Speaker unverified: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That, to me, sounds like a whole year between when you said our two years of bootstrapping are behind us. We want to raise money. And then you actually did raise money. Am I off there or did that really take a long time? We weren't fundraising the entire year but we did go out towards the end of 2008. It was the fall of 2008. I don't know if you too young tabs are old enough, but it was a tough time for the economy. The sky was falling. We met with 27 venture firms and we received 27 nos. We did raise a C fund. If you remember, we began in earnest in 2006. A big portion of the C fund was our own money, so we rolled some of those PayPal proceeds. We raised a couple of $100,000 in a seed in a friends and family round. Jeff Clavier was an early supporter. The Birches, Michael and Xochi Birch were a husband-and-wife team that we admired so much, that had a phenomenal outcome selling the business to AOL. We went on a merry way to building and then you saw the 2008–2009 economic collapse, the housing bubble burst, and we were thinking we're really going to be in trouble here. But what you see in these massive dislocations is that there's this movement online, that the world figures out that it's far more efficient to use a service like Eventbrite than the traditional manner of doing that, and we see that today. It's a very important lesson. We see this dislocation that's happened due to COVID and you see the future come faster, whether it's Xoom conferencing, whether it's food and grocery delivery with Instacart and DoorDash. This is an extraordinary phenomenon. It's also an opportunity for new players to outhustle even more so the incumbents. We saw a lot of flipping happen of leadership where old media still had a strong foothold or real estate practices, the past had a strong foothold. But then, a lot of these marketplaces became much more prominent, gained market leadership. Trulia, which we had the opportunity to write the first check into, became market leaders in the space and surpassed their offline equivalence.…

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