'It Forced Us to Clarify What Matters'

How do you keep a business thriving for 20 years? Ask Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz, who believes that disruption is just another opportunity to improve.

- by JASON FEIFER

If you want to build a great business, look for an unsolved problem that's newly solvable.

Two decades ago, that's what the cofounders of Eventbrite saw. Many people wanted to host events, but selling tickets had always been complicated. Then, two changes emerged: Social media enabled communities to form and organize events. And financial services companies like PayPal enabled micro-transactions in a way previously unimagined.

Eventbrite was built to bring it all together. “We wanted to combine the power of micro-transactions with the creative brilliance of community organization,” says Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz, one of the company's three cofounders.

The company officially turns 20 in January, and a lot has changed. Eventbrite is a public company, awash in competition, and is actively evolving—working to find even more unsolved problems that are newly solvable. Instead of simply being a ticket sales platform, it's expanded to become an event discovery platform. Hartz explains how they've kept the company relevant so long.

Twenty years is a big milestone. How are you feeling right now?

I'm feeling sentimental. And I've been thinking about how post-IPO, post-once-every-hundred-years-pandemic, post different changes that we made to our product, there were a lot of would-be “endings” in there that we saw as opportunities. They forced us to clarify what really matters. And recently, we've been using this analogy of Eventbrite becoming “the Spotify for events”—which, kudos to them, because the analogy instantly sticks for people.

What inspired that comparison?