Eventbrite (with Julia & Kevin Hartz)

**Kevin Hartz** (0:00)
You guys are probably getting annoyed because we should get started, huh?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
No, I mean, I think we have enough tape here of just breakfast sandwich conversation that that can be the episode.

**Julia Hartz** (0:08)
Good. I hope you really go there.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:21)
Welcome to Season 7, Episode 2 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:31)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:32)
And we are your hosts. Today, we come to you with the long overdue story of Eventbrite. This is, of course, a fascinating one right now, an events company during a global pandemic with minimal human contact and nearly all in-person gatherings having been canceled. And while it's interesting to dive into how Eventbrite is problem-solving in this era, the history of the company is unique and something that we haven't really covered on Acquired, a husband-wife founding team. We're in the unique position to be joined by CEO Julia Hartz and her co-founder and husband Kevin, who was also the longtime CEO and is now chairman. Rather than the full blow-by-blow of the company, we're going to zoom in on a few key moments together with them. The 2006 founding and how deeply intertwined the company is with Kevin and Julia as a couple and as a family. 2018 when Julia led the company through IPO and how they are managing and streamlining the business today through the coronavirus. We will also be continuing our discussion on the LP show with Kevin on his new secret until last week project, a $200 million special purpose acquisition company or SPAC that he has launched.

**David Rosenthal** (1:42)
Yeah, we're going to go deep on this potentially revolutionary way to go public that is now hot off the presses officially endorsed by the anti IPO crusader himself, Bill Gurley. We'll also talk with Kevin about why everyone seems to be rushing to raise these things right now, how they fit into the last decade of staying private longer, and how he believes it's truly in the spirit of Silicon Valley to leverage old mechanisms like this to unlock new innovation.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:09)
I'm pumped. As always, if you want to listen to that or any of the LP episodes, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquired.fm slash lp. Now, just one announcement from us this time before diving in. We read every single survey response, which thank you for all of your thoughtful feedback, and we learned that the number one way that all of you found out about the show was word of mouth, from a friend or from a colleague. Now, this is a gift because, of course, who doesn't love organic growth, but are also partially accursed, since it actually makes it hard for us to repeat. So we have a favor to ask today to pick your favorite episode and share it with a friend or on social media to help our little experiment of seeing if we can move the needle just by asking. We've also heard that a bunch of you have started discussion groups within your company Slack with your colleagues, which was just a fun pattern to see among all the survey responses. So anyway, that's our one ask today. No Slack podcast reviews, feedback, any of that. Just pick an episode, share it, say why you love it, and thank you. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (3:20)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose built for AI and run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:45)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:51)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, et cetera, and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:09)
Yeah. obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. These lower energy costs get passed on to customers.