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. I've wanted for years to put on a conference just for women, and 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.

I'm gonna try to keep it in the early years, but, I mean, Adora was amazing at that. That talk just killed me! 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 think that I, 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. 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 vaguely a great idea. But when you actually focus on that idea, it may turn out to be something that wasn't so great after all, and 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. 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.

The first major decision you'll make as a founder is who to choose as your co-founder. I'll point out that Adora said that we're all nuts. 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 whom I guess, or as 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 LA. 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. 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.

This guy was the guy that really helped me make that leap, and 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 is like 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 when I had a perfectly great job offer from Current TV up in San Francisco.

So I somehow managed to close my eyes really tight and reach out and take a leap with him. It's obviously the best thing I've ever done. We were engaged at the time, so when we started Eventbrite, a lot of people ask us what it's like to be co-founders and spouses. We don't know any different. We started Eventbrite when we had just gotten engaged.

I think that when I reflect back on why it worked out for us, I think that we put a lot of care and attention into how to make it work as co-founders. In hindsight, so much was on the line. By the way, obviously, we wanted to preserve our relationship, but also we wanted desperately to make it work as co-founders.

We had fun working together in a windowless conference room with a wall of Top Ramen and sawhorses and doors as desks. But, you know, I think in hindsight, actually having that amount of care and attention to detail and really putting effort into making it work with your co-founder is incredibly important for future success.

Obviously for us, it turned out well! We got married and grew Eventbrite alongside our family. Emma's here with me today, who's incredibly wowed by my talk just on the floor. For us, our lives and our work are intrinsically linked, and it just works for us.

The second thing that we had to figure out when we started Eventbrite was where to base the company. I can't underestimate the sort of strangeness in choosing San Francisco in late 2005, early 2006. We got a free office in what became a co-working space in Potrero Hill, owned by a friend of ours. His only request was to bring other startups into this space and tell other people about it.

We would go on these walks through SOMA, and we'd walk past one empty building after another. Kevin would tell me all of these stories about the companies that had lived in those buildings, much like the pets.com story. It was a ghost town, and we were sort of crazy to start our company in San Francisco because the conventional wisdom was that everybody was down south. I’m not kidding for those of you who can't believe that right now.

You needed to be by Stanford to be able to pull the best talent. Well, what ended up happening was because we sort of knew that we needed to defy conventional wisdom to be able to make it as a small scrappy startup and not compete with the big massive companies down south, but also because we were a live experiences company – something based on the idea of cultural and live experience density – we knew that San Francisco was the right place for us.

For many years, we were one of the only young and burgeoning tech companies in San Francisco. What ended up happening was we actually got a lot of our friends and a bunch of co-founders to join our space, and soon we had about 20 different companies in this 10,000 square foot space of just co-founding teams.

I think that was incredibly informative and really transformational for us because we actually kind of grew up in the course of two years with all of these other companies. In this one tiny space came TripIt, Flixter, Zynga, Trulia, Eventbrite, Opower, and then a couple of others that didn't end up making it. It was absolutely the best idea in hindsight to defy conventional wisdom and stick with San Francisco.

Now fast forward. A lot of my time is spent in this sort of all-out battle for talent in San Francisco. These are just a few of our friends who are within blocks of us, and San Francisco is no longer the different or unique place to be. But for me, I think it made us a better company because we were able to really flex that muscle and be very aggressive in recruiting.

But it makes it a harder job, and I think at the end of this craziness, if there ever is an end, we'll be a better company because we stuck to San Francisco and because we're fighting the good fight and recruiting against these amazing companies that I admire.

The third thing that we thought about was how to make money. Kevin and I are notoriously horrible at monetization. We launched Eventbrite with a basic service and a premium service, so sort of the classic freemium model. The only problem was that we never ever put anything just in the premium service.

So all of our features – it was impossible for you as a customer to come to the site and understand why you should pay a two-and-a-half percent plus ninety-nine cent fee because they were two in the same. So we agonized over whether or not to change that, feeling like we'd see a bunch of attrition and our customers would leave us if we asked them to pay us for our service.

We finally ripped the band-aid off, and lo and behold, our attrition rate was pretty much nothing! Our conversion rates skyrocketed because users didn't have to come to the site to decide why they should use it for free or why they should pay for the service.

In hindsight, we shouldn't have ever launched with a free service in the first place. We ended up becoming truly a freemium model because we based our ticket fee off of the ticket price and we didn't think about what would happen if somebody put a zero in the ticket price box.

So what began as this free service – if you have a free event and use Eventbrite – all the bells and whistles of the product and the platform are free. When we realized that, we were like, 'Huh! That was a mess-up!' But wait, it'll really piss our competitors off because we won't monetize a free product, and we'll just undercut our competitors.

Then what happened? Thousands upon thousands of free events started to be published to the platform. So when I talked about that one billion dollars in gross ticket sales last year, that actually only represents 30% of our business. The other 70% are free events.

The reason why that's such a good thing for us is because the growth of Eventbrite – the engine of growth – is based on this virtuous cycle where attendees become organizers. Those who have attended an event and who become aware of the Eventbrite brand are the number one driver of new event organizers on the platform.

So we don't care if you're attending a free event or a paid event. You're still attending, and a portion of your cohort is going to convert into a paid event organizer. So that for us, in hindsight, was golden for our business model.

The last thing I want to talk about is one of the other key components and things I think about a lot in hindsight, and that is the growth of the team, particularly in leadership. We were three people: Kevin, myself, and Renault, our third co-founder. Bless his heart!

In 2006, we were 15 people. By the end of... I was with 3 people for 2 years, and then we started hiring in 2008. We were 15 people, and then 30, then 100, then 200, then 300. For us in the early days, it was all about hiring the best and the brightest people to do things that Kevin and I really were not good at doing.

We ended up in that sort of 15 to 30 range with a bunch of really smart individual contributors. As we started to grow towards a hundred, we had this big growth spurt in 2010. I saw something kind of crazy happen, which was it was like a pop-up book.

We suddenly organized ourselves into this sort of hierarchical formation, and what happened was that we ended up with this huge layer of first-time leaders. Let me tell you, in hindsight now – and this is something I've just realized in the last maybe six or twelve months – leadership, when you're growing a company and getting bigger, is really one of the biggest opportunities to blow it.

I think that we put people in positions where they've had very little experience, and everybody's running so quickly that it's hard to really understand when somebody needs help or when they just need to see a great model of leadership.

For me, it really helped me understand what is most important when we build leaders. This moment happened to me when last summer I wanted to reach out and talk to all the leaders in the company and just have one-on-ones with them.

I asked for a list of leaders and was like, "Great! I'm gonna just go around and see how everybody's doing and what they need, how we can help them be better leaders." Then somebody gave me the list, and there were 60 leaders in the company. That blew my mind!

Not only because it would take me longer than a week, but also because I had no idea we had 60 leaders in the company. Now I think, in hindsight, I've realized that it doesn't matter what stage of the company you are. I actually wish I would have thought about this much earlier in our growth.

It's so incredibly important to think about the WHO, the why, the when, and the what when you're choosing your leaders. Who are they? Why would you choose them to be a leader in your company? What is it that they exude or that they have, beyond their amazing Rockstar ability to do their job, that would make them a great leader?

When is it the right time in their career development to make them a leader? I think a lot of times in hyper-growth companies, we're pushing people into those positions much too early. Sometimes it works out, but I've seen it unfortunate when we put them underwater and really take an amazing individual contributor or team player and make them into something that they feel is a failure, which, in my opinion, is not right.

Finally, what is the most important part of leadership for you as you grow your company? Again, I think that could be a very abstract notion right now when you're just starting out, but I wish I would have thought about it in hindsight a little bit earlier.

The last thing that I wanted to touch upon is sort of philosophy and culture. One of the things that's really, really, really hard to do, in my opinion, and really scary, is setting a philosophy as a founder or a leader. I think the reason why I'm scared to do it sometimes is that I feel like that philosophy will become stagnant or irrelevant over time.

It's a bit scary to put your own philosophy out there, but what I've learned recently is that it's so incredibly important to have that anchor. Philosophies change; they can evolve. At Eventbrite, we say we're in pursuit of relentless evolution when it comes to our culture, and philosophies can also evolve. You won't get persecuted if they do.

I think it's so important to put that anchor down so that your team isn't just floating out at sea. Recently, we were able to come up with our vision for Eventbrite. I know that's probably really surprising that we never had a vision statement before, but our vision is to bring the world together through live experiences.

The way that we're going to do that, or our mission and how we're going to achieve that, is to efficiently build a global marketplace of live experiences that people love. This felt not unlike birthing one of my children to get this out and to get it into the company. It didn't take that much time; it wasn't months and months of work. There were lots of conversations, and it was a collaborative effort.

But I think that it's so good to be able to point to something and make sure that we're all moving in the right direction. I know this could evolve, but I mean, if we were able to actually build a global marketplace that people love, that would be a dream come true. We chose that because it's really, really hard to do.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about culture because obviously that's something that's near and dear to my heart. I spend most of my day thinking about the people of Eventbrite, or the Breitlings, and I get to work hand in hand with each one of them to form our culture.

The backstory is that our culture really derives from every single Perez – every single person that comes to Eventbrite. When we started to hire in that hyper-growth phase between 30 and 100, we did a brand exercise – our first-ever branding exercise – where we asked our users how they would describe Eventbrite.

They used these words: accessible, empowering, social, delightful, dedicated, innovative, and genuine. When I saw that list, I realized that those words describe the Breitlings themselves. In hindsight, that shouldn't have been such a surprise because the people who build the product should probably personify the product, and they're both intrinsically linked.

What I did was repurpose the brand tenets to be our culture tenets. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel or come up with some mission statement around our culture, I actually used that list to jump-start our hiring and what we looked for.

In addition to impact and skills, we looked for this list of culture tenets. When I think of how you continue to evolve a great culture, I think it has to include a high-velocity feedback loop. Just recently, we implemented an eNPS score – the employee net promoter score.

A background on that promoter score, for those of you who may not be familiar, it was invented by a guy named Fred at Bain, and it's basically a way to measure customer satisfaction. We implemented this in the Breitland because we not only measure the satisfaction of our customers, meaning our event organizers or our event attendees, but we also measure the satisfaction of the Breitlings because, again, they're very closely tied.

We publish this report every month, send out the survey – it's just one question every single month – and then we publish the results. Transparency is really important to us. So I brought some of the feedback today to you guys.

To really build that high-velocity feedback loop that has transparency embedded in it is something that, in hindsight, I wish I would have thought of earlier. I think we were doing it naturally in some ways at Eventbrite, but now as we grow, this is such a great way – among others – for us to continue that and to continue driving that high-velocity feedback loop that people trust.

I think it's such an important part of building trust in your team, which, as some of you may know, when you're facing enormous challenges or huge mountains or you can't quite see the horizon, the trust your team has and the confidence of your team is all that matters to get you through that.

To sum up, I think hindsight can truly be a mixture of data, making sure you're being acutely observational of what's going on and taking note of it, wisdom – never forgetting the past and learning from your mistakes – and perspective, looking out, trying to step back and see the big picture.

I won't claim that I've mastered this, but I think that if you're able to use those together, it helps you make better decisions in the future and actually makes the future more clear instead of hindsight only being 20/20. Thank you so much!"