Heroes in Business - Renaud Visage the Co Founder of Eventbrite is interviewed by David Cogan

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Renaud Visage the Co Founder of Eventbrite is interviewed by David Cogan of Eliances Heroes radio show amfm. Renaud calls in to the show from Paris France to discuss the meteoric transformation of event planning brought on by the joining of internet and Eventbrite.

Welcome back to Alliances Heroes, where heroes in business align. To be part of our super community and find out more about Alliances, visit www.alliances.com. Now, back to our super host, David Kogan, founder of Alliances. Thank you again. This is David K kogan and it's a hero morning we just had the president of child help helping so many children children that may have been abused a hero on the air and let me tell you who we're going to be having on later today before we go into our first incredible hero we are going to have the president of the UPS store with 4,700 franchised locations. And we're also going to have the founder of Blackboard. He sold his company recently for

$1.6 billion and he's going to share with us some secrets. But let me tell you who we have now. All the way from France. Now most of us have used a site to register for events. In fact, nowadays, when you register for almost anything, you do it online. Our next hero revolutionized the way this is done. He is the co-founder of Eventbrite. Here with us is Renaud Visage. First, Renaud, I've got to ask you, exactly where were you when you came up with the idea to create a way in which users

register for events? My co-founders and I were in San Francisco and we went to a lot of tech events, and we saw that there must have been a better way to do entry and sell tickets online than using pen and paper and sending emails and maintaining Excel spreadsheets. So that gave us the idea for Eventbrite that we would create a very simple system, that we would create a very simple system, very simple to use, quick to sign up, so that you could start selling your event in just a few minutes and monitor the sales and engage with your community. So we built a feature set of tools that allows organizers to really quickly sell tickets online.

I mean, Eventbrite is huge. I must receive an invite a week to an event that uses your platform. What do you think is the secret to have becoming so popular? Well yesterday we're the world's largest event technology platform. We power more than 2 million live events around the globe and we process billions of dollars in ticket sales each year. I think the secret is to have been very observant of how technology evolved before we got started, to understand what people expected as far as user experience was concerned. And I think the thing that really separated us from existing competitors at the time was our obsession for the customer,

to understand them, to talk to them all the time, and really come up with a solution that's tailored to their needs. I think that's really what created a lot of goodwill around Eventbrite and made us the platform of choice today. I mean, again, you're doing so much. You're based in France. You're recognized as the top 100 digital influencer in Europe. How was it expanding your platform to other countries? So we started in the U.S., and that's where our initial takeoff took place. We started in the U.S., and that's where our initial takeoff took place.

London, in 2011, when we started thinking about the international markets, was already our third biggest city in terms of usage. We've been very lucky to have a lot of people adopt the platform around the world, even though we were just in English and only accepted a few currencies. So it was very natural for us to expand internationally. We decided to expand in the UK first. Now we have five offices in Europe, and we're present on four continents. So it's been a big opportunity and also a major challenge.

As you know, building a global company is not easy. You need to scale the technology, scale the team, change your processes so that you can account for multiple team members being on different time zones in different locations with different local cultures. So that's something we've been building over the years. It's been 10 years since we started Eventbrite. We've learned a lot along the way and have accomplished a lot to be present across the years. It's been 10 years since we started Eventbrite. We've learned a lot along the way and I've accomplished a lot to be present across the globe. I mean, it's just mind-boggling

because everybody, I'll tell you, everybody in the U.S. certainly knows Eventbrite for sure. You're listening to Alliance's Heroes on Money Radio. Are you a hero in business? Go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com. Certainly too, we'll have Renaud's clip on there too. So you'll have contact information. You can

reach him at eventbrite.com, eventbrite.com, or go to alliances.com. So much. In fact, you know, not only are you a co-founder of an extremely popular event registration platform, Eventbrite, you're also an angel investor. You're a mentor in the European startup scene, working with so many companies, Mobius Motors, and many more. What's the magic to decide which business that you invest in? that you invest in? So I started investing two or three years ago when I decided to spend more time in Europe. I thought I could share a lot of the learnings

that I've had through Eventbrite as to how you build and scale a company and exchange with the people here to accelerate growth of European startups. First and foremost, I think I'm looking in people. People who have ambition, who have the ambition of building global businesses, which is slightly new for Europe. I think we've been very European-centric for a long time,

but these days are over now. We're in a global economy, and you have to think big. Maybe not from the start, but at least have that in the back of your mind as you're building your company. And I think the most talented entrepreneurs really have built a network already internationally so that when they're ready to expand their businesses, they can do so very effectively. And I think angels like myself help them in the process, connecting them with the right people on both sides of the Atlantic or with other countries like India and China where a lot is happening today. So that's why I decided to invest in companies in Europe. And advice that you can give, what precious advice would you give to children to be able to create and be successful like yourself?

I think you have to be interested in entrepreneurship from the early days. I think that's something the U.S. does very well, this spirit of entrepreneurship that is taught along the way by the media, by the schools, and encouraged. I think, for example, in Europe, it's not as much of a hot topic. So creating that desire to be your own boss in the end, I think, is what we can give children. At least give them the option to do that, and don't think that it's a subpar option as you build your career. Building your own boss,

being your own boss has tremendous advantages. You can control your own destiny and I think that's what a lot of people who jump into the entrepreneurship bandwagon are looking for. And I mean, you know, again, we're speaking with the co-founder of Eventbrite. Everybody knows Eventbrite.

Again, I get an invite every week. So you're, again, doing so much. Who was the biggest inspiration in your life growing up? Who helped you? Well, my father was a photographer and he taught me a lot about being independent. He was a freelancer for most of his life, trying to find clients and traveling around the world to take photographs of animals. your own person and to really go after what you believe and just kill all the obstacles in front of you to manage to get where you want to be. I think that was my biggest inspiration, not really an entrepreneur per se, but still had to be of his own business.

Renaud, that's the secret because now I know from another time, another site that you're doing has to do with photography in fact if you go to your own personal website right you have amazing pictures so now I know where you get it from in fact too is this professional architecture in the landscape photography right run out yes so I grew up surrounded by photos my father would go on trips for two or three months, bring hundreds of slides that I would go through and help them classify and organize.

So I've grown up with that desire to photograph the world and to his pictures. And then when I became old enough, I took my own camera and traveled on my own trips and started really being a photographer on my own. It's a hugely creative endeavor. I think it complements software programming very well, both on very creative processes.

And that's why I've developed this hobby on the side that I'm doing when I can. Well, absolutely incredible. And again, the co-founder of Eventbrite that everybody knows. We've got less than 30 seconds left if you could take a picture of any superhero who would that be renaud would be superman awesome well anyone who strives for a better way to get things done creates a new pathway where one doesn't exist as a hero re Renaud Visage, co-founder of Eventbrite, is a changemaker in entrepreneurship and event scheduling, so he is our hero.

And when we return, we're going to have the president of the UPS store with 4,700 franchised location, Tim Davis, president of UPS store.