Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Learn more about Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.com/about/.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– AI, Your Story, & the Professional Identity Crisis with Christopher Washington

– Thriving During Crisis in the Middle East with Aline Kamakian

– The Human Energy Crisis at Work with Joshua Freedman

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Julia Hartz is the Co-Founder, former CEO, and Executive Chair of Eventbrite. Under her leadership, Eventbrite grew from an innovative idea into one of the world’s largest marketplaces for shared experiences, powering more than five million events annually across the globe. Since its founding in 2006, the company has generated billions in gross ticket sales and processes over two million tickets each week.

Julia has prioritized building a strong organizational culture alongside business performance, scaling Eventbrite to more than 700 employees across nine countries. The company has been recognized on Fortune’s 100 Best Workplaces for Women and for Millennials, and has been named one of the Best Places to Work in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She has received numerous accolades, including Fortune’s 40 Under 40, Inc.’s 35 Under 35, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs, and Inc.’s 500 Female Founders (2026). Her leadership and impact have been featured in leading global publications.

Julia began her career as a development executive at MTV and FX Networks before moving to Silicon Valley. She believes that real-life human experiences foster individual happiness and stronger global communities—a conviction that continues to shape Eventbrite’s mission.

Transcript
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Hartz – Video Baseline

[00:00:00]

Maureen: ​Welcome to Innovating Leadership co-creating our future, where we explore the practices, mindsets, and systems that help leaders navigate complexity and create sustainable impact. I’m Maureen Metcalf, CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute. I work with senior leaders and organizations to strengthen strategy to execution, develop leadership capabilities, and build continuity results endure through disruption.

Today’s guest is Julia Hartz. Julia is known for helping build Eventbrite across its multi-phase growth journey, contributing to the experience economy and supporting millions of people in connecting through live experiences. So are you ready to jump in, Julia?

Julia: I am so ready. Thank you for having me.

Maureen: [00:01:00] Looking back at Eventbrite’s 20 year journey, what leadership systems or decision discipline proved most critical as the company scaled through multiple phases of growth?

Julia: Over two decades Eventbrite has seen the advent of. Social media when we began, we really, were focusing mostly on Google search as our vector of finding new customers and growth, and within two and a half to three years, our main mode of distribution was social media through Facebook.

So that was one big wave of a technological shift. The second was mobile. When we started Eventbrite, people were using their phones for mostly communicating with each other and in the span of the last. two decades we have seen Eventbrite be rebuilt for [00:02:00] mobile and have a really far extensive system and dis not only distribution network, but functionality through mobile devices. The third was big data. When we began, data was kept locked away in a database, and today it informs most of all of our decision making and how we get closest to our customers, and of course, the big wave of AI now helping us build faster, more efficiently and more personalized for our customers. In the middle, we had a big growth era that was marked by six acquisitions of companies. We had, of course our IPO and taking on many new shareholders and capital. We had international expansion and then a global pandemic that rendered the basis of our business null and void for [00:03:00] a period of time, and essentially gave us this huge opportunity to reset 14 years in and rebuild the company, the two systems that allowed us to persevere through that time that I think, whether it was weathering. Pandemics and recessions or this constant technolo technological change really A capital efficiency, and B, treating our customers as our greatest advocates and scouts. And I think underpinning all of it, of course, was resilience and belief in the core mission, that bringing people together through live experiences is something that all humans need.

Maureen: Can you overlay now your career trajectory? ’cause I think it’s easy to, as we’re navigating ai. Even the pandemic for many of us seems like it it was a while ago now, and yet you’re talking [00:04:00] 20 plus years. Level set us on your career journey as technology changed over that arc of time.

Julia: Well, I came into starting Eventbrite not being the obvious entrepreneur. I met my then fiance now and still husband Kevin Hartz, when I was working in television and I was on the development team at MTV and then at FX Networks. And so I was really focused on story arc and evoking emotions from audiences through great story stories.

And I was able to work with some of the best storytellers in the world. And what I saw through Kevin, we had this meet cute at a wedding. And what I learned from him for the next two years when we were in our sort of dating era, was how quickly things were changing in Silicon Valley.

He’s a multiple time entrepreneur and an investor, and also [00:05:00] I was intrigued by the idea of being more on the disruptor side than the disrupted side and just the velocity of how quickly things were moving in his world versus my world when we made the decision to start a company together. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. I wasn’t the kid with the lemonade stand growing up. I was a ballerina. I was really focused. I’m very good at taking direction and adjusting, and I have a lot of discipline, but I did realize almost on day one, that I finally solved the mystery of why I didn’t love school. And it was because I didn’t love to be just talked at.

I love to learn by doing.

Maureen: I

Julia: love to get my hands dirty. And so starting a company is exactly that. And I’ll never forget the day that we set up our little office in a windowless phone closet in a warehouse in Portrayal [00:06:00] Hill. With sawhorses and plywood as desks. And I remember opening my computer and typing, how do I create my first search engine marketing campaign into Google? And I thought that was kind of meta. And I got this jolt, this almost like lightning strike of energy. And so what I love about. Being an entrepreneur, even though I wasn’t born one, but I learned how to be a great one through, Kevin’s mentorship is that I’m an excellent problem solver and I really leaned into building a great culture in the company that now 20 years later, I can say, is one of our great legacies. Also. Decided about halfway through the journey that I needed to not be concerned about the fact that I felt like I was being an imposter as an entrepreneur, but actually embrace the fact that I’m a [00:07:00] great operator and that was the yin to Kevin Yang. And with our third co-founder, Renaud Visage, who built Eventbrite, we made an awesome founding team.

So that taught me a lot about, with your core competencies and leaning in, and then not everyone has to be the perennial entrepreneur.

Maureen: Beautiful. I love hearing the personal stories layered in with the systemic piece because it brings it more to life that it wasn’t just a combination of systems, it was your heart showing up every day.

Julia: It really was. And I think that the culture part, I can’t underestimate how important that is. And I have this benefit now of being on the other side of 20 years and of building Eventbrite. And I can say without a doubt, that was the best investment that we made. But in that, there were systems.

So I remember when we had raised our first of outside [00:08:00] capital from Sequoia Capital and Ruloff Botha, and that was about almost three years into our journey. So we had been bootstrapping and been supported by family and friends and early investors that you know and angels until then, but this was our first big slug of capital and were going to grow from 30 people to a hundred people in less than a year. Instinctively I understood that we were going to be growing from a team to a company and all around us, the 2006 vintage companies were going through, the ones that had made it through, from product market fit to traction, and had been funded. Were all going through some sort of growing pain. And I remember thinking, wow, this growing pain is gonna be inevitable. Something’s going to break. We’re going to lose our culture. But then I paired that thought with the feeling that Eventbrite, to me was important as my firstborn human baby. at that time I had a [00:09:00] baby too. So I could make a good as a good assessment there or authentic assessment.

And I thought I might as well die trying to cultivate a great culture through this hypergrowth phase and beyond, because I think that’s worth dying in, in the process of trying and that unconditional love I felt really compelled me to dig into what I didn’t know much about, which was building culture.

And I ve I realized very quickly that culture is actually, and very simply, the manifestation of the people at that place and time working together. And so therefore, it’s not something that stays in one place. It’s not a bug preserved in amber. It’s actually an amoeba that constantly changes. But if you have the right core and the right elements and you have that, whatever people call it, center of gravity nor star values principle, like you’re [00:10:00] always going to be building strength attracting great people. And I just attended the 20th anniversary party of Eventbrite, where we brought together current and former, we call ourselves Britelings, and I can definitively say we, we did the job. The bonds that people have, the stories they tell, the way they referenced their time at Eventbrite, really meant something.

Maureen: So we talk about culture as agreements, and my assumption is you and the Britelings had explicit or implicit agreements about how you work together. Can you share a couple of those?

Julia: Absolutely. The first one that is very clear now, and again, I have the benefit of hindsight is that we care for one another. And that was this funny thing when we were growing in the beginning and we were hiring engineers, I remember, an engineer would come through and would interview with Renault and [00:11:00] pass the technical interview.

Then they would interview with Kevin and they’d pass, common sense and product sense. And then they’d come to me. And I remember when we were scaling from like a hundred to 500 people, I was still meeting with every final candidate and the recruiting team would say, “Ah, watch out. This one’s a little, this one’s a little thorny. This one’s a little cranky.” There’s so much reverence for software engineers and certainly back then when everyone was coding, it was like, all hands on deck to recruit these engineers. And I would always walk out of the room practically arm in arm with this otherwise known as cranky engineer. And finally, one of the recruiters asked me, “What are you doing in there?” And I said,” I’m just asking them to tell me their story and then I’m showing them empathy.” And what I believe is there is not an engineer cranky enough that who just doesn’t wanna be loved. Like everyone just wants to feel cared for. And that actually, that was not me [00:12:00] alone, that actually started to just reinforce people treated each other. So care for one another above all else. That then translated very easily to care for customers. And so we had this almost like symbiotic relationship for if you care for one another and you can, so you’re never looking over your shoulder to ask, do I belong or is this person doing something to undermine me? Then you have more energy to care for your customer. That ended up being this virtuous cycle that just fed Eventbrite strength through every crisis and every hard time. And we’d al, we didn’t always have the best culture, but we had a culture that cared for one another and then sub things around that. We’re like, don’t lie and do the right thing. That’s just how Kevin and I were raised. And so I think it was like reinforced into our culture from the [00:13:00] beginning and that really came in handy a lot.

Maureen: Yeah. ’cause it’s easy to just not share something that’s a mistake

Julia: Yeah. And

Maureen: or embarrassing.

Julia: we were always really honest with our customers, our team, when things weren’t going well. That was always the harder path, but I never wanted to go to bad thinking, oh, I’m not telling the full truth.

Maureen: So can you give an example of some, one of those times that was really hard because I think we all say do the right thing and it sounds easy on the surface, but we fail to consider how painful.

we’re, when stuff’s on the line.

Julia: sure. Two, two things that come to mind immediately, so I’ll just tell you both, which is: COVID hit Eventbrite in early March of 2020, and we were ready. Thankfully, we live in San Francisco, we have the crown jewel of UCSF and the research community, and we happen to be very close to the head of the infectious disease department. So it was [00:14:00] like. Wow. A great fortune but also terrifying.

So we knew that this was not going to be a passing two week thing. We also had the benefit of some incredibly smart people surrounding Eventbrite at the time. So people like Roloff Botha our board of directors, Henry Allen Bogan, incredible investors and long-term thinkers, and we went to them and said, ” What would you do if you were us?”

And they said, “Don’t assume this is going to be fast. Do, you know, take costs way down and raise money now and don’t wait.” And in the midst of that, that was, call it maybe the first couple of weeks of March, by mid-March we were processing more refunds than revenue. Actually Bob Milot, who had been the CFO of what became Booking during nine 11, told me about that, about a [00:15:00] week before it happened.

He said, “Kid, strap in, you’re about to have negative revenue days.” And I’m like, what are you talking about? And then I called him a week later and I said, “All of our Tableau dashboards broke because our revenue line is below zero. Because what was happening was w- we were refunding more tickets for events that were getting canceled than we were selling tickets. Now the bigger issue is that Eventbrite had grown to be this really efficient transactional platform. We were great at moving micro transactions of $50 or less. In some totals of billions of dollars a year for these events, we’d gotten so good at anti-fraud that we could actually front the ticket sales to our event creators for them to book the venue, book the act, pay the vendors with less than a 1% fraud loss. So you get to mid-March and we have hundreds of [00:16:00] millions of dollars. Advanced out to event creators and producers and promoters and venue owners. have more refunds than ticket sales and all of those events are not gonna happen, but nobody knows that and when they don’t happen, get angry and they charge back and, it’s a disaster.

And so we were facing potential insolvency, which is why we needed to cut costs quickly and go raise money. But we also couldn’t continue advancing that money. And so we had to decide to turn it off and turn off this advanced payouts program that many of our creators were counting on to stay afloat. And that was a really difficult decision. And I remember Kevin and I sitting in this office because we’d all gone home because we are now quarantining, right? And we were calling our biggest customers and they were just I furious with [00:17:00] us. And we were trying to tell them, your event or your festival is not going to happen. And we can’t pay you money for an event. That’s not going to happen. But also, you should not be paying your vendors and you’re booking your venues because you’re going to lose that money. And that was a really hard period of time that, took a long time to recover from in terms of trust. But it also was the right thing to do because it actually protect.

We protected their money. That was still their

ticket sales were their money but we needed to make sure that they could stay in business and that we could stay in business. That was really hard. I think the second hard one was when we changed the pricing of our core product and we didn’t land the execution. And then we reverted it a year later and we were sorry because that obviously did not land with our customers. There’s so many ways you can shimmy out of that, you can change it again, you can change it quietly.

Maureen: [00:18:00] Yeah.

Julia: not change it and, and figure out another way to make more money.

But we went down the hard path of saying, you know what? We got this wrong. We didn’t hit the mark on this and here’s why and here’s what we wanna do about it. And that was important for me as CEO to be able to look our customers in the eye and say, this was our mistake. Nothing. Nothing you did, and we’d like to regain your trust.

Maureen: To me this is all about how do I make sense of things, and that seems like one of the biggest struggles for CEOs over time and especially now when things are changing so quickly, the hype cycle is accelerated and we’re just trying to. Decipher the signals that are coming from so many different directions that how you made sense of what was happening with the pandemic is interesting to guide our CEOs in [00:19:00] thinking how, so can you tell us more about the, the process you went through of making sense of the mixed signals your customers are saying these things are gonna happen. Your friends in, in the medical community are clear that it’s not gonna happen. You’ve gotta make a decision with insufficient information.

Julia: The information was sufficient. It was the human

Maureen: Okay?

Julia: that was muddying the signal. I mean,

Maureen: Okay.

Julia: it was so clear. There was no, once you understood the history of this and the science of it, and the rate at which it was spreading, there was absolutely no denying that it was to be a pandemic.

So I think the hardest part was having that knowledge. A lot of people have the knowledge. This isn’t like we were in some secret bunker. It’s just the human emotional system has a way of saying, but [00:20:00] maybe not. And we just weren’t

Maureen: Mm-hmm.

Julia: risk our customers businesses and our business on what if we’re wrong?

I really am admire and am grateful to the people who told us to act fast, as painful as it was. And I’ll take you through what that looked like, because what that actually looked like was my team in mid-March. We had just filed out of our beautiful offices and had gone home and it was chaos.

You remember like everybody was trying to figure out Zoom, the Zoom team themselves. I spoke to Eric, the CEO, because people were starting to do on online events, virtual events. So we did it. We built an integration really quickly. But I was talking to him and he said we’re such an in-office culture. It’s just chaos right now because people are trying to figure out how to work from home. And I thought huh? That is so ironic. That’s amazing. But, I gathered my executive team. And there was a lot of fear, a lot of chaos, a lot of kids [00:21:00] and dogs running around. And you know, I was like, how about we, we make a rule that you don’t apologize for your kid or your animal because, if they hear that a lot, they’re probably gonna have some issues in the future.

Like, they’re gonna have issues anyways. This is crazy. But like, we just don’t apologize for them and just let them be in, in the picture, you know? And then I said. Given what you know about this business and all the choices we’ve made, good and bad and indifferent, what would you do if you could do it all over again? Like what? What could we do? And we just started riffing on that and I was, this was like a boat analogy that I don’t re exactly remember the details of, but I’m sure I’ll find the sketch somewhere. We started like writing things down and at the end of the meeting we had a one pager on what we would do differently. And then I did not pre-plan this, but I have to say it was one of my finer leadership moments. I said, we’re gonna rebuild the company because there is no company right now. We’re not

Maureen: Yeah.

Julia: money and we’re facing this sort of imminent disaster if [00:22:00] all of these events get canceled that we’ve already, all this money for.

So go do this. Let’s go make this company. And the most brutal part of that was we had to almost have the company.

My, my rationale there was we needed a North star and a strategic plan to make those cuts. Otherwise, you’re just making your best guess and you’re taking people’s lives in your hand that like and without a real purpose, right?

So we needed that north star to go build that company and then figure out who we needed for that company. Second thing was I had an instinct given, again, our embracing of the fact that. That COVID was going to be enormous, that companies would take a while to do their layoffs. And I had this sense that if we laid off our team early, we could take, we kept on our entire recruiting team, which was like 25 people [00:23:00] at the time because we were 1200 people global. We could keep them on and actually make their full-time job getting the people we were laying off jobs. So that you could invert the system and then rewire it and our KPI was how many Britelings are secure in a new job? My feeling was if we were the first ones to go out and we could land those people before everything went to hell in a hand basket. And that worked. Obviously not a hundred percent, but it really did work. And it showed people that we were willing to walk the walk even in the hard moments. And then had to go raise expensive debt, to shore up our balance sheet, which I’m still a little sore about, but we had great partners. and we ended up not needing the debt. That was acting quickly and being decisive and paranoid, healthily, paranoid that this was not gonna be a small or short endurance sprint. [00:24:00] That really paid off for us in terms of why Eventbrite even exists today. There’s no reason why we should have made it through that.

That was a disaster.

Maureen: and you’re back to your culture of caring about people that you would pay recruiters to place. Your folks make such a strong statement about not just we say we care. We put money behind it. You had to pay those recruiters to place people.

Julia: and I’m not trying to get accolades for doing a big layoff. ’cause I think obviously that’s always should be the last case scenario.

In a moment when the company essentially didn’t exist because again, we weren’t making revenue. I was sure that there was a way we could do it that would be aligned with our values and humane and thoughtful. And that wasn’t something that I wanted to be great at, but I knew that in, in any case, when you’re facing that much uncertainty and you have to do something that hard, that there would be a way to show up for each other and care for one [00:25:00] another. And I think that also helped. A lot of people feel not alone, especially the people,

And that was not an easy time to stay at the company. The years after that were not exactly, we weren’t like whistling Zippedee Do-Dah. It was hard and it was really hard. Long rebuild.

Maureen: and my presumption is, as with many companies, you didn’t know if you were gonna have a business in a couple of years.

Julia: there was exactly one point when I thought it could be totally over. And I remember sitting, and a lot has happened in this blue office, and I remember sitting here and going, I think I might’ve been laying on the ground and I was thinking like, how did I just spend the last 14 years building this company with Kevin and Renault? To lose it in 14 days. It had been exactly 14 days. And then I called one of my mentors RU off and I said, I don’t know. I don’t know if [00:26:00] we’re gonna make it. And he said, “No gonna make it like you have. You have the determination, you have the sheer will, and you have the right people around you, you’re gonna make it.”

And he made sure we made it. And I really, again, it’s like when the chips are that far down and you’re in the middle of that much chaos, you really appreciate the people who pick up the phone and then the people who, who clear the way, you know? And then after that conversation, I thought, oh my God, he’s right.

We’re gonna make it. ’cause I have this sort of fierce, like ownership and mentality and like Mama Bear quality around this

Of course we’re gonna make it, and that gave me the boost and then I just assumed we were gonna make it. So that helped.

Maureen: So you went from fighting for this company that was akin to one of your children and now you’ve exited. So what was that journey like both for you personally and for the company [00:27:00] to ensure you had successors and processes? Because it’s when there’s a charismatic founder or a charismatic senior executive who’s been with an organization for years, often after they exit, the company doesn’t thrive.

And yet you’re thriving.

Julia: I think that it’s very early days. I have a very large amount of optimism through knowledge of bending spoons, which is the company that acquired Eventbrite. I know that they will create a stronger product. Build Eventbrite in a way that meets customers’ needs faster than we were moving. And if I

Maureen: Okay.

Julia: know that definitively, wouldn’t have even been a concept. But also Eventbrite needed to become a private company again. We needed to be able to invest in technical debt and take risks that weren’t [00:28:00] measured on a public quarterly cadence. As well as the public markets have changed and are really not hospitable, small cap companies.

Gotta decide is it worth it to have all the things that I really valued in being a public company, the transparency, the rigor, the access to capital, those all worked in our favor, and we embraced them wholeheartedly. I always said I would never take Eventbrite public and then complain about being a public company. we were sure that this needed to, this company needed to become a private company and there’s multiple pathways to do that, right? And we looked at all of them and we evaluated our options. And this option, I think, really does carry the most significant upside for our customers. And that was what was most important to me.

And so I used that as the North Star to make the decision. And you’re right, it is a big deal when a founder steps away. I’ve always marveled at the fact that. [00:29:00] A couple things. One is that just because you were there when the company was built and you were a founder, doesn’t mean that you should be the CEO of the company.

I think that entitlement is bizarre because a CEO is a totally different job than being a founder and being a CEO is not for everyone I think it’s strange that people equate the two. Now in our case Kevin was the CEO for the first 10 years, and then I was the CEO for the second 10 years.

So we’re sort of unique in that way that, we have both played that role so we can support each other and understand, and it, there’s like this sort of legacy that has both of our imprints as very different CEOs on it, but also I think it’s bizarre how much weight, the conviction of a founder holds, and I think that’s very true I’ve experienced it many [00:30:00] times. Part of what I had to do was find it in myself to authentically and genuinely have conviction that this is the right direction for the company that this acquirer is the right acquirer. And so it took a while. I might have been like the last one to, to party on this. But I. I I can say that without a doubt I think it will be great for our customers and this era of Eventbrite, as it was, is over and that’s okay. A new era starts and that’s what happens in life, right? So it took me a long time to get here and be able to be pretty passionate about this and honest with you. But I feel a huge degree of gratitude and optimism.

Maureen: I hear you saying it was the right thing for our customers. I, and yet I also hear the same woman who was laying on the floor after 14 days saying, we’re dead. We’re dead. And [00:31:00] picking yourself up and. Probably in part through force of will, in addition to being supported by your spouse and your co-founders and team members, so not you alone, but force of will to move you forward.

How did those around you help shape that choice to now let your child graduate and go off to college?

Julia: There’s so many parallels. I have a kid who is applying and hearing about college today. It’s like there’s so many weird parallels. I try to not make that. That comparison in my day-to-day at Eventbrite, because I never wanted people to think that I was calling them children and or my family like we were a

Maureen: Yeah.

Julia: I have to give so much credit to my team and the people that I worked closely with over the last couple of years because we were day in and day [00:32:00] out, really trying to change Eventbrite fast enough to meet the future. The future of consumer expectations, the future of technology advancements, the future of the business model. And every day they would show up without ego fully in it. And we would just keep going. you involve your team so much in the day to day, and I really a leader, my, my system is a round table with eight or nine totally equal seats when you involve everybody and expect them to know everything about the business and be an equal share owner, truly in the decisions that we make. It’s not hard for everybody to see the same picture. So while it was disappointing and there were different, people were on different timelines of acceptance, all eventually got there and by the time we [00:33:00] announced that DL was going to happen, everybody either was explicitly there or implicitly there and understood why.

And then as we’ve all turned the page on this next era for the company, the whole executive team left. And I think that’s actually a really good thing. It’s very clean, it’s very thoughtful and it’s part of bending spoons playbook is that they’re coming in to really run the company.

And they’re very hands on the way that it’s gone over the last few weeks has just been such a testament to the quality of the people. That were attracted to work on the Eventbrite mission and with me in building the company. And I don’t wanna just say I feel like it’s a mic drop because I did that.

Like I found those people and they’re incredible people. And now I spend my day. Connecting them to future opportunities and telling anyone who will

Maureen: Hmm.

Julia: How incredible they are. I was on stage at South by Southwest and my chief comms a brand officer, my chief legal officer were in the front [00:34:00] row and we hadn’t seen each other since the deal had closed days before. And I gave like their full resumes to the audience, as I had the mic. ’cause I’m like, I might as well. And I think things like that where you really care for one another, you can have some fun. Um, made the last few months between, announcing the deal and closing really gratifying for me.

And and fun. I did learn a very important leadership lesson that I don’t know, if I’ll have the opportunity to use it, but if I do, I will use it, is that when you release that white knuckle grip on something and you say, “Do what you know is right. Do what you know is important and go have some fun,” better outcomes occur. So I went from daily metrics readouts and like hounding people on Slack to being like, okay, when once the deal was announced, I took a moment to be like, okay, everybody digests this, but also let’s. [00:35:00] Look out for one another. Let’s look out for our customers and let’s have some fun in this.

Very awkward, in-between period and every other day I’d get an update that was like it’s like you’re going to the hairdresser and you’re having a good hair day. ’cause all of a sudden things were moving and good things were, was good things were happening and metrics were going up into the right and products were shipping faster.

And I thought Got it. I should have done that a couple years ago. Darn it.

Maureen: What is one leadership choice you believe senior leaders or boards should make in the next 30 days?

So you’re talking about white knuckles and.

Julia: I’m trying to think of the right words here, but unequivocally. I believe most important system to pay attention to is common sense human decency. is it alive and well in the organization? Where is it missing? We have gone [00:36:00] through not only a global pandemic now, wars on multiple fronts, all the things. We also have gone through a huge period of reckoning as a country. I think it’s time to wipe the slate clean and say, why don’t we focus on common sense and human decency? Basic human decency, and why don’t we build cultures that can cultivate that. In this virtuous cycle, just as we built Eventbrite, and I think that boards and founding teams need to be really, really thoughtful about that. I spend my time now with entrepreneurs who are working on very early startups, and some of their earliest employees are these AI researchers who are being thrown lots of money, lots of opportunity, and they’re very passionate about building. Foundational models and the [00:37:00] future. What is not being talked about is what kind of a company, what kind of a culture do you wanna build if you’re successful and you can’t wait to be successful to do that.

And so bit of my, not so much fear but I think a huge opportunity going back to that, that, I had never met an engineer who didn’t just want. A big old proverbial hug, sure that we’re weaving in to the early company creation and early expectation of founders. This idea of, again, I would just call it like common sense, basic human decency.

I’ll probably think of a better term. But, you we’re workshopping here and making culture. Giving it the proper place, the proper seat at the table. Once again, not making it something that we’re afraid of. Not making it something that turns into unhealthy activism, like actually cultivating the thing that [00:38:00] builds great teams and making sure that’s a top priority early on.

Maureen: you talked about how you started Eventbrite, it sounds like culture was the secret sauce and your foundation out, out of the gate

Julia: it

Maureen: that.

Julia: from that, yeah, from that earliest day. And I would give Kevin a hundred percent credit for seeding the culture. And he doesn’t even see that in himself, which is interesting. But he’s a culture creator and a gatherer. And that was really like what started it. And then I took that like seedling and I made it into something that became a forest. It was really simple. didn’t overcomplicate it, and I was never shy about having bad reviews on Glassdoor. I don’t go to blind, but I am imagining there are terrible things there. Because we did go through hard [00:39:00] times. I never thought that was a bad thing. I thought, oh, yeah. If we were all always happiest place on Earth, like that would be weird, you know?

And you are not trying to be the happiest, you’re trying to be the most sustainable, positive culture to drive innovation, to drive success, to drive a high performing team. And that’s gonna take like anything consistency. You know what’s funny is that two members of my family. You need to be doing physical therapy to tend to injuries that they have chronic injuries. And it’s really difficult to do physical therapy because it’s not as exciting as your sport. It’s not as exciting as, getting fit. It’s really boring, but it’s the consistency that compounds over time that’s gonna solve the problem that’s causing you so much pain. So I would say culture creation is a lot like that.

Maureen: I love that, that it is building a [00:40:00] company excellence of any sort is practice.

Julia: Yeah.

Maureen: getting up early in the morning, getting to the gym. I am at an age where I work out regularly. I’m, I am making up for decades of overworking and too much socializing. And that idea that

Julia: Same.

We’re

Maureen: just.

Julia: We’re drinking our creatine, we’re going to the

Maureen: Okay.

Julia: That’s what we’re

Maureen: Yeah.

Julia: Yeah.

Maureen: And it’s, it’s early mornings. It’s doing things late at night, but that consistency builds the ability to perform. It’s not sexy.

Julia: And longevity.

Maureen: Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully clear cognition. It

Julia: crossed.

Maureen: Drawing that parallel to culture, that it is the choice when it’s hard, it’s the choice. When I’m tired and it’s dark and cold and [00:41:00] snowy to get in the car and drive to the gym or the studio and workout with my friends in a really hot room, sweating.

Julia: there were times when I had to reach in and. Not so much, take the drivers. We all, I’m sure the person on the other side felt like I did, but use some appreciative inquiry as to why we were making certain decisions around Britelings. And it only took a few times me having to do that.

And certainly I try, would try to do it gracefully for. The message to make it like make its way into the organization, that

Always going to treat Britelings well, fair and well. And we were always gonna do our best. We never, ever, ever proclaimed that we would get it always right, but that fairness was really important to us.

you know, I think that too, as a leader. Taking the energy and, breaking the [00:42:00] glass sometimes when you need to make sure that, and going back and redoing it, and okay, wait, hold on, let’s go a different, let’s go slightly different route.

Maureen: Yep.

Julia: that became second nature for me in a way of I very seldom would have to do it in the last few years but to really make sure that we were holding ourselves accountable for that high bar.

Maureen: Julia, thank you. I love the personal stories and hearing, not just you put the right systems in place, but the complexities, it’s hard to do this and. It takes every bit of stamina and commitment and heart and, and I love the combination of stamina, commitment, heart clear systems that you are looking at, data, make monitoring that you are white knuckle, making sure things get done every single day.

That discipline, combined with systems, [00:43:00] surely paid off for Eventbrite and for the Britelings.

Julia: Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Maureen: Me too. Thank you. So how would our listeners learn more about you and what you’re doing now? Are you writing? Are you blogging?

Julia: I have a presence on LinkedIn. So you can check me out there.

Maureen: Okay.

Julia: and Instagram. just Julia Hartz, and that’s where I’m communicating externally right now.

Maureen: Beautiful. So to our listeners, thank you for joining us. Please like us and share this podcast with others you care about.