Business Daily meets: Julia Hartz
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From noticing a gap in the market, to launching a start-up with her husband, CEO Julia Hartz tells us how she's built Eventbrite to become one of the biggest event ticketing platforms in the world, distributing 272 million tickets to more than 1.7 million global events in 2024. The online site enables users to buy tickets to all kinds of community gatherings; with almost one-million creators publishing get-togethers like, cooking classes, yoga sessions and cold-water plunging.
Julia shares how the company has dealt with challenging economic climates, the scourge of surge pricing, and how it's adapting to new ways of bringing the world together offline.
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Presenter: Ed Butler Producer: Amber Mehmood
(Picture: Julia Hartz. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily Meets here on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.2 | This is where we bring you in-depth interviews with people in business from around the globe. |
| 0:11.8 | Today, it's the turn of Julia Hart. She's the co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite, a multi-million dollar ticketing firm, |
| 0:20.0 | which allows people to create and promote |
| 0:22.3 | all kinds of local events. If you imagine it as a pyramid, we are that fatty middle layer |
| 0:28.8 | of every single type of event that could possibly be ticketed all over the world. Julia shares with us |
| 0:34.6 | her journey from working in the American TV industry in Los Angeles |
| 0:38.6 | to launching a startup that's become a world-famous ticketing brand. |
| 0:44.0 | It was a risk that I had not planned to take, and I had never imagined myself as an entrepreneur. |
| 0:49.7 | And she reflects on the challenges of turning digital communities into real world connections. |
| 0:55.7 | We had changed our pricing last year, which really didn't work well for our creators. |
| 1:01.0 | We listened to them and we reverted back to our original pricing. |
| 1:04.5 | That's Julia Hartz, here on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:13.3 | Growing up in Santa Cruz, California, Julia Hart's always had a strong desire to work in |
| 1:19.0 | the TV industry. When she was in college, she managed to land an internship on the hugely |
| 1:24.3 | popular TV show Friends. Then she went on to work for the likes of MTV and FX. |
| 1:30.6 | Until in the early 2000s, she met her future husband and considered a different option. |
| 1:36.9 | I was in television development. |
| 1:38.7 | This came out of left field and was brought to me by Kevin, who I was engaged to Mary at the time. |
| 1:44.6 | And we had decided to settle in Northern California where I am from. |
| 1:49.6 | So I moved from Southern California to Northern California and left my TV career behind. |
| 1:55.4 | And I like to say that Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and one of the commonalities of serial |
... |
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