the logo of the event and, and where the ticket purchase was being made from. And I'll never forget when New York started to light up. And that was the first time that we were sort of getting out of the Bay Area in our little bubble. And it was for speed dating events.

• 19:20Hala Taha?

  Oh.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  And I remember thinking like, oh, wow, that's a totally different genre than tech meetups. There's probably a joke in there somewhere. But like, wow. And, you know, we were sort of off to the races at that point. So we, we bootstrapped until, and we had, we had friends Family support, but we bootstrapped until we really had product market fit. And then, and then we raised at that point.

• 19:45Hala Taha?

  There's so many lessons for entrepreneurs in what you just said. So you tried to make it super user friendly, as easy as Gmail. You had your husband's father testing it to make sure that even like an older person who wasn't tech savvy would be able to buy tickets on your platform. You had this guiding principle to democratize events. And so that's why you decided on the zero fee also, right? So it was that like core value that actually helped really spread Eventbrite by word of mouth. Like I remember hearing about it, probably like 2010, I was having events on Eventbrite. I had a little blog and I was using it and like everybody knew about it. And it was like this cool platform, like you said, that it was just like free.

• 20:30Hala Taha?

  So there was no barriers. It was easy to just get hooked on it. And then you became like the household name of community event ticketing. And it was because you put it community first, not monetization first. So talk to us about the importance of finding product market fit. And how, and when you decided like, okay, we, this is really sticking and working. And then also like some of the thought behind like how to keep lowering those barriers to entries so that more people use it and spread it.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  You know, I think, I think there's, there's a lot of virtue in, in if you can, you know, being capital efficient. I think we're entering a period of time where that actually will be put to the test in a major way. Because while we're gaining massive efficiency and scale in creating new ideas, the cost to do it is so high, right? With GPU. And that will come down over time, but the compute is really a barrier. We didn't have a lot of barrier. The only barrier we had was could we put food on our table? And thankfully we figured out how to, you know, make do.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  But it allowed us to not be.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Kind of distracted by maybe other people's agendas. And, you know, and then when we did raise our first round of institutional funding, it was from Sequoia Capital. Rollout Boat, though, was our earliest investor and board member for 14 years. And, you know, we were really sure of the people we chose to be on this journey with us, on the board, investing in the company, that they were value-add and not valued, you know, extracting in terms of their agendas or their ideas. And that's totally possible. I mean, I think that, you know, oftentimes you hear the kind of age-old story of a board not being fully aligned behind the entrepreneur and they all have their own agendas.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  And especially if things go well, it's like, you know, everybody's got an agenda. And I just think, I don't think that has to be the case. I think if you really are thoughtful about the people that you, that you bring into the fold and put, ask to put on your team's jersey, like, you can, you can really, really get far and stay true to your principles. But I think that, that, you know, the way that we built Eventbrite was this kind of perfect blend of, of who we were as founders. And I'm really proud of that because I think, you know, right around 2010, we were ready to go from a team, like a two-pizza team, to a, you know, full-fledged company.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  And I remember the 2006 vintage companies had all gone through, either they hadn't made it, or they'd all gone through hyper-growth challenges. And I remember thinking, wow, this seems inevitable that we're going to lose our culture. Something's going to go wrong. We're going to scale too quickly and the wheels are going to kind of come off the bus. And I remember thinking, well, I feel for this company as I feel for my own human child. We had a two-year-old at that point. And I thought, there is this like unconditional love that I have. So I think what I'm going to do is die trying to make a great company alongside a successful business. And I think that commitment was really supported by Kevin and Renaud.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  And I think it it made a huge difference and helped Eventbrite become what it is today. And and, you know, obviously, it tickles me pink to hear you say it's a household name.

• 24:08Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  But I think it's like, that didn't come easily. And it didn't come from a way of we were sitting around going, how do we scale? It was like, very human.

• 24:18Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so let's dig deep on the company culture part because you've won like so many awards of having such a great company to work at. Talk to us about leading up to COVID. What your company culture was like, what were some of the values that you were instilling? I know that you weren't the CEO, I believe, at that point, or right before COVID, you became CEO.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:40Hala Taha?

  So and you were really leading the culture and the people. So talk to us about what were your strategy with that?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, a few things. I mean, you know, we so Kevin was CEO for the first 10 years and then I was CEO for the second 10 years. I'm really proud of the fact that we're still married. That's not an easy feat. And we we loved working together the first 10 years. It was phenomenal because we, again, are really complementary in our skill sets. So we just divided and conquered.

• 25:08Hala Taha?

  He was like product and you were more people.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was marketing and customer service. He was product. And then as we scaled, I became more, I guess, culture and I don't know. My title was incredibly nebulous. It was president, which I was sort of confused by. But I would have been intern if I could, if I could have done that. First, when I took over, it was like about 1,000 times harder than I expected. You know, he had made it look so easy. And I, to this day, am not over the fact that, you know, he just didn't didn't really tip his hand on to how.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  How challenging it is to be a CEO and how mental it is. Like the most, the biggest challenge is yourself in your own head. He did it with such ease. And then the second thing was, you know, thought of our culture as sort of like building Legos. You know, it's, it's, you're like laying, if you lay the right foundation, you can build a lot of different things on top of it. But sometimes you like build a tower that's way too high and like falls over. And it's really about sort of the, the other supporting Lego structures that you can actually have a culture that's sustainable, uh, but also can go through hard times. And so, right when I took over as CEO, when I stepped in in 2016, it was like the good

• 26:30Speaker 01

  times were ruling. We were, you know, a private company, eyeing an IPO, about to, um, acquire our largest competitor in music. Somebody had written an article about our company that said we were like the Disneyland of startups when you walked into our office. Like everything, I just, I definitely understand the art of energy and gathering and, you know, and man, like, the minute I maybe perhaps felt like, I don't think I ever felt like we had it made. I think I'm always healthily paranoid, but I mean, that was like a very fleeting moment. Because we acquired this big competitor that was like oil and water culture wise.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  I was completely naive and thinking that, you know, oh, we can just come together, it'll be kumbaya. Um, not, that was not the case. It was incredibly difficult. And then we prepared to go public. We went public and then we were like a new public company stumbling in the public markets, you know, trying to do a lot of things. And I kind of, I, I came into, came into 2019 and then transitioning into 2020, feeling like we were spinning five plates with the right hand and like patting our stomachs with the left and it was just, and like standing on one leg. And it was a lot and we needed to simplify and we needed to focus. And so, 2020 was our focus year.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  It was just like, we know what we need to do. We know how to get there. Let's stop doing all this other really cool, bright shiny object stuff because we've really got to get back to basics. And then March 4th of 2020 happened and

• 28:15Hala Taha?

  No more events.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  It was just, yeah. So it felt like, you know, I think what people like maybe don't know is like, we weren't in great shape going into COVID. We were like going, we had gone through a really tough year.

• 28:29Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  And we, but we were, we were stronger and leaner and fitter, so to, so to speak, going into 2020, which actually helped us tremendously when we had to completely reset and reimagine the company.

• 28:41Hala Taha?

  What was going through your mind and what were some of the things that were happening once events stopped? And what did that mean for how you had to like think about your company, restructure your company, rethink company culture? And also I know that you got a lot of scrutiny

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:57Hala Taha?

  online for, for the layoffs and things. So, so talk to us about that.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, certainly I, I have a lot of empathy for people who live in the future, whose job it is to be futurists, especially when people are unwilling to believe them. Because that's only happened to me once. And, you know, we had the benefit of

• 29:28Speaker 01

  having, we, having been close to the head of the infectious disease department at UCSF, Joe Dorisi, who's a phenomenal scientist and public health expert.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Having people around us who maybe are on the slightly more paranoid side, weren't sure exactly what was going to happen, but knew how we needed to handle it, if it were the worst that we could possibly imagine. And it was the worst that we could possibly imagine. And I have to say Kevin was there for me the whole time. He dropped everything he was working on. And he has a sense of urgency and decisiveness that is second to none. So.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  What I was thinking was this is going to be really bad and we need to move very quickly for a number of different reasons, but not least of which to be able to help our creators rebuild their businesses.

• 30:27Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Now, there was a moment of time about two months where our customers did not understand what we saw. And that was really hard because we had to make changes pretty immediately to help them save their businesses. And they didn't even, it's not that they didn't have the intelligence, but they just didn't have the information that we had. There was like asymmetrical information and willingness to believe.

• 30:56Hala Taha?

  Like they didn't, they thought events were going to continue or this was temporary or something like that?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Everybody thought that, right? And, and it's not that we had like, you know, security level information. We just were listening to the worst case scenario and had wise people around us telling us there's no like downside to believing the worst case scenario, especially when you're facing something that could be so, so crushing. And the whole basis of our business went away. Like 14 years in the making was actually completely gone in 14 days.

• 31:33Hala Taha?

  Wild.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  We were processing more refunds than revenue. Our Tableau dashboards broke because our revenue was negative and they didn't, we hadn't accounted for that in the configuration. And again, we had to be the bearer of bad news in such a critical time when everyone was so scared and confused anyways, like never underestimate the human's ability to be optimistic, you know, and cling to hope.

• 32:01Hala Taha?

  Especially entrepreneurs.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had to kind of be like, no, it's, this is going to be bad. You need to not pay your vendors or your venue right now. You need to think about how you're going to refund your fans. You know, changing the company was a non-negotiable. We couldn't, we couldn't actually keep going.

• 32:20Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  The way that we were and. I wanted our actions as it came to company to be really intentional and thoughtful. And I wanted us, I knew that we would have to change the size of the company during a really scary time. And so I started with a core question, which was, given what we know about this business, what would we do if we could do it all over again? And I asked my team that. And the executive team at the time was a mix of tenured people who'd been there from the beginning, who had just arrived, who had perspective from different companies. And we wrote down a one pager that basically described what we would do if we could do it all over again. And the punchline

• 33:04Speaker 01

  was, we get to do it all over again if we make the right decisions here. So let's go do this. And we built the company to that model. And, you know, a lot of it was getting back to the basics. A lot of it was getting back to the core principles of the company. This is a tale as old as time. You scale, you let ambition take you into new areas, you get more complicated, you start, you know, bolting things on. We had a lot of cleanup to do. And so that's what we really focused on. But first, we had to throw away our product roadmap and just help our customers and help our creators figure out a pathway forward, which included online events,

• 33:44Speaker 01

  which included, you know, offering credits to their customers alongside refunds, which included how do you create community branding and togetherness in a time when everybody has to be a part. And that really took us through, you know, much of 2020.

• 34:00Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And, you know, COVID lasted a pretty long time. I remember, really, I started my business in 2020. It's really funny to think how 2020 was so detrimental to some businesses, but then gave so much opportunity to other businesses. Like for me,

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:16Hala Taha?

  I had my podcast for a couple of years and then I started my, I quit my job and started my social media podcast agency at a time where everybody wanted social and podcasts. So it was like, million dollars, like, right away in revenue, like, before we even hit a year with my agency. Like, it just took off. And I was doing a ton of online events at that time, like Clubhouse was really popular. And just like all these sort of like webinar type events. And I'm sure Eventbrite was supporting creators doing that. But now, fast forward, 2026, everyone is like clamoring for these like, In-person events and it's becoming more of a trend than ever.

• 34:57Hala Taha?

  Even though there's so much opportunity online for creator entrepreneurs and making money online. There's also a lot of opportunity right now for live events. And I'd love to learn from you, what are some of the trends that you're seeing in the live event space? And why is it something that people who have a lot of followers, creator entrepreneurs, uh, something that they should really think about?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I, I would start from like kind of a heady place, which is, you know, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You have the physiological needs, so food, water, um, air. You have a need for security and shelter. And right above that, you have a need for connectedness.

• 35:35Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  And the reason why I bring that up is not because it looks good on a, on a, you know, strategy deck. It's really because in the span of 20 years, we have seen several technological advances and revolutions and pivot points that, you know, for all intents and purposes, could have driven us farther away from being together in real life. And through all of those, whether it's social media, mobile phones and how much content, you know, we're, we're watching and, and, and scrolling through virtual reality, global pandemic, now AI.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  It's all of these things have been enablers of bringing us together and also have driven up the premium value of live experiences. People want to, or are can now find their people and find their niche online. It's incredibly accessible to find your people now. But it drives this desire to want to then meet them in the flesh. And it, I think there's a combination of a few things going on. One is the old adage of you don't know what you got till it's gone.

• 36:54Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  And I would say for rich countries, the taking away of liberties and being able to be together momentarily.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Or that stress that got put into the system of being together made people realize how important it is to be in in real life. And I also think, you know, I think about the story that happened on Eventbrite, which was an incredible creator, Rada Agrawal, started a company called Daybreaker. Prior to COVID, they were doing early morning raves, where, you know, total like epic events where it's like 5:00 AM and it's sunset on the or sunrise.

• 37:36Hala Taha?

  Coffee and stuff.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, like coffee, kombucha, but just like total parties. And they were doing like a thousand people in multiple cities. COVID hits and they set up a studio, kind of like this, you know, in New York, just like total nightmare. And they start live streaming these Sunday morning dance parties. And within a few months, this had grown to a global party of over 100,000 people a week.

• 38:09Hala Taha?

  Wow.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Of all ages. You know, people who just wanted to feel that connection and that magic and were like stuck at home with their kids. And it became this ritual and they became a totally different company out of COVID. So to your point, they built a multimedia platform and their business became massive. And I think that that that idea of, you know, accessibility and bringing these otherwise pretty exclusive events, you had to live in like a cool city and kind of be in the know, to the masses, opened an opportunity and opened people's eyes to what could what could happen in the future.

• 38:45Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  And now I think, you know, we have this almost like renaissance coming out of this pandemic. We've seen this before. So big, big massive pandemic. And then this renaissance period of creativity and connection that I think is going to breed a whole new generation of live experiences that kind of cross the transom of, you know, I'm a passive participant to I'm in the middle of this storyline.

• 39:12Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 01

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

• 39:20Hala Taha?

  Yeah. So for somebody who's really interested, like you mentioned, there's this huge opportunity in creating experiences. And actually, not just like talking to people at an event, actually bringing them in. So they're like actually participating. What are some of the coolest events that you've seen or opportunities for entrepreneurs? When it comes to throwing these, these new types of experiences?

• 39:41Speaker 01

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

• 40:10Hala Taha?

  I gotta interview her. She sounds interesting.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  She's incredible. And she talks about generous authority of hosting and just the job of a host and how important that is. And I think so often we get to about 10 or 20% of what that, that role actually is. And I think the coolest events that I have found, uh, on the platform and otherwise, have been experiences where the host, the creator is thinking from beginning to end about the experience of the guest or the fan or the participant. And drawing them in in a way that is going to take them through the arc of a story or them through the arc of learning or them through the, the, you know, magic of connection.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  And they have that idea in their head through the eyes of their customer from beginning, especially to end. And I love, I love Priya so much because she, she like kind of harps on this thing that I'm not great at, which is a great ending. Like I know how to begin a talk, a speech, an event, a party, a dinner. I know exactly how I want to give that opening toast or connection. And I'm terrible. How do you tie it in a bow? Like, how do you create that magical end that everybody? Cause that's the last thing that people remember.

• 41:25Hala Taha?

  They remember. Yeah.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  You know? So, I mean, there have been these, I mean, the best part about Eventbrite is that because we didn't predetermine.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  What kind of event should use Eventbrite? Every single day, we were seeing incredible concepts and formats that we'd never even thought of. And in that way, we were able, we are able to be sort of micro trend forecasters of what's, of what's coming up. And I think, you know, recently, I think book talk has like given way to just these incredibly immersive events around genres like romanticy, you know, and like, how you create these like fully immersive experiences around one book series that just sort of grows and lives on and on and on. And it's not your typical book talk. You know, it's not going to,

• 42:19Speaker 01

  I love a good book talk, so, you know, in a local bookshop. But it's like more so actually bringing people into the full 360 view of an author's mind around a story that they created and how the fans of that can become a part in the story. And it's just like that, I mean, not to be cheesy, but that is a tale as old as time. That is something that people really want.

• 42:45Hala Taha?

  Something that you just touched on was that Eventbrite's product was able to sort of evolve.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:51Hala Taha?

  With, with, you know, COVID and going back to events and just like, now it's like, you know, so many things have changed over the last 20 years. Like it's, it's night and day. But you also have said that company culture has to be able to evolve.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:05Hala Taha?

  And you can't like have the same company culture as day one, as year 20. So I'd love to learn from you, you know, how you think about company culture, what kind of values you had in the beginning and like how it had to change over time.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  When I think about the Eventbrite product and why it worked and why it became ubiquitous with live experiences, I think a lot of it was that we built it to melt into the background. We wanted our creators and their events and the people who gathered around that passion to be front and center. So all of our marketing, all of our storytelling was really around that. We started to become and evolve naturally from just a platform and like a utility into a marketplace. When we realized that we could start to help creators find bigger audiences and when we realized that people were coming to Eventbrite to find things to do because they realized that we had really niche content that they couldn't find on other platforms.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  So that evolution of a marketplace was really going on in parallel to the evolution of the Eventbrite culture. And I'll never forget when I, when I took on the sort of self-anointed role of, of, of like coming to the table of every major business decision, putting Brightlings, which is our cute little name, uh, first, like their needs first, then I realized like great cultures are often just a manifestation of the people at the company at any given time. And because of that, cultures change. You know, they

• 44:41Speaker 01

  change through time because people come and go. I mean, being a founder and being a CEO, you have to be okay with people leaving you all the time. Sometimes they come back. And that was my favorite was a Brightling boomerang. But I, I thought like, you know, it's not about preserving a culture. We're not like a bug stuck in amber. You know, it's about creating something that's more like an amoeba that like can, can travel through time and space, but sustain itself and grow stronger over time. And one of the things that I thought was interesting is just that we, we measure certain parts

• 45:21Speaker 01

  of a culture to get some sort of finite metric about how we're doing. You know, most companies have something like a culture ramp that sends out surveys to their, to their employees and you get these scores and you scrutinize the scores and you know, you could cut the data a million different ways. Frankly, I always thought that was like a waste of time because A, I don't think we were asking the right questions and B, I think those, you know, it's, it's sort of like a snapshot. I was never afraid of getting bad scores on that because if something was hard was going on at the company, I

• 46:02Speaker 01

  would have expected the scores to be lower, you know? And I was also really like mindful of the fact that you can't ever have the happiest culture. That's not possible. What I was striving to do was create the most sustainable culture in that our principles would sustain themselves. We could trust each other. And that, you know, through hard times and good times, there would be connection. And I think the, the, the most common thing that was said about Eventbrite in the employee experience was that people care for one another. And that, that really matters, I think, a lot.

• 46:35Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  And I have been forever in pursuit of creating a successful business where people really cared for one another and where you had, where you just, you had like three things. Best place to work, best manager, and best friend. Those were really important to me.

• 46:56Hala Taha?

  Yeah, that's so cute. So I want to focus more about your like entrepreneurship journey personally.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:04Hala Taha?

  Something that you said early, very early on in the conversation is that like entrepreneurship is like, it's kind of in your head. What did you mean by that?

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Well, I think being a CEO is a mind game first and foremost, because a lot of people feel ownership for a company, no matter what their title is. And I realize that now, now more than ever. Having the CEO title is this construct. And I actually, it's an interesting construct because I'm starting to wonder if it will be the, be like the title that we use in the future. But being the like, single point leader of any organization just creates this sort of like headiness.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  And I do think, I definitely think there are people who are trying to like fly on the org and, you know, get away from being, but like ultimately, there's always going to be that leader. And I never took for granted the idea that because I was on the founding team, I would be a good CEO. I think that's actually a huge misnomer. And I think it's, it's why some companies fail. Because the people who were there at the beginning, who were, you know, brave enough to start the company aren't, are definitely not often the right people to run the company.

• 48:27Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  And while it's incredibly valuable to have a founder running the company.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  You have to be leveling up every single day. I mean, literally every, sometimes multiple times a day to be the person that's most deserving of that title.

• 48:44Hala Taha?

  What kind of skills were you like, okay, like Kevin was doing this, this and that. I've got to figure, like, was it like the financials or like, what kind of skills were you thinking? Like, I've got to nail this down in order to be the best CEO that's going to take this company public.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  I wasted so much time asking myself, what would Kevin do? I mean, he was right there, but I worried that I was not doing it anywhere as good as he was. And I really wish I could have all that time back. Because I just did it different, you know? And that's not better or worse. I think in some instances it was worse and in some instances it was better. Certainly, you know, table stakes are strategy, financials, ability to communicate a compelling vision. I mean, that was, that was like, you know, well, I think what everybody needs to have. I think some of the things that I learned later, after COVID made me, leading through COVID made me stop asking myself what somebody else would do and start

• 49:42Speaker 01

  really getting behind what I knew we needed to do. I had a lot more conviction after that crisis. And COVID wasn't the first crisis. I mean, we had a, a just kind of this like rolling wave of crises after COVID.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  I think some of the skills that are underrated and underpracticed is listening and seeking to understand. Often, as a leader, you want to, you, you are kind of asked implicitly and explicitly to know everything.

• 50:20Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  And to always have the right answer. And that is completely.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  A garbage idea. Like, if one person had all the right answers, this would be a really boring life. You know, the whole point of working on something together is to get the best ideas, to distill an amalgamation of the best ideas, to get diverse thinkers and people around a table, problem solving toward a better outcome. And so I felt at first that I had to have all the right answers. And when I became more confident, I was able to ask to A, say, I don't have all the answers, and I want to learn from different perspectives. And it wasn't that I wanted to be told what to do,

• 51:11Speaker 01

  but I actually wanted to take everybody's perspective, synthesize it, and make the call. Yeah. Right? And that's incredibly rewarding. But I think often what happens is we either just make believe that we have the right answer, and we make a call, or we have recency bias and we do what the last best idea was given to us. Right? We listen to the last person and go, okay, I'm going to do that. Yeah. Or, you know, we just seek to listen for bias of confirmation that we're right. And so I think beginning to a place where you can say every day, the right answer might not live in my head. It might live somewhere else. I'm going to go find it by, by being, by practicing appreciative inquiry.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  I think that's like the next level, and that is an evolved part of being an evolved leader. And then another part of it is, you know, being able to be corrected and change your mind and be okay with that and let, like, let people in on that without it becoming this sort of, you know, destabilizing moment. Yeah. And I think the things that I wish I would have done better, I wish I would have taken more risks. I definitely think coming through COVID was such a harrowing journey and, and, you know, definitely took us holding hands and making a couple really hard moves and leaps that after that I became a little bit more protective of the company.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  And I feel like I could have taken more risks. And

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Another thing I could have done is been a bit tougher. And I don't know if other people would agree with me on that. But I feel like I have always been really in tune with what people are going through and what they're feeling. And that empathy can be ruinous sometimes because I can get really kind of, I can revert to the mean of what I think a group of people are capable of. And that's often undershooting the goal.

• 53:15Hala Taha?

  So like you were putting the people first, not the company first?

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:18Hala Taha?

  Yeah. I do that sometimes too, because it's like you just care so much about the people. But ultimately, the company should be the first priority. But there's probably some benefit in doing that as well, because there's loyalty involved.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Well, I think I learned this incredible lesson in the last hour of leading Eventbrite, so to speak, which was the last two years or so, I had been really sure of where I, where we needed to be. And I had been almost like this white knuckle grip on the reins. And when we announced that we were selling the company, I really had this moment. I didn't know what I was doing because I had never done that before. So I was totally in new territory. And I got this sense that everybody was just like immediately disconnected and detached. I remember like going on to a Zoom and it was like dead face everywhere.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  And I'm like, uh oh, you know, how are we going to operate over the next few months as we move to, you know, we need to go as a public company. You have to go through regulatory compliance and approval. And so I thought like, oh gosh, I got really, really, really low for like a night.

• 54:36Hala Taha?

  So like your team was upset because they're like, what does this mean for my job?

• 54:40Speaker 01

  They weren't upset. I mean, my, my team is, are consummate professionals and they had, you know, known that we were going to be going private and I, and they were really amazing. But I could just tell they were sort of, they needed a beat a little bit longer than I needed. And I was ready to get back to work and kind of like plow through this period of uncertainty. And I remember just feeling really down and dejected, like, oh no, this is going to be a terrible few months. Like, what have I done? And so I came back to them the next day. And I was like, you know, I think this is how we should operate over the next few months. Do the right thing for the customer, always.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Do the right thing for each other, always. Take care of one another and have fun. And kind of like YOLO, like we're not going to be together for that much longer because we knew the structure of the deal and what would happen post-close. Oh, my God, like from that point forward, I released the white knuckle grip. And as it were, I think somebody said, you know, it's like having a good hair day before you go to get a haircut. Every day, something was going better than it was before, up and to the right. And it wasn't, it wasn't, at first I thought like, oh, it's just people feeling kind of bittersweet about this and adjusting to it. No, it definitively giving people those like, pretty loose, you know?

• 56:07Hala Taha?

  Yeah, the handcuffs were off.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Hardrails and being like, just go do your best. It was like actually better for the company. And that was my, my last lesson. That's a pretty big one.

• 56:18Hala Taha?

  So 20 years of lessons.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:21Hala Taha?

  You ended up exiting the company.

• 56:25Hala Taha?

  I'd love to understand what it feels like because for me, like I've been running my company for like six, seven years and it's so ingrained in like who I am, so attached to my identity. You founded your company as well. What does it feel like to exit a company? Like, did you have any grief?

• 56:47Hala Taha?

  Or is it more like, or do you feel like relief? Like, what do you feel?

• 56:51Speaker 01

  It's hard to tell. I mean, I, I can only equate it to being postpartum in terms of any other like life experience that feels familiar where.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  There's like a world of possibility in this new shiny thing of the future that you, you know, that you're excited about, but you also don't know what which end is up. And you're like totally confused about how time moves. I feel like, you know, for 20 years, I've had this singular focus. I really am not the type of person to have many different types of pursuits. I was like the monorail, you know, in our family. It was like Eventbrite and my family and my friends.

• 57:36Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I definitely think that there's grief. I I pre-grieved, which was like probably my way of of, you know, handling this. And I'm sure I'm sure I need to go through this kind of hard moment of not immediately jumping into the next thing. And that was, you know, that was something that I knew in my gut and had been told about, I don't know, a million times from people once the news was public, like, don't jump into something right away. And just taking the time to reflect. And then, you know, I think I I really just want to help people.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  And I know that I want to personally go back and learn from square one. Like, that's so important to me. And so, you know, I don't know exactly what that is, but I'm being being very, very intentional about how I build the next 20 years.

• 58:39Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Which is kind of cool, sort of like these, you know, these eras.

• 58:42Hala Taha?

  Yeah, it's like a new chapter that you get to figure it out and with so much more freedom.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I never felt like I didn't have freedom is the thing. Like, I always felt like, how lucky am I to work on the thing that I feel most passionate about, that I was able to help build? That I was I was there when it was born and I was there when it flew the coop? And how lucky am I? I never, ever felt burdened.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Or obstructed or held back from being the leader of Eventbrite. I felt like what an honor and a privilege. So, you know, like that, that to me, yes, I went through what, who am I going to be without it? This is my whole identity. Am I going, am I going to be irrelevant? Am I going to, you know, fall into a deep, dark depression? I would say it's been about a month and I feel like there's a lot of opportunity. A lot has come my way, which I feel really, really grateful for, but I know that I need to take my time and go slow. And I have this like, I don't know, I have this passion around this idea of like in television, you reset to one, right? When you're shooting a scene, you go back to the beginning, you do it again. I have this like obsession with that concept.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  I don't know what format it'll take, but I do know that as I, as I start to spend time with other people,

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  and you know, incredible content creators like yourself and you know, I'm, I'm lucky enough to be advising Sammy Cohen and, and people like her where I just feel like I now have the time to learn more and to support. But I also just have this, this insatiable appetite of learning. And rather than go off and be the sort of wise sage that, you know, knows everything, I want to do the opposite.

• 1:00:32Hala Taha?

  You want to go back to starting something?

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:36Hala Taha?

  That's so exciting.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Hala Taha?

  Uh, another question that I have for you, that I'm very curious about because uh, something that I want to, I don't have kids yet. And so like, I really want to have kids soon. And I, I've been going through this like internal struggle of like, well, could I really be a C, like I'm, I'm running a po, I feel like I have three jobs. I have two companies, a podcast. Could I really tack on a kid onto this? And my partner is also an entrepreneur and like, he's not slowing down. He's actually a little younger than me.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Hala Taha?

  So.

• 1:01:10Hala Taha?

  How did you balance it all? You're one of the only really successful female entrepreneurs. Like, there's not that many. Like, there are, but-

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  There's more now, thankfully.

• 1:01:19Hala Taha?

  There are more now, but I would say like nine out of 10 successful entrepreneurs on the show, or even, you know, more than that are men.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when, when we took Eventbrite public in 2018, I was the 21st woman to found and lead the company into an IPO as CEO.

• 1:01:39Hala Taha?

  Wow.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Ever. That was like really sad to me.

• 1:01:42Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  It was like really bittersweet to hear. I was like less stoked about that and more-

• 1:01:46Hala Taha?

  You're like, what is wrong with the world?

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  And I was the second youngest ever. Um, and I was not that young. So, uh, you know, I, I do reflect a lot about on how, how I have made it happen. And I think it's a confluence of factors that's incredibly personal. But the thing that I see happening more often now than I experienced, because I was pretty young when I had my first, I was 28. So pretty young by that, by like modern times, is that I didn't, I didn't really overthink it. And I think now, like with science being where it is, thankfully, we have options to, to like, put off-

• 1:02:31Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Having kids for longer and later, and I think that's great. But it also kind of makes you overthink it.

• 1:02:38Hala Taha?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  And what I like to tell people, and I've, I've had this conversation with so many, so many women and men at Eventbrite. One of my favorite parts of building a company is being able to be in people's lives. We have, you know, I think over two dozen babies that were born to people who met at Eventbrite. So that I take that metric-

• 1:02:56Hala Taha?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Very seriously. But I always would say, you got yourself here somehow.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  There were things that you were born with. There were things that you learned. There were challenges that you overcame. There were things, opportunities that you took. You are going to get to that next level, which, you know, in your, in your cases, building a business and building a family with the exact same tactics. And like, it doesn't, it doesn't, it's certainly life defining for sure. But it also, I use, for me personally, I thought of it as, hey, kid, you're getting on my train. And like, you get on the train and we're going. I'm not stopping the train to then divert a different way. And I, I was so passionate about that and am so passionate about that

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  with women in the workplace of, let's go through all the ways in which you personally have gotten here. Because those are the things that you know, you know, and maybe you take it for granted. And let's apply it to the future. And like, that's how you're going to do it.

• 1:04:02Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  And we became very specific and precise about our support of, of people building their families while working at Eventbrite. To ensure that women had the highest degree of success possible in coming back and building their careers. And that, to me, was really important work that we did. You know, we didn't, yes, we won awards and whatnot. But I mean, we really didn't do it for that. We, we did it because it was the right thing to do. And because Kevin and I had gone through the process of having a child and having a family and building a company, we had that empathy. And so I think that's going to be a really important part

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  of the next era for you is really having confidence in your ability to figure it out. Because it's different for everybody. And it's not easy, but it's certainly not impossible.

• 1:04:58Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  And I think that the final thing I'll say, because I have older kids now, I've, I've older kids and younger kids. I have two cohorts of ages. And I can say without a doubt, it, it definitely takes a different level of engagement and parenting.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  In different chapters of the child's life. And so you can, it's not just one mode.

• 1:05:22Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  You know, and, um, and I think that's like maybe something that people don't talk about that, you know, there are times when you can really lean in and to one side or the other. For, and I would say, I used to always get told this and I never believed it until I experienced it, bigger kids, bigger problems. And so, you know, it's like, as they get older, it does, it definitely takes a lot more cognitively to guide a young adult through the world than,

• 1:05:51Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  you know, a small child.

• 1:05:53Hala Taha?

  Incredible advice. Thank you so much. That's incredible advice. If you had to start all over, would you still go into business with your partner?

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Oh, a thousand times. I mean, we really, the last 10 years have been the most challenging for us because we haven't been working side by side. So while we both have, you know, this, this shared passion and unconditional love for Eventbrite, we weren't sitting, we sat side by side for the first 10 years.

• 1:06:19Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  And the second 10 years.

• 1:06:20Hala Taha?

  So much to talk about.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it just, it's, it's amazing. So I would say, do it if you can. I mean, it's, it's such a rewarding experience to be able to build something together and to have that shared experience and context and passion. And, you know, I, I, I would say like, if I had to place a bet, we likely are going to do something together again, um, because we really enjoyed that.

• 1:06:47Hala Taha?

  Bonding, right?

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And way of being side by side in something that's not just the kids or not just, you know, our personal lives, but something that you're building, that's, that's incredibly valuable.

• 1:06:57Hala Taha?

  You exited Eventbrite and AI is taking over. It's going to be bigger than electricity, than the internet. It's like the biggest technology shift that we've ever seen. What's your advice to the new leaders of Eventbrite as they, you know, approach this AI era?

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Well, part of why we chose.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Bending Spoons, who acquired Eventbrite, is because they have a track record of applying, you know, cutting-edge technology to consumer businesses to drive a better result for the customer.

• 1:07:34Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Um, I think that they are misunderstood in the US. I think they're going to be an enormously successful company, and I feel really strongly about the stewardship of their, uh, of them to Eventbrite because of how they think, how they've run the company, and ultimately, the kind of people they are. Because at the end of the day, you know, when it comes down to it, are they making the right decisions for people? They're constantly thinking about how to better the experience of the customer and how to put the customer in a better spot all the time. So that was really, like, important to me as I was thinking through this, um, the set of options that we have.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Uh, also, a company like Eventbrite is basically in a very, very crowded space of companies that either have to completely disrupt themselves or they will be gone.

• 1:08:29Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  And I wanted Eventbrite to be around longer than us. And I think that in order to drive longevity, you have to be really sure about, about, again, the playing slate exercise, because this is a reimagination moment for most companies. Almost all web 2.0 companies are absolutely facing this existential opportunity. And so I think one of the things just that I think is really important that may seem kind of silly is just, I think the people who are leading companies need to be playing with AI every single day, as, almost like as hobbyists. And I just think that that is something that gets missed because people are either

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  too busy doing their day job, or they're reading about it as passive participants, but they're not, like, setting up their open claw. They're not, you know, using it in all these different ways, even if it's just in their personal life. I think just getting to be more fluent faster is really important. And the final thing I'll say is that I do think that there's a rate of change that, uh, that, that outpaces humans' ability. And I think we have to be prepared to go back to the basics, you know, of human emotion, of human desire, of that Maslow's hierarchy of needs to come together and work together through this massive dislocation, change, and big uncertainty.

• 1:09:55Hala Taha?

  You were just saying that you want Eventbrite to live on beyond you and your husband. Why? Why is that? Why is that so important to you?

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Because I think the legacy of what Eventbrite brings to the world is really important. Eventbrite's the largest platform of live experiences in the world. We are the second largest trafficked events site in the world. We are a place where niche is mass, where people can find their identity, they can find their people, they can connect, and they can create indelible memories. So I know that may sound heady, but if not Eventbrite, then who? And Eventbrite, I know, is a place where everyone is included. And there's a way for, you know, the new stewards of Eventbrite to create something

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  that is a magnitude of, you know, order of magnitude larger than what we created. I'm so excited to see that because the world needs in-person live experiences now more than ever.

• 1:10:59Hala Taha?

  Yeah. Okay, last question before I go on to like the couple of questions I end my show with. What is like your top one, three pieces of advice for entrepreneurs tuning in right now who want to build a company as big as Eventbrite is?

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  I can't stress enough the importance of capital efficiency. I think that like the, it gives you freedom, it gives you options, it gives you power.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  You know, it is, it's really important. And I actually was just listening to one of my business heroes, Anna Botin, who's the head of Santander, the largest bank in Europe. And I mean, she wakes up every day thinking about that. And they're incredibly valuable company with over 180 million customers. And, you know, she's obsessed with how to, how to drive efficiency and, and, and make more money. And I think, you know, it's sometimes alluring to raise the big round and alluring to get the nice office and alluring to say that you've raised, you know, but it's, that is all smoke and mirrors.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  If you don't have a very, very strong way to return on your invested capital.

• 1:12:25Hala Taha?

  One of the last questions that I ask all my guests is something actionable that we can do today. So what is one actionable thing that our young and profiteers can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  And I wish I would have done that even more often.

• 1:13:26Hala Taha?

  Julia, this was such an awesome interview. I feel like I learned so much and I feel so inspired. My last question to you is, what is your secret to profiting in life?

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  Wow, I think it is.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:25Hala Taha?

  And where can our listeners learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Well, I'm on Instagram, JuliaHartz, at JuliaHartz. And then I'm also on LinkedIn.

• 1:14:34Hala Taha?

  I see. You've got a pretty big following on LinkedIn.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Thank you. I really appreciate it.

• 1:14:38Hala Taha?

  Well, thank you so much, Julia. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:14:42Hala Taha?

  Well, there you have it, YapBam. JuliaHartz is the real deal. What stayed with me from this conversation is how much of Julia's success came down to the decisions that looked small in the moment. Bootstrapping longer than it felt comfortable, choosing investors based on values, not valuation, building a product designed to disappear into the background so creators could shine. None of these feel like headline moves, but every single one of these moves became load-bearing for everything that came after. Julia's blank sheet exercise is something I want you to try this week. Right at the top of a page, what would I do if I could start over? Then answer honestly about your business, career, or next move. Then act on one change immediately. And on capital efficiency, Julia was direct.

• 1:15:27Hala Taha?

  Freedom, options, and power all flow from how disciplined you are with your resources. So take an honest look this week at your time and where your money is going in your business. Cut what's not earning its place and double down on what's actually moving things forward. YapBam, I hope this episode pushes you to build with more heart, lead with more conviction, and stop waiting for perfect conditions. The entrepreneurs To win are the ones that keep learning, keep adapting, and keep going. If you listened, learned, and profited from this episode, share it with somebody in your world who needs to hear it. Leave SFI a star review on Apple Podcasts, watch the full conversation on YouTube or Spotify video, and connect with me on Instagram at @yapwithhala and LinkedIn by searching Hala Taha.

• 1:16:10Hala Taha?

  Until next time, this is your host, Hala Taha, AKA The Podcast Princess, signing off.