Eventbrite, Inc.

Good afternoon, and thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Eventbrite fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question today, please press star followed by one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to pass the conference over to Ms. Catherine Chen, head of investor relations. Catherine, please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to Eventbrite's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 earnings call. Prior to this call, we released our shareholder letter announcing our financial results, which can be found on our website at investors.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, February 10th, 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 and adjusted EBITDA margin, non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles and have limitations as an analytical tool. You should not consider them 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 Hart, co-founder and chief executive officer.

Thank you, Katherine. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us this afternoon. I hope you and your families are staying safe and healthy as we start a new year. We are excited to share our fourth quarter results today and tell you about what we have planned for 2022. The strength of our platform and our strategy were on full display in the fourth quarter. And first, I want to congratulate our team on their incredible performance. We more than doubled revenue year to year and grew sequentially for the sixth consecutive quarter. We transacted over 22 million paid tickets and nearly 50 million free tickets for our creators. It's been truly inspiring to see how our passionate creators have persisted and how we can help them be even more successful. As we move past the recent variants, business conditions are improving and we're well positioned to help creators capture the growing demand for live events. I'm proud that we have fully reoriented our company around a product-led strategy that allows us to scale and grow alongside our most valuable customers. In 2021, we made exciting progress on our strategy as we supported our creators and the resurgence of live events around the world. Over 650,000 creators used Eventbrite to produce more than 5 million events during the year, setting an all-time record for events on the platform. We enabled creators to transact over 290 million tickets and reach an audience of over 83 million unique buyers. While supporting this surge in activity, we also launched new tools and functionality for frequent creators and opened a critical new growth avenue with our boost marketing products. We achieved positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year, propelled by a 77% increase in revenue and a significant step up in growth margins and operating leverage. All of this reflects strong and consistent execution by our team. When we strategically refocused on accelerating our self-service platform development and serving frequent creators, we also set a roadmap for sustainable long-term growth. We've prioritized meeting the needs of frequent creators, our most valuable creators who typically have small agile teams and large loyal audiences. These creators need intuitive ticketing and powerful marketing tools so they can maximize their time spent on creating captivating events that really showcase their passions and skills. The changes we've made to our platform have helped us successfully attract and retain frequent creators. Of all the paid tickets in the fourth quarter, frequent creators sold 67% of them, and their paid tickets doubled compared to the same period a year ago. Now, entrepreneurial creators like the Greenwood Historic Fund are helping drive that growth. Greenwood is redefining what a cemetery can be as a destination by hosting popular walking tours, workshops, and concerts to the tune of nearly 500 events in 2021. That's an astonishing 39 events per month, which helps them triple their ticket sales growth in the year. We're proud to have helped Greenwood grow and preserve one of Brooklyn's first green spaces. Just like the example of Greenwood, we're seeing signals that our platform is helping creators grow their businesses. In the fourth quarter, creators of paid events hosted just over three events on average, a nearly 20% increase in average event frequency since the fourth quarter of 2019. Similarly, the average number of paid tickets transacted per event rose for the sixth quarter in a row, climbing 20% over the third quarter. Whether creators are adding events in response to strong demand or creating new events that attract new audiences, we're giving them the confidence and helping them succeed. The accelerating strength of our platform is propelled by a product-led strategy that leverages everything about our sales, from our data to our creator community to our investment resources. More than half of our teammates work in development, including engineering, product design, and data science. That's a material shift since the start of 2020 when this team was roughly just one-third of our workforce. Investments that we've made in our technical infrastructure and core engineering are enabling greater product velocity. This translated into more than 40 product launches and meaningful enhancements to existing products in 2021, setting a new benchmark for future performance. And we're working on further enhancing areas like navigation, checkout, and payments that will create an even better power user experience in 2022. I'm also excited to announce that we're establishing a talent hub in India. There is incredible talent in the city and region we've selected, and I cannot wait to welcome our new members to the team in the coming months. So summarizing 2021, our strategic focus on frequent creators is generating excellent returns. Looking to 2022 and beyond, we see many more opportunities for scalable product-led growth for the business. Our ability to seamlessly combine ticketing, multi-event management, and marketing into one self-service platform helps creators manage their businesses and more confidently plan and track their investments. This is critical since many of our frequent creators are small business owners or solo entrepreneurs, and their precious time is best spent on creating the content for memorable live experiences. The Eventbrite Boost product is helping to simplify social advertising and lift ticket volume for busy creators. Usage of Boost is growing strongly month over month, and subscribers have tripled since June. Leveraging our scale and data, we plan to introduce additional boost features in 2022 to help creators better acquire, engage, and retain attendees. Importantly, our expansion in the direction of marketing is relevant not only to creators of paid events, but also to the very large and valuable community of free event creators who rely on our core ticketing capabilities. In fact, since we launched an upgrade to boost email marketing capabilities, more than 20% of new subscribers have been creators of free events. This is just one example where our strategy and our marketing tools roadmap will expand our opportunity to serve creator needs. Another opportunity we'll begin to address in 2022 is demand generation for creators. Eventbrite-driven tickets made up 24% of total free and paid ticket volume for 2021, and we've seen many opportunities to become an even stronger demand generation partner by putting the right event in front of the right audience at just the right time. Eventbrite is still in the early stages of our long-term strategy, and we're more encouraged than ever to achieve the full impact of our plan. Our improved financial results prove that we can operate effectively in any environment while supporting our creators and remaining focused on our goal to make the best live event platform for their needs. And our team is excited and motivated to roll out innovative new products and engage with our reconvened community as we help creators power live events in 2022. On behalf of the entire Eventbrite team, we thank our creators, our employees, and our shareholders for their unwavering support as we enter the next exciting phase of our journey. We look forward to updating you on our progress in the coming year. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Lanny.