Eventbrite, Inc.

Good afternoon. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Eventbrite first quarter fiscal year 2022 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 keypad. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Ms. Catherine Chen, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

good afternoon and welcome to eventbrite's first quarter fiscal year 2022 earnings call prior to this call we released our shareholder letter announcing our financial results which 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 april 28th 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, Catherine, and thank you everyone for joining us today. I hope you and your families are healthy and that you've been able to get back out and enjoy the thrill of live events once again. As I look at the progress we've made in the first quarter, I'm feeling increasingly confident about our strategy, our connection to creators, and the products we're building for them. Our entire team is united around a singular focus to build the best marketing and ticketing platform for frequent creators. Our momentum toward that goal is feeling tangible success for creators on our platform, and we believe our impact will be amplified as live events continue to rebound. A few numbers from our first quarter illustrates these key takeaways. We grew the number of paid creators transacting on our platform by 60% year to year, thanks to the ongoing recovery of live events and the accumulating strength of our product and marketing investments. We then converted that 60% growth in paid creators into a 76% increase in paid tickets by focusing on the needs of frequent creators and helping them connect with even larger audiences. And we leveraged 76% growth in paid tickets to achieve 100% increase in revenue, thanks to an uptick in average ticket value and take rate improved by product advances and sustainable business model improvements. Now, when you combine that revenue flywheel together with expanding gross margins, strong operating leverage, and our third consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, you can see why we're excited about our strategy and our momentum. Going a layer deeper, we have delivered several key product wins this quarter, and this is where our product-led strategy is delivering impact above and beyond the recovery of our industry. We rolled out a brand new and much improved creator navigation experience during the first quarter, and already nearly half of the creators have adopted this upgraded user experience. Many customers are reporting their new discovery of existing features that they simply had never known about. Meanwhile, adoption of calendar, collections, and more advanced reporting functionalities are increasing, and we believe these deepening usage patterns will help strengthen customer retention over time. We introduced a new paid email feature within Boost at the start of the quarter, and this premium-priced offering is proving to be just as highly popular among creators as we anticipated. Since January, more than one-third of Boost new subscribers have been drawn in by premium paid email. Our creators' total email campaign volume has increased by more than 50% over the same time frame. One of our featured creators, Matt Orlov, is producing some of the most sought-after parties in the country right now. He has over 91,000 email subscribers in Los Angeles alone. Prior to using Eventbrite's premium email campaign tool, he struggled to get a strong click-through rate for his weekly emails. Now Orlov estimates that emails sent via Boost are three times more effective than other services he's tried because his customers trust the Eventbrite brand. We also upgraded Boost's social media marketing features in the quarter, adding AI-generated keyword recommendations and automated audience targeting. Both of these features save creators time and leverage Eventbrite's extensive live events data. Creators have now marketed more than 30,000 events via Boost, and the average return on ad spend among these users has been an attractive five to one return. The last set of T1 product wins I'll call out today center on improving the customer checkout experience. Upgrades to the ticket buyer payment experience have lifted checkout conversion rates and delivered a direct sales volume benefit to our creators. We also added Apple Pay in our largest markets in the first quarter, And this too shows encouraging signs for conversion rates. When we step back and take the full measure of our product initiatives, a few key themes stand out. First, our focus on frequent creators means that our product roadmap addresses the needs of the largest and broadest set of creators in our market. As a result, new products we introduce are making faster, wider ripples across a large base of valuable customers. Second, our commitment to delivering a self-service product experience means we are continually redesigning for greater ease and efficiency. These are value propositions that resonate with busy creators and strengthen our user loyalty. And third, our close connection to our creators means that we have an intimate understanding of their needs and expectations. This reduces the risk and increases the probability of success associated with our product investment decisions. While the creators we serve are often individuals or small, nimble teams, our platform serves these businesses collectively at enormous scale. Over 300,000 creators chose Eventbrite to power nearly 1.4 million events during the first quarter. We transacted over 62 million tickets to these events, which translates to nearly 700,000 tickets processed every day all around the world. We believe our ticketing volume places Eventbrite at the top of our industry, and we are committed to extending our leadership position. Our commitment is not only to help new creators join the live experiences economy, but also to build a strong creator community where all participants can benefit. For example, we're extending our industry reach beyond our product investments into the vibrant community of creators who rely on Eventbrite. In Q1, we announced the launch of two new programs aligned with our customers, the Creator Collective and the Reconvene Accelerator. The Creator Collective is an ambassador program for established event influencers to connect with us and each other, setting the agenda for our Reconvene Summit and Series and amplifying their work across our marketing channels. The Reconvene Accelerator will sponsor emerging creators with grants and mentorship opportunities. These initiatives generate valuable insight for our product development team to incorporate into our roadmap. Looking ahead, we'll continue investing in our frequent creator tools as we also lean into a continuous release cycle for Eventbrite Boost. We're developing Boost into a comprehensive solution for both paid and free creators to manage their events, engage their communities, and raise their brand awareness. Features like organic social media, new social media integrations, and promoted content are all in different stages of development, and we look forward to updating you on these in the future. Demand generation within Boost is an attractive opportunity with strong interest and appeal among our creators. We're making progress on product development here and actively assessing the best paths to monetization. Eventbrite-driven tickets are already a valuable benefit for creators who host events on our platform. These tickets made up 26% of total ticket volume in the first quarter. That's equivalent to over $174 million in gross ticket sales. That's a remarkable number that really highlights the existing sophistication of our demand generation capabilities. It's also why we're so encouraged about the impact we can drive for creators as they work to build bigger audiences. Another area of Eventbrite leadership will be our social impact program. As everyone on this call knows, our mission is to bring the world together through live experiences. And an important offshoot of that mission is the impact we can have on combating the negative mental health consequences of social isolation. We believe we're uniquely positioned to activate creators and events on our platform to help alleviate isolation, especially among young people. We'll have more details to share when the program launches next month. We're kicking off 2022 with strong financial results that reflect the recovery of live events accentuated by the impact of our product-led strategy. Like me, our whole team is energized by the progress we've achieved and the opportunity ahead. Our product roadmap will accelerate throughout the year with marketing tools and demand generation shifting upwards on our priority list. And we remain well positioned in a highly attractive market as the leading ticketing solution for independent entrepreneurial creators. These are the people who are fueling the next phase of growth for live events. And our team is laser focused on this momentum. We're excited to share more details about our strategy and see many of you in person at our investor day on June 2nd. As we look forward to those updates, I have one more important announcement to share today. We're always looking for new perspectives and expertise to inform our strategy and strengthen decision making. Our board of directors is highly engaged in these areas, and I'm thrilled to announce that April Underwood has been nominated to join our board later this year. April is an experienced public company board director and has a wealth of product knowledge gathered through her impressive career at places such as Slack, Twitter, and Google. On behalf of the entire team, I want to thank our creators our employees, and our shareholders for your ongoing support and dedication. Now let me turn the call over to Lanny.