Online ticketing platform goes box office

"I wasn't the kid with the lemonade stand," says Eventbrite co-founder Julia Hartz, piecing together a career path that saw her move from working with TV development teams creating shows such as Jackass, Rescue Me and The Shield to co-founding the ticketing web start-up, which processed over €800 million in sales last year.

“I do wake up some days and wonder how this has happened,” the Eventbrite president adds, noting the 1.1 million-plus events “actively ticketed on the platform last year in over 190 countries”.

Any absence of entrepreneurial spirit has long passed and, later in the day, she’s the main speaker at the Female Founders’ Forum in the Guinness Storehouse.

Sitting next to her in the Dublin Docklands' offices of the company's Irish solicitors, Mason Hayes & Curran, is fellow Eventbrite founder and her husband, Kevin Hartz. As a counterpoint to Julia, he was, in his own view, "perhaps unemployable" due to the desire to work for himself from an early age.

Democratisation

The pair, joined by Frenchman Renaud Visage, established Eventbrite in Silicon Valley eight years ago. The idea was to promote the "democratisation" of ticketing, allowing anyone to operate as the box office for their own events.

Early adopters in the California tech industry began to spread the word and, having slowly built the business up in various locations around the globe, in 2011 they raised over €36 million in funding.

Eventbrite’s business model – which generates revenue by charging organisers a 2.5 per cent service fee plus 75 cents per ticket sold – attracted a further €44 million in investment last year.

So far this year, they've processed more tickets in Ireland than for the last two years combined, which between them were worth a not-too-shabby €6.5 million. Like almost any successful Silicon Valley company, talks of an IPO are never far away.

Inevitable milestone

“Unless we screw something up dramatically, it’s an inevitable milestone,” says Kevin. “It’s not an endpoint or anything, it’s a fundraising milestone. We happen to have a sizeable balance sheet today and no need to fundraise, but at some point there’s a lot of advantages to being a public company.”

The company’s Irish offices consist of two employees, though the pair’s visit coincided with the hiring of a third “briteling”, the Eventbrite equivalent of a “googler”.

Sitting in an office a stone’s throw away from Google’s Irish headquarters, they’re keen to play down the idea of scaling up to match operations the size of the search giant, Twitter or LinkedIn here.

“If we can do what we’ve already shown we’ve done this year, I would say that we definitely will expand the team,” says Julia, adding that, while the near 3,000 employees of Google is “not a milestone that I’d like to hang my hat on, we will continue to lean into investments that show great growth and great promise”.

While his wife’s background was in TV, Kevin Hartz was an early-stage investor and adviser for companies including PayPal and Pinterest. With distant (“about seven or eight generations back”) family ties to Cappawhite in Tipperary, it’s his second time in Ireland and Julia’s first.

The couple and Visage decided to set up an operation in Dublin after noticing “unusual growth in Ireland” and they namecheck Dublin Chamber of Commerce, IDA Ireland and the Government as being extremely helpful in helping them to rubber-stamp the opening of their Dublin 8 operations and “getting us acclimated” to doing business here.

“When we’re in any specific location, we’re trying to learn as much as we can about the local environment,” says Julia, “and I think there’s a really interesting community that’s been building over a number of years in technology here”.

The success of Eventbrite can in some part be traced to the company's ongoing relationship with another Silicon Valley name with Irish operations – Facebook. The number one driver of traffic to their site, Hartz talks about sitting down with representatives of the social network to discuss a trend they noticed of "people taking their event details from Eventbrite and manually pasting them in Facebook and inviting their friends through Facebook" back in 2007.

“You either seize these opportunities or get disrupted by them and some other player comes in and takes advantage of that,” says Kevin, who adds “to our knowledge” Mark Zuckerberg’s company never saw Eventbrite as a possible acquisition to round out the Facebook model. Instead, the ticketing site now allows users to link their event to Facebook using a “one button push”system.

Last year Eventbrite began moving down the acquisition route itself, buying British start-up Lanyrd, which provides a social directory of conferences and other professional events, as well as Latin American ticketing service Eventioz.

With the company ramping up in terms of investments and spending, the couple, who have two young daughters, say finding time outside of Eventbrite is “difficult”. Working with your spouse is helped, they admit, by having Visage on hand as well, though he’s not asked to combine his role with “being a tie-breaker” for any disagreements between the pair.

Different opinions

"I don't believe that we looked for a third co-founder to mitigate the relationship," says Julia, "especially because Kevin and I are in San Francisco and Renaud is in France, so it's not like that would have been a recipe for success. It's about three different opinions, three different perspectives," she says. "It's not to mediate or referee Kevin and I."

She adds that one big advantage of working with her husband is that, despite focusing on “completely different areas of the business” on a day-to-day basis, “we don’t ever have to wonder why the other person is stressed out” or “provide context as to why we’re feeling the way we’re feeling”.

"We have like a Vulcan mind-meld," laughs Star Trek fan Kevin to slightly raised eyebrows from his wife. "We have to be extremely disciplined with our time", he adds. "We're not going globetrotting and we can't go to all the conferences that our community goes to, ironically enough seeing as we ticket a lot of them. We have to make sure they go off as planned."