Hala Taha

And it's just like that, I mean, not to be cheesy, but that is a tale as old as time.

Something that you just touched on was that Eventbrite's product was able to sort of evolve with COVID and going back to events.

That is something that people really want.

And just like now it's like, you know, so many things have changed over the last 20 years.

Like it's night and day.

But you also have said that company culture has to be able to evolve.

And you can't like have the same company culture as day one as year 20.

So I'd love to learn from you, you know, how you think about company culture, what kind of values you had in the beginning and like how it had to change over time.

When I think about the Eventbrite product and why it worked and why it became ubiquitous with live experiences, I think a lot of it was that we built it to melt into the background.

We wanted our creators and their events and the people who gathered around that passion to be front and center.

So all of our marketing, all of our storytelling was really around that.

We started to become and evolve naturally from just a platform and like a utility into a marketplace when we realized that we could start to help creators find bigger audiences.

And when we realized that people were coming to Eventbrite to find things to do because they realized that we had really niche content that they couldn't find on other platforms.

So that evolution of a marketplace

was really going on in parallel to the evolution of the Eventbrite culture.

And I'll never forget when I took on the sort of self-anointed role of like coming to the table of every major business decision, putting Brightlings, which is our cute little name, first, like their needs first, that I realized like great cultures are often just a manifestation of the people at the company

at any given time.

And because of that, cultures change.

You know, they change through time because people come and go.

I mean, being a founder and being a CEO, you have to be okay with people leaving you all the time.