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- Eventbrite faced significant challenges during the pandemic, leading to layoffs and a need to pivot their business model
- Eventbrite focused on supporting local organizers and hosting virtual events during the pandemic
- The pause during the pandemic allowed Eventbrite to reset and rethink their business strategy
- The CEO of Eventbrite maintained optimism and confidence while leading the company through the crisis, with the support of advisors.

- The speaker received valuable guidance from investors on cutting costs and raising money during a crisis.
- They reflect on the concept of a "wartime CEO" and how crisis can bring out the best in people.
- Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the speaker focused on making others happy but realized they needed to prioritize critical areas for their company.
- These critical areas included supporting creators and their own team, raising money, and refocusing the company.
- The speaker shares their experience of navigating the challenges of a virtual business and the importance of focusing on a specific segment of customers.
- The company underwent foundational work and developed a three-year strategy to help creators find and grow their audience.
- The speaker discusses the challenges of finding signal for local events and how they aimed to address this through Eventbrite's strategy.
- The speaker mentions a break in the conversation and teases more discussion on how they kept the company going during the pandemic and the evolving events market.

- How I Built This is asking fans to share their favorite episode in a short recording
- Eventbrite used the lockdown period to improve support for event creators
- Despite multiple crises, Eventbrite remained resilient and saw a surge in demand for live events
- Virtual events on Eventbrite decreased from 90% to 10% as people wanted to gather in person
- Eventbrite made strategic decisions and raised capital to ensure survival during the pandemic
- Eventbrite is shifting from being a ticket-selling platform to a marketplace for event discovery
- Eventbrite aims to solve the problem of local event discovery and become a trusted space like Etsy
- Marketing efforts include targeted advertising and putting the right events in front of the right consumers at the right time.

- Eventbrite is focused on helping professional event producers and organizers build their audience more effectively through their platform.
- They recently rolled out the ability to buy Eventbrite ads, allowing event organizers to promote their events on high-traffic surfaces like the homepage, newsletter, and app.
- Eventbrite also acquired a marketing company called Tone Den, which helps event producers build a smarter audience for their advertising by aggregating consumer data points and generating ads for them to deploy on various platforms.
- The company primarily generates revenue from ticketing fees, but they have introduced a small per-event fee for access to their advertising and marketing tools.
- The CEO acknowledges the challenges of being a publicly traded company and the impact of stock prices on employee morale, but remains focused on running the business and staying grounded.
- Eventbrite has adjusted to the changing work environment post-COVID, transitioning to a remote-first company and making shorter-term plans to give employees clarity and flexibility.

- The speaker discusses the importance of virtual meetings and being intentional, productive, and thoughtful during them.
- They mention the need for leaders to be good conveners and bring people together with intention and productivity.
- The speaker suggests setting expectations and having a strategic map for in-person gatherings to make them more efficient and cost-effective.
- They talk about the challenges of remote work for younger employees and offer advice on developing talent in a remote or hybrid environment.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of bringing your whole self to work and balancing compassion and demands for productivity.
- They discuss the challenges of companies taking public political positions and how they focus on what their company can do to be a great company.
- The speaker mentions Eventbrite's stance on freedom of assembly and the need to draw the line carefully when it comes to content on their platform.
- They emphasize the importance of making well-informed and unbiased decisions and mention having a team and policies in place to handle these decisions.

- The CEO of Eventbrite discusses the organization's team, policies, and strong operation.
- Dealing with anonymous online behavior is not a major problem, but something that needs to be addressed from time to time.
- The CEO wants Eventbrite to be known as a great company to work at, where employees can do their best work and form strong relationships.
- The focus is on doing the right thing, even if it is difficult.
- The CEO expresses a desire to slow down, be more thoughtful, and build the best product for event creators.
- The energy at Eventbrite is palpable, especially regarding the potential of using AI to build great companies.
- The CEO sees a difference in the growth and communal building after the COVID pandemic.
- The episode concludes with acknowledgments and promotions for other episodes of the podcast.

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- Capital One's VentureX Business Card offers unlimited double miles and access to airport lounges.
- Eventbrite faced challenges during the pandemic, but focused on supporting local organizers and hosting virtual events.
- The CEO of Eventbrite maintained optimism and received guidance from investors during the crisis.
- Eventbrite shifted from virtual events to in-person events and is now focused on becoming a marketplace for event discovery.
- Eventbrite offers advertising and marketing tools for event organizers and recently acquired Tone Den for smarter audience targeting.
- Eventbrite has adjusted to a remote-first work environment and emphasizes the importance of virtual meetings and talent development.
- The CEO of Eventbrite discusses the company's policies, handling anonymous online behavior, and the desire to be a great company to work at.
- The CEO wants to slow down, be more thoughtful, and build the best product for event creators.

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 told in February 2020, and Julia’s Resilience series dispatch 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 & Instagram, and email us at hibt@id.wondery.com.




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Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab.

The pandemic nearly crushed the ticketing company Eventbrite.

For nearly 2 years, people basically stopped going to events.

And for Eventbrite's founder, Julia Hartz, the pandemic was the biggest test of her career.

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 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.

Those early days I remember as being very dark, but very definitive.

I think so often we're faced with gray moments as leaders, especially these days, that was black and white.

We went from 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 2 weeks.

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.

And at the time, you had about 1,100, 1,000 to 1,100 employees.

I remember you saying, like, you know, you'd been kind of nervous, which I thought was remarkable for you to just talk about.

By that point, you'd been CEO for almost 4 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're faced with massive challenge and test.

Just, I can't think of a blunter way to ask it.

Yeah, no, what strikes me is that there's all sorts of different, there's paradox in leadership 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.

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.

And what we realized was that our business was in great risk.

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.

Yeah, I mean, I remember at that how quickly obviously live events turned into were canceled or postponed and then and then they turn into virtual events.

We had to how I built this live show scheduled in March of 20 21 was in Seattle 1 was in San Francisco.

We obviously canceled those shows and then pretty much by April we came up with a an entirely new live episode of the show that we would livestream.

So we were just acting, acting, acting, deciding, acting, deciding, acting on this very, very short loop.

But at the same time, everything stopped.

For about 2 to 3 weeks, there were no events happening.

And That pause guy was the silver lining for our business.

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

So really, that pause was so transformative because it allowed us to sit back and say, given what we know about this business, What would we do if we could do it all over again?

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 it may be 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.

CECILIA MUÑOZ 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.

And I just, I combined vulnerability and empathy with just almost like a mama bear quality of I'm not gonna let this company fail.

And so we're gonna get through this 1 step at a time.

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 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.

And the second 1 was from Rulof Botha, who said, we're not giving up now.

I should mention both these are prominent investors.

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.

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 1 problem, like a war.

Like like Churchill had to solve the problem of being defeated and destroyed by the Nazis.

And, you know, 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 have to be determined and you have to move quickly.

It's harder to do great work when, like, you know, many years ago, I covered the Pentagon, 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?

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 Breitling.

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 5 areas of criticality for us.

And the first 2 are the most important, which is the people.

So it was how do we show up for creators and help them maintain business continuity?

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 Yeah, and so I I focused on those 3 in particular

I stopped me trying to make people happy and I stopped worrying about If I was doing a good job or not,

it's so interesting I wonder how you I mean if you know revenue goes to 0, 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.

So, I haven't told this story yet, so I think I was waiting 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 3 years later.

Prior to COVID, things weren't going great at the company.

We were buckling under the weight of that integration and migration and disappointing everyone.

So COVID was kind of our like do sex amok in a 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 in 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's sort of like the everything platform,

And we found the signal right before COVID hit, which was that frequent creators, those who are coming to Eventbrite, regardless of their category, geo, size, but they were using the platform at least 1 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.

Focusing on that segment of your customers, but what about just keeping the business afloat when there was nothing coming in?

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 rewired how Eventbrite works because we had built it to serve an event, but actually not to serve the creator.

So if you had many events, the Eventbrite product experience just broke down.

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 1 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.

There's a lot to be said about large ticketed events like Taylor Swift, and 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 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.

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.

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.

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You know, every time I run into a How I Built This fan, the first thing they wanna do is tell me about their favorite episode, which is so awesome.

So now, I wanna 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.

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 1 about Hamdi, Ulukaya, and Chobani because I learned so much about how to just push through and nothing seems to be working out and it gave me a whole new perspective on being resilient.

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And we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks in future episodes.

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.

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.

Everybody talks about the crisis, but it's like there were about 9 different crises in 2 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.

So while we saw 1 of the craziest Black Swan events that I think has happened to a company, we also knew that the intrinsic need to be together and the way in which you make indelible memories would eventually prevail.

So virtual events went from 1% of the events on Eventbrite to 90% of the events on Eventbrite to now 10%.

And that happened over a pretty long period of time.

But once people started to get back together, you really saw it fall off in terms of people don't really want to sit on a Zoom at an event.

I mean, obviously, you could look at presumably you look at your, your PNL, 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 3 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?

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 1 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 we raised 2 rounds in very favorable interest rate environments.

I mean, That was not something that we took lightly.

It's expensive capital, even if it was at attractive rates.

And I still run the company as if I'm writing the check out of my own bank account.

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.

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

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.

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

We had this vision and we knew where we needed to focus.

See all How I Built This with Guy Raz transcripts on Applepodcasts

Leading through radical change with Julia Hartz of Eventbrite