Eventbrite

“Our own research shows that pretty much every Gen Z-er, 98% says that they want to extend their relationship with a product or a story that they love in real life.”

“Well, you know, live podcasting shows are up over 65% on the Eventbrite platform this year, and that's really driven in part by what you've built.”

“Like, even with Eventbrite selling at one X today, I think it was still like a 50 or 60% premium that Bending Spoons had to pay.”

“Just this week, they acquired Eventbrite for five hundred million dollars.”

“And when I went to Dropbox and I ran the question, I was like, 50% of people said they'd be very disappointed without the product. And then and then I went to Eventbrite after that. And at the 80% of the people said they'd be very disappointed if they could no…”

“He used to call me up at Eventbrite and scream at me, like, for, you know, he had a big rivalry with TechCrunch, And when we would ticket things for TechCrunch, he would get really angry and like, just call me up and scream at me for doing that.”

“I don't think cross-site network effects really kick in until you're like past 50% of the demand, probably even more than that.”

“You have kind of ephemeral inventory, generally not a lot of data on the consumer side as to what consumer preferences are, because historically you haven't been collecting it. So then your ability to match And drive true discovery is initially very bad.”

“The frequency maps to their business model, not to how good our software is, right? The music festival person's not going to start putting on music festivals every week. Like, it's just not possible.”

“They actually, Eventbrite, when I joined, was not really in the habit of measuring cohort retention. It just measured net dollar retention.”

“Niche is the new mass. So people are absolutely wanting to be in more highly curated experiences that map to those groups that they found on Reddit.”

“It's not the best way to make money, but it's the best way to influence is getting people together in real life.”

“So we're seeing these creators who have been in the past matchmakers or speed dating organizers. They're actually changing their format completely.”

“I think it's hard to make a lot of money in ticketing.”

“The discovery of events is hard because it's not askew. It's an ephemeral thing that happens. You don't go to it alone. So I buy shoes on Instagram post-temp, but I'm not going to go to an event alone, you know, that often post-temp. You have to coordinate wit…”

“We, all of our Tableau dashboards broke. We were generating negative revenue, so more refunds than revenue.”

“What we saw is virtual events went up to like, 90% of the events on the platform.”

“We went from, you know, record high ticket sales to negative revenue in 14 days, and something we had spent 14 years building was It basically evaporated in the span of two weeks.”

“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 and also a public company?”

“And by and large, the most important guidance I got were from people like Henry Ellenbogen, who said, you know, cut costs and raise money now, don't wait, and be severe about it.”

“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.”

“Frequent creators, those who are coming to Eventbrite, regardless of their category, geo size, But they were using the platform at least one time a month. They were a small portion of creators producing a big portion of revenue, and our product absolutely suck…”

“So virtual events went from one percent of the events on Eventbrite to 90% of the events on Eventbrite to now 10%.”

“So when we halved the company, which was so extreme, no one was doing that, and when we raised more than we needed, and this is where being a public company was a virtue, because we could raise convertible debt, which, you know, we raised two rounds in very fa…”

“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 Eventbrite's ticketing fees, on average, are three dollars.”

“Yeah, so that means taking a step back periodically about once a quarter we take a week to scrub the calendar of our regular, regularly scheduled programming and reassess why we meet and what the intention is.”

“But I don't think work is the enemy. Like, I think being productive and being in community is the antidote to social isolation and mental health challenges.”

“There has to be space for CEOs to be human and to be learning and growing alongside everyone else, and I reject the notion that a CEO should be You know know-all, be-all. Like, that's really dangerous, right? That's not good. So I stepped back from that practi…”

“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.”

“Eventbrite was a thirty million dollar product led growth company.”

“Products like cloud poker night have a different kind of virality. Which I think, I don't know what it's called, but group virality or something. Similar to how Eventbrite grows or meetup.com grows, which is an attendee becomes a host.”

“When we first started Eventbrite, we built the product hand in hand with our earliest users, and those early adopters were mainly tech bloggers who were using the platform to host meetups, and part of that process was creating a very sort of tight feedback loo…”

“Among Eventbrite's first customers was the tech blog, TechCrunch, and the event that would ultimately grow into TechCrunch Disrupt.”

“Let me tell you, like, there's no better way to get great feedback than to build a product for people who build them themselves and or write about them all the time.”

“That type of observation of not having a bias towards what you're trying to confirm And not always having a hypothesis that you're trying to prove, but simply observing your customers can yield such great results, and to me is the cornerstone of creating an ef…”

“We took our data and our findings to Facebook. We gave them to Dave Morin, and we said, hey, check this out. And in turn, he gave us the Events API key that nobody else had for Facebook Connect. So we built the bridge for event creators to be able to just one …”

“I actually think that the data insights team that we have, it almost in a way has benefited from not talking to customers all day because they are actually looking at just the data and then looping that together with folks who are talking to customers all day …”

“User research is a scarce resource. We have to reserve it for the areas that have extreme uncertainty and high leverage for getting to certain.”

“And now Eventbrite drives, you know, 25% of the ticket sales itself.”

“It's going to work, but it's hard and it's not replicable for a lot of other SaaS businesses. You need to have a direct relationship with your customer's customers. First off, those customers need to have needs beyond that single supplier. Usually it's like a …”

“Something we started doing more recently at both Eventbrite and whatnot is just designating the person on the cross-functional team who drives the project. At Eventbrite, we call it the driver. At whatnot, we call it the DRI, directly responsible individual. B…”

“Another one that comes to mind, you know, where we worked with this was in, in their pre IPO days, you know, even bright, which is a, you know, B to B SaaS company. They used to have a one product that was actually servicing all of their customers. And then we…”

“When you use the particle product, it like, it feels really good. When you use Eventbrite, like you want to take a shower.”

“We strive for this concept of what we call perceived simplicity, which is there are advanced features in the product and they are easily discoverable when you look for them, but they're effectively hidden if you're not looking for them. And of course the major…”

“Some of the most impactful projects that product teams can work on at scale, you know, not early stage startups per se, but at scale are the hardest to measure. And because of that, they just get chronically underfunded.”

“Growth is about connecting people to the value that's already been created by the business, you know, either through product or services or whatever. So growth is not about building totally new features, totally new products. It's about once we have those and …”

“In the case of Eventbrite, our Series A was actually the lowest price term sheet, but having that trust and knowing his brainpower and prowess in building companies, it became a very easy choice for us”

“And we started to pay really close attention to how COVID could impact, particularly the United States, where two-thirds of our business is produced.”

“We have seen, you know, multiple thousand percentage increase of online events on our platform in comparison to last year.”

“What's interesting is that 85% of consumers who are buying tickets to these virtual events knew the creator prior to COVID.”

“And then I think April alone, we processed over eight million tickets to events virtually when, you know, many in-person events were not happening.”

“There's something really delightful about receiving a physical good and then going online with other people who've also re received that physical good, whether it's a craft kit or it's craft beer tasting or it's cheese tasting. We've seen this Across the board…”

“While ticket prices Tend to be lower, a bit lower on online events, and we imagine they may have a premium for in-person events once we can gather again in person. Those online events can hold a lot more people, right, at a lower cost, and so it actually works…”

“We never have charged for free events in the history of Eventbrite, and we're a fourteen-year-old company.”

“For instance, we've had over a thousand drive-in events on the platform in the last month alone.”

“Sequoia Capital, Rolof Botha, I mean, they first funded us in the depths of the recession in 2009.”

“I think online events like the ones we're creating has, have any way more than about 10 X, 20 X.”

“Today, 14 years since it was founded, Eventbrite is a publicly traded company With a market cap of nearly two billion dollars.”

“One of the things was about this very simple transactional platform to sell tickets to any kind of event, and it was really the conversation about why we would go and approach ticketing Was much, much less about the industry and more about the notion that expe…”

“We spent less than a quarter of a million dollars in the first two years of Eventbrite being up and running and operating.”