This content was created by Kevin Hartz. This content was uploaded by Kevin Hartz. This is a YouTube interview (Bloomberg West) titled "CEO Hartz Says Social Media Is Driving Eventbrite Sales" (created 2012-03-23). The excerpt is an on-camera interview between host Emily and guest Kevin Hartz (co‑founder & CEO of Eventbrite, Sequoia special technology partner and early PayPal backer). They discuss Eventbrite's rapid growth, how social media is driving ticket sales, technical and operational challenges of scaling to large events (handling traffic spikes/DoS-like surges, ticket scanning/anti-duplication at venues), democratizing ticketing versus incumbents like Ticketmaster, and briefly touch on Jack Dorsey’s roles at Twitter and Square.
Chapters
Well, it's spring, the music festival season is heating up and Eventbrite may have just the ticket. The online ticketing company helps you host and promote your own events. To date, they've organized 370,000 of them. Let's bring in Eventbrite co founder and CEO Kevin Hartz. He's also a special technology partner at Sequoia, an active early stage investor, and was one of the earliest backers of PayPal. Kevin, welcome to Bloomberg West.
Thank you very much, Emily.
So, Eventbrite, you've been growing really fast. You just move into a bigger office. Tell me where you guys are right now and how technology is going to help you get to the next phase.
Well, we started out very modestly and back in 2006, in the last couple of years has the last two years in particular has really been a big shift in momentum and a lot of it is just what's happening now in the market. A lot of what's being driven is being by our sales are being driven by social media.
Big change in terms of taking on bigger and bigger events, which you are doing. What kind of challenges do you face in taking on a company like Ticketmaster?
Well, we've always talked about democratizing ticketing and what that means is that we want to make ticketing available to all organizers of all shapes and sizes. Whether it's a conference or a seminar or a school play or reunion or so on. It's just this broad range of event organizers across the board. And over the last few years, we've had millions and millions of attendees of this event and as you mentioned, hundreds of thousands of organizers of the event. And as our product has matured and we're building this really great world technology team right here in Silicon Valley, we're finding ourselves moving up into larger, larger events where we had an event just a few weeks ago that was 30,000 events, 30,000 attendees. And we've got an event this summer that's going to be close to 70,000.
But in terms of scaling, is that the hardest part to have these bigger events?
Well, there's, there's many different moving parts in the large events. In particular, when you have popular artists, musicians that go on sale, you have to be able to handle what's called a planned denial of service attack. Denial of service attack is when people hit the server. In the case of malicious activity, you have people hitting the server and trying to bring your server down. You in fact have that when you put a big on sale for a large artist like a Lady Gaga or U2, so you have to architect a system that can really withstand this intense servicing of hundreds of thousands of people trying to buy tickets. That's part of it also. It's just how you handle the crowds when they get there. You've got to have a network around the arena or stadium to check people in, to scan them in and ensure that people aren't trying to duplicate tickets or so on. So there's a few nuances, but it's really the same core platform that our school play, high school or elementary school plays are using, as you're seeing used by some, some of the largest event holders in the world.
So you're also a tech special technology partner at Sequoia and as part of the PayPal mafia, you've got your ear to the ground in terms of what's going on in Silicon Valley. Sequoia is an investor of Square. I wanted to ask you about Jack Dorsey going back to Twitter but also still running Square. Can he do both?
Well, I have high expectations that he is a young Steve Jobs. So if you make the Pixar analogy that Steve Jobs ran both Pixar and Apple, I think you can, I think he can do it. He's an absolute product visionary. It's incredible what he's obviously done at Twitter and what he's doing at Square. Square also has a depth of team of Keith Roboys as their CEO in the right next to each other. So I think he can, I think he'll handle them both quite well.
All right, Kevin Hart, CEO and co founder of Eventbrite. Thank you so much for joining us. We have so much more to talk about. We'll just have to have you back. Thanks.
