Eventbrite

“The thing I learned back then is it's so important to give a fast no rather than nothing at all, because certainly not 27 VCs did not call us and say, hey, you know what, it's not for us for these reasons, or not right now, but would love to see this, and this…”

“It was always part of our plan to go public, meaning we wanted Eventbrite to be a public company, and so this wasn't an agenda that was brought on to us by our investors, but rather, you know, our own agenda.”

“We were confident enough to say that we were accepting term sheets on a certain date, and, ah, and we received three term sheets, and we raised six and a half million from Sequoia Capital in that round.”

“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…”

“So we decided to charge a per paid ticket fee of two and a half percent plus 99 cents, and we decided to not charge for free tickets.”

“I'll never forget there was a 100,000 person free salsa congress in Mexico City that happened on Eventbrite when we had no business Ticketing. A 100,000 person event.”

“Certainly I don't think Eventbrite is completely impervious to another, you know, big economic meltdown, but I feel pretty confident that, that we'll be able to weather the storm.”

“Basically there was this big void in the market. You know, either you were using checks and cash collected at the door and tracking your attendees on maybe Excel spreadsheets or by hand. Or you were using really expensive kind of dinosaur software on the enter…”

“One of the things that happened in 2009 Is we started to see Facebook become one of the top 10 drivers of traffic to our site.”

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

“What I do know, while I don't have the exact number for 2009 in my head, I know gross ticket sales was around ten million.”

“One of the most remarkable things that has happened in this journey is that we imagined Eventbrite would be what it is today, and that's not because we're clairvoyant. There's a lot of luck that goes into not having to pivot or to completely change your busine…”

“I think building something from scratch allows you to expand and grow with the progress. That's why when I look at Other companies that have had this sort of hockey stick growth or just that rocket ship, that would be difficult.”

“We raised a round of friends and family money, basically an angel round, less than a million dollars. And that took us until 2008, and we had maybe two employees, two or three employees who had joined us. And then we decided to go raise our first round of inst…”

“The Ticketmaster strategy is one part of a Live Nation strategy, which is to be vertically integrated into an event. It's large arenas and stadiums that typically serve sports and music that But Eventbrite is a horizontal platform that enables a wide array of …”

“If you can't take the heat of that responsibility, then you absolutely shouldn't be a public company CEO”

“The process of going public was really helpful for us. It forced us to codify who we are, and what we're building, and why people are buying what we're building, and what our strategy is for the future. And it's not as if we weren't doing those things, but I t…”

“So what we did was we left our 2009 operating plan with every VC that we met with. And that was sort of seen as, you know, a little risky. Because nobody knew what 2009 would hold. And then our plan B was to take a more lean approach to scaling in 2009, go bac…”

“Well, we went and saw 27 firms, and we received 27 no's or not right now. Huh. So we received zero checks. No checks.”

“I would say that 70% of this was work ethic and staying focused, and I would say 30% is about luck and whether that's luck of, you know, meeting the love of my life and co-founder and co-parent back on that fateful day in May of 2003 at a wedding, or the luck …”

“And I can't imagine a better user group, sort of tech bloggers and critics to test your product out on.”

“I mean, it's interesting that the median ticket price on Eventbrite is around 40 dollars, so it's actually higher than you would think. You know, it's always been within that range, and so there were a lot of five dollar ticket events, and there were a few, yo…”

“We never work on the same part of the business at the same time, and we have complementary skills, and we have a set of rules to work through conflict quickly.”

“I don't spend any time lamenting about being a public company. I think that's so boring and unoriginal.”

“We set a few rules, as I mentioned, and one of them was if we ever were frustrated or had an impasse, we would stop what we were doing, turn the lights off, and I'm not kidding, lay down on the ground and hold hands and talk about it.”

“And we did that for two full years. It was just the three of us.”

“We raised private capital sometimes when we didn't need it because we wanted to ensure that we would have it when, you know, the bottom fell out again.”

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

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

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

“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…”

“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…”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”