- Julia Hartz, founder of Eventbrite, shares her insights and lessons learned in building the company.
- Eventbrite processed a billion dollars in gross ticket sales and had over a million events on the platform last year.
- Hindsight is a combination of data, wisdom, and perspective, which can help make better decisions in the future.
- Choosing the right co-founder and putting effort into making the partnership work is crucial for success.
- Eventbrite defied conventional wisdom by choosing San Francisco as its base and grew alongside other tech companies in the area.
- The company struggled with monetization initially but followed a freemium model.

- Eventbrite initially struggled to differentiate its premium service from its free service, causing confusion for customers.
- Eventually, they decided to make the premium service more distinct, resulting in increased conversion rates and minimal attrition.
- Eventbrite unintentionally became a freemium model due to a pricing error, with 70% of their business now coming from free events.
- The growth of Eventbrite is driven by a virtuous cycle where attendees become organizers.
- The company experienced challenges in leadership as it rapidly grew, realizing the importance of choosing the right leaders at the right time.
- Eventbrite emphasizes the importance of having a clear philosophy and culture, which can evolve over time.
- The company's vision is to bring the world together through live experiences and their mission is to efficiently build a global marketplace of live experiences that people love.
- Eventbrite's culture is shaped by the qualities that their users associate with the brand.
- The company values a high velocity feedback loop and has implemented an employee net promoter score to measure employee satisfaction.

- Bright Land measures the satisfaction of both customers and employees
- They publish a monthly report based on a survey with one question
- Transparency is important to them
- Building a high-velocity feedback loop with transparency is crucial for trust and team confidence
- Hindsight involves data, observation, wisdom, and perspective
- Using these together helps make better decisions for the future

Julia Hartz, founder of Eventbrite, shares insights and lessons learned in building the company, including the importance of choosing the right co-founder and making the partnership work. Eventbrite defied conventional wisdom by choosing San Francisco as its base and struggled with monetization initially. They eventually differentiated their premium service, resulting in increased conversion rates. Eventbrite unintentionally became a freemium model and their growth is driven by a virtuous cycle. The company emphasizes the importance of clear philosophy and culture and measures employee satisfaction. Building a high-velocity feedback loop with transparency is crucial for making better decisions in the future.

Julia Hartz, cofounder of Eventbrite, at Female Founders Conference 2014

She's the founder of Eventbrite, which is such a big deal.

And I've known Julia for years, actually.

We kind of started our companies around the same time.

And I've wanted for years to put on a conference just for women.

And she was always the female founder that I said, she is going to be like my first call to come get to speak.

So I am so happy that Julia is here to talk to us today.

Well, I admire Jessica immensely, as well as Paul and Sam and the rest of the YC team.

And for a couple of years, we've had the great pleasure to come to 1 of the YC dinners.

And it's so humbling to sit in front of now 80 people and tell our story.

And today I wanted to talk to you about some of the things that I've learned in hindsight.

And I'm going to try to keep it in the early years.

And so I can honestly say it is a sprint marathon.

That was the best way that I've ever heard anyone describe it.

But I also think that it's 1 of those things where you really, I always call Eventbrite an overnight success, 8 years in the making.

Today I wanna give you just a quick snapshot of where we are as a company.

So last year we processed a billion dollars in gross ticket sales and had over a million events on the platform.

And those numbers actually mean nothing to me, because day to day I'm always looking at how we can continue to grow in the right way and think about the culture and the people, which is sort of my dream job.

But in hindsight, I think I've learned a lot.

And I wanted to share with you a little bit about what I've learned.

And, you know, the old saying goes, hindsight is 20-20.

And if only hindsight could help you predict the future.

But I really found that for us, focusing on what is most important is key.

And sometimes hindsight can make you think like you have a really great idea.

But when you actually focus on that idea, it maybe turns out to be something that wasn't so great after all.

And in hindsight, you learn the hard way.

I'm guessing by the laughs that some people know about pets.com, It was sort of the symbol of the great disaster of 2000.

We have a pets.com puppet sitting on our desk.

When I say ours, Kevin and I sit next to each other.

And it reminds us of to be frugal and to be lean.

But I've tried to throw away the pets.com puppet many times.

And Kevin thinks it's actually going to be worse than things.

But for me, I think hindsight, instead of being 20-20, is really a mixture of 3 things.

And in that way, I actually am hopeful that maybe hindsight over time helps you make better decisions in the future.

So the first major decision you'll make as a founder is who to choose as your co-founder.

And I'll point out that Adora said that we're all nuts.

And I'd like to say that I actually wasn't nuts to begin with.

I was development executive at MTV and then at FX Networks.

And along that time, I actually met Kevin and was able to see through, sort of like a, vicariously through him, I guess, or a fly on the wall, what it was like to build a company.

He was building his second company, Zoom, in San Francisco, and I was working in television in L.A.

And it soon became clear to me that I was in the wrong industry and that I wanted to be up here very badly because of 2 things, velocity and meritocracy.

And so those were the beginnings of me deciding to make what became a major, major transition in my life and a shift in, really, the course of my life.

And this guy was the guy that really helped me make that leap.

And it's because of his eternal optimism and sort of this feeling that there was no way that something that we worked on couldn't work out.

He could not see failure, which it's like, that's all I could see.

He could not see a reason why we wouldn't try to work on something together when I had a perfectly great job offer from Current TV up in San Francisco.

So I somehow managed to close my eyes really tight and like reach out and take a leap with him and it's obviously the best thing I've ever done.

We were engaged at the time so when we started Eventbrite And a lot of people ask us what it's like to be co-founders and spouses.

So we started Eventbrite when we had just gotten engaged.

And I think that when I reflect back on why it worked out for us, I think that we put a lot of care and attention into how to make it work as co-founders.

And because so much was on the line, by the way, obviously we wanted to preserve our relationship, but also we wanted desperately to make it work as co-founders.

We had fun working together in a windowless conference room with a wall of top ramen and saw horses in Doris' desks.

But you know, I think in hindsight, I think that actually having that amount of care and attention to detail and really putting effort into making it work with your co-founder is incredibly important for future success.

We got married and grew Eventbrite alongside our family.

But for us, our lives and our work are intrinsically linked.

The second thing that we had to figure out when we started Eventbrite was where to base the company.

And I can't underestimate the sort of strangeness in choosing San Francisco into late 2005, early 2006.

We got a free office in what became a co-working space in Potrero Hill owned by a friend of ours.

And his only request was bring other startups into this space and tell other people about it.

But we would go on these walks through Soma and we'd walk past 1 empty building after another.

And Kevin would tell me all of these stories about the companies that had lived in those buildings, much like the pets.com story.

And we were sort of crazy to start our company in San Francisco because the conventional wisdom was that everybody was down south.

I'm not kidding for those of you who can't believe that right now.

And that you needed to be by Stanford to be able to pull the best talent.

Well, what ended up happening was because we sort of knew that we needed to defy conventional wisdom, A, to be able to make it as a small, scrappy startup and not compete with the big, massive companies down south, but also because we were a live experiences company, something based on the idea of sort of cultural and live experience density, we knew that San Francisco was the right place for us.

But for many years, we were 1 of the only young and burgeoning tech companies in San Francisco.

And what ended up happening was we actually got a lot of our friends and a bunch of co-founders to join our space.

And soon we had about 20 different companies in this 10,000 square foot space of just co-founding teams.

And I think that was incredibly informative and really transformational for us because we actually kind of grew up in the course of 2 years with all of these other companies.

And in this 1 tiny space came TripIt, Flixster, Zynga, Trulia, Eventbrite, Opower, and then a couple of others that didn't end up making it.

But it was absolutely the best idea in hindsight to defy conventional wisdom and stick with San Francisco.

A lot of my time is spent in this sort of all out battle for talent in San Francisco.

These are just a few of our friends who are within blocks of us and San Francisco is no longer the different or unique place to be.

But for me, I think it's made us a better company because we're able to really flex that muscle and, and, you know, be very aggressive in, in, in recruiting, but it may, it's a harder job.

And I think at the end of this craziness, if there ever is an end, will be a better company because we stuck to San Francisco and because we're fighting the good fight and recruiting against these amazing companies that I admire.

The third thing that we thought about was how to make money.

And Kevin and I are notoriously horrible at monetization.

We launched Eventbrite with a basic service and a premium service, so sort of the classic freemium model.

The only problem was that we never, ever put anything just in the premium service.

So all of our features, it was impossible for you as a customer to come to the site and understand why you should pay a 2 and 1 1% plus $0.99 fee, because They were 2 and the same.

We agonized over whether or not to change that.

And we felt like we'd see a bunch of attrition, and our customers would leave us if we asked them to pay us for our service.

And we finally ripped the Band-Aid off, and lo and behold, our attrition rate was pretty much nothing, but our conversion rate skyrocketed, because users didn't have to come to the site to decide why they should use it for free or why they should pay for the service.

And in hindsight, we shouldn't have ever launched with a free service in the first place.

Actually, we ended up becoming truly a freemium model because we based our ticket fee off of the ticket price.

And we didn't think about what would happen if somebody put a 0 in the ticket price box.

So if you have a free event and you use Eventbrite, Eventbrite and all the bells and whistles of the product and the platform are free.

And so when we realized that, we were like, huh, well, that was a mess up.

But wait, it will really piss our competitors off because we won't monetize a free product and we'll just undercut our competitors.

And then what happened were thousands upon thousands of free events started to be published to the platform.

So when I talked about that that $1 billion in gross ticket sales last year, that actually only represents 30% of our business.

And the reason why that's such a good thing for us is because the growth of Eventbrite, the engine of growth, is based on this virtuous cycle where attendees become organizers.

So Those who have attended an event and who become aware of the Eventbrite brand are the number 1 driver of new event organizers on the platform.

We don't care if you're attending a free event or a paid event.

You're still an attendee and a portion of your cohort is going to convert into a paid event organizer.

So that for us in hindsight was golden for our business model.

The last thing I want to talk about, 1 of the other key components and things I think about a lot in hindsight is the growth of the team, and particularly leadership.

So we were 3 people, Kevin, myself, and Renaud, our third co-founder, bless his heart.

And in 2006, we were 15 people by the end of, oh, so 3 people for 2 years, and then we started hiring in 2008.

And we were 15 people, and then 30, and then 100, and then 200, and then 300.

And for us, in the early days, it was all about hiring the best and the brightest people to do things that Kevin and I really, or Renaud, really weren't good at doing.

So we ended up in that sort of 15 to 30 range with a bunch of really smart individual contributors.

And then As we started to grow towards 100, we had this big growth spurt in 2010, I saw something kind of crazy happen, which was it was like a pop-up book.

We all of a sudden organized ourselves into this sort of hierarchical formation.

And what happened was that we ended up with this huge layer of first time leaders.

And let me tell you in hindsight now, and this is something I've just realized in the last maybe 6 or 12 months.

Leadership, when you're growing a company and you're getting bigger, leadership is really 1 of the biggest opportunities to blow it.

Because I think that we put people in positions where they've had very little experience And everybody's running so quickly that it's hard to really understand when somebody needs help or when they just need to see a great model of leadership.

And so for me, it really helped me understand What is most important when we build leaders?

And this moment happened to me when last summer, I wanted to reach out and talk to all the leaders in the company and just have one-on-ones with them.

And so I asked for a list of leaders And I was like, great, I'm going to just go around and see how everybody's doing and what they need, how we can help them be better leaders.

And then somebody gave me the list, and there were 60 leaders in the company.

Well, not only because it would take me longer than a week, but also because I had no idea we had 60 leaders in the company.

And so now I think in hindsight, I've realized that it doesn't matter what stage of company you are.

Actually, I wish I would have thought about this much, much earlier in our growth.

It's so incredibly important to think about the who and the why and the when and the what when you're choosing your leaders.

Why would you choose them to be a leader in your company?

What is it that they exude or that they have beyond their amazing rock star ability to do their job, that would make them a great leader.

And then, when is it the right time in their career development to make them a leader?

I think a lot of times in hyper growth companies, we're pushing people into those positions much too early.

Sometimes it works out, but I've seen it unfortunately put them under water and really take an amazing individual contributor or team player and make them into something that they feel is a failure, which is, in my opinion, not right.

What is the most important part of leadership for you as you grow your company?

And again, I think that could be a very abstract notion right now when you're just starting out, but I wish I would have thought about it in hindsight a little bit earlier.

The last thing that I wanted to touch upon is sort of philosophy and culture.

So 1 of the things that's really, really, really hard to do, in my opinion, and really scary, is set a philosophy as a founder or a leader.

And I think the reason why I'm scared to do it sometimes is that I feel like that philosophy will become stagnant or irrelevant over time.

And it's a bit scary to put your own philosophy out there.

But what I've learned in just really recently is that it's so incredibly important to have that anchor.

At Eventbrite we say we're in pursuit of relentless evolution when it comes to our culture and our team.

And I think that it's so important to put that anchor down so that your team isn't just floating out at sea.

So recently, we were able to come up with our vision for Vempri.

I know that's probably really surprising that we never had a vision statement before.

But our vision is to bring the world together through live experiences.

And the way that we're going to do that, or our mission and how we're going to achieve that, is to efficiently build a global marketplace of live experiences that people love.

And this felt not unlike birthing 1 of my children to get this out and to get it into the company.

It wasn't, you know, months and months of work.

There were lots of conversations and it was a collaborative effort.

But I think that it feels so good to be able to point to something and make sure that we're all moving in the right direction.

But I mean, if we were able to actually build a global marketplace that people love, and that'd be a dream come true.

We chose that because it's really, really hard to do.

And then finally, I want to talk a little bit about culture, because obviously, that's something that's near and dear to my heart.

I spend most of my day thinking about the people of Eventbrite or the Brightlings, and I get to work hand in hand with each 1 of them to form our culture.

As a back story, our culture really derives from every single person that comes to Eventbrite.

But when we started to hire in that hyper growth phase between 30 and 100, we did a brand exercise, our first ever branding exercise, where we asked our users how they would describe Eventbrite.

And they used these words, accessible, empowering, social, delightful, dedicated, innovative, and genuine.

And when I saw that list, I realized that those words described the Breitlings themselves.

And in hindsight, that shouldn't have been such a surprise, because the people who build the product should probably personify the product and they're both intrinsically linked.

And so what I did was I repurposed the brand tenants to be our culture tenants.

And instead of trying to reinvent the wheel or come up with some mission statement around our culture, I actually use that list to jumpstart our hiring.

And what we looked for, in addition to impact and skills, we look for this list of culture tenants.

And then finally, when I think of how you continue to evolve a great culture, I think it has to include a high velocity feedback loop.

And just recently we implemented an EMPS score, an employee net promoter score, and background on net promoter score.

For those of you that may not be familiar, it was invented by a guy named Fred at Bain.

And it's basically a way to measure customer satisfaction.

And we implemented this in the Bright Land because we not only measured the satisfaction of our customers, meaning our event organizers or our event attendees, but we also measure the satisfaction of the Brightlings because, again, they're very closely tied.

And so We publish this report every month.

And transparency is really important to us.

So I brought some of the feedback today to you guys.

But to really build that high-velocity feedback loop that has transparency embedded in it is something that in hindsight I wish I would have thought of earlier.

I think we were doing it naturally in some ways at Eventbrite, but now as we grow, this is such a great way, this among others, is a great way for us to continue that and to continue driving that high velocity feedback loop that people trust.

And I think it's such an important part of building trust in your team, which as some of you may know when you're facing enormous challenges or huge mountains or you can't quite see the horizon.

The trust of your team and the confidence of your team is all that matters to get you through that.

So to sum up, I think hindsight can truly be a mixture of data, making sure you're being acutely observational of what's going on and taking note of it, wisdom, never forgetting the past and learning from your mistakes, and perspective, looking out and trying to step back and see the big picture.

And I think, and I won't claim that I've mastered this, I think that if you're able to use those together, I think that helps you make better decisions in the future.

And that actually makes the future more clear instead of hindsight only being 2020.


Speaker 0: Our next speaker is Julia Hartz. She's the founder of Eventbrite, which is such a big deal. I know you've all used Eventbrite. And I've known Julia for years, actually. We kind of started our companies around the same time.

And I've wanted for years to put on a conference just for women. And she was always the female founder that I said, she is going to be like my first call to come get to speak. So I am so happy that Julia is here to talk to us today.

Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. Can you guys hear me okay? I got the Britney Spears mic on. I need to get my... Well, I admire Jessica immensely, as well as Paul and Sam and the rest of the YC team.

And for a couple of years, we've had the great pleasure to come to 1 of the YC dinners. And it's so humbling to sit in front of now 80 people and tell our story. And today I wanted to talk to you about some of the things that I've learned in hindsight. And I'm going to try to keep it in the early years. But Adora was amazing.

That talk just killed me. And so I can honestly say it is a sprint marathon. That was the best way that I've ever heard anyone describe it. But I also think that it's 1 of those things where you really, I always call Eventbrite an overnight success, 8 years in the making. So time does fly.

Today I wanna give you just a quick snapshot of where we are as a company. So last year we processed a billion dollars in gross ticket sales and had over a million events on the platform. And those numbers actually mean nothing to me, because day to day I'm always looking at how we can continue to grow in the right way and think about the culture and the people, which is sort of my dream job. But in hindsight, I think I've learned a lot. And I wanted to share with you a little bit about what I've learned.

And, you know, the old saying goes, hindsight is 20-20. And if only hindsight could help you predict the future. But I really found that for us, focusing on what is most important is key. And sometimes hindsight can make you think like you have a really great idea. It's a vaguely great idea.

But when you actually focus on that idea, it maybe turns out to be something that wasn't so great after all. And in hindsight, you learn the hard way. I'm guessing by the laughs that some people know about pets.com, It was sort of the symbol of the great disaster of 2000. We have a pets.com puppet sitting on our desk. When I say ours, Kevin and I sit next to each other.

And it reminds us of to be frugal and to be lean. But I've tried to throw away the pets.com puppet many times. And Kevin thinks it's actually going to be worse than things. That's actually kind of funny. But for me, I think hindsight, instead of being 20-20, is really a mixture of 3 things.

Data, wisdom, and perspective. And in that way, I actually am hopeful that maybe hindsight over time helps you make better decisions in the future. So the first major decision you'll make as a founder is who to choose as your co-founder. And I'll point out that Adora said that we're all nuts. And I'd like to say that I actually wasn't nuts to begin with.

I had a great career in television. I was development executive at MTV and then at FX Networks. And along that time, I actually met Kevin and was able to see through, sort of like a, vicariously through him, I guess, or a fly on the wall, what it was like to build a company. He was building his second company, Zoom, in San Francisco, and I was working in television in L.A. And it soon became clear to me that I was in the wrong industry and that I wanted to be up here very badly because of 2 things, velocity and meritocracy.

And so those were the beginnings of me deciding to make what became a major, major transition in my life and a shift in, really, the course of my life. And this guy was the guy that really helped me make that leap. And it's because of his eternal optimism and sort of this feeling that there was no way that something that we worked on couldn't work out. He could not see failure, which it's like, that's all I could see. He could not see failure.

He could not see a reason why we wouldn't try to work on something together when I had a perfectly great job offer from Current TV up in San Francisco. So I somehow managed to close my eyes really tight and like reach out and take a leap with him and it's obviously the best thing I've ever done. We were engaged at the time so when we started Eventbrite And a lot of people ask us what it's like to be co-founders and spouses. We don't know any different. So we started Eventbrite when we had just gotten engaged.

And I think that when I reflect back on why it worked out for us, I think that we put a lot of care and attention into how to make it work as co-founders. And because so much was on the line, by the way, obviously we wanted to preserve our relationship, but also we wanted desperately to make it work as co-founders. We had fun working together in a windowless conference room with a wall of top ramen and saw horses in Doris' desks. But you know, I think in hindsight, I think that actually having that amount of care and attention to detail and really putting effort into making it work with your co-founder is incredibly important for future success. Obviously for us, it turned out well.

We got married and grew Eventbrite alongside our family. Emma is here with me today. She's incredibly, wow, taken by my talk. She's on the floor. But for us, our lives and our work are intrinsically linked.

And it just, it works for us. The second thing that we had to figure out when we started Eventbrite was where to base the company. And I can't underestimate the sort of strangeness in choosing San Francisco into late 2005, early 2006. We got a free office in what became a co-working space in Potrero Hill owned by a friend of ours. And his only request was bring other startups into this space and tell other people about it.

But we would go on these walks through Soma and we'd walk past 1 empty building after another. And Kevin would tell me all of these stories about the companies that had lived in those buildings, much like the pets.com story. And it was ghost town. And we were sort of crazy to start our company in San Francisco because the conventional wisdom was that everybody was down south. I'm not kidding for those of you who can't believe that right now.

And that you needed to be by Stanford to be able to pull the best talent. Well, what ended up happening was because we sort of knew that we needed to defy conventional wisdom, A, to be able to make it as a small, scrappy startup and not compete with the big, massive companies down south, but also because we were a live experiences company, something based on the idea of sort of cultural and live experience density, we knew that San Francisco was the right place for us. But for many years, we were 1 of the only young and burgeoning tech companies in San Francisco. And what ended up happening was we actually got a lot of our friends and a bunch of co-founders to join our space. And soon we had about 20 different companies in this 10,000 square foot space of just co-founding teams.

And I think that was incredibly informative and really transformational for us because we actually kind of grew up in the course of 2 years with all of these other companies. And in this 1 tiny space came TripIt, Flixster, Zynga, Trulia, Eventbrite, Opower, and then a couple of others that didn't end up making it. But it was absolutely the best idea in hindsight to defy conventional wisdom and stick with San Francisco. Now fast forward. A lot of my time is spent in this sort of all out battle for talent in San Francisco.

These are just a few of our friends who are within blocks of us and San Francisco is no longer the different or unique place to be. But for me, I think it's made us a better company because we're able to really flex that muscle and, and, you know, be very aggressive in, in, in recruiting, but it may, it's a harder job. And I think at the end of this craziness, if there ever is an end, will be a better company because we stuck to San Francisco and because we're fighting the good fight and recruiting against these amazing companies that I admire. The third thing that we thought about was how to make money. And Kevin and I are notoriously horrible at monetization.

We launched Eventbrite with a basic service and a premium service, so sort of the classic freemium model. The only problem was that we never, ever put anything just in the premium service. So all of our features, it was impossible for you as a customer to come to the site and understand why you should pay a 2 and 1 1% plus $0.99 fee, because They were 2 and the same. So we agonized a couple years in. We agonized over whether or not to change that.

And we felt like we'd see a bunch of attrition, and our customers would leave us if we asked them to pay us for our service. And we finally ripped the Band-Aid off, and lo and behold, our attrition rate was pretty much nothing, but our conversion rate skyrocketed, because users didn't have to come to the site to decide why they should use it for free or why they should pay for the service. And in hindsight, we shouldn't have ever launched with a free service in the first place. Actually, we ended up becoming truly a freemium model because we based our ticket fee off of the ticket price. And we didn't think about what would happen if somebody put a 0 in the ticket price box.

And so what began was this free service. So if you have a free event and you use Eventbrite, Eventbrite and all the bells and whistles of the product and the platform are free. And so when we realized that, we were like, huh, well, that was a mess up. But wait, it will really piss our competitors off because we won't monetize a free product and we'll just undercut our competitors. And then what happened were thousands upon thousands of free events started to be published to the platform.

So when I talked about that that $1 billion in gross ticket sales last year, that actually only represents 30% of our business. The other 70% are free events. And the reason why that's such a good thing for us is because the growth of Eventbrite, the engine of growth, is based on this virtuous cycle where attendees become organizers. So Those who have attended an event and who become aware of the Eventbrite brand are the number 1 driver of new event organizers on the platform. We don't care if you're attending a free event or a paid event.

You're still an attendee and a portion of your cohort is going to convert into a paid event organizer. So that for us in hindsight was golden for our business model. The last thing I want to talk about, 1 of the other key components and things I think about a lot in hindsight is the growth of the team, and particularly leadership. So we were 3 people, Kevin, myself, and Renaud, our third co-founder, bless his heart. And in 2006, we were 15 people by the end of, oh, so 3 people for 2 years, and then we started hiring in 2008.

And we were 15 people, and then 30, and then 100, and then 200, and then 300. And for us, in the early days, it was all about hiring the best and the brightest people to do things that Kevin and I really, or Renaud, really weren't good at doing. So we ended up in that sort of 15 to 30 range with a bunch of really smart individual contributors. And then As we started to grow towards 100, we had this big growth spurt in 2010, I saw something kind of crazy happen, which was it was like a pop-up book. We all of a sudden organized ourselves into this sort of hierarchical formation.

And what happened was that we ended up with this huge layer of first time leaders. And let me tell you in hindsight now, and this is something I've just realized in the last maybe 6 or 12 months. Leadership, when you're growing a company and you're getting bigger, leadership is really 1 of the biggest opportunities to blow it. Because I think that we put people in positions where they've had very little experience And everybody's running so quickly that it's hard to really understand when somebody needs help or when they just need to see a great model of leadership. And so for me, it really helped me understand What is most important when we build leaders?

And this moment happened to me when last summer, I wanted to reach out and talk to all the leaders in the company and just have one-on-ones with them. And so I asked for a list of leaders And I was like, great, I'm going to just go around and see how everybody's doing and what they need, how we can help them be better leaders. And then somebody gave me the list, and there were 60 leaders in the company. And that blew my mind. Well, not only because it would take me longer than a week, but also because I had no idea we had 60 leaders in the company.

And so now I think in hindsight, I've realized that it doesn't matter what stage of company you are. Actually, I wish I would have thought about this much, much earlier in our growth. It's so incredibly important to think about the who and the why and the when and the what when you're choosing your leaders. Who are they? Why would you choose them to be a leader in your company?

Why? What is it that they exude or that they have beyond their amazing rock star ability to do their job, that would make them a great leader. And then, when is it the right time in their career development to make them a leader? I think a lot of times in hyper growth companies, we're pushing people into those positions much too early. Sometimes it works out, but I've seen it unfortunately put them under water and really take an amazing individual contributor or team player and make them into something that they feel is a failure, which is, in my opinion, not right.

And then finally, what? What is the most important part of leadership for you as you grow your company? And again, I think that could be a very abstract notion right now when you're just starting out, but I wish I would have thought about it in hindsight a little bit earlier. The last thing that I wanted to touch upon is sort of philosophy and culture. So 1 of the things that's really, really, really hard to do, in my opinion, and really scary, is set a philosophy as a founder or a leader.

And I think the reason why I'm scared to do it sometimes is that I feel like that philosophy will become stagnant or irrelevant over time. And it's a bit scary to put your own philosophy out there. But what I've learned in just really recently is that it's so incredibly important to have that anchor. And philosophies change. They can evolve.

At Eventbrite we say we're in pursuit of relentless evolution when it comes to our culture and our team. And philosophies can also evolve. You won't get persecuted if they do. And I think that it's so important to put that anchor down so that your team isn't just floating out at sea. So recently, we were able to come up with our vision for Vempri.

I know that's probably really surprising that we never had a vision statement before. But our vision is to bring the world together through live experiences. And the way that we're going to do that, or our mission and how we're going to achieve that, is to efficiently build a global marketplace of live experiences that people love. And this felt not unlike birthing 1 of my children to get this out and to get it into the company. And it didn't take that much time.

It wasn't, you know, months and months of work. There were lots of conversations and it was a collaborative effort. But I think that it feels so good to be able to point to something and make sure that we're all moving in the right direction. And I know this could evolve. But I mean, if we were able to actually build a global marketplace that people love, and that'd be a dream come true.

We chose that because it's really, really hard to do. And then finally, I want to talk a little bit about culture, because obviously, that's something that's near and dear to my heart. I spend most of my day thinking about the people of Eventbrite or the Brightlings, and I get to work hand in hand with each 1 of them to form our culture. As a back story, our culture really derives from every single person that comes to Eventbrite. But when we started to hire in that hyper growth phase between 30 and 100, we did a brand exercise, our first ever branding exercise, where we asked our users how they would describe Eventbrite.

And they used these words, accessible, empowering, social, delightful, dedicated, innovative, and genuine. And when I saw that list, I realized that those words described the Breitlings themselves. And in hindsight, that shouldn't have been such a surprise, because the people who build the product should probably personify the product and they're both intrinsically linked. And so what I did was I repurposed the brand tenants to be our culture tenants. And instead of trying to reinvent the wheel or come up with some mission statement around our culture, I actually use that list to jumpstart our hiring.

And what we looked for, in addition to impact and skills, we look for this list of culture tenants. And then finally, when I think of how you continue to evolve a great culture, I think it has to include a high velocity feedback loop. And just recently we implemented an EMPS score, an employee net promoter score, and background on net promoter score. For those of you that may not be familiar, it was invented by a guy named Fred at Bain. And it's basically a way to measure customer satisfaction.

And we implemented this in the Bright Land because we not only measured the satisfaction of our customers, meaning our event organizers or our event attendees, but we also measure the satisfaction of the Brightlings because, again, they're very closely tied. And so We publish this report every month. We send the survey out. It's just 1 question every single month. And then we publish the results.

And transparency is really important to us. So I brought some of the feedback today to you guys. But to really build that high-velocity feedback loop that has transparency embedded in it is something that in hindsight I wish I would have thought of earlier. I think we were doing it naturally in some ways at Eventbrite, but now as we grow, this is such a great way, this among others, is a great way for us to continue that and to continue driving that high velocity feedback loop that people trust. And I think it's such an important part of building trust in your team, which as some of you may know when you're facing enormous challenges or huge mountains or you can't quite see the horizon.

The trust of your team and the confidence of your team is all that matters to get you through that. So to sum up, I think hindsight can truly be a mixture of data, making sure you're being acutely observational of what's going on and taking note of it, wisdom, never forgetting the past and learning from your mistakes, and perspective, looking out and trying to step back and see the big picture. And I think, and I won't claim that I've mastered this, I think that if you're able to use those together, I think that helps you make better decisions in the future. And that actually makes the future more clear instead of hindsight only being 2020. Thank you so much.

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Julia Hartz at Female Founders Conference 2014