Leading through radical change with Julia Hartz of Eventbrite

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And for Eventbrite's founder, Julia Hartz, the pandemic was the biggest test of her career, and that's an understatement. Julia was first on the show back in early 2020, right before COVID. And that episode is worth scrolling back to and checking out. It tells the entire story of how she built Eventbrite, and it's an amazing story. But today, you're going to hear the inside story of how Julia and her team saved the 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. There was never a gray moment. I think so often were 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 two weeks. In April that year, you had to lay off, and we talked about this a little bit. You had to lay off about half of your employees because you couldn't, I mean, there was no revenue coming in. There was nothing coming in. And at the time, you had about 1100 to 1100 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. You've been nervous to step in a CEO. By that point, you'd been CEO for almost four years. But you were still sort of quieting voices, doubting voices, self-doubting voices in your head, which I think is very healthy, by the way. I think all CEOs have those voices, but very few of them acknowledge it. So now, you know, you're faced with massive challenge and test. So how did you do that? Just think of a blunter way to ask it. Yeah, no, what strikes me is that there's all sorts of different, there's paradox and 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And, you know, what we, what we realized was that our business was in great risk. Their businesses were in peril. And we needed to work together to get through this. So early on, we looked at ways that we could really support local organizers and 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. 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 how quickly obviously live events turned into were canceled or postponed. And then, and then they turned into virtual events. We had two, how about this live show scheduled in March of 2020? One was in Seattle. One was in San Francisco. We obviously canceled those shows. And then pretty much by April, we came up with an entirely new live episode of the show that we would live stream. I mean, it was just complete insanity. So we were just acting, acting, acting, deciding, acting, acting on this very, very short loop. But at the same time, everything stopped. For about two to three weeks, there were no events happening. And that pause guy was the silver lining for our business. We were forced to pause and reset. And what business gets to do that after 14 years? also a public company. So it 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? How did you maintain optimism or did you not? Like when you, you know, 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, you know, confidence and optimism and to shield. I think it may be such a job of the CEO, but as a leader, I think in part, it's to shield your team from the arrows that come, you know, your way. It turns out that I, I ended up being a great, more time 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, 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 event bright team. So it was a shared experience together. And I just, I combined vulnerability and empathy with just almost like a bomb of air quality, if I'm not going to let this company fail. And so we're going to get through this one 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 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 Ellen Bogan who said, you know, cost and raise money. Now don't wait and be be severe about it. And the second one was from Rulath Boat that who said, we're not giving up now. This isn't how the story ends. I should mention both these are prominent investors. Yeah, yeah. And they knew us and they knew the business really well. And you never quite forget when someone says the right thing at the right time and you remember it. Yeah, you know, it's so important. You mentioned this term wartime CEO, which I mixed feelings about because obviously wartime is, you know, you think about Churchill, but it is true that it was a crisis. And crisis does tend to bring out the best in a lot of people because it forces you to focus on solving that one problem like a war, right? Like Churchill had to solve the problem of being defeated and destroyed by the Nazis. And you know, similarly, I think about like reporters, when I was a reporter, when I was a covering wars, that was very easy to do. Not easy, but it was easier to do great work because you're focused and you had to be determined and you had to move quickly. It's harder to do great work when like, you know, many years ago, cover 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 bright wing. But I was tying myself into knots, trying to make everyone else happy and losing the plot more often than I probably was willing to admit. So I dropped that premise completely and I focused on really five areas of criticality for us. And the first two are the most important, which is the people. So it was, how do we show up for creators and help them maintain business continuity? 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, workstream. And so I focused on those three in particular. Yeah. I stopped trying to make people happy and I stopped worrying about if I was doing a good job or not. So interesting. I wonder how you, I mean, if, you know, revenue goes to zero, right? And then you have this virtual business that you start, but there's no, there was no way that was going to make up for the loss from live events, right? Because you guys got a fee on every ticket sold. I mean, you're probably traded company, right? I mean, going without any revenue for a long time or significantly lower revenue for a long time is hard. How are you able to withstand that? So I haven't told the story yet. So I think I was waiting for this, for this moment. But when we talked in July of 2020, I think it was impossible for me to have the clarity that I have in hindsight now three years later. Prior to COVID, things weren't going great at the company. We were a newly public company. We had acquired our largest competitor. We were buckling under the weight of that integration and migration and disappointing everyone. So COVID was kind of our like, do sex a machina moment? I feel like we were, you know, it was in a moment of just like discovering what we needed to do and almost stopping, you know, decline that was happening. And we'd lost the thread on who's our most successful creator on the platform? Because of every sort of like the everything platform, right? And we couldn't find that signal. And we found the signal right before COVID hit, which was that frequent creators, those who are coming to event right, regardless of their category, geo size, but they were using the platform at least one at one time a month. They were a small portion of creators producing a big portion of revenue. And our product absolutely sucked for them. So that was the opportunity that we had just uncovered when COVID hit. And so beyond structurally changing the company, raising money to ensure that we'd have a balance sheet at the end of however long the recovery would take, we just completely reset what we were going to be coming out of the crisis. So obviously that was important, right? Focusing on that segment of your customers, but what about just keeping the business afloat when it 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 ripped out a bunch of old tech. We rewired how Eventbrite works because we had built it to serve an event, but 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, which we published for our board at the end of 2020. And we said the most important thing that we can do for what we call a super creator, which is a frequent creator hosting at least one event a month, is we can help them find their audience and we can help them grow their audience. And no one's doing this at a scale that we can do it at for these mid market events. 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, a pyramid with the very top, the big stadiums and arenas and the very bottom, how you interact with your friends and what barbecue you tend, the middle of that's a big fat ticketed matrix of events that exist on Eventbrite. Sure. And it was really hard to find signal for local events, especially during recovery. So we decided to build that for our customers. And that's what we focused on our strategy on. And that really helped us gain focus and momentum and be a part of the recovery, not just standby and what to 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 Roz and you're listening to how I built this lab. 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That's LinkedIn.com/buildthis, terms and conditions apply. Hey, everyone. You know, every time I run into a high-built this fan, the first thing they want to do is tell me about their favorite episode, which is so awesome. So now, I want to share your favorite episode with the millions of people who listen to this show. Episodes, they might not have heard or might want to hear again. So here's what I want you to do. Grab your smartphone and record a short memo short, like less than 30 seconds and tell us your name, where you live, and which episode is your favorite, and why you loved it. So, for example, I might say, "Hey, it's Guy Ross here in San Francisco, and my favorite episode of the show is the one about Hamdi, LaKaya, and Chabani, because I learned so much about how to just push through when nothing seems to be working out." And it gave me a whole new perspective on being resilient. So that's it, something like that. You know, and by the way, that's not my favorite episode. I love them all equally. Anyway, once you're done with the recording, email or message it to us at [email protected]. And we'll share your favorite right here in the ad breaks in future episodes. Thanks so much, you guys are the best. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross. My guest today is Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. She was on the show back in early 2020 when we told the whole story of Eventbrite. And if you missed that, scroll back and check out that episode. It's really, really cool. Anyway, going back to this conversation, with the lack of live events in the early days of lockdown, Julia and her team used the hiatus to try and figure out how Eventbrite could better support event creators. And then, they waited. Everybody talks about the crisis, but it's like there were about nine different crises. And two and a half years. The last moment that COVID impacted our business was Omicron in very late 21, early 22. And even then, it felt almost surreal, right? Yeah. 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. Right. And that is indispensable. So while we saw one 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. It was just about win. Yeah. So virtual events went from 1% of the events on Eventbrite to 90% of the events on Eventbrite to now 10%. So that's sort of the curve and that happened over a pretty long period of time. But once people started to get back together, you really saw it fall off in terms of, you know, people don't really want to sit on a Zoom at an event. No, they don't. I mean, obviously, you could look at presumably, you look at your P&L, you look at your balance sheet and you're like, okay, we need to do this, this, this and that. And we know that we'll be okay for three years based on the cash we have and on the, you know, if we can grow our business, our virtual business and we'll get some cash coming in. But was there ever a moment where you thought we might not actually survive this thing? Thankfully no. So when we, when that all came back to the decisions we made in March, so when we have to the company, which was so extreme, no one was doing that. And when we raised more than we needed, and this is where being a public company was a virtue because we could raise convertible debt, which, you know, we raised two rounds in very favorable interest rate environments. We, we've barely touched that money. I mean, that was not something that we took lightly. It's expensive capital, even if it was at attractive rates. And, you know, I still run the company as if I'm writing the check out of my own bank account. So, so it was important for us to maintain that fiduciary responsibility and that conservativeness. But we also needed to shift into a high gear at some point, not just beyond 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. Totally. I mean, it's absolutely. What's the downside? Prepare for the worst every time. Every time. And hope for the best. 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. You cannot, yeah, you can't simulate that scenario because you wouldn't have imagined it. Right. Right. So it gave us, it gave us a new lease on life. We had this vision and we knew where we needed to focus. So essentially before, Eventbrite was really just a platform where people would sell tickets, and then you would get a cut. And you're saying now it's more focused on a marketplace. And what you mean by that, I think, is that you go to Eventbrite, it knows where you are, right? Geo locates. And then it suggests events that are in your area. Yeah, that's right. So Eventbrite is the, I would say like the Etsy for live experiences. I, you know, I don't love referring to other companies. Yeah, is it a. new way you would describe it now versus three years ago? - No, not in the way of inventory, but in the way that we are thinking about how we can help make creators more successful. What we've stepped into now is, Eventbrite is a place where you go to market, your events through our marketing tools, where you go to advertise your events through promoted listings, and Eventbrite is a place where you go to discover great things to do. And that relationship with the consumer as the customer is the biggest shift. And I'd say the big challenge ahead of us is that, you know, we're a ubiquitous logo on a ticket. If you go to New York and you ask 10 people on the street, seven of them will say, yeah, I know Eventbrite. Either they'll say, I buy tickets to it for my, you know, my pursuit or interest, I buy tickets to it for a school event. I got a shows on Eventbrite, or they'll say, oh my God, of course I know Eventbrite. I mean, let me show you the events that I go to, you know, and it's really like your playlist of memories. If you ask the same 10 people, where do you start when you don't know what to do on a Thursday night? Definitely not seven of them are going to say Eventbrite. - Yeah, right. So in other words, I remember like 20 years ago, when I went out, right, now I've got children. - Yeah. - Like, I go sleep at eight. But when I didn't do those things, I would open up the Washington City paper, or if I was in New York, the village voice. And you would look to see what was playing, what was going on. And essentially what you're saying is, you are pushing to be that thing, that people would just have that page up. Oh, let's go to Eventbrite. See what's going on in this program. - Yes, yes. And that's a big tall order because I would posit that no one has solved local event discovery. Nobody has, no one has solved that problem. I think about this all the time. - Yes. - Like, yeah. - And Eventbrite is going to solve that problem. And I would say, hell, half no fury like a company that has a new lease on life. - Yeah. - And can see the problem that still persists. And we believe it's our right to win because we're already powering the events you're looking for. - Right. And we have the knowledge of what's going on. And Eventbrite has that ubiquity and it has that trust because we've built it over the last decade and a half. I mean, in Silicon Valley being an older company is sort of like being an older person. You like, you know, there's a little bit of like ego ageism that happens. I actually think it's a great virtue. We know a lot about life events through the lens of the hardest thing to do, which is ticketing, it's hard to make money in ticketing and it's even harder to make a profit. And guess what? We've done both. - Yeah, I think the Etsy analogy is actually quite apt because Etsy is a space for, you know, all kinds of crafts people and creators also there are people who, you know, mass producing. But it is a trusted space. You know, like every time scrambling to find like something for somebody, I'll go to Etsy. - Yeah. - The problem is that I go to a rabbit hole and then I spend like six hours, six hours later. Like I've been on Etsy for six hours. So, but actually, like you can imagine, right? That if you can position your site as a place for, hey, you know, I want to learn about photography. I wonder if someone's teaching a course or if there's like a maker of fair this weekend or if there's just, I'm looking here in San Francisco. There's a dumplings festival coming up on the, so there are a lot of things, but how do you do that? Like do you do bus ads? Do you do social media campaign? It's a marketing challenge, right, to get the awareness out. How do you do that? - So we do it through what I would say is like the pull in push mechanisms. We start with our first principle, which is our job to put the right event in front of the right consumer at the right time wherever they are. We're not building a closed walled garden. - Right. - You know, people who are interested in building audience are quite sophisticated in what kind of audience they want to build. So when you're thinking about professional event producers and organizers, they know more about what they want to be crafting than we do. Our job is to make it better, faster, and more effective for them to do that through event, right? Then they could do on their own. And so what we focus on is we just rolled out in the back half of 2022, the ability to buy an event right at. So now you can promote your event in our highest traffic surfaces, which is our home page, our newsletter, our app. You can actually effectively buy clicks to your event. The second thing we did was we actually acquired a company in Q4 of 2020, if you can believe it. - Right, so is it marketing company, right, yeah? - Yeah, yeah. They were our partner, Tonden, and they hung in there with us during COVID. And so we came together at the end of 2020. And in five months, we integrated the team and rolled out marketing tools called event, we call Eventbrite Boost to our customers. But effectively what these marketing tools do, is they aggregate the consumer data points on Eventbrite around a certain type of event or a geography, and they help the event producer build a smarter audience for their advertising. Then through our favorite generative AI, we auto-generate ads for them that then they can deploy onto platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever they want to reach more people. And the reason why it's better than DIY is because you're getting like a five to six return on advertising when you do that, five to six acts, because we're able to help you build the creative. But then also we're the first party transaction platforms. So we're actually transacting the ticket. - Yeah. - So the creator doesn't have to wait and try to read the tea leaves as to what's happening in order to get that signal. - So let's talk about your revenue streams. I mean, primarily it's a cut of ticket sales, but then also advertising or boosting an event. What other ways are you looking at to build other streams of revenue? - Well, so 95% of the revenue comes from ticketing fees. And over 80% of the time those ticketing fees are actually paid for by the consumer. And event rates ticketing fees on average are $3. - Yeah, they're low. - So when we're ticketing and this is not the same thing. So we've built this business on that. What we've done now is we've brought all of that, you know, advertising and marketing goodness to the front door literally yesterday. So this is new news that anyone who's using event bright has access to all of that tooling and advertising, marketing tooling and advertising for a small per event fee. So we're effectively introducing a two-sided marketplace fee, but I'm talking about like $10 an event for an event that's selling over 25 tickets. So we think this is a great way to balance out what we've built to help event creators drive audience as well as continue to keep those ticketing fees as low as possible because that's what really matters is the consumer being able to buy a ticket without getting gouged. - Julia, like many, many tech companies, you've also had some layoffs this year. And you know, when we spoke in 2020, that you're running a publicly traded company, it is not necessarily the metric, but is one of several metrics, which is the stock price. Stock price is considerably lower than about a half as much as it was when we spoke in 2020. How does that weigh on you? I mean, do you feel, obviously, you feel responsible to shareholders, but sometimes it's not much you can do about a stock price. - You know, it's one of those things that they don't tell you when you become the CEO or when you take a company public, they don't tell you both sides of the equation, which is mostly what I heard when we were taking event right, public was, well, first of all, don't go public from currently public. - Yeah, public CEOs. And I decided I would never be that person to pass on that advice, but secondly, don't pay attention to the stock price, just run the business. Dad, the other side of that is when your employees' stock options are underwater, that's a problem, meaning it puts a lot of morale pressure on. And while I don't believe in doing anything unnatural to solve for that because we are all in this together and in the long run, we're growing the business, I do think it's something that can become a distraction. So the way that I've approached it is to make sure that everybody has a level playing field on information. So we share quite a lot at Eventbrite and then to explain the different stages of the stock as it changes. Does it get me down? Yeah, of course it does, I'm human. I mean, this is a really easy indicator of success and I don't feel like it shows, you know, great. I don't feel like I'm a plus. But do I know that in the end, any given day will be a very small blip on the radar of a very valuable company that's growing up into the right? Yeah, so, you know, I can't eat, there's no great answer, but you have to stay grounded. And you can't let the stock marketer, the current stock price dictate what you do. We're gonna take another quick break, But when we come back, more from Julia, I want it takes to be a good leader. in really difficult times. Stay with us, I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Roz. Here's more for my conversation with Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz. I want to ask you about employees because I know when we had you on the show like you had free food for employees in a fitness center and a wellness stipend and and and maybe you might still have some of that but I'm assuming like many companies here in the Bay Area you are at at the very least hybrid and maybe some people are entirely remote. Tell me how you how you manage just the workforce the employees like coming out of COVID it's different time. Employees made different demands and had different expectations and with a tight labor market they had a lot of power for the first time in a long time. So how did you kind of adjust and manage to both retain employees but also to keep expenses down? Well first I think starting from a principle of it's not in us against them mentality and we are a company that puts at the very center of its differentiation as an employer the idea that you can come here and be the be the whole person you are and that you're cared for. So there's that was just a neat in in our culture. This has been an interesting evolution and there has been no easy answers and so I sat back and watched a lot of companies make a lot of proclamations during COVID and I kept scratching my head because I sort of thought like how the hell do you know how this ends up like like companies that said we're remote forever. Yeah either one either side of the spectrum right yeah I have I couldn't look anyone in the eye and say I have seen the crystal ball and after the last global pandemic here's how we worked I mean I have no idea how you would do that so I didn't I I really like stepped away from that and said okay what do we know for right now and we're making shorter term plans and giving people clarity where you could pick your path you know there was a point where like you we were going to be hybrid and then where we've arrived today is today we are resetting as a remote first company we are the best gathering company in the world and when I say that I mean you are gathering for a virtual meeting it is going to be an intentional productive thoughtful great easier time. How do you do that tell me how you do that because a lot of a lot of CEOs are saying to me what what are what are you doing how do you do what what are people doing and I'm getting a lot of different different examples so you're the best gathering place company let's just talk about virtually what what does that mean yeah so that means taking a step back periodically about once a quarter we take a week to scrub the calendar of our regular regular regularly scheduled programming and reassess why we meet and what the intention is it means making leaders the best conveners now I believe that the skill set that a great leader needs at the at the very top of the list is the ability to bring people together thoughtfully with great intention and productively yeah but how do you make a meeting let's just say anything right because I hate meetings and I think a lot of meetings are waste of time and I think a lot of times meetings that I'm asked to go to I shouldn't be at they're too long and there's just too much stuff yeah that half the people that don't even need to know I mean I'm not saying how did you solve this problem because I don't think you have nobody like yeah like if somebody has they're going to go to Stockholm and get the Nobel Prize or wherever Oslo wherever they give that prize how are you trying to tackle that problem how are you making your company a better place to to convene gatherings for employees well there's a way that you can do this through expectation setting and through you know supporting those expectations so particularly for the meetings that you hate to go to we're starting with cultural norms of make the main thing the main thing yeah actually got that from Josh Silverman I'll give him a shout out on that from Etsy yeah yeah and then I think it's it's it there has to be a very strong strategic map as to when people meet to solve what problem predominantly for the in-person gatherings because having people fly all over the country or the world and meeting up at off sites it's exhilarating but it's also very costly it's time consuming and it's taxing and so what we're working on right now for next year is how do we build a system wherein you can anticipate as a brightling when you'll see your team and you know exactly what you're going to be achieving together you know I've we've been a remote team all my teams on all my different shows be being before COVID just because you can work that way and in what I do and we communicate regularly and I talked to everybody pretty much every day because I'm tracking or recording or so we were using video interfaces for a long time you know I've talked to a lot of a lot of leaders now who are like you know it's challenging because when you aren't in an office especially for younger newer employees it's hard for them to find mentors I mean if you're if you're a 22 year old joining event by the college today and everybody around you is pretty much remote it's different than when you started you know in your career because you know you worked for in the TV industry right you were working on jackass and I'm TV shows and stuff like a lot to pick up right and you found some people who thought you were smart and interesting and they helped you it's much harder now so do you have any any thoughts about how you actually develop talent from within when we're we're we're all many of us are in a primarily remote or hybrid environment yeah I mean I think it's I think if you flip it and you look at it from a blank slate opportunity perspective rather than recapturing of what was and what worked for us when we were we little pups I tend to find that great things happen when you work on a multitude of different projects and the advice that I give my niece who just accepted her offer at Microsoft she's going into a remote team and my biggest advice is take every single project that comes your way like just absolutely knock yourself out because the more that you're participating and the more that you're working on different types of projects that is a that's actually an opportunity we didn't get early in our careers I was you know I was like a copying VHS tapes as an intern for for MTV right then also leaders have to care about bringing on younger talent and mentoring them and there's ways that you can do that remotely that you actually couldn't do that if they were in you know in office in Spain and you're in an office in San Francisco Julia the advice I got when I started my career 25 years ago was be the first one in in the last one out which is a version of what you told your your niece right and and take on all the assignments that come your way and I don't give that advice today because I I worry that that it doesn't resonate quite as well with younger folks and like when when you and I were starting our career you'd be told hey leave your attitude leave your baggage leave your personal life at the door sorry if you're having a bad day at you know at home but like this is work bring your A game to work that was just normal par for the course and that was the environment that many many senior executives today and senior leaders in companies grew up with but now it's different now it's bring a whole self to work including your challenges including the other things how do you how do you approach it how do you accommodate for that yeah I mean I think about it as you don't have to trade one off for the other and I want to build a company where you can both be cared for and feel the demands of opportunity so compassionate and demanding is the paradox that I focus on a lot and I think that it's it's I guess I find it's a fallacy that working hard and being fulfilled with accomplishment is antithetical to wellness and you know I think burnout is real and I think the mental health challenges that we face during the covid pandemic present an opportunity for us an opportunity to have honest conversations an opportunity to embed support into companies which I think should be the case and an opportunity to open up access to mental health support like we haven't had you know in our lifetimes really but I don't think work is the enemy yeah like I think being productive and being in community is the antidote to social isolation and mental health challenges what about politics I mean companies are and maybe it's tapering off a little bit now but for a while they'll really expect it to take public political positions either you're in this camper in that camp and and it became very challenging for companies that you know if they were neutral that essentially they were not and they were, you know, consorting with the enemy or whatever. And this can have a massive impact on the business. You know, if, you know, look at Bud Light, right? Bud Light made a decision and had a huge impact on its business for all kinds of things. It just didn't work an issue for corporations and companies and public companies a while ago. What do you do? I mean, if there's a big issue, if there's a big, you know, I don't know, you know, something that happens in the United States, what's your position? Do you, do you, as a leader in a company, publicly make your views known? Or do you just say nothing? It's, it's been a journey. That's for sure. And I feel like there was a moment in time where I was sending an email every other week on an issue that was completely out of my control. And it started to feel personally, incredibly inauthentic. Because there has to be space for CEOs to be human and to be learning and growing alongside everyone else. And I reject the notion that a CEO should be, you know, no all be all, like that's really dangerous, right? That's not good. So I stepped back from that practice and I really focused on how can we get back to what Eventbrite can do to be a great company? Eventbrite can advocate for social connection through live experiences. That's right in our wheelhouse. And we can be an active participant in helping to relieve the impacts of social isolation. We stand for freedom of assembly. And that's a really important thing for people to understand when they join the company. And there are things that people aren't going to agree with on the platform. Yeah, where do you draw the line? I mean, presumably, you know, if somebody wanted to have a drag event or something, no problem, but I'm assuming if somebody wanted to have like a neo-Nazi rally, not obviously there's a not comparable at all, but I'm just throwing two samples out, that's that would not be allowed. He draw the line very carefully. Yeah. And you keep yourself grounded in first principles. What's really important for us is that the decisions we're making, we're making well-informed, well-intentioned, and without subjective bias. And so that's a tall order, right? It is. I mean, do you, do you, I mean, how do you decide? Do you have a team or do you case by case or what? We do have a team. We have a team, we have a set of policies, and we have a very, very strong operation. Most of the time, we're not dealing with anonymous online behavior when people get together, so I don't want to give the sense that like, this is a big problem, it's really not. It's something that we have to deal with from time to time, but it's also a place where I think, as an organization, we continue to grow and be curious about what it means to stand for freedom of assembly, and there's been a number of different challenges. Like 30 years from now when I look back on Eventbrite, I want Eventbrite to be known as one of the best companies to work at, where you could do your best work, where you had one of your best managers or best leaders, and where you made a best friend. And underpinning all of that is, I think, how are walking the walk at Eventbrite is that we do the right thing. Sometimes it's extraordinarily difficult to do the right thing, but I think if your orientation is toward that, then that's where the gravitational pull is going to take you. - Yep, to tell me in 2020, you said, five years from now, so that would be 2025, so we're not there yet, or we're approaching. You said, I want to have slowed down, start to live in a more thoughtful mode to jump off the merry-go-round and be less transactional about life, and be really thoughtful about how we build the best products for Event creators. I think that you are, given what you told me over the course of this conversation, I think you're on that path, is it? Do you feel like you're on that path? - Yeah, I do. I mean, I think getting back to the basics is an incredible exercise in discipline and focus, but also in realizing what's most important. And myself personally, making that shift from somebody who was trying to make everyone happy to really focusing and making the main thing, the main thing, and bringing people along to that vision has meant the difference between me, feeling transactional and me feeling more grounded, and thoughtful. So while I'm always in pursuit of using time to its end degree most effective, I also have felt like I've been able to slow down because we have a plan and we're executing on it. And I can enjoy a bit more, you know, the things that might come up in the future. We didn't talk much about it, but I don't, I mean, I don't know by you, but the energy here is palpable around all the ways in which we can build, you know, great companies using AI. AI, yeah, sure. I'm going to these events all the time and watching this happen in real time. It's really cool. - It's exciting. I think it's a moment of growth that we've seen before. So if you've been around long enough in the Bay Area, you can recognize the signs, but I think, I think this time it feels a little bit different because I don't think we knew what was gone, what we had lost until it was gone. And I think communing and building together, that's the best antidote, I think, to putting COVID in the rear of the mirror. - Julia Hartz, thanks so much. - Thanks, Guy. - That's Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. Hey, thanks so much for listening to this show. This week, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode. And as always, it is free. This episode was produced by Ramelle Wood with music composed by Sam Paulson and Ramelle Bluey. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Carrie Thompson. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Neva Grant, Casey Herman, Jayce Howard, Sam Paulson, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Ross and you've been listening to how I built this lab. (upbeat music)