But differentiated is first and foremost,
a lot of what we think about in, in terms of beating the competitors,
you don't -if you've read Peter Thiel's book,
you've read about, you don't want to be an undifferentiated airline,
you want to have this competitive sustainable advantage.
I will mention a couple about Eventbrite and one is that the service
is self-service and that sounds like a duh kind of moment,
but when you're moving billions of dollars in small amounts,
all around the world,
it's actually just a real honey pot for hackers,
for fraudsters and so on.
And so we have continually been under
fire from fraudsters and as a result,
over the years we have built a fraud detection and deterrence
team that -in the engineering and operations around that
we consider very proprietary and give us advantage.
When we see new competitors entering the space
or trying to gain any kind of scale,
fraud really acts as almost a aircushion of sorts,
you - we've effectively deterred fraudsters from our site and they
swarm over to a competitive site or a like site and overrun that
and that's from the kind of algorithm side and also the operations
side of creating a silver bullet to stop the bad guys,
but not stop your customers in a self-service manner.
So that is a kind of specific example of differentiation.
The other that we alluded to that Julia will speak to you is just
around talent and thinking around talent as a differentiation.
Sure.
So in 2009 when we raised our $6.5
million from Sequoia Capital,
we were at a stage in the company where we knew exactly
where we wanted to go and who we needed to get us there.
And the plan called for us to grow our
team of 30 to 100 in less than a year.
At the same time we are watching all of our sort of fellow
tech entrepreneurs go through their own hypergrowth stories
and come out the other end with broken cultures,
the loss of identity and they really had to go back and self correct
on some of the hiring mistakes they had made or they'd kind of
lost their way in terms of the soul of their company.
So the idea of growing from 30 to a 100 terrified me and at the
same time I felt this irrational love and loyalty towards the company
not unlike what I feel for our own children to be honest.
So I put all of that together and realized that the only way that we
were going to go through this hypergrowth state and grow our team successfully
was if somebody and preferably a crazy person like myself,
but basically any founder you have a little bit of crazy,
would be focused entirely on people.
And I think what I realized about myself is that through this journey
of being an entrepreneur and trying to blend my background with -in television
with this newfound reality as an operator of my own company.
I realized that I had a keen sense of
how I wanted to make people feel.
And so I dug into that and took a leap
of faith and said to Kevin and Renaud,
I'd like to focus entirely on people and specifically the Britelings.
We had built up our customer service operation
and our marketing operation,
so we understood how to try to find people and how to service
them and really what that meant to the Eventbrite experience.
But we hadn't thought about how we were going to scale
our team and what we hoped our culture would be.
And one of the things that I think differentiates us from other tech
companies is the idea that our culture is designed to be sustainable.
So it's actually a manifestation of every single
Briteling who is currently at the company.
We have the free meals, we have massage Mondays,
we have the cool office,
those are just table stakes these days in the start-up world.
It's actually about how you treat people and how you make them feel,
that makes all the difference in the world.
So what I'm most proud of is not how cool our company is,
it's that I know I work at a company where we'll always
do the right thing and where we're truly people-centric.
And that actually means that we put people before
the company and the company before ourselves.
And that, in practice isn't always the easiest way to operate.
And we get into some really interesting debates.
We do things the hard way.
We sort of take windy paths to things,
things are not always clean and streamlined and sometimes messy.
But ultimately the fabric of our culture and who we are as
a team is actually -is what is going to lead us to success.
It is what is going to give us the opportunity to be an
independent standalone company for in the long haul.