Julia Hartz knows that when you buy companies, you buy people. Founders must be kept, employees embraced and customers comforted.
So when her event management and ticketing company Eventbrite bought rival Ticketfly last year, she focused on winning hearts and minds. Just 10 days after the $200m acquisition — Eventbrite’s seventh and largest deal — nearly 140 of the target’s employees moved to its San Francisco office.
“All of a sudden you are going to the bathroom next to your arch enemy, who you were just competing over deals with,” she says. “There’s a bit of friction in that. But we were able to come through it.”
We are trying to create a totally global company, which means over time, San Francisco should not be the centre of the universe, right?
Ms Hartz pushed to integrate the companies before Ticketfly’s annual conference in January, just four months after the deal. Presenting a united vision to the acquisition’s most important clients was essential: she and Andrew Dreskin, Ticketfly’s chief executive, gave keynote speeches, and every session featured representatives from both companies.
“We created this sense of ‘this is happening, we’re in this together, and not only here’s how we are going to mash everything up, but here’s the greater future you are going to have’,” she says.
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Ms Hartz, 38, speaks with verve, conviction and an expanding grin. She started Eventbrite 12 years ago with her husband Kevin Hartz, an entrepreneur who was originally chief executive and now chairman, and Frenchman Renaud Visage as chief technology officer.
Putting on a show is her forte. Before entrepreneurship, she studied journalism and started her career in television in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, working on shows such as Jackass and Nip/Tuck. She moved to San Francisco with her husband, where the three founders funded Eventbrite for two years before venture capital investments from Silicon Valley’s Sequoia and, more recently, from fund managers Tiger Global and T Rowe Price.
Eventbrite helps event organisers co-ordinate their projects and has expanded because the millennial generation is hungry for experiences. “Our hunch was that the aggregation of all of these events that we considered to be mid-market — not birthday parties and not Taylor Swift at Madison Square Garden, but everything in between — would be massive,” she says. Social media works in the company’s favour. Says Ms Hartz: “The Fomo [fear of missing out] flywheel repeats, right?”
Eventbrite has passed $10bn in gross ticket sales on its platform, from which it takes a cut — generally between 1 and 2.5 per cent, plus a fee. It has expanded to provide analytics to events organisers to better understand their marketing and even into hardware for processing tickets at festivals.
Millions of events have been created with the help of its services across 180 countries. The company has more than 900 employees in 12 offices around the world, and a valuation estimated at more than $1bn.
But Ms Hartz and her co-founders were not the only entrepreneurs to spot the opportunity. She says the market is fragmented, everything is for sale and, with “strong growth” and a “great culture”, Eventbrite is the preferred buyer.
Three key questions to Julia Hartz
Who is your leadership hero?
Katherine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. People are talking about her more because she was in the Meryl Streep film The Post. But actually in that movie they don’t cover what’s most remarkable about her.
If you were not a CEO, what would you be?
I had this career in television development before [her husband] Kevin so rudely interrupted it and I came on this journey. I would be an operating executive — I’m really, really great at operating. If not, my dream as a child was to be a back-up dancer for Janet Jackson.
What was your first leadership lesson?
Not to hire people who are just like myself.
The company has recruited industry talent and bought companies it spotted through its integrations platform Spectrum, including Nvite, which creates websites for events. It has also closed some large deals, including last year’s purchase of Ticketscript, a European ticketing platform, and April’s acquisition of Ticketea, a Spanish service, both for undisclosed sums. Javier Andres, Ticketea co-founder and chief executive, will join Eventbrite as director for Spain and Portugal.
When assessing a potential acquisition, Ms Hartz says 70 per cent of her concerns are about talent — it has to feel like a “cultural fit”, she says. Then 20 per cent is about “strategic fit”: whether it will accelerate Eventbrite’s progress in a particular type of event, region of the world or new area of business, such as Scintilla Technologies, which helped it create smart wristbands for festivals using radio frequency identification.
[Company founders] like to make an impact, they like autonomy, and they like to solve big hairy problems
The last 10 per cent is about finances. Ms Hartz says she wants to keep Eventbrite lean, a habit she developed when she was writing personal cheques in the days when the three founders funded the company themselves.
Talent can make or break a deal, particularly in the technology industry. Most often founders leave their company after it has been acquired — or “rest and vest”, waiting for when their stock options can be exercised. But Ms Hartz is proud Eventbrite has kept all the founders from its deals, except one.
She puts them in senior positions, with one on the board, another leading a region, and a third managing a new technology product. “[Founders] like to make an impact, they like autonomy, and they like to solve big hairy problems,” she says.
An important part of Eventbrite’s due diligence process is learning about the people who work in a potential acquisition. It has even backed out of partnerships when Ms Hartz has felt the fit was not right.
Eventbrite’s acquisitions
2018
Ticketea (Spain): company has sold tickets in more than 150 countries for festivals and concerts.
2017
Ticketfly (US): music ticketing site was acquired for $200m.
2017
Ticketscript (Netherlands): a ticketing provider active in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium.
2016
Nvite (US): a highly-customisable, community-focused event management and registration platform.
2016
Queue (US): platform that helps streamline the workflow for venues and promoters with online planning and collaboration tools.
2015
Scintilla Technologies (Canada): a tech company that provides devices and software to track and manage entries into events.
2013
Lanyrd (UK): London-based data group that allows people to add and find conferences.
2013
Eventioz (Argentina): ticketing company with operations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.
In 2016, for example, the company was in talks with Wantickets, a US service, for months. But the deal fell through and Wantickets later filed a lawsuit against Eventbrite, which was settled out of court. The FT was unable to reach Wantickets for comment. Ms Hartz will not be drawn on the subject, other than to emphasise the importance of cultural integration.
She recognises there is a challenge in spreading the “Briteling” culture (as Eventbrite employees are known). The group has bought companies with offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the Netherlands. She says many US companies get it “wrong” by focusing on their head office when they expand internationally. “We are trying to create a totally global company, which means over time, San Francisco should not be the centre of the universe, right?”
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Now an initial public offering is under consideration. Ms Hartz says she and Kevin are “very aligned” on a strategy for building a lasting public business. “We’ve always thought that if we could get to a place and build a sustainable company clearly positioned for the long term, then it should be a public company,” she says.
Clearly a fan of lists, Ms Hartz counts off the conditions for going public on her fingers. Eventbrite should be profitable; it should be technically ready to deliver consistent results; and the macro environment should be right.
“I know we have the fortitude to be a strong young public company and to live through those moments that are obviously going to be stressful,” she says. But, ever vigilant, she adds: “I can’t comment on whether we are ready yet.”
Ask an outsider
When one business buys another in order to scale up, people from the two organisations are brought together who have tackled similar problems and found solutions that each considers superior. This will usually lead to friction, says Hal Gregersen, executive director of the MIT Leadership Center and author of Questions Are the Answer.
To set the right tone from the start, he suggests setting every newly-combined team a problem-solving exercise that neither has tackled before.
“Consider taking time away from debating whose solution is better, and shifting that energy towards figuring out what better questions could be asked,” Prof Gregersen explains.
Reframing a problem is a powerful way to spark innovation and encourage bonding between new colleagues, he says.
“And what better time than post-acquisition to do this, when teams have not settled into groupthink yet, and want to believe they could take on much bigger problems together?”
Janina Conboye
Main picture: Julia Hartz by Thor Swift
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