Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…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. We have the section of the show called the playbook and rather than waiting for it later, I'd rather pull forward a bullet point here. I think it really gets to why the perception of Eventbrite was that you didn't have a large market by VCs at first because Julia, as you said, it's because of the shadow market. It was largely offline transactions. There was no good way to see that there was a large opportunity here. The internet creates the opportunity for niches to individually be large. This whole long tail of creators that otherwise didn't have the tooling and were (thus) collecting checks at the door, or not having events because it's too high of a friction thing, this basically unlocked new value for that massive longtail of I think you have something close to million creators in 2019 using Eventbrite. I think if you would have told me in 2008 that a decade from now that there will be one million [...] events using just this one company's toolset, it frankly seems ludicrous. Now it seems obvious, but then you can totally see how you would have to be Julia and Kevin Hartz, the crazy people who think this is actually going to happen for that to believe it. This is why we want to be on the Acquired podcast because you understand. You actually do your homework and you have a sophisticated understanding of the intricacies of this. You're like the Statetris of podcasting. We're also going to try to recruit you two during this show given that.…

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