♪ emily: they started the company closet at a warehouse in san in a windowless phone francisco. now, 12 years later, along with their cofounder renaud visage, julia and kevin hartz have turned eventbrite into a global business that powers of its in 180 countries in the world, racking up $10 million in ticket sales. for the first 10 years, kevin served as ceo. now, julia is in the chief executive office driving the company towards an ipo. joining me today on "bloomberg studio 1.0," eventbrite cofounders julia and kevin hartz. you founded a company at the

same time that you were planning a wedding together. that is a big risk for a future husband and wife. why did you decide to do it? julia: i have to say that when kevin and i first met, i did not know where this was actually going to lead. and it was part of a two-year-long evolution of getting to know each other and understanding how we might work together. ultimately, we had complementary skills. and so, when you find yourself in that situation, you realize you can be a powerful duo, i think it is a shame if you don't go for it. emily: kevin, you were a tech investor, you had invested in paypal, you also founded a company called xoom, a money transfer company. kevin: i love technology. i had a front row seat to paypal -- to see what happened at paypal and the great things that happened there. really finding the right partner to do this, and we can't leave out renaud, our third cofounder, but it just felt very natural. we worked -- we weren't entirely

sure how it would work out, but 10 years later, here we are. emily: did you set ground rules, who does what? what happens if we get into a fight? julia: one of the best things we did was find renaud, our cofounding cto, and i like to say the bravest person on the planet for starting a company with two people who are engaged. as we started to work together, we had this agreement that we would, first of all, divide and conquer, and that we would also always check in. so i was the customer support, marketing, and finance department. kevin was the product department. and renaud was the engineering department. we bootstrapped the company. we were just three founders for two years. emily: why events and ticketing? why did you think that the -- a problem that needed to be solved or had so much potential? kevin: it was addressing this market that had been unaddressed and kind of left to itself. and what is exciting about

eventbrite's we were enabling all these different people's and creators to come together and host these events that they could not do before. so enabling this broad, many different categories of events, many different geographies, it was really a greenfield opportunity for us. emily: when you disagreed when kevin was ceo, how did that get resolved? julia: we always have the pact that the ceo is the final say. and so, i could provide a divergent opinion. others on the executive team would provide their opinions, and ultimately kevin would make a decision. and at eventbrite, we benefited from coming at problems from different angles. and so kevin may look at a problem from a product angle. i may look at it from a customer angle, but we meet in the middle. and similarly now i feel that autonomy. and i have the support of kevin and our board. kevin is the chairman of our board, and my executive team, that i have not only recruited and developed, but i have been

in the trenches with them, some of them for up to seven years. emily: talking about the opportunity, when you guys started raising money, it was the middle of the financial crisis. right? it was not a good time. kevin: we said let's bootstrap this company. let's not not take outside funding. we are going to build a very efficient and profitable business. emily: is that something you learned from starting xoom? the challenges of dealing with investors? kevin: just seeing in the previous cycle of the crash of 2000 to 2001 that it was dangerous to be reliant on capital and we have seen that consistently through this cyclical period. we are in the period of a ten-year expansion. right now, everything is up and to the right, but we like to be the masters of our own destinies. emily: but at a certain point you needed to raise money. julia: yes, we chose the worst time to go out. going out in late 2008 was a really special experience. but it taught us a lot. i think we met with 27 or so

venture capital firms, and we were turned down by all of them. so that experience teaches you a lot, right, going into the room and having to answer really critical questions about your business model. sometimes it takes a down market to create that critical question asking moment. and i think if we had gone out during a frothier time, we would not have faced that. so what we did, and i attribute this to you, is we lost everybody with our 2009 plan, our annual plan. and we just came back towards the end of 2009 and showed our results, and that spoke for itself. it was a very different experience. it wasn't easy, but i think that people were surprised by how much traction we had in such a difficult market. emily: sequoia led your first round. kevin: that's right.

and we were really excited -- i was excited to work again with a person i knew from paypal. he worked with us at xoom and eventbrite, and he has been fantastic. ♪ julia: most people we talked to, they say, i can't imagine working with my spouse. i can't imagine it. we would kill each other. ♪

emily: so kevin, you step down as ceo in 2016, in part due to health issues. how are you feeling? how are you doing? kevin: i am feeling great. i am 100%. serendipitously, oddly, it was really a great transition because we had a founder in the

building in julia that had been impassioned and really had this great insight about the business, who has really great perspectives, and she stepped up during an incredibly tough time personally, where she really was kind of taking care of me at that point, but also really took the baton and has been fantastic. emily: i know this was a moment for you, julia. there was a vacuum in leadership to fill, but you also have this personal situation in your life that you had to deal with it. julia: it is hard for me not to get emotional because when we talk about it, it is like i am right back there again. it was difficult. the most difficult part was the notion that we would not be sitting side-by-side every day. i know that sounds cheesy, but we actually have sat at desks next to each other by then for a

whole decade. and so that was probably the scariest part. for some people, or most people that we talk to, they say, i can't imagine working with my spouse. i can't imagine it. we would kill each other. that is what we hear all the time. if you can imagine, that was the normal for us. that was our normal. so i was terrified of what it would do to us as a partnership when we didn't work together every day. it was sort of the opposite. and so i think that is the thing i was afraid of most, and i have to say that now almost two years into this new normal we have really found our stride as being, co-operating in this new construct. emily: i want to talk about how you became ceo. because it wasn't actually obvious. it wasn't an automatic now julia is going to be ceo. in fact, you had to propose this idea. julia: i think it was really

important for us to be very objective and to rely on our board to make the right call, but i did need to tell kevin that i was ready. and that was scary, because you just don't know what is on the other side of that. emily: how did you tell him? julia: we were on an airplane. and i had a glass of wine. [laughter] julia: and i said, i think i might be ready. i think this is something i would like to propose to the board, but i wanted to the board -- but i wanted the board to know they had the space to make the decision if they wanted to run a process, if they wanted to take time. emily: kevin, how did you react when she told you she wanted to be ceo? kevin: i thought it was an ideal situation, not just because she is extremely talented, but also because typically when you have these ceo transitions, the first job of the new ceo is to explain how horrible the past ceo was, but because we live together she kind of could not get away with

that. so, this is how you unload to the board all these challenges, and unfortunately she was restricted from doing that. julia: i was also there for the 10 years, so any mistakes we have made or lesson we have learned is something i was a part of. emily: you are one of the few female ceos and founders, and i know when you took the job there were nerves about whether people would take you seriously. how did you overcome that? julia: i put my head down and focused on what we needed to do as a business. this has been a tremendous growth period for eventbrite and i had to get to work. and so i sort of let all of that fall away and i just focused on building the right team for the future, on executing, on making sure the culture, which is global, right? everyone understood we were going to be ok, because i think these big moments of transition

can be unnerving. it create uncertainty, even if there is nothing wrong, and so i needed them to know that i was aware of that and that we were all in this together. and then as you take the helm, i felt the difference of being ceo, that made me really respect some of the founder-ceos that i know and the women that i have watched grow their companies. it is sort of like when you have your first baby, and you go back to work and you have immense respect for the women who have children and work. i felt the same way about taking the reins of ceo. emily: the company eventbrite is actually pretty solid when it comes to gender diversity. i am curious to hear from both of you how you did that. julia: we are actually still almost 50-50 despite -- we have acquired some companies that have different gender ratios. we have always been focused on

trying to build a company that looks like our community, and our community of creators is global, right, so diversity has to be embedded in what we do. so me being a female ceo certainly provides a great embedded role model at eventbrite, but inclusion is entirely a choice. and you can have great diversity and really not great inclusion. kevin: i think just as a company needs a competitive advantage, technology or a network-based business, there is a recruiting advantage that needs to be built, and all the great companies have come up with specific recruiting advantages, whether it was microsoft recruiting from young students out of college in the 1980's. we saw this unfortunate bro culture here in this very competitive san francisco environment, and we saw all this talent available, so for us

hiring moms and looking broader than people that looked just like ourselves was a competitive advantage. emily: so how did you do that? kevin: there is the stereotype of the 20-something male engineer, and you have these incredibly talented women in the bay area that have maybe had children and maybe they unconsciously get written off. we saw that as our competitive advantage. julia: the maternity leave is a great time to recruit someone, by the way, because you have this moment of reflection and there is a varying degree of which companies decide to support people who are going through such an important milestone, and don't even get me started on it. this is a great subject for me to pontificate on. it is very curious to me that especially in the u.s. corporate

culture we basically penalize people for procreating, which pregnancy is a medical condition. emily: it is a disability. julia: despite anybody's broad religious beliefs, i'm pretty sure we're supposed to be procreating on some level as humans, and so that i think is curious. when you look at it and say this is not only a moment where somebody is going through a major life transition, and this is for men and women, but they are also fearful of what their life is going to look like. are their careers going to go off track? are their peers going to think about them differently? are they not going to be able to juggle or put the jigsaw puzzle together? there is always a piece missing under the couch, right? just life, of balancing kids and career. and so all of our sort of policies around that are great, but it is really about how we treat each other. it is about how we show up for

each other, and so part of that i think is identifying that really talented candidate, especially in competitive markets, may be reflecting on what their experience is at their own company, right, during that leave period. emily: what do you think the biggest risks to the business are? the biggest challenges that lie ahead? we hear about things like scalping, or the fact that you can't get a ticket to "hamilton" if you are just a regular joe. kevin: if you just look at the blockchain, there you have a means of actually assigning ownership and having clarity of who actually owns a ticket and being able to transfer that properly, and not have it end up in the hands of a scalper that then the artist does not benefit, the creator doesn't benefit. it is a third party taking a big cut. it is a scalper taking a big cut on a third-party platform, so

there are lots of ways technology can address that. it is up to us to build or lose to a competitor. so it is on our shoulders and that means continuing to build the best team we can do. emily: you have been very straightforward about going public. you have said it will happen. when will it happen? julia: when i think about what we have accomplished in the last decade plus, right, we have had in excess of $10 billion in cash of gross ticket sales flow through eventbrite, and we are just getting started. so if you are sitting in my seat and looking out over the horizon, you are really thinking about how do i build this for the long term? and we have never shied away from saying that when the timing is right, if eventbrite is ready and it is the type of company that can be a successful public company, we are going to go for it. kevin: i would just add that we are in an environment where we

used to be, someone said that after six quarters of revenue growth, it was time to go public. that was the sentiment of tech in the 1990's, that you would be out really quickly, and now we have swung in the other direction where companies are just staying private for a long time. that can have a detrimental effect because you don't have the light, the sunshine of the public markets to shine in and kind of breathe more accountability and a lot of bad things can happen, so i see personally a lot of benefits to going public, and the company is ready when julie is ready to make that call. ♪ emily: you invested in paypal, you invested in youtube. you invested in pinterest, pretty good hit record. what is your secret? ♪

emily: kevin, i want to talk to talk a little bit about your investing career. when you stepped down as ceo, you became a partner at the founders fund, and in fact you have been investing for a really long time, starting with paypal. kevin: i have always seen investing as a sort of selfish endeavor in one sense. but i love to learn from bright, talented founders that can give me a new perspective, but what i really love about it is helping to pay it forward. emily: you did this on the side, right? kevin: it was pretty natural. instead of going to some type of club or playing golf, it was working with young founders and new companies. i could pattern match and learn a lot. emily: so you invested in paypal. you invested in youtube. you invested in pinterest.

kevin: paypal, airbnb, pinterest, uber. emily: a pretty good hit record. what is your secret? kevin: what is my secret? again, i am just looking for really talented people that look at the world in a different way and are so impassioned about what they do and want to have a positive impact on the world. emily: i think you said something like you met with 900 companies your first year? kevin: i think it was 951 companies. emily: wow. you met with 951 companies in one year. that is dedication. kevin: obviously, we did not fund most of those companies, but i think what is exciting about this period as well is that the capital available is a wide variety, whether it is synthetic proteins, or space travel, or something in the biotech space, this is an

incredible period to build and really impact society. emily: how did you end up going with founders fund, which is one of the more controversial funds? peter teal is certainly -- peter thiel is certainly well-known for his support of donald trump, but also investing in out of this world ideas. why did you choose that? kevin: i knew peter while at stanford. i was involved in student politics. this is where i give the disclaimer. i was chair of the stanford democrats, and peter was staunchly conservative libertarian. but i loved the diversity of opinion that existed there, and while i did not agree with a lot of his views, i was keen to hear his perspectives because they are insightful. i guess i would say it is unfortunate it feels like there is a bit of groupthink in the valley right now that maybe kind of muscle -- muffles or kind of dims other perspectives

that we could be more open-minded to. the second reason is really how this is a partnership, a group of real dreamers truly investing in really world-changing ideas, whether it was an initial investment in facebook or being the first institutional backers of spacex and elon musk, it is great to see these independent thinkers that take risks in this manner. emily: peter has caught a lot of flack for supporting president trump. founders fund has been dragged into that. what is it like to weather that behind-the-scenes given that we are in the heart of the left-leaning west coast? kevin: i try not to get caught up in the drama of the headlines, albeit exciting, salacious headlines. -- i guess it is never a little moment. emily: it was never a

distraction? kevin: perhaps here and there. i would not over exaggerate it. emily: so peter is now moving to l.a., as we understand, because of this groupthink you mentioned and his dissatisfaction with that. what does that mean for founders fund? kevin: that is peter's choice. and founders fund is a partnership. so i think often incorrectly it is viewed as peter, but it is made up of a diverse set of investors. and we will continue and work along with peter, but there are other great team members, whether it is scott or lauren or brian or shyam, it is a partnership and not around one person. emily: what is it like being married to a venture capitalist now? julia: what is it like being married to kevin? sometimes you feel under accomplished just by the sheer number of meetings that he takes, and then to realize that

even despite him meeting somehow 951 companies in the first 12 months, he is a 50-50 partner to me at home. we co-raise our parents -- co-raise our children together. kevin: we do co-raise our parents. julia: we also co-raise our parents. sorry, mom and dad. and just how involved he is, so i do have to say, i don't know where you find the time, but it has been great to watch him. kevin: it pales in comparison to what julie has done over these last two years at eventbrite as ceo, and how the company has grown and expanded, and i am so excited for the future. emily: kevin and julia hartz, cofounders of eventbrite, thank you so much for joining us on "bloomberg studio 1.0." ♪ ♪

david: coming up on "bloomberg best," the stories that shaped the week around the world. turmoil in washington. comings and goings shake up the white house. >> donald trump has obviously decided that skill set, notwithstanding, it is important to him to have people who agree with him. >> at the end of the day, he makes his own decisions. and if he decides that you are not going along with his program, you are fired. david: goldman sachs sets the stage for a ceo succession. china plans new financial regulations. broadcom's blockbuster bid for qualcomm gets blown up. >> you have to look at this as a chilling effect of m&a. >> this notion of broadcom as a chinese company is nonsense.