All right, thank you everyone for joining us. My name's Matt Farrell. I'm the vertical marketplaces analyst here at Piper. We're lucky enough to have Lanny, the CFO of Eventbrite, with us here for our fireside. I'll just jump right in, if that's cool with you. Well, let me say thank you first. Thanks for having us. Yeah. It's been great to be here- Yeah -once again. Yeah. We really appreciate the great research you do on the company. Yeah. It's wonderful. Awesome. Well, I want to spend some time talking about, first, the demand generation tools, which are in the early days, have been a home run for you guys. You recently made the decision to integrate Boost into your core product offering. I just wanted to spend some time, you know, hearing from you about the decision-making process to go through that, and, you know, how does that really impact the creator and the financial model? Yeah. Well, it's been a bit of a journey, but I think the, like, overarching and most fundamental point is all event creators want to market their events. Mm. There's a few that don't, that are maybe serving in a club, but the vast, vast, vast majority want to market their events. So in response to that, we looked at how can we help them do that? Three years ago, we found a small affiliate that had really cracked some codes, some early code on how to market events in social media. We had partnered with that company for a couple of years. We saw how they had been working with some of our customers, and we decided to acquire that company in 2020. It was kind of an opportune time to pick up a little business like that. Five months later, we had integrated their product into our core product, and we called this suite of social marketing tools for live events Boost, Eventbrite Boost. And then we really embarked on a two year process of refining that tool, optimizing how it performed, adding features to it, and getting really good at how we marketed it to creators. And over the ensuing couple of years, we grew it to about 10,000 subscribing creators. And most importantly, we saw customer retention on that product get better quarter-over-quarter, quarter-over-quarter, as we worked on improving its functionality, its ease of use, and as creators got accustomed to using it. What we see is that creators who are using our marketing tools are getting a 5 or 6x return on their ad spending, which is great. But the really fascinating thing is that they're getting a significant improvement in their ad spending using the tool versus not using the tool, like a 60% improvement in the efficacy of their advertising. And we're giving that to them by doing a couple things. We're really good at creating lookalike groups of consumers to market your event to. We have so much more data than any one creator does, so that helps us advise them on who they should be seeking to, to target. Recently, we've integrated generative AI in writing ad copy about events, and we can again use our scale to look at what ad copy works best for marketing events, and in seconds, literally seconds, write ad copy and event descriptions for creators that they can use that we know will convert for them when they put that into their social media marketing. And then we've added some features, like an enhanced email capability, that also allows them to target their email. Eventbrite has a great advantage when we're delivering these marketing tools, and that is that we can help them shoot their ads out to all the different places that they want to shoot those ads out. But when the ad works and a consumer buys it, they're buying that ticket through the Eventbrite ticketing system, so we can really quickly close the loop on which ads, which campaigns, which media properties are working. And that allows them... And if you think about it, most creators have 45 days to market that event, and then it's over and it's gone. It's an ephemeral, really short period of time. So helping them be fast in getting the ad up, fast in targeting it, and make quick decisions about where it's working and not working, really helps improve the efficacy of that ad. So we've done all this in two years. We've been really excited about that development and product velocity. And I'll go back to the first point. Almost all creators want to market their event. So here we've got this great, high-performing, retentive tool. It's behind a subscription wall, and it's something that we have 10,000 customers, that's great, but we have 175,000 creators on our site every month, and we want to get it to all of them. So what we've made the decision to do is to take those core marketing tools and make them a part of the basic Eventbrite product offering, available to you at, as on day one as part of your usage of the product. And we've introduced in the process a little bit of a different pricing model. And what we've said is, and we've scaled this according to the size of the event. For small events, they can use those tools for free. But for medium-sized and larger events, they pay a fee per event, based on the size of the event, to have to list their event on Eventbrite and to get access to those marketing tools that can help them. We're in the process right now, this week, this month, of introducing those organizer fees. In some parts of the world, we're fully rolled out, but in the United States, we're a week or two away from fully rolling out the new organizer fee, listings fee, model. And we're really excited about it because we're going to- it's gonna have a nice monetization opportunity for Eventbrite, but more importantly, it's putting these tools in the hands of all of our creators, enhancing the performance of their marketing efforts. And when they succeed in marketing their event, it turns the turnstiles of Eventbrite's business model and drives more ticket sales. So, that's been our journey. We're really excited about it. Yeah, and maybe just pivoting over to ads as well. You know, you recently launched that, and you've had a lot of success there as well. It speaks to the kind of Eventbrite-driven tickets that you always talk about. You know, what are some of the next steps that we should be looking for for the ads rollout, as we look into the back half of this year and maybe into 2024? So I put that, and frankly, the marketing tools, in the context of a really important evolution and almost a transformation in Eventbrite's sort of positioning and our strategy and identity in many ways. We've been a creator ticketing platform, and we are in the process of migrating and evolving into being really a two-sided event marketplace. And we want to be the indispensable place for live experiences. So if you're a creator, you where else are you going to list your event but on Eventbrite? Because that's where the audience is, that's where the tools are to promote my event. That's where the scalability and reliability and trust, and all those benefits that we can bring to them are. And on the consumer side, we've got a ways to go, but we also want to be in more than just the seasonal categories, where we see this all the time. People come to Eventbrite and say: I know I want to do something for Halloween, or for New Year's Eve, or for Valentine's Day, or for, I want to find a food and wine festival in this part of the country that I'm traveling to. We see people come to Eventbrite looking for things to do, and we want to build on that already it's in some categories and in some, some seasons. We want to build that across more and more of our footprint. And so Eventbrite Ads fits very much into this dynamic of becoming a marketplace, where creators are looking to promote and distribute their events, and consumers are looking to find events that are relevant to them. One way to do that is. You see this in marketplace after marketplace, after marketplace, as you know, that there's a sponsored listings opportunity. So we introduced this availability to promote your event in our search and discovery experience or in our newsletters and other places on our sort of consumer surfaces. You can basically advertise your event to the top of the funnel. It's grown really well. We introduced that product in response to creators telling us, "We want to market on your property. We know consumers are looking for events there, and we want to push our event to the top." We launched it with what I would call kind of the MVP version of the technology, which is it's an exposure-based product, it is not a conversion-based product, and it's got a cost per thousand sort of old school internet advertising model. And so our evolution at, I think, very importantly from a product perspective, is to evolve from a CPM exposure cost per thousand model to a cost per click and a cost per action model. And we're doing the engineering work right now, and the product work, and the UI and UX work to be able to switch over to and introduce a cost per action model, which our creators are telling us really resonates more with the way they run their business. That'll be live. We expect by the end of this year, but early part of next year. I think that's going to be a big unlock for us. I also think that this repositioning around the organizer fees and putting those marketing tools into the core bundle of Eventbrite products, that gives us a great opportunity to say, "Hey, we're here to help you with your marketing, and you're running ads, and we can help you run them more effectively on other sites. But we also have one of the, one of the primary places where consumers are shopping for live experiences, and you can advertise on our, on our product offering as well." So those two things, I think, like repositioning around the marketplace and moving to a cost per click dynamic model there, are really important for the next phase of growth. But gosh, that business grew 40% quarter-over-quarter last quarter. We're really pleased that the adoption of Eventbrite Ads is coming from paid event creators and also from free event creators. 25% or 30% of the advertisers in Eventbrite Ads are creators of free events. And why would you advertise a free event? Because at that free event, there's beer, and there's wine, and there's merchandise, there's memberships, there's sponsorships, there's all kinds of other activity going on. I guess as we take a step looking forward three-five years out, you know, what in your eyes do you consider a success for both Boost and Ads? Whether it's a dollar amount or an adoption amount or a penetration amount, you know, what would be something that we should be thinking about? Well, I think, you know, the way we do it, like, looking out three-five years- Yeah. Our goal is to be this indispensable marketplace for live experiences. Yeah. Where, you know, creators are really aware of the incremental distribution and ease that we bring to them, and where they understand that the cost of leaving Eventbrite is losing those tools, losing that distribution, losing that incremental audience, losing all that intelligence. And the benefit of joining is gaining all those things. That's what makes us indispensable on the creator side. What makes us indispensable on the consumer side is, you know, it's reliably a place to sort through all the different things you can do and find really good experiences that meet your interests, that you can share with your friends, that will be fulfilling and engaging experiences. So as we look forward over that time frame, the primary goal is to become that marketplace, and the advertising product is a key facet of it. If you look at other marketplaces, we're not inventing something that, you know, that doesn't exist elsewhere. Right. Most marketplaces, whether it's Amazon or it's eBay or Airbnb or Etsy, they have some ability for, you know, the seller to promote their wares. And in many of those models, you'll see that, like, maybe 25% of the revenue can come from those sponsorship products. Now, we're in low single-digit% of our revenues today with the ad product that we have today. But I will say, if you look at it on a customer-by-customer basis, and we outlined some of this in our Analyst Day materials a year and a half ago, we are seeing that for those creators who are adopting Eventbrite Ads, we're getting 25% of the revenue from those creators coming from the ads product. So getting to that kind of contribution, which we see others do- Mm-hmm. And we see our pioneer customers do, it's a matter of time, and product development, and effective marketing. And I think we've shown with everything I related a minute ago about Boost, that we're pretty good at, at improving the core product, adding functionality to it, and marketing it well. ... and maybe just pivoting over, you talked a little bit about, you know, improving the consumer experience, but then we just kinda hit on what you've been doing for the creator. Would love to just hear what you've been doing over the last few years to improve the consumer experience and make it easier for users to, you know, look for the live events that they're searching for. You know, over the last three years, I would say we've not been doing a whole lot. We made some tough, tough, clinical, decisive choices during COVID. That was a tough period for the live events business, and we focused very, very heavily on the creator product. And that meant that geographic expansion and consumer product experience sort of got put on the wayside for a while. Now, we're through COVID. Our core ticketing business is performing super well. Creator acquisition, you know, here's an interesting thing on the creator side: since the second quarter of 2021, we've grown the creator volume every quarter, every category, paid, free, frequent creator, infrequent creator. Every quarter, year-over-year, we've been growing. So the creator product is in great shape. So now we've really... So I laugh when you say three years. That's where we were three years. So now, for the last three months, or maybe a little bit more than that- Yeah ... we've really started to ramp up the investment on the consumer side. Yep. We have three years of opportunity, at least, on the creator product development. But let me talk to you a little bit about, give an outline of where we're headed. Well, personalization of the experience, the, just the presentation of the events, the search and discovery mechanisms, and our SEO are three really big areas of consumer product investment for us. And let me, let me go a little bit deeper on that. On the, on the presenting of the events, we've added video to the events, and that addition of video can lift an event's visibility by, like, 70%. And, and every live event should have video to market it. It shouldn't be a static page. So we wanna make video ubiquitous across our listings, which will make our pages much more dynamic and more compelling and help showcase events and sell them better. On the personalization front, we're just beginning to really put all the pieces together of you're in this city with these kind of habits, and these are the kind of events. Right now, if you look at what's surfaced in the For You category, it doesn't incorporate sort of what's hot in your demographic as much as it incorporates what you saw last week and gives you more of last week. So we have work to do on the personalization of the product, and we know that when we enhance our Things to Do page, we've seen, like, a 60% increase in traffic to the Things to Do page as it's gotten more relevant. And then on the distribution, on the SEO side, you know, that was an area that we've been very strong on SEO historically and driving visibility for our pages, but it was another area that we kinda de-emphasized during COVID, and that period, and we're now putting resources back on the way we get our pages to rank, the way we tag our pages, what's on those pages. And we think we can become a lot more visible to consumers out on the search frontiers. So these are all areas, I'd put them in those kinda buckets that we'll be focused upon. And you know, our consumer product experience, the mobile app, it's functional- Mm-hmm ... but it's not at the level of, like, sit and spend some spare time browsing through the kaleidoscope of events that we have. Yeah. But we just don't have that product experience at that level, and we're hiring people from the Airbnbs and the Kayaks and the other companies that really cracked the code on how to market similar experiences to consumers. Maybe let's pivot over to the financial model a little bit. Earlier this year, you kinda announced a restructuring, and you are a couple quarters in at this point. Would love just to hear maybe some background on why the restructuring made sense. And then second, you know, you kind of have talked about hitting the 20% Adjusted EBITDA margin at some point next year. What are kind of the remaining hurdles to get there from where you are right now? Well, the restructuring that we undertook was motivated by the success of Boost, the success of Ads, and the early, early success of some of the investments we've been making on the consumer side. And as we've been turning over those cards with investments, they're coming up face card after face card after face card, telling us that we have permission and opportunity and ability to really bring the consumer side of our two-sided marketplace into full bloom. Mm. We just wanna go faster. Yep. So we looked at the ways of going faster, go back to investors and say: We're not gonna deliver the margins because we got to make more investments, or think about how we operate our core business more efficiently. We made the decision that, hey, we think we can wring greater efficiencies out of our core business. We've been investing in that ticketing platform for a decade and a half, but really intensively for the last three years, and we have great numbers to show for it. We went back through our vendor agreements, our support agreements, our outside consulting agreements, where we have staff positions that support it, and we just said, like: Where can we operate this business more efficiently? And we found about $15 million of operating expenses that we could take out of the core business, out of the core ticketing business, and hold aside as a investment fund to drive growth on the consumer side. And, so that meant moving some of our engineering resources from high-cost markets like the United States to India and to Spain. It meant moving our customer support operation from the United States, to move most of it to the Philippines. And, and, you know, doing other things throughout our business to lower the cost of serving the core part. So we could hire the people I just talked about, the people who are going to build ads, and the people who are going to build the consumer experience, and the design experts. And so we're on our journey there. You know, I think where we are today, the plans that we crafted in March and April on this reorganization, it's pretty easy to take the costs out. Mm-hmm. It's never easy to take the costs out, but it's procedural to take them out. Mm-hmm. But when you're saying, "We want to take these costs out so that we can invest them elsewhere," that's on the come, and I would say we're now kind of halfway through that investment period of this year, and we're right where we want to be. We're, we're in great shape in offshoring the things we want to offshore. We're in great shape in building up additional talent and staff in areas that we didn't, that we were sort of short-staffed on historically. And I think you'll see that pay off in the future. So, your last part of your question was on the margin front. I described we were motivated to make these decisions in a way that fit with our long-term margin goals, which is we will operate the company at a 20% or better revenue growth rate with a 20% or better long-term adjusted EBITDA margin. Those are our two goals. And, you know, we're well on track. Well, first half of this year, I think the margins were almost 14%. At similar levels of revenue pre-COVID, we were kind of break even. Mm-hmm. We've made a lot of progress in the profitability of the business. We'll get through that 20% EBITDA threshold some point in 2024. Maybe just thinking longer term, you know, a big question I've been getting from investors is, now that you 20% is within sight, you know, what should the next target be? And I'm not expecting you to give a number here, but just, like, qualitatively, you know, as the business continues to scale and, you know, you continue to launch the ads that is, you know, really profitable, like, how should we be thinking about the levers of profitability expansion or margin expansion beyond that 20% number? Yeah. Well, thank you. I think, you know, our we said when we laid out the target, we think we have 20% or better margin. Yeah. And the better was there. Yeah. We mean it. When we get to 20, we'll- Yeah ... we'll talk about how much better. But I think the drivers, that's a great way to think about it. It's a combination of volume, monetization, and expense management. Mm-hmm. And so volume will be driven by continuing to acquire and retain creators and investing much more on the consumer side to turn the consumer per-ticket purchasing side of the market faster and faster and bigger and bigger. And so unit volume will be a key driver to operating leverage against the fixed costs of the business that don't move that way. The second is the sort of monetization dynamics. Mm-hmm. Services like Eventbrite Ads, the organizer fees, things that are not just processing the tickets, have 20-25 points greater gross margin characteristics. And so as more of our revenue comes from sources like Eventbrite Ads, promoted content, and things that we have on the roadmap beyond that, that will also drive just a nice incremental profitability flow through to the bottom line. We're introducing most of these services at relatively low sales and marketing cost because we're introducing them to customers who are already- Mm-hmm ... coming to us. And then finally, I think, you know, you can look at the expense management that we've shown over the last couple of years, whether that's, you know, a couple of years ago or it's just a couple of quarters ago. We're gonna continue to be tight on the screws on G&A, make sound investments that we need to make in product and engineering, but we'll do it with the advantage of having markets like India and Spain, where the talent is great and the cost dynamics are different than here in the United States. And we'll continue to invest in sales and marketing in kind of a balanced way. And the benefit of sales and marketing dollars is they're kind of coin- op, you know? You know what you put in, you know what you get out- Mm-hmm ... you know, salesperson, and so we can manage those pretty well. Maybe from a top-line perspective, as we think out of 2024, and, you know, you talked about the 20% top-line CAGR that you kind of target over the long term. You know, what are some of the biggest company-specific growth drivers for you next year, and that can help you get to that 20% growth number? Yeah. So we've laid out this model where there are a lot of levers for us to pull. Mm-hmm. There's the number of creators, the number of events they do, and the attendance at those events, the ticket price, and then our take rate. And I think you can kind of simplify those into... There are three big chunks- Mm-hmm ... that move our model: creator volume, consumer volume, and the take rate monetization in between. We've had a couple of years of intense investment and really rewarding results on the creator side, which has put us in a place to have a period of really strong monetization upleveling. Mm-hmm. Whether that's at the revenue per ticket level, or it's the gross margin, or it's the EBITDA margin level. All of that improvement in our unit economics will be. We'll take that increased value that we're capturing and go back to our customers with increased value for them in- Mm-hmm ... better consumer acquisition and consumer product experience. So, as you look at next year, our sort of the upside drivers will be super strong consumer demand- Mm-hmm ... or super weak consumer demand will be a variable. And then our success in delivering the traction on the marketplace, whether that's the ads and the monetization or it's the consumer demand generation that drives ticket volume. Mm-hmm. You know, better results there. Mm-hmm ... would put us at a higher growth rate. Lesser results would put us at a lower growth rate. But we like the, we really like about our business, the fact that it has multiple levers, and against that, we plan, like, with a very purposeful, sequential timing of which lever we're pulling when to be able to deliver that consistency of growth. Because it's hard to deliver consistent growth if you only have one way to do it. Yeah. We're fortunate to have a couple ways. Cool. Well, I think we're almost out of time, so I'll, I'll wrap it up there. And, Lanny, thank you for being here, and thank you for your time. And, thanks everyone for attending. Thank you, Matt. Yeah. Thank you, all.