We're sunsetting PodQuest on 2025-07-28. Thank you for your support!
Export Podcast Subscriptions
cover of episode Business Daily meets: Julia Hartz

Business Daily meets: Julia Hartz

2025/4/10
logo of podcast Business Daily

Business Daily

AI Deep Dive AI Chapters Transcript
People
J
Julia Hartz
Topics
Julia Hartz: 我从美国电视行业转行,与丈夫和另一位工程师共同创立了Eventbrite。起初,我们看到了当时购票方式的不足,缺乏便捷的线上购票渠道,于是我们致力于打造一个更加民主化的购票平台,让更多人能够轻松创建和参与各种类型的线下活动。 在Eventbrite发展的过程中,我们经历过许多挑战。例如,我们曾经调整过定价策略,但由于没有充分考虑创作者的感受,导致用户不满,最终我们根据用户反馈将价格恢复到之前的水平。这让我们深刻认识到倾听用户声音的重要性,并始终保持迭代和改进。 我们专注于中小型线下活动的票务,而非大型体育赛事或演唱会。这使得我们能够避免与Ticketmaster等巨头直接竞争,并专注于为社区活动提供服务。我们的平台上不存在黄牛票和动态定价问题,因为我们直接销售门票,没有中间商。我们也积极支持打击黄牛票的立法,因为这不仅损害了消费者的利益,也影响了艺术家的收入。 在技术方面,我们积极拥抱AI技术,将其应用于核心产品中,以提升用户体验。同时,我们也关注到“第四空间”这一新兴的线下社交趋势,即人们将线上兴趣与线下活动相结合,这与Eventbrite的使命相符。 总而言之,Eventbrite的成功在于我们始终关注用户需求,建立信任,并不断适应变化的环境。我们致力于为创作者和消费者提供便捷、透明、安全的购票体验,并通过持续改进和创新,在不断变化的市场中保持竞争力。

Deep Dive

Chapters
Julia Hartz's career path transitioned from the American TV industry in Los Angeles to co-founding Eventbrite. Initially hesitant about entrepreneurship, she embraced the challenge and discovered a passion for hands-on learning.
  • Julia Hartz's background in the American TV industry
  • Co-founded Eventbrite with her husband and Renaud Visage
  • Initially hesitant about entrepreneurship but found a passion for hands-on learning

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
中文

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily Meets here on the BBC World Service. This is where we bring you in-depth interviews with people in business from around the globe. Today, it's the turn of Julia Hart. She's the co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite, a multi-million dollar ticketing firm which allows people to create and promote all kinds of local events.

If you imagine it as a pyramid, we are that fatty middle layer of every single type of event that could possibly be ticketed all over the world. Julia shares with us her journey from working in the American TV industry in Los Angeles to launching a startup that's become a world-famous ticketing brand. It was a risk that I had not planned to take and I had never imagined myself as an entrepreneur. And she reflects on the challenges...

of turning digital communities into real-world connections. We had changed our pricing last year, which really didn't work well for our creators. We listened to them and we reverted back to our original pricing. That's Julia Hartz, here on Business Daily from the BBC.

Growing up in Santa Cruz, California, Julia Hartz always had a strong desire to work in the TV industry. When she was in college, she managed to land an internship on the hugely popular TV show Friends. Then she went on to work for the likes of MTV and FX, until in the early 2000s, she met her future husband,

and considered a different option. I was in television development. This came out of left field and was brought to me by Kevin, who I was engaged to marry at the time. And we had decided to settle in Northern California, where I am from. So I moved from Southern California to Northern California and left my TV career behind. And I like to say that Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and

And one of the commonalities of serial entrepreneurs is they don't have the chip in the brain that says this might not work out. So his optimism was quite infectious. And before I knew it, I was working in a windowless phone closet with him on Eventbrite. And then we recruited Renaud to join us as our co-founding engineer.

This was 2006, and alongside co-founder Renaud Visage, Julia and Kevin Hartz honed in on the lack of cash-free options to buy event tickets at that time. The result was Eventbrite, the ultimate goal to help turn online communities into in-person connections. We saw a gap in the offerings of event ticketing. There was really just

big incumbent expensive systems and then pay by cash or check at the door. And we thought there was an opportunity to democratize event ticketing and really elevate event organizers who bring people together.

In 2016, a decade after the founding of the company, Julia took over as its CEO from her husband Kevin, leading the business to go public shortly afterwards. It was a risk that I had not planned to take and I had never imagined myself as an entrepreneur before.

What I realized in the first year of working on Eventbrite is that I love to learn by doing. So I, in fact, have a core skill or attribute that lends itself well to entrepreneurship. I hated school. I hated sitting passively. I love to get my hands dirty. So building Eventbrite from the ground up was incredibly in line with what I love to do.

The online platform enables users to buy tickets to community gatherings. And almost one million creators publish on the site, advertising all kinds of events, from cooking classes

to cold water plunging. What you won't find, though, are tickets to high-profile music concerts or sell-out sports events. The company's focus is on smaller-scale public gatherings. Last year, Eventbrite distributed 270 million tickets to more than 4.7 million events. Anyone can ticket an event. It's

a few minutes to get started and you can be accepting payments for tickets wherever you are in the world. And so that genesis of democratization started Eventbrite as a platform for ticketing.

And today we're a marketplace for live experiences, ticketing over 5 million events in the last 12 months alone. We don't ticket large stadiums or arenas. That's a pretty different business model. And we also don't focus on backyard barbecues or birthday parties. If you imagine it as a pyramid, we are that fatty middle layer of every single type of event that could possibly be ticketed on Eventbrite and, you know, all over the world.

What are the overheads? I mean, I suppose your competitive advantage typically on things like this is price, right? What is your margin within a sale? 98% of the people that use Eventbrite are not going through a sale cycle. That's incredibly efficient for us. And that lends itself to a nearly 70% gross margin in core ticketing, which is hard to do at an average price of $40 a ticket when you're paying payment processing fees on that.

We're very mindful of the fact that an event organizer doesn't have a ton of incremental profit to spend on the event. There's startup costs that go into that. So we really focus on keeping our ticket prices very low and accessible for the consumer to pay, as well as not overburdening the creator in cost. And so Eventbrite is free to use for the creator because the consumer is paying the ticket fee.

in almost 90% of the cases. So there you are, one of the big hitters now, I guess, in this market, along with Ticketmaster, which I guess is the other big name in the sector. I mean, they tend to do the bigger events. Is that right?

We're focused on the live experiences that fill your calendar on a more regular basis. And so the reason why Eventbrite is a brand that people know and a generational company at this point, rounding to 20 years, is because we've built something that people want, first and foremost. Second of all, we've built trust and a relationship with consumers. So when they see Eventbrite, they know that they're buying something that they can trust.

But third, we're making it easier for the creators to reach their audiences. We're not dependent on one category or one geography. We're building a generational company that actually reinforces itself through what we call self-sign-on, which is that 98% of creators and 70% of our revenue is flowing through Eventbrite in a way that's

quite programmatic and it scales really well. Now, the other 30% of revenue is really targeted inside sales where we're going after events that we know our consumers want. So we use the breadth and insight from the data of where consumers are going to then target

certain creators in certain cities. And so that gives us a balancing lever in terms of the business, but also brings better inventory and just, you know, breadth and depth of what people are looking for to the platform. You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, host of Wondery's Business Movers. In our latest series, media mogul Ted Turner launches a 24-hour channel dedicated solely to breaking news. But CNN doesn't just shake up the television industry. It transforms journalism, politics, and culture in America forever. Listen to Business Movers, making the news on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Ed Butler, and today I'm speaking to Julia Hartz. She's the chief executive of Eventbrite, the online ticketing platform. And ticketing is a sector which has come under scrutiny in recent years over how the tickets are being sold and especially how they're priced. Tickets to your favorite show in Michigan could soon be easier. State lawmakers are considering new legislation designed to fight overpriced tickets by cracking down on automated ticket bots.

It is the so-called Taylor Swift bill. It combats automated bots buying up all the tickets to popular concerts and shows and then reselling them for higher prices. The price of resale tickets for live events in the UK could be capped under government plans to clamp down on ticket touts. Ministers are also looking at so-called dynamic pricing. That's after Oasis fans were caught out by rocketing prices last summer.

OK, I just want to raise some of the issues that people do complain about. And this isn't specific to your company, but in general terms, we had the controversy, didn't we, connected with Ticketmaster and Taylor Swift a couple of years ago. And this was all about dynamic pricing. That's essentially surge pricing, which increases ticket prices based on demand.

Did you apply that principle in your sales? That's a very charitable description of what was happening in dynamic pricing.

I would say that we don't see at all the secondary market brokers and bots in our marketplace because we're selling primary inventory and we're focused on smaller scale events rather than the massive stadium and arena tours. And so we thrive by empowering creators and communities to connect more.

There's no middleman in our sale. And so thankfully, we don't have to fight that battle. Right. So there is no surge pricing on your platform? There's no surge pricing on our platform. No. I mean, I would argue that there was no surge pricing in the Taylor Swift platform.

In the Taylor Swift tour, it was bots and brokers buying the inventory and then selling them on other platforms. OK, well, what about the issue of ticket touts and scalpers? I mean, all scalpers. It depends on which country you're in and what you call them. But I mean, some countries like the UK, for instance, they are now proposing legal caps on the market for tickets.

Do you support that? I mean, are you concerned about the presence of secondary markets around your own product?

No, not at all. We keep an eye on that because obviously we're interested in the market as a whole. And we've been in support of legislation that does bring greater scrutiny and regulation against these practices, because in general, it's not good for the consumer. It's not transparent and it's not fair. The second thing is that it's not good for the artist because

they're not seeing a lot of that revenue flowing back to them. And so I think in total, the industry as a whole is starting to become highly scrutinized. And there are several regulation bills and acts that are being prepared to pass. We actually lobbied in the United States for the Fans First Act, which is a bill to bring more transparency to ticketing fees and to the pricing of tickets.

And what about fraudulent and counterfeit tickets?

We certainly, as a self-service platform, have had to run fast and hard against fraudulent and spam events. And I'm really proud of the impact that our team has had in battling this problem in an increasingly more sophisticated world, especially with the advent of AI and bots that can create content really easily. But our back-end algorithm and our ability to detect things that aren't

anomalies and not in line with what we would normally see is just getting better and better. It's always been a part of the challenge of scaling a business that has such a high level of self-service. And it's one of our strengths. And again, part of that competitive mode.

I think that consumers are expecting to have consumer protection when they're buying tickets on a platform like Eventbrite, as they should. And so we really focus on making sure that we can provide that transparency, that we can work behind the scenes to prohibit any sort of fraudulent activity. But it is a 24-7 battle, that's for sure.

You raised a question of trust and trust in your brand. There is criticism out there. I was just online looking at one of the review platforms, Trustpilot in this case, and it was giving you 1.2 out of 5 stars. I was seeing, I think, primarily for your recent relaunch of your online platform. Is that right? I mean, I can quote back some of the comments from

but they weren't favorable. Reviews are reviews and you can't please everyone all the time, but there did seem to be a less than friendly response to some of your revamped website. Yeah, I think what you're referring to is we had changed our pricing last year, which really didn't work well for our creators. And we rolled it back. We listened to them when we rolled it back.

And we reverted back to our original pricing. You know, it's a tough lesson to learn, certainly publicly and to have that moment with your customers. But we will always be a company that listens and iterates and experiments and

The couple of things on what you referenced, I would ask you to look at other ticketing sites that are being reviewed by Trustpilot. There's certainly an ecosystem of reviews in different places. We read all of them. So we take them to heart.

no matter where they occur. The second thing I would point you to is our app reviews for our consumer app, which have millions of reviews at 4.9 stars. So there's certainly ways in which we're excelling and there's ways in which we're, you know,

Learning hard lessons and making corrections along the way. So I feel proud about the team's reaction to these things because we don't rest on our laurels and allow unhappy customers to continue to feel those pain points. We work hard to solve those pain points. And are you succeeding? Because there are rising costs in your area, aren't there? I mean, there was some, I think, negative feedback

financial results announced in the last couple of years? How are you facing up to the financial challenges of the current economic climate? So when I look at Eventbrite as a company,

We have a balance sheet that far exceeds anybody in our market that we're competing against head to head. Most of them are private companies, so they don't have the level of transparency as we do. But I'm very proud of how we have managed both the COVID crisis where the entire market

basis of our business went away, where we have invested in our product and continue to build a world-class team, and where we have shown up for our customers. We are producing revenue in a way that is responsible and that allows us to invest in the future. And, you know, as a public company, every quarter we're showing up and showing our numbers and where we're headed is into profitability and being able to be self-sustaining through any condition. I'll

say like COVID was a black swan event. So we know that we can we know that we can make it through the toughest times. With rapidly advancing technology such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, the businesses in the event ticketing industry are on the cusp of some major transformations. But that's not the only change taking place. On the consumer side, there's an emerging new trend, Julia says, which is offering a new type of gathering. The

future of event ticketing sites, it goes hand in hand with the future of how consumers are thinking about getting together. A couple of things for us. One is that we've, we've

adopted AI into our core product for some time. You can use AI to create your event, to create your marketing materials. The cultural movement around events is, I think, even more interesting, which is, you know, we've recently released a report around fourth spaces, which is this

idea that you have, you know, your offline life, your online life, your, you know, going to sit in a cafe and work life. And then you have this convergence of your online interests. So whatever communities you're a part of online,

meeting an IRL in real life through organized events. And that's really why we continue to remain relevant is that people are craving that connection. So the future is that we will continue doing what we do

at a bigger scale, at a higher quality, and really meeting people where they are. And, you know, I don't want to sound too heady, but I think what makes Eventbrite special is that we're working on a mission that matters. And that's, you know, it's relevant through many, many different seasons of change and challenge. An online platform, but working in real life. Correct. Correct.

That's Julia Hartz, the co-founder and the CEO of Eventbrite. She was speaking to me, Ed Butler, for this edition of Business Daily. The programme was produced by Amber Mahmood. To get in touch with the team, do send us an email. The address is businessdaily at bbc.co.uk.

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, host of Wondery's Business Movers. In our latest series, media mogul Ted Turner launches a 24-hour channel dedicated solely to breaking news. But CNN doesn't just shake up the television industry. It transforms journalism, politics, and culture in America forever. Listen to Business Movers, making the news on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.