Eventbrite's CEO quit a cushy career in Hollywood to launch the $225 million company with her own money: ‘If it's a disaster, we'll just be broke'
Most people would jump at the idea of working on hit TV shows like Friends, Jackass, and The Shield, but Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz left it all behind to pursue her passion of bringing people together.
Just five years into her rising TV career—where she'd climbed the ranks to junior executive at FX—Hartz tossed the towel in on her 9-to-5 to launch Eventbrite in 2006, bootstrapping the company entirely with her husband and fellow cofounder Renaud Visage.
The pitch was: 'Come work on something that doesn't exist. We'll use our own money to fund it, and if it's a disaster, we'll just be broke,'' Hartz tells Fortune.
Eventbrite is now estimated to be worth $225 million, and offers events ranging from wrestling classes, to comedy shows, to cheese raves with Queer Eye star Antoni Porowski.
But it all started when Hartz and her husband—serial entrepreneur and early PayPal investor Kevin Hartz—assembled a dream team to get Eventbrite off the ground. They recruited fellow cofounder Visage to come on board as chief technology officer, and the trio of entrepreneurs decided to chuck $250,000 of their own money to get Eventbrite running, moving to San Francisco.
Hartz had to sacrifice her job to put all her energy into Eventbrite, skirting the route other entrepreneurs have gone down: juggling a full-time job while scaling a company on the side. Instead, she found it best to wipe her slate clean and leave her TV career behind to pursue Eventbrite. It was a professional gamble that paid off in the long run.
'I've seen entrepreneurs do that, and I think that that's a clever way to gain validation and product market fit, without putting yourself in such a perilous state,' Hartz says. 'I did not do that.'
Inspiration struck during her 9-to-5 job in TV working on Friends and The Shield
Hartz started working at just the age of 14—pouring coffees in cafes, and driving kids to after-school activities—and hasn't taken her foot off the gas since.
While attending Pepperdine University, she worked as an intern on the set of hit TV-show Friends, later scoring an internship at MTV in the series development department. It was a 'magical' experience that eventually landed her a job at the station—once she graduated, Hartz went straight into developing shows including Jackass, The Shield, and Rescue Me across MTV and FX. Part of her job entailed researching fandom events, and suddenly, something clicked.
'I remember going to this fandom event that was insanely niche, and feeling the energy of the people in the room, it just stuck with me,' Hartz says. 'It was this palpable, kinetic energy…When we started Eventbrite, I was thinking about that all along: 'How do we enable the people who gather others around these niche passion areas and create this magic?''
While most couples may wring their hands at the idea of putting their finances on the line to launch a company together, Hartz's partner was enthusiastic about going all-in on a light bulb moment.
In fact, the Gen X CEO's nearly 20-year success may have never panned out if it wasn't for her husband Kevin—who's success investing in the then little-known startup called PayPal—persuaded her to take the leap into entrepreneurship.
'It's only serial entrepreneurs who can convince someone of that,' Hartz says. 'We made it on less than a quarter of a million dollars…I'm really, really proud of it.'
Scaling a business idea into a $225 million ticketing giant
Once Hartz made the decision to leave TV forever, she packed her things into boxes, and drove up the coast of California to settle in her company's new headquarters: San Francisco. The Silicon Valley hub had the tech connections and industry access to help get things off the ground. So just like that, she set up shop in Potrero Hill, the 'warehouse district'.
'I was moving saw horses and plywood into a windowless phone closet on Monday, in this warehouse district in San Francisco, going in my head, 'Wait, what if he's crazy?' Well, it's a little late for that,' Hartz says. 'I've been working since I was 14 with no break. So it was really important to me that I be working on day one.'
Eventbrite was able to get things off the ground thanks in part to perfect timing; in the mid-2000s, social media platforms were looking to bring together its users in real life. Facebook made Eventbrite one of its first connect partners, solidifying a huge new customer base looking for community events to partake in.
Then 2008 came, and thousands of workers from all across the U.S. were being laid off in droves during the financial crisis. Hartz said 'the world collapsed' in those dire years, and people were desperate for community while facing hardship. It was a tough era for corporate American workers, but was an opportunity for Eventbrite to bring them together. Over the next decade the business would amass a total of $373 million in equity funding through 11 fundraising rounds, according to Pitchbook, attracting investors like Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital and Square.
The ticketing platform has since amassed a fanbase in nearly 180 countries—in 2024 alone, it had distributed 83 million paid tickets for over 4.7 million events. With 89 million monthly users, people are scoring seats at events ranging from a sunset Bach concert in Central Park to a house music cruise on the Hudson river.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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