Kevin Hartz: observation

Transcript context

…All right. Now, on the grading. As you both know, the way that we finish these episodes is with a grade. Dave and I have gone back and forth on how on earth we do that for this episode. What I want to do with both of you is what’s the scenario where five years from now we look back and say A+ between product and strategy decisions. What could be the A+ outcome from this? The A+ outcome is the silver lining of being able to dramatically focus the business on the core of the business. Oftentimes, in expansive growth companies, you’re placing a lot of investment that’s in a lot of different areas and sometimes getting ahead of yourself. The A+ scenario would be really focusing back to the core that really grew Eventbrite, made it great in moving the world even faster towards the self-service ethos, and building a better product about that. Right now, music venues have been by far the hardest hit. If you look at some of the ticketing competitors in those spaces, they’re accustomed to very manual and horrible platforms that require a lot of people, human software of sorts, and now to be able to make it so simple for a venue, a venue that doesn’t have the balance sheet and resources to be able to do this in an automated way into it, except as just as companies accepted Salesforce, HubSpot, or these other platforms, this really paves the way to the future. It also retires the incumbents in the same way that you saw, just the inefficient businesses disappear during the 2000 crisis, the dot-com bust, during the housing crisis, where it’s actually an opportunity to gain market share and come out a real leader with a much sharper focus. That’s the A+ scenario. Julia, what do you think?…

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