20 years ago, Julia Hartz abandoned a promising career at MTV and FX, drove down the California coast and created, with her own resources, the ticketing platform Eventbrite together with her two co-founders. Now, the longtime executive wakes up with a completely empty schedule; Hartz sold his company in a $500 million transaction and is deciding his next chapter after parting ways with his creation.
“It’s not much different than what I experienced when I had my baby. It feels a little like postpartum… I’ve literally never been without a job since I was 15,” Hartz told Fortune. “I have a very deep passion for learning and starting over from scratch.”
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The entrepreneur has been busy and full of commitments for more than three decades. As a teenager, he earned his first money working in cafes and taking children to activities after school; and, while studying at Pepperdine University, she worked as an intern on the series Friends, later joining MTV’s series development department.
Four years later, developing shows like Jackass and The Shield, Hartz decided to pursue entrepreneurship. Since then, Eventbrite has been his path; she led the business through nearly $350 million in fundraising, an IPO, the Covid-19 shutdown and the $500 million sale to Bending Spoons.
In the period after the transaction, Hartz is evaluating all the ways he can use his new free time.
“I am receiving very interesting opportunities coming to me, which makes me grateful,” she says. “I also can’t help but feel like there’s an incredibly symbiotic way I’m starting over.”
On March 13, Hartz served his final day leading the events and ticketing company. Now, she’s taking advantage of the rare opportunity to chart her next course.
Hartz says her husband and Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz has already made a list of 27 different companies they could create together, and she’s weighing entrepreneurship against all her other career options.
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For now, at age 46, she has joined the board of the Live Like Braun Foundation, run by Jenn and Dan Levi, helping to raise funds and awareness about the risks of drug-impaired driving.
The entrepreneur also claims that a good portion of her free time has been dedicated to acting as a “solo recruiter,” helping affected Eventbrite employees find new job opportunities.
Other than that, she’s finally resuming hobbies that founders tend to put aside. Hartz is learning to play the piano again, working on his golf game and even playing chess with a robot at home.
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Leveraging her experience in technology entrepreneurship, she is also spending time exploring the new AI tools driving the latest technology revolution.
“What I’ve been doing in an insane amount of time is digging deeper and deeper into Claude’s code and OpenClaw,” continues Hartz. “I’m doing things that I think a lot of people should do, but unfortunately, don’t have the time for.”
The executive is also excited about the idea of starting all over again, but not creating another company with her name. Instead, she wants to learn by returning to the lowest point of the corporate hierarchy: through an internship.
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Hartz values this early-career experience as a way to gain access and learn more — and would like other experienced leaders to also take time to intern with each other, even if it’s for a week lower in the hierarchy.
“I love the idea of internships,” says Hartz. “I always liked the idea of people already established in their careers interning with each other.”
Hartz’s $500M Exit After Two Decades Building Eventbrite
Eventbrite has been connecting users to niche community activities for more than two decades, distributing tens of millions of paid tickets per year and hosting millions of events annually.
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But last year, as Hartz and his board reassessed how the company should move forward, it became clear that something needed to change. They decided to sell to Bending Spoons and go private, ending Hartz’s two-decade run at the helm of Eventbrite’s expansion as a landmark name in culture.
“I always imagined myself, visually, as a grandmother with a shotgun on the porch. I never wanted to sell the company, it was never a gold mine,” explains Hartz. “In fact, I felt like I needed to make that absolutely clear so that no one would try to come in and take over the company.”
“And in that, one of the difficult things you have to do as a CEO is to constantly be looking ahead and making somewhat detached decisions about what’s best for the company… even if it goes in the opposite direction of what your heart wants.”
Since going public in 2018, Eventbrite has faced a number of financial concerns; the IPO initially valued the company at $1.76 billion, but over the next eight years its shares plummeted.
And the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t help — its consumers stayed home while large public events were heavily restricted.
In recent years, Eventbrite has struggled to achieve profitability and has undergone several rounds of headcount reductions. Hartz claims that the company was rebuilt after the lockdown period, but the cycle had “completed”, and it was time to think about Eventbrite’s next metamorphosis.
“My mindset was: let’s take the company private. It was clear that Eventbrite needed to be a privately held company. We would benefit greatly by not carrying that level of structure, cost and pressure,” explains Hartz. “I needed to put my ego aside to do what was right.”
It was a difficult decision, and Hartz says her board — made up almost entirely of women, with the exception of one man — contributed a diversity of opinions. Still, they concluded that a smaller capitalization company like Eventbrite has a harder time building a solid base of investors that will lead to greater success.
Going private and stepping down as CEO was not easy at all. But Hartz is excited about the next phase of Eventbrite and what her own future holds as an independent professional.
“I am so grateful to have led a company that I helped create,” says Hartz. “I don’t think this should ever be taken for granted or a right — people really need to earn this privilege, and it’s the honor of a lifetime.”
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