Yeah, we can kick it off. Hi, and welcome, everyone. I'm Cameron Mansson-Perrone, Morgan Stanley Music Live Event Analyst. Before we get started, I want to note that important disclosures, including my personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures, all appear as a handout available in the registration area and on the Morgan Stanley public website. With that, I want to please welcome Julia Hartz, co-founder, CEO, and executive chair of Eventbrite, and Anand Gandhi, chief financial officer. Welcome, both of you. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Nice Cameron. Julia, obviously, the 2025 outlook you provided last week reflects some near-term headwinds. How would you describe the general health of consumer demand for live events and experiences? How are you looking to position Eventbrite appropriately to best capture those trends? Sure, thank you. I want to talk about consumer demand because that's the really fun part of your question. First, I want to start with the less fun part of your question, which is the 2025 guide and the headwinds. Stepping back, in 2023, we decided to change the pricing structure for creators on Eventbrite. We decided that instead of charging add-on fees for marketing tools, which we had built to help drive more ticket sales, we wanted to combine that functionality and democratize that for everybody to allow anyone to use those tools, which is really in line with the principle of Eventbrite and how we built this almost 20-year-old company. And we're certainly not the first company to have some challenges with pricing. It won't be the last. I think what we learned through that, we rolled out this new pricing in 2023. What we learned in 2024 was the pricing was confusing to our creators. And I think the headline lesson that's applicable to any marketplace is that it's a dialogue, not a mandate, meaning we were sure that we had simplified the structure enough that our creators would feel it was a no-brainer to pay a low fee per listing. To them, it was orthogonal to what they felt Eventbrite did for them. And so, I think what we did in reverting back to a predominantly ticket fee structure is that we showed that we're adaptable. We showed that we listen, w e showed that we're not afraid to take risks, even if it means that we were wrong and having to guide for a year that we have to lap these incremental fees. We also showed that we can find ways to monetize this business that are in line with creators' best interests. Today, while the majority of our business is driven by ticketing fees and revenue, advertising, which is net new to the business, is growing quite quickly, grew 83% year-over-year. That is a promoted listings feature that gives creators the opportunity to opt in to drive greater exposure in the marketplace and to drive ticketing revenue. That brings me to consumers. The consumer demand story is really stable and exciting. We're seeing the rise of online communities that people have really engendered themselves to translate into even more formats and categories of live experiences. It's really driven by Gen Z, but it's also supported by millennials and even baby boomers who are very active on Eventbrite, including my own parents. And the ways in which we're capturing that is, I think, evident in our metrics. We're driving consumers to the right event at the right time, wherever they are. Eventbrite-driven tickets were up 10% year-over-year. We're also investing in spaces where consumers are looking for great things to do at a higher rate, where it's more concentrated and they're more active. For us, that's the consumer app. It's growing 17% year-over-year. And Consumers that are coming to Eventbrite to find things to do through the app are transacting at about 2.5 times the rate of those who are using web. In total, we have about 90 million active monthly users on the consumer side. It's not an insignificant number. We think there's a lot for us to do there. The categories that are showing sustainable growth and even acceleration continue to be things like music, food and drink, cultural events. That is really exciting for us as we look forward and we really lead the way through our consumer efforts to drive demand for our creators, to help them reach a larger audience, and to drive efficiency for them, especially in marketing. One of the trends that you guys conducted a study on recently touched on this idea of fourth spaces, I think, to the demos you just touched on, Gen Z and millennials. What was surprising about those data to you? What do you think that it means in terms of opportunity for Eventbrite? Fourth spaces is a nod to the idea that we have our home, which is our first space. We have work. Probably all of you have work, office, which is your second space. Third space is like cafes and public places where you can go and be with people and maybe also do work, which is a lot of young people today. When we looked at our consumer data, 90% of 18 to 35-year-old, sorry, 95%, so let's just say all of the 18 to 35-year-old that we talked to on the consumer research side said they want to find more ways to be in real-life experiences with their digital communities. So we just kind of think about that over the last five years, these are young adults who grew up with social media, who created digital identities early in their lives, who leaned into those digital communities, whether it's niche interests or, you know, affinity chatboards. They leaned into it early, and they went really deep in COVID. Now this emergence of fourth spaces, we coined the term fourth spaces, but is coming to fruition in live experiences where consumers are wanting and desiring to bring their digital community selves into real-life experiences. What does that mean? Because I just said a bunch of buzzwords. It means culinary pop-ups and anime speed dating and silent disco yoga. There's a lot of mash-up that's happening in formats and themes, which is probably the most surprising thing. It's just like how many combinations you can generate in these engaging live experiences. And Community organizers are really savvy about how they bring people together. Eventbrite is capturing that. We're leading with the idea that niche is the new mass. The digital identity we've created online and we've cultivated throughout many, many years is now part of the flywheel of growth because now we're seeking out experiences that underscore who we are and then sharing them back online. And for the first time, we're really seeing a drive in content creation that's happening IRL that's based on the type of formats that you see online. That's creating net new business opportunity for brands, for partnerships, and for small creators. When we think about, because it's not just you guys, I think broadly, companies who work in the live event space talk to very healthy underlying demand. Typically, when consumer demand is very healthy and high, it attracts competitors and capital. How has the competitive landscape for Eventbrite evolved? Yeah, I mean, I think with consumers in our recent studies showing that three-quarters of them plan on attending more live events in the next six months, it shows that the market is healthy. We think that our current total addressable market is between $20 billion-$30 billion, and we're doing $300 million in revenue. We think that there's a lot of great room to grow in our core mid-market. I think that the fact that the average ticket on Eventbrite is less than $40 lends itself to greater accessibility. Competition remains incredibly fragmented and hasn't really changed a whole lot. There are market dynamics and people going out of business and new entrants all the time. But if I had to categorize the tactical business competitors that we have, the first is vertical ticketing players. Because Eventbrite, we're the number two primary ticketing site by traffic globally. The reason we are is because we have such a breadth of live events. If you can dream it, it is on Eventbrite. Quite literally, I'll sound like Bubba Gump Shrimp if I tell you all the events that are on Eventbrite. That breadth really lends itself to the audience reach that we can give our creators, which gives us a competitive differentiator against these vertically focused subscale ticketing platforms. It is also challenging because in the conversation with a creator, we have to make sure that they understand both the efficiency that we bring them from our tooling, but also the audience reach and show them. Recently, we've had a number of large creators come back to Eventbrite after leaving the platform, maybe during or right after COVID. The number one predominant reason why they came back is because they sell more tickets on Eventbrite. We have leaned into that with marketing tools that they can use and that they can see actually will work for them. The second thing that we compete against is DIY solutions. In the mid-market, and especially with small creators, which make up a very important long tail of our business, they might think, you know what, I don't want to pay a fee on top of payment processing. I'm just going to put a Venmo button on my web page, or I'm going to add PayPal to my Squarespace. What happens there is they also suffer from the lack of reach and the lack of activity in the marketplace and the analytics and reporting that we make available to everybody through our self-service solution. And the third thing is social selling. so that, t his is a sort of newer competitive pressure to us. The idea that if you have an Instagram following, you should just be able to sell tickets on Instagram. And certainly, most social media platforms we actually integrate with and we integrate very deeply with to help create that transaction. Alone, it does not work because there is way too much noise in these mass social media platforms. We have the highest intent audience in this mid-market ticket buying-wise. We differentiate ourselves on conversion there. And then finally, I would say the esoteric competition we have is sitting on your couch and not going out, watching Netflix or being alone. We think that Eventbrite holds a very special purpose in enabling creators and consumers to connect in real life. Everything we are seeing is around the support for the antidote to social isolation. And I would say that that's really that underpins our mission of bringing the world together through live experiences. Anand, I want to ask you, I think, an appropriate question given you're relatively new to the CFO role. What attracted you to Eventbrite? I guess in talking about competition and the landscape, what do you view as Eventbrite's competitive advantage, its most valuable asset? Thanks, Cameron. Great to be here. For me, it was really immediately evident the tremendous potential Eventbrite has to be an even larger two-sided marketplace. The fact that two decades of experience building deep relationships on both sides of the marketplace, creators and consumers, is really, really valuable. Julia mentioned some of the stats. That vast broad selection on the supply side, plus all this traffic on the demand side, really gives a massive advantage to building that type of marketplace environment. And there is a simple other piece of that. Eventbrite's a leader in the space and what it does. Julia mentioned the second highest traffic site for primary tickets. And the product, all this time, all this experience sets us up to have the best product for both creators and consumers. And so this leadership position is valuable. And coming from a marketplace, coming from Viator, I see a lot of parallels. All of that, actually, and since I've come inside Eventbrite, I'm just even more confident about. One thing that's really interesting as well is the ability for this business to scale, one of returns to ticketing volume growth. The cost structure works out very nicely for margin expansion. Because of all this organic traffic, we're not reliant on really expensive acquisition marketing like a lot of platforms are. And we have, if we go that path at some point, that's just upside. It's a really the bones are there for a company that, as we return to growth, can be a very, in my mind, very high margin marketplace. So let's talk about that return to growth in the context of your 2025 outlook. We touched on it at the top, but obviously, short term, immediate term, working through some paid ticket volume headwinds. Obviously, no longer have the benefit of organizer fees. Help frame for us the kind of trajectory for growth as we move through the year. You mentioned that you'll get back to positive growth by the back half. What does that trajectory look like? On the profitability side, as you move through that and this year, what does that look like within the context of your kind of mid-single digit margin guidance for the year? Yeah, you know this year is unique here. We have this situation of the organizer fees going away. So you have $20 million of fees that is mostly drops, dividend going away. And that is unique and something we'll fully lap before the end of the year. So you know, we had about a year kind of reaching kind of the bottom, I guess, of the negative impact of the fees on ticket volume. Now it can take it'll take some time to get back to growth. And so that one piece in itself, mathematically, that margin compression could get you just to mid-single digits. We also have some incremental compression just from the fact that we haven't returned to ticket volume growth yet. That adds a little bit of deleverage operating-wise. Again, once we return to growth, that becomes a positive. So these margins are really a temporary situation of just these really unique, I see one-time dynamics. And it sets us up in a really good place for next year because our core revenue streams are really ticketing, which has vast potential, huge market, and these ads that are really high margin and that are growing nicely. And those are the revenue streams going forward. And we're confident that they'll be growing. And so when you look at a cost base that we believe has been right-sized and reduced, that we don't believe needs to grow to continue to scale revenue, it sets you up for the simple math there is quite compelling. So you know, we feel really good about the trends we're seeing this year that suggest returning to paid ticket volume growth second half of the year, all the things Julia mentioned. That's really positive. Everything we've seen since we removed the organizer listing fees have been exactly what we wanted, exactly what we hope to see. Creators coming back, improving both the new creators and retention of creators, volumes improving. It is all the right trends. Everything's heading in the right direction. Obviously, everyone wants to know, pinpoint exactly at what point you flip to paid ticket volume growth. I think right now, I think the right thing to say is what we did the second half of the year. Obviously, we'll share more as the year goes on. What are some of the specific actions that you've taken from a blocking and tackling perspective that's helped you start to move paid ticket volume back in the right direction? Yeah, you know I think as we reset the pricing and really oriented the messaging around Eventbrite is free to grow because we had introduced greater functionality through our marketing tools and promotional tools that had previously been behind a separate paywall. We streamlined the organizer or the creator experience to go from creating your listing to being able to market your event and really see the benefits of that right off the bat. In addition to that, we have rolled out much better and more sophisticated reporting and analytics that is drop-dead simple to use, as well as Timed Entry, which pushes us into a new market and a segment, which is for hyper-frequent events. With that rollout, we also had introduced account-level payouts, which was a behind-the-scenes change that means a lot to our creators and how they can perform bookkeeping for their events. So there was a lot to say in terms of benefits. Strangely, even in the midst of a crisis, when you're trying to make up with your customers, you can't let it go to waste. The marketing message landed well. It also helped us engage high-value creators and really get sharp and specific about what we want to see as we rebuild the marketplace, mostly on the event inventory side, where we want to be spending our time, how we want to be targeting the creators that we know drive consumer demand to the platform, and how we think about that not only from a self-sign-on side, which is 70% of our revenue and 98% of our creators, but also from a sales side. We've been rebuilding our sales motion for the last 12 months under new leadership. And these two things converged at the same time. So it is building some really healthy momentum on the supply side, both bringing in high-value creators and categories we care about and metros we know we can drive marketplace liquidity and as well as you know, opening the doors to the self-sign-on creators who maybe had opted out or had decided not to use Eventbrite because they were confused by the pricing. That's a good segue. I wanted to focus on specifically high-value creators. You guys mentioned it as a big opportunity. When you refer to high-value creators, I think in my mind, at least, it is a cohort of your creator base that is not only active on the platform, but kind of proactively taking advantage of or availing themselves of a lot of the demand gen capabilities that you provide to your creators. Is that a fair characterization for what you mean when you refer to high-value creators? Absolutely. I think you said it better than I could. So well done. The threshold for high-value creators is really above $1,000 a year in GTV. So that is a pretty large cohort of customers. When you drill into who we are building for and how we are reaching them and who we are investing marketing and sales dollars into, it really becomes a bit more nuanced. In terms of on the sales side, we want to work with creators that have been long established, who we have clear relationships with, and we know that they are bringing with them not only consumers, but also lighthouse account effects, so halo effects within their category. The kind of the good news, I think, about event creators is that it is a community-driven industry where if you are hosting a cooking workshop in Seattle, you are acutely aware of what your competitors are using in terms of ticketing. same thing goes for a venue in Brooklyn. And so we can capitalize on that through our sales motion and how we rebuild our book of business there. And then on the self-sign-on side, again, fundamentally, we're driving the conversation on growth and audience reach, and those marketing messages are really starting to land. I feel confident that we can stay the course, that we can stay focused on what we're doing. We're really focusing on driving demand for our creators. We're focused on expanding Eventbrite Ads as a monetization channel. And we're focused on driving operational efficiency for creators and consumers. We don't want consumers to have to spend so much time looking for the live events that they should be attending. We want it to be quite literally always there ready for them. And o n the creator side, for every hour that we can save an event creator, it's gold to them because they are such small teams or often solo entrepreneurs. Any help with sizing the base of high-value creators within your overall creator universe? I don't think that we've shared that yet. I don't think I should make up an answer for you right now. No problem. The problem. The other big focus, it seems to be, is on customer service and really adding value to your creator base through those support services. What do you see as the opportunity there and maybe to bring it back to the financial outlook and what it means ultimately for the business? What's the value to Eventbrite from what I assume to be mostly driving retention up, driving creator churn down? Yeah, you know I think that there's a huge amount that we can do to drive up the feeling of trust and support for our creator base by showing up for them when they need us the most. What we do is we focus on the critical moments where it's like do or die for creators, which is, can you sell tickets to your event? And can you get the money that was generated from those ticket sales? We obsess over those moments and really focusing on making sure that we can give the best possible service to our creators in those moments. Beyond that, we're looking at ways that we can make Eventbrite's service and customer success always on because event organizing is a 24/7 profession. I was going to say sport. It's not really a sport, profession for people. It's something that oftentimes things go wrong in the off hours. We want to make sure that we have the internal infrastructure and technology to just always be on for them. And then third is we want our service to be consultative, meaning we do not want to just be triaging issues. We want to actually be able to help creators proactively grow and take advantage of the marketplace. And then one more thing, which is consumer support has scaled. We have partnered with a company called Decagon, and we have scaled AI-driven support there by partnering with creators to populate their own FAQs so that our chatbot can be their customer service department for the consumer questions that come our way. That is something that is nascent. I think we'll see some great returns from that this year as consumer sentiment goes up because there are a lot of questions that come, and our creators don't have customer support teams to man those. We can take that on for them. Got it. I want to branch out from just ticketing and touch on your ancillary revenue streams, ads, which you mentioned before. I think it's now the Pro plan are collectively, I think it was 8% of revenue in the Q4. Where do you think adoption of those goes long term? Where do you think the revenue contribution from those ancillary streams can go? Yeah, going forward in this marketplace line, we're not going to have those organizer fees, and it's going to be ads as well as these Pro services. We see ads growing and that being a significant driver. And it's a very high-margin, attractive offering that's seen a lot of success with our consumers. So I think the way to think about that is that line, yes, this year, it's adjusted down given lack of organizer fees i n the future, it's going to be mostly ads. And there will still be some, we still feel like there will be good, solid Pro services and those fees. But Ads is the one that we see the ability to grow fastest of everything and really become a real kind of significant revenue stream. I think the ticketing, the core ticketing will always be a really, really large revenue stream given the size of this market and the potential for what would come when we return to growth. I mean, that's always going to be the biggest driver. But having also ads there that is seeing success, that customers are getting benefit from, and that's high margin going fast really sets us up well as we continue. As mentioned, those are our revenue streams going forward. It's really ticketing and ads. They're both positioned quite well. What is the recipe for ad scaling? Is it about better communicating or continuing to communicate with your creators and make sure that they're aware of these tools? Is it continuing to build out and improve the efficacy of the tools? Yeah, I mean, I think first, one note on Pro because we kind of threw it around. It's premium email marketing. So it's a higher volume option for premium email marketing and more sophisticated tooling. It replaces the Mailchimp. So that's what we mean by Pro. I don't see us developing more into that package in 2025. We're going to focus on ticketing and ads, but that could become something in the future. On the ad side, it comes down to three things. Yes, awareness and adoption. Making sure our customers understand how they can use Eventbrite Ads and why they should use Eventbrite Ads over spending their marketing and advertising dollars elsewhere. We know that the average creator spends about 40% of the face value of the ticket on marketing. And so we know that Eventbrite is the highest intent audience of event seekers to advertise to. Again, it's very noisy out in social media land and traditional digital advertising spaces. We think that we have the highest conversion rate, and we're seeing some really strong ROAS for our creators. On average, a creator who uses Eventbrite Ads sells four times more tickets than when they sell tickets to the same event not using ads. And so we have some strong signal that we can use in our messaging and our case studies for creators. So building awareness and adoption is key. This year, we're really focusing on making sure our sales account management teams, our customer success teams, are really incentivized and focused on ads adoption for our highest value creators. Secondly, as we're pushing into the timed entry segment, we're focused on making sure that those customers are all using Eventbrite Ads since those events tend to be evergreen. And you know, you can really study the efficacy of Eventbrite Ads over time with those creators and show them the benefit of that versus just a one-off event. The second thing is expanding ad placements. So making sure that tomorrow we'll be launching our redesigned app, making sure that ads are showing up in the places where consumers are transacting more. Consumers in the app are two and a half times more active than those on the web. Making sure that we've expanded ad placements throughout the ads experience or throughout the app experience. And the third thing is getting to a more sophisticated objective level for our advertisers. Today, you can drive impressions and you can drive clicks, but you can't set your goals on ticket sales. And we obviously want to get to that point because that's what we care about most. We think that there's something for everyone once we have that in place. You mentioned the new mobile app. What else is on the radar from a product development standpoint where you guys focused with regard to the product? For the mobile app, what do you see as the big unlocker opportunity that that can help provide? Yeah, I would really just categorize our product roadmap this year on two key themes, which have been pretty consistent for us in the last few years: efficiency and reach. We really think that creator tooling to ensure creators can use Eventbrite for their needs to be able to get on sale quickly, to be able to see the sophistication of where their ticket sales are coming from, to be able to advertise their events and market their events in a way that's really efficient is our number one job. And the second is over half of our creators state audience growth as a problem, as their number one problem. So reach is our second major pillar and theme. And so our product roadmap is centered around those two parts of the marketplace this year. What I'll say about the consumer app is it's not just a new brand logo and color palette. It's really about centering around contextual discovery and really that driving usage of the app and discovery and ticket sales for our creators, and also the ability to build a social graph and allow consumers to start to partake in the idea of curated discovery and building out your own digital interests, that whole bridge, right? The whole Fourth Spaces bridge is really about what we're building that consumer app for. And I would say it's really important to note that we're not betting the future of Eventbrite on the consumer app, but that's where our most active consumers are. And again, mobile app MAUs are up 17% year-over-year. We're seeing greater conversion and value from those consumers. Rather than boil the ocean, we're ring-fencing our consumer demand investments around the app, not only to get signal faster, but also to help drive creators to partake in that and to see return. You guys have, I mean, the mobile app's a good example, but have seemed to be executing well from the perspective of shipping product without OpEx growing super healthily recently. Is that an opportunity that you see continuing to be the case? Or do you feel like there's a robust enough product map and high enough ROI where you see yourselves leaning more into product development spend? What's the outlook for that financially? We do feel like we're in a healthy place with staffing for product and in general for OpEx. This is part of, I think, what sets us up well. We believe for solid margin expansion is the fact that we are staffed well today. We've taken costs out of the business. We're very disciplined about adding any costs in the business and basically ensuring that people self-fund and find. It's about reprioritizing resources and having strong talent and not necessarily about adding new talent. It goes to the bigger just overall, the margin piece, right? It lends itself to why the math, from our perspective, makes so much sense because you have a team that's solid, that's strong, that is well staffed, but it is also smaller than it was before. And we believe we can continue to meet our growth objectives and aspirations without requiring incremental investment, really. So that's our plan. And all these initiatives we have taken to really monitor spending have been really well received internally. People get it. And sometimes it forces you to get the best work out of people when you are really being disciplined about it. So one of our key themes that I am a broken record on is financial discipline, which we are really confident is going to pay dividends as revenue reach starts growing again. As we think about the overall profitability opportunity, we're almost out of time. Maybe I'll end it here. Do you see scaling the ticketing business as providing sufficient leverage for you over time to really ramp that profit curve? Do you need to grow ads and ancillary streams? You said, as you highlighted, they're higher margin revenue. Do you need to ramp those, or do you think just scaling ticketing is enough to really execute on your margin trajectory? Yeah, ticketing by itself 100% is enough, right? And so the opportunity there and the ability, what we think the market is to scale, that itself provides more than enough room in our view for safer margin expansion. The ads is a really great opportunity on top of that, right? And just to remind, our core ticketing business is high margin. It's just ads are even higher margin. So we have our core business that has a lot of room to scale that is high margin, that itself, I believe, when will get us to will drive significant margin expansion. On top of that, we have this great revenue stream that's showing a lot of success in those stats that Julia was mentioning in terms of how effective they are for our creators. those are real stats. You know, I think that's going to provide a nice little bonus. Bonus is underselling it. It's going to provide additional upside that's meaningful. But I don't think it's required to deliver margin expansion, but I think it will add to margin expansion. Great. That takes us to time, but thank you both for joining us. Thanks, Cameron. Thank you all.