Eventbrite, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Eventbrite, Inc. First Quarter 2021 Earnings Compass Call. At this time, offer to spend during a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Julia Taylor. Thank you. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Eventbrite's first quarter 2021 earnings call. Prior to this call, we released our shareholder letter announcing our financial results. It can be found on our website at investor.eventbrite.com. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that during today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements regarding future events and financial performance. We caution that such statements reflect our best judgment as of today, May 6th, based on factors that are currently known to us and that actual future events or results could differ materially due to several factors, many of which are beyond our control. For a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties affecting our future results, we refer you to the section titled Forward-Looking Statements in our shareholder letter and our filings with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during the call to reflect events or circumstances after today or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. During this call, we will present adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure. This non-GAAP financial measure is not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles and has limitations as an analytical tool. You should not consider it in isolation or as a substitute for analysis of our results of operations as reported under GAAP. A reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is available in our shareholder letter. We encourage you to read our shareholder letter as it contains important information about GAAP and non-GAAP results. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Julia Hartz, Eventbrite's co-founder and chief executive officer.

Thank you, Julia. Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining us on the call today. I hope you and your loved ones are safe and well. I know that all of us have been anticipating a return to normal life for over a year now. With vaccinations ramping and our schools and businesses finally reopening, it really does seem like the next chapter is in sight. At Eventbrite, we're naturally very excited about the emerging recovery of in-person gatherings and getting back to our mission of bringing people together through live experiences. It's core to our mission to help people connect in real life and create indelible memories through live events. We've been busy preparing for the return of in-person gatherings since last summer, and as our first quarter results indicate, the light at the end of the tunnel really is getting brighter. Revenue and adjusted EBITDA improved compared to the fourth quarter of last year, and we gained momentum through the quarter and into April. In Australia and New Zealand, where we previously called out the first stages of recovery, paid ticket volume matched the quarterly average of the year preceding COVID. In March, paid ticket volume in the region reached a new all-time high that was more than 20% above our monthly average in the year before the pandemic. As the recovery builds, we are looking even further ahead toward what I believe is a very bright future for a business that we purposely reshaped and strengthened during the pandemic. Over the past year, not only do we stand with creators throughout the pandemic, we use that time to learn more about their needs and aspirations. As a result, our refocused roadmap is built on delighting the highly entrepreneurial creators of frequent events who are the engine that drives the live events industry. We are building and offering an intuitive self-service platform which will make our customers' lives easier and businesses stronger. Our increased operating leverage and reduced capital intensity positions us to maximize the margin potential of our business. Frequent creators like Sugar Republic are at the heart of Eventbrite's strategy. After a year of closure due to the pandemic, Sugar Republic was able to launch their new experience on the platform of ease. The Museum of Love, a selfie experience in Sydney, was able to sell in just a few months of 2021, nearly three quarters as many tickets as they sold in all of 2019. And our platform drove 80% of those ticket sales. Today, creators who host three or more events per quarter account for more than 80% of events organized on the Eventbrite platform. These creators have increased their frequency considerably over the past year. While most of the metrics in our business are lower year to year, our frequent creators have been the most resilient segment by a wide margin. In the first quarter of 2021, creators who hosted three or more paid events accounted for 68% of paid tickets, up from 64% in the first quarter of 2020 and 60% in the same period of 2019. Trends like these underpin our strategic focus and highlight progress we are already making in this vibrant and innovative part of the live events market. Although we will certainly welcome the return of more one-time and annual experiences as the world opens up, our product focus is centered on the frequent creator to achieve our long-term strategy goals. For those creators, our self-service approach is essential. Setting up and managing an event on Eventbrite has always been fast and intuitive, and the volume, breadth, and variety of events on our platform signals how easy we make it for creators of all types. During the first quarter of 2021, we acquired over 75,000 new creators and supported more than 1.2 million events, issuing 67 million total tickets. Self-sign-on creators accounted for two-thirds of paid tickets in the first quarter, up from 50% a year ago and 45% of the paid tickets two years ago, again demonstrating the strength of our organic acquisition channels. Our success with frequent creators and the self-service model emanates from the work we're doing to improve the product experience for our customers based on their evolving needs. We're making it easier to plan, publish, market, and manage attendees for multiple events at one time. Improvements to our creator calendar introduced in February drove the adoption of this feature by 10 percentage points in March. Shortly after that, we released an improved navigation for our reporting feature, which included new designs for key reports. With these changes, creators can now more easily discover the data they need to manage their operations and understand ticket sales performance. We've also made it simpler for creators to publish and host online events with an improved integration with Zoom's video streaming capability, powered by their recently released SDK. Looking forward, we'll continue to invest in and meet the needs of frequent creators. We talked to you previously about the fourth quarter acquisition of Tone Den as part of this strategy. Today, we're announcing the launch of Eventbrite Boost, a marketing solution that integrates Tone Den into the Eventbrite product experience and offers tools to increase exposure for events across a wide variety of social media platforms. The timing of the Boost launch could not be any better in our estimation. As the world opens up in the coming months, Eventbrite Boost will be a way for creators to reconnect with their communities and find new audiences for both in-person and online events. As committed as we are to our long-term strategy of serving our core customer through product innovation and excellence in all parts of the customer journey, we are also doubling down by redesigning our business and financial model to follow suit. Case in point, 54% of our team is dedicated to product engineering, data, and design, up from 36% a year ago. Along with other shifts in the operating expenses, we have a lower revenue threshold to break even and increased operating leverage as the recovery takes hold, which sets us up for potentially higher long-term profitability in the future. In March, we also strengthened our capital structure by refinancing our term loan, significantly lowering capital costs in the process. Collectively, these changes provide greater operational efficiency and financial flexibility, which we plan to use to fuel our growth far beyond the recovery. We are excited about the year ahead, and the entire Eventbrite team is looking forward, not back. We cherish our creator relationships, and it's gratifying to see so many of them now leading the charge as we work to support them in bringing back in-person experiences. Over 10,000 customers and prospective customers have signed up to attend our self-produced customer summit called Reconvene, happening later this month. This two-day virtual summit will bring together the best in the industry along with thought leaders and big thinkers to design the next live events revolution. We have a unique vantage point and clear commitment to do all we can to support the businesses who have struggled during the pandemic to come back stronger than before. I have confidence that this is going to be a watershed moment for the event-producing community to share ideas, gain insight, and make plans that will shape the future of the live experience of the economy. Thanks to the hard work, dedication, and grit shown over the past year by our committed team and the fresh energy of those who have just arrived, Eventbrite is a much stronger and more focused company with encouraging product momentum and a clear vision for the long term. On behalf of our Brightland community, I would also like to thank the hundreds of thousands of creators across the globe who continue to place their confidence and trust in Eventbrite. These strong partnerships will allow us to meet our collective goal to bring the world back together through live experiences. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Lanny.