Mentions personal use of Eventbrite.

Transcript context

…Xoom (XOM), the remittance business had been an exercising delusion. We had to take a lot of capital. We had an excessive amount of fraud. We had our first fight off and developed systems and algorithms to stomped that. Remittance licenses were very expensive. It was a fairly capital-intensive business. While we were very happy where the business has grown and the outcome there, it was an exercise in over delusion. In the second go-around—I guess the third if you consider the Kinect group—we really wanted to polish the product. It didn't require a lot of infrastructure. It was just the three of us. So, for a long time—I think close to two years—we just wanted to get product/market fit, build this business. Julia would respond to customers and learn about them. We would talk. I would work on the product to sign and hand them over to Renaud who would code. He spent most of his year in Paris, actually. We were ⅓ remote team at that time. He would work. Because of the eight hours difference, he would crank away while we slept. We would come in the morning and there'd be all these new features and attributes pushed. We would just wash, rinse, and repeat. We really feel—and I feel strongly—that's the right way to build a company. Capital can be a good thing, but a lot of times, financing really hinders companies. That it gets one focus on the wrong things that don’t really focus you on what's most important and that's your customer. We spent a few years doing this. The other side was that nobody wanted to invest in us. They were thinking what is this strange business of this not large concert events but everything under the sun that our creators, our event holders, our merchants, were publishing? We use Eventbrite for all of our Acquired events. It's awesome but this is not what people are thinking about at that time. There's Ticketmaster and there are you guys. We talked about this. People were collecting checks at the door for everything below the arena-sized venue. How quickly did you identify that gap? Forget the arenas. There's this whole sea of micro event entrepreneurs, essentially, that don't have tools. Was that division in the beginning? It was. Our hypothesis was that there were far more people trying to sell tickets to events than anybody had ever seen because it was offline. The fatty middle between the top of the pyramid being large arenas and the bottom being backyard barbecues and birthday parties that there would be this really rich, interesting, middle layer that was global. If we could build something with a self-service ethos that could meet the basic needs of as many different types of event creators as possible, that would continue to grow volume, scale, and give us optionality in the future. We just focused on building a great product, but I think from a customer standpoint, for the first year or so, our earliest adopters were tech bloggers and people in that community who were hosting in-person events with their readers. We were the ticketing platform for the first tech crunch disrupt. Literally, we printed out a guest list, showed up, and checked people in at the door (we have the pictures to prove it). Then, I remember about a year in, we started to see speed dating on the east coast popup. In particular, there was a customer who ran an event called Red Carpet Speed Dating. That started to flourish. We started to see the maps light up.…

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