Where do million, billion and trillion dollar ideas come from? Do the ideas just linger languidly in the ethers until the right person (or people) tune into the right frequency, at the right moment? This was Teilhard de Chardin’s co-theory, developed in the 1920s, which he called the noosphere. For the vivacious Julia Hartz, CEO and co-founder of Eventbrite, a $435 million ticketing company, the vision manifested through a lifetime of stacking and integrating core lessons, many of which took place in Santa Cruz.
One could point to Santa Cruz as a sublime alchemical cauldron for innovators, divergent thinkers, and entrepreneurial mavericks, who then manifested their passions into worldwide brands. Netflix, Joby, the Screaming Hand, Santa Cruz Skateboards, Santa Cruz Bicycles, and Plantronics, to name a few. And in Hartz’s case, Eventbrite.
A Different World
Hartz, 46, was born in Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose and spent her earliest years in the Rose Garden District near Willow Glen. The area is known for attractions such as the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden and the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Hartz’s baby eyes were often bombarded with a myriad of roses and ancient sarcophagi. The vibrant immediate moment and the dusty past intertwining into something new.
The divorce revolution of California might have peaked in the 1970’s, but Hartz’s parents still got swept up in the undertow, and mutually separated when she was 2 years old, and her brother, 7. While divorcing was no longer considered a novelty, Hartz’s parents did come up with the freshly innovative idea of co-parenting. An idea new and old at the same time. An idea that harkened back to when America was still like a village.
“They lived down the street from each other in San Jose,” says Hartz from her corporate office in San Francisco. “My mom eventually met a fireman who was building a house in Santa Cruz. It was emblematic of those times. Back when they had this ‘manship’. San Jose Fire Department dudes would go to Santa Cruz on the weekends and help build another fireman’s home.”
The fact that Hartz returns to this memory is not random. Within this tale of almost Amish values, raising each other’s barns, and lifting each other up, is what would eventually become a core value of Eventbrite –- the democratization of ticketing.
Family Matters
Hartz lived between San Jose and Live Oak until she was 4, which is when her mother finally married her firefighting, soon-to-be stepfather. At which point, the couple (with kids in tow)moved full-time to Santa Cruz. Co-parenting was still a goal, and before the ink had dried, the newlyweds approached Hartz’s biological father and gave him the nuptial news and an invitation to join them. Not so much an ultimatum, but more of a question, with the desired goal of doing what was best for the children. “They asked him, ‘What do you think?’ And my dad’s like, ‘I always wanted to live on the beach. Let’s go,’” Hartz recalls.
The extended family landed with all 10 feet on the ground, and Hartz went to Live Oak Elementary, Del Mar and Soquel High School. Her family was intact, albeit in separate homes. Hartz was an early transplant who soaked up the Santa Cruz lifestyle and experience, and was able to see that valuable lessons were everywhere – like ciphers in the sand.
Cheers
Teenagers getting jobs in Santa Cruz has always been a badge of honor born out of boredom, a mandatory requirement or just the thirsty necessity for summer cash. The Boardwalk’s extensive hiring net caught as many potential ride operators and ice cream scoopers as possible, but there were also smaller unique businesses that were also involved in churning the youth into, hopefully, responsible citizens.
On the corner of Soquel and Porter is the Ugly Mug Coffeehouse. Opened by Steve Volk in 1996, it was, and remains, a throwback coffee spot that is a cultural and community center. Volk always loved the beatnik spunk and vigor in the cafes that he worked at in San Francisco, as a teenager. Volk aimed to create not only quality coffee, but a specific vibe.
Regarding a certain young employee, named Julia Hartz, Volk lets loose with some very Ferlinghetti thoughts.
“As much as I can remember anything that happened 30 freakin’ years ago,” Volk begins. “I kind of have a foggy memory of it. I was 28 and they were 17, if I look at their birth date and when we opened. And they were either just out of high school or in high school. And of course, the other employees were college kids, and they were crazy. So they were probably the least crazy of them.
“I’ve heard interviews over the years, and what I heard was that she had trouble with a certain customer on Saturday mornings who was never happy. I can remember that customer,” Volk laughs.
Hartz definitely remembers that customer. “I would get to work at 5am on a Saturday to open the shop. And I always had this really difficult customer who would stand outside and wait for me to open at 6am. And she’d come in, and it would still be dark out. And I’d be the only one in there. I’d make her whatever she ordered.
“And she would just tear me to shreds on how awful my barista skills were. I went home the third time that this happened, and I told my mom. My mom, who has been the constant throughout my whole story, said, ‘I think it sounds like she needs someone to talk to. It sounds like it might not be about your coffee.’
“So the next time I took my parents’ Sunday Times from their doorstep and brought it with me. I laid it all out on the counter. Section by section. I started to point out stories and ask, ‘What do you think about that?’
“And that was the first Sunday that she didn’t tear me to shreds. She really did want someone to talk to. It was my first lesson in connecting with people and customer service. And that’s all I remember about it, except for the fact that I learned how to massively caffeinate myself, which is very dangerous at that,” Hartz laughs.
When pressed on what he was really trying to impart to his crew, Volk said that he wanted a level-headed employee who also knew how to take away lessons from every situation.
The concept that every single encounter in one’s life offers possibilities, with potential outcomes that are advantageous, lands somewhere between Eastern mysticism and Hogwarts. But it was a huge takeaway that Hartz carried in her pocket for the future.
The Wonder Years
Hartz got an internship with Dina Ruiz when Ruiz was the local TV news anchor at KSBW-TV (and future ex-wife of Clint Eastwood). Hartz was savoring the invisible electric life of being behind-the-scenes of a live news television show. There was the constant motion of multiple people, in very specific jobs, all pushing the same rock up the hill, until the countdown began and America was suddenly watching. The experience ignited a career interest.
Hartz applied to Pepperdine University, as it ticked off the boxes that Hartz sought, with a solid news broadcasting program, and it being a small liberal arts college that was near the water. Santa Cruz had a deeper impact on Hartz than meets the eye. “It felt very disorienting if I was not near the water.”
Hartz had a solid emotional support system growing up, but when she did not receive any financial support to attend Pepperdine, things looked dire.
“I couldn’t afford to go, and then in the 11th hour, my mom suggested that I write them a letter. I did. And, they ended up giving me a full financial aid package, which included student loans,” Hartz said.
Working two jobs to pay back the student loans, Hartz realized that it was less news broadcasting and more television production that she wanted to pursue. Which led to her work at the television channel, FX.
But don’t miss the through-line in these remembrances. Besides being able to hear and comprehend the tutelage of her mother’s wisdom, Hartz got into Pepperdine because she attempted a Hail Mary missive, an outside-the-box attempt to break through the bureaucracy, and it successfully glided into an individual’s arms.
Over the years, Hartz has tried to find the person who read her letter and thereby granted her a second chance. This core lesson that one-on-one attention can amplify smaller voices also became an Eventbrite trademark.
Fearless
“I had just got recruited by FX Networks and I got to work with John Landgraf,” Hartz says. “This was the beginning of the FX power era, where we were giving HBO a run for its money. The Shield redefined television. I worked with Denis Leary on Rescue Me, which was his poignant love letter about his own coping with 9/11.
“It was so thrilling to see something come to life that was so familiar to me. I grew up in firehouses, and around that culture, and around those men and women. I remember the first woman firefighter in San Jose, who went on to be a captain, and was a dear friend of my parents. It was a full circle moment for me to be involved.”
Mad about you
“It was love at first sight,” Hartz says about her husband, Kevin. He was an entrepreneur in the Bay Area, working on his second start-up and an early investor in PayPal. “We were head over heels for each other. We would go to PayPal parties at an apartment. And he would come down, and I would take him to the MTV Movie Awards. It was a funny juxtaposition of two industries. Entertainment that was actually in decline, and one that was in its early infancy, which was technology and the Internet.
“During those couple of years, I was able to see through his eyes what was going to happen. How disruption was going to accelerate, and I wanted to be on the side of the disruptor. I also had gotten a little jaded as far as how things work in Hollywood, and I didn’t quite fit in. It’s all about who you know and not really as much about meritocracy,” Hartz reveals.
Hartz had a job offer to join Current TV. That was the Joel Hyatt and Al Gore startup cable network. Hartz was finally making decent money. “I had an assistant. I’m not really sure why. And I had a window office in Fox Plaza in Century City,” Hartz laughs.
Northern exposure
Hartz decided to head north from Hollywood, back to her family, to become involved in Kevin’s newest startup. “We laugh about it now, but we had really big debates about whether or not he was going to move to LA and run his tech company from LA, or if I was going to move to San Francisco. I really thought about how I need to be careful dealing with serial entrepreneurs, because they will convince you of crazy ideas,” Hartz chuckles.
Crazy idea?
How do you take the reins away from legacy ticketing agencies like Ticketmaster and Ticketron, and make it intuitively easy for even the smallest event producers to access and use?
The original idea on the Eventbrite whiteboard was “To make event ticketing as effortless and accessible as creating a web page — open to anyone, not just big promoters.”
From tiny church groups that were putting on an inspiring play and wanted to sell tickets, to Rotary Clubs that were about to have a fundraiser, to humble comedians just trying to make strangers laugh in dive bars, Eventbrite swung that door wide open.
Their 2011 imaginative, forward-thinking, integrative partnership with Facebook, whereby individuals could eventually create “event pages” that were as good as websites and sell tickets, blew the doors off the building.
Designing Women
The harsh reality is that it is unusual to have Hartz be a CEO at such a high level. Not like a unicorn on a rainbow level, unusual. But close. Out of all the CEOs in America, including the Fortune 500, roughly 10% are women. Hartz has the platform to raise other women, all women, up. Hartz’s good friend, Brit Morin, also understands the mission.
Morin has used her platform to educate women and non-binary people about finance and the future.
Morin is legendary in Silicon Valley. Business carded as an American venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and technologist, who came about by leaving Google (working on Google Maps, Google TV and iGoogle) at age 25, to build her own empire.
“Julia is a chameleon,” Morin says over emails. “She is likable by literally everyone. She reads the room better than almost anyone I know — understanding when to pipe up or down, what questions to ask (or not), and how to empathize with people. This has amounted to her success in numerous ways, from her ability to hire and retain talent at Eventbrite, to the volume of partnerships she has done over the years, to the PR she has been able to acquire for herself and the company, and of course, to all sorts of personal matters — from friendships to family. She has had several colleagues that have stayed on for 10+ years at Eventbrite which is an anomaly in Silicon Valley where the average tenure is 16-18 months.”
Who’s the boss?
“I now understand that the secret of Kevin and I as a partnership, whether it be husband and wife, or co-parents, or life partners, or co-founders, is that he sees the possibility where other people would have a chip that would filter it out. I believe in his ideas. But, I make them work. It’s the yin and yang of a strong founding team. How do you actually bring a big vision into the world?” Hartz asks.
For the budding Hollywood executive, Hartz, it was putting every penny she had into her soulmate’s starry-eyed startup, and then having her brother drive her back home. “I have blocked that memory from my archives,” Hartz laughs. “I moved into my tiny plywood office in 2005 and our official launch event was January 2006.”
This January 2026, Eventbrite was valued at $437 million dollars. In 2025, Eventbrite sold over 83 million tickets. Last month’s sale of Eventbrite to the Italian high-growth technology company, Bending Spoons, hasn’t changed the top tier, Julia Hartz remains the CEO and co-founder.
Blossom
Hartz’s dedication to innovation, channeling the flow of modern times, and always leaning towards increasingly intuitive platforms, is such a Santa Cruz ethos and attitude. So you might assume that Hartz was a surfer, and you would be incorrect. “I was not. I went to a ballerina dance studio. So I was dancing all the time and so I didn’t surf. Funny enough, I ended up marrying a surfer and my kids surf. We’ve traveled around the world to different surf spots, and I’m really patient. I’m a really great surf watcher,” says Hartz.
Patient, observant and waiting for the next big thing.
