Eventbrite Co-Founders Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz on What No One Tells You About Selling a Company

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz, Co-Founders of Eventbrite. Kevin traces his path from the early days of Silicon Valley to co-founding Xoom, a money remittance company that became one of the first developers on the PayPal API and was ultimately acquired by PayPal in 2015 for $1.1 billion. Julia shares how she left a career in television development at MTV and FX to co-found Eventbrite with Kevin. Together they built Eventbrite into one of the world's leading live events platforms, took it public in 2018, and sold it in April 2026 for $500 million. In this conversation they talk about what it actually takes to build a company with the person you are married to, how they handled investors who told them flat out they would not back a husband and wife team, and what happened when COVID turned Eventbrite from a $5 billion GMV company to negative revenue in 14 days. They also get into the real overhead cost of running a publicly traded company, why Kevin believes selling Xoom when he did was a $10 to $20 billion mistake in hindsight, what Julia honestly does not know about what comes next, and their unfiltered takes on AI, the current investment cycle, and whether we are heading into a bubble.