Julia Hartz at Female Founders Conference 2014

Our next speaker is Julia Hearts. 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. She was always the female founder that I said, "She is gonna be like my first call to come get to speak." So, I am so happy that Julia is here to talk to us today.

"Hi everyone! Can you guys hear me okay? I got the Britney Spears mic on. Well, I admire Jessica immensely, as well as Paul and Sam and the rest of the YC team. For a couple of years, we've had the great pleasure to come to one of the YC dinners, and it's so humbling to sit in front of now 80 people and tell our story.

Today, I wanted to talk to you about some of the things that I've learned in hindsight, and I'm gonna try to keep it in the early years. But I mean, Adora was amazing at that. 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, I also think that, you know—it's one of those things where you really—I always call Eventbrite an overnight success eight years in the making. So, time does fly.

Today, I want to give you just a quick snapshot of where we are as a company. 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.

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, you know, focusing on what is most important is key. 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 may turn out to be something that wasn't so great after all. In hindsight, you learned 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 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 gonna be worth something, so that's actually kind of funny.

For me, I think hindsight instead of being 20/20 is really a mixture of three things: data, wisdom, and perspective. 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. I'll point out that, um, 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 an executive at MTV and then at FX Networks. Along that time, I actually met Kevin and was able to see sort of like 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.

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 two 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, um, was the guy that really helped me make that leap. It's because of his eternal optimism and sort of this feeling that there was no way that something 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."