Eventbrite, Inc. (EB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Some people trickling in, but we can kick it off. I'm Cameron Mansson-Perrone, Morgan Stanley Music, Live Events analyst. I'll note here at the beginning that important disclosures, including my personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures, all appear as a handout available in the registration area and on the Morgan Stanley public website. And with that, I'd like to welcome Julia Hartz, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Eventbrite; and Lanny Baker, Chief Financial Officer. Julia and Lanny, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks, Cam. Yes.

You provided initial guidance for '24 on your recent Earnings Call. I want to get into that, but I thought maybe we could start with the big change that you made to the platform recently in terms of starting to charge listing fees for creators on the platform. Why was that the right change for the platform? And why was now the right time to roll that out?

So, stepping back, Eventbrite is one of the largest self service ticketing platforms in the world. Last year, we had 92 million ticket buyers, 850,000 creators, and 5 million events. Sorry, I'm distracted by the world's tiniest cupcake that you just ate. I think that must be Morgan Stanley budget cuts. I don't know.

We're down slightly.

Okay, we could talk about to Kate about that later, but that was amazing. That was, like, the tiniest cupcake. Okay, starting. So when we think about the scale of Eventbrite and what we've achieved in this mid-market Events space, that's very fragmented and what we have built from a self service standpoint, we've known for some time that we were operating as a platform, but really driving value as a marketplace, and that our demand generation for creators, which is the #1 thing they ask us to help them with, was strong and growing. Today, it's 47% of all tickets on the platform or in the marketplace. [ Steve ] and I need to keep retraining myself, are driven by Eventbrite's efforts, and 53% are driven by creators efforts. So we knew that we wanted to lean into how we could build the marketplace at scale, because we know, again, that our customers, their top need is for us to help them build their audience and community and convert that community into more event goers. And so for us, it's been a practice of building product that matters. We rolled out Eventbrite Boost, and with that, a suite of marketing tools that allowed our creators to be able to be better, more effective marketers using those tools. Same-store sales are up 60%, 5 to 6 row ads -- x row ads on those. And then we also knew that as a marketplace, we needed to be able to monetize that demand. So there are 2 things going into that. The first is Eventbrite Ads, the ability to buy a promoted listing spot for the first-time ever in Eventbrite, so that we could drive the goodness of all the consumers and the traffic that we're getting into our creators events. And the second is, the marketplace pricing model. Eventbrite's revenue model has been a per ticket transaction fee for 1.5 decades, on average, roughly -- and historically, it's been $3 per ticket, 88% to 90% of the time, that's paid for by the consumer. The creator wasn't really paying anything for Eventbrite prior to this change. And so what we did was, after lots of research and design and testing, we figured out that we could exchange value based on the marketing tools, so we could bring those marketing tools that were hidden behind or were behind a subscription, and really only for our Enterprise-level customers, we could actually bring that functionality into the core experience, which is very Eventbrite. We're -- we were founded on the principle of democratizing shared experiences. We'll continue to bring all of our product capability to anyone. That's the beauty of the self-service model. And so we brought all those tools forward into the core experience, and we created a new packaging model that only affects about 40% of the events on the platform. And we can talk more about that, we have 40 minutes, after all. And so that, plus a number of other measures that we're putting into place to focus on marketplace liquidity is creating near term volatility that will play through. So I'll hand it over to Lanny to talk about the pricing, and also we can get into the outlook, which is sort of the headline.

Yes. I guess, and you can touch on this.

Or you can keep moderating this conversation.

That's all right. I'll just let you run with it. Yes, and in terms of the reaction, I know you guys anticipated some type of creator reaction to this and some people pulling back or responding adversely, but what surprised you about the way that the creator -- the universe of creators on Eventbrite responded to the change?

I think overall, one of the challenges that we're focused on solving, and at Eventbrite, it's paid tickets, paid tickets, paid tickets, is that -- as we've transitioned into this marketplace model, paid ticket growth has come down a bit. And it's not -- I don't want to convolute the story, but it's this shift to the marketplace model that's caused this friction. It's not just the pricing changes. We think about it as a shift that we know we've wanted to make that we're moving through right now and that we believe is better for the business, better for our customers, and then allows us to reinvest wisely into building greater capability for the marketplace and for our creators. But I think that -- I think, what we've seen here is that creator churn has not been super alarming. We're not -- it's not outside our thresholds of what we had planned for. It's the ticket volume that has fallen a bit more than we expected. And really what we've been signaling to investors is that that's a near term event that's happened in this quarter that we want to be honest with people about.

Yes, makes sense. What are the -- backing up a little bit. It's pretty simple on the face of it in terms of charging creators to list an event. But what are the different options for creators in terms of listing fees today? And do you see that option set expanding? Is that something that you see changing? Or is kind of the current framework what you anticipate to be in place for the near term?

So, like I said, we built this earlier last year. We tested it, a bunch in noncore markets. We got a lot of feedback, we continue to get a lot of feedback, and I think that what creators are looking for is something that's simple, that meets their needs. They understand the value proposition that we're giving them; 75% of creators on the platform agree that we help drive demand. That's our most recent survey, so, yay. Our messaging is getting out there and they're actually seeing value for it. But we want to -- I think what we want to do is really help them see results and feed that back into the loop. And I think that as we look forward to what we might be able to do in terms of options, this framework gives us sort of almost too many options, and we have to keep coming back, subtracting and focusing on the ones that really matter. But we offer a flexible pricing, which is an Ala-Carte. So you pay $10 for an event, on the listing side, it can come out of your event balance, so you never really exchange a credit card with us. You can actually pay for it through your ticket sales all the way up to $120 a month, where you have unlimited tickets. Now it's gated on tickets. So that's the interesting factor, is that there's a lot of leverage for us to move and control the pricing and capacity. And it's also, for the first time ever, we get a very clear signal as to what capacity an event creator is thinking about when they come onto the platform; 99% of our creators come through self sign on. And before this, we didn't really know how big their events would be. Now they're showing us an intention. And the reason why that matters is because we can find more creators like those that we want to see back on the platform, the higher value creators, and inform our paid marketing. So the first option is flex pay-as-you-go pay, pay per event. The second option is a subscription. It ranges in price based on the volume of tickets you'll be selling, but it's a really easy monthly subscription. We're actually seeing adoption much higher than our expectations on that. We'll be fast following with an annual plan because we have a signal that creators who are using Eventbrite a lot, those frequent creators we've been focused on building for, they just want to set and forget their marketplace fee and move on. And so there's things like that, or offering discounts to nonprofits that we can do to really start to drive more volume. There's far more things that are happening internally at Eventbrite to drive volume than just pricing tweaks.

Yes, that makes sense. Do you have a preference in terms of people doing Ala-Carte or Subscription? Are you happy to just kind of let it shake out how it will?

Well, it's wonderful to have the Subscription relationship. It gives you a little bit of predictability and visibility into the future, and I think it represents a deepening of the customer relationship, a commitment to say, I'm going to have my events here on this platform for the duration of the time, which I'm paying for on a subscription basis. We've been surprised, frankly, relative to our expectations that the uptake of the Subscription offering versus the Ala-Carte offering has been a bit -- it's tilted towards Subscription by a pretty hearty margin relative to what we expected. And we expected it to be somewhat low because most creators are pretty marginal, economics-oriented. They want low fixed costs, and they want everything to sort of come in at the day of the event. And we thought reason why we offered Ala-Carte pricing was to avoid some big subscription upfront, some outlay that raised their fixed costs. But I think that with the addition of the marketing tools and the marketing that we're doing, showing the demand that we're driving, we've had creators -- by far, the majority of creators have sort of sailed right through the organizer fee, subscribed to the product and kept on going, hosting their events on the platform. We've had some that have had a reaction to the first-time ever that wears a direct fee for using Eventbrite against -- for the creator to pay to get onboard. Now, when you look at it honestly, the $10 event fee, the Ala-Carte fee works out to, in most cases, less than 1% of the revenues of that event. So it's a very affordable charge. But it's almost that 0 to 1 moment of it used to be free and now I'm paying something, which is on us to amp up our marketing and our expression of the value they're getting in what they're paying for. And to your question a moment ago, there is some simplification we're thinking about with the plans. We've got 3 Ala-Carte options and 3 Subscription offerings. We can probably tailor that a little bit better to reduce some of the purchasing hesitance and frequent -- and friction that creators are feeling.

Makes sense. Let's get into the outlook for '24. You guided for revenue growth of 10% to 14% this year. Obviously a moderation from strong 25% growth in '23. We've been talking about or touching on kind of the paid ticket dynamic that's driving a part of that. But as we think of what the rest of the [ algo ] in driving that 10% to 14% growth this year, what should we expect to see in terms of where your -- where that growth is coming from?

Sure. So relative to our long term target of delivering 20% revenue growth, the big delta this year is paid ticket volume. And we talked a little bit about where paid ticket volume has been disrupted by the transition to the marketplace. And it's both the introduction of the organizer fees for the first-time ever, as we just mentioned. And it's also a bit of a reorientation of our sales effort to focus on the top metros and the top categories and the top events that we know really drive the like product excitement and the magnetism of Eventbrite as a place to go to find things to do. Those top events that our sales team is focused on also are great sources of new customer -- consumer introductions for us, that we can then drive repeat purchase and frequency of habituation with the Eventbrite marketplace. So we're in the early stages of sort of reorienting the business around those 2 things. And what that means for this year is that our full year view is that paid ticket volume will be down a little bit a couple of percentage points, to up a couple of percentage points, but call it roughly flat. And so the big delta between looking at a low double digit revenue growth rate between 10% and 14% in our outlook this year and 25% revenue growth we delivered last year is really that downshifting in paid ticket volume, as Julia said, as we switched to this marketplace mode. And on the larger account side, we've been focused now for 6-plus months on those select cities and that select inventory, and we're booking events and filling up the future calendar in a way that we're very excited about, sort of how that'll play out over the course of the year. And then we've got to play through the introduction of the organizer fees, which will take us a quarter or 2. In the first quarter. paid ticket volume will be down high single digits, based on what we could see as of our earnings date. And I think those numbers get better as we go throughout the year. So for the full year, we're thinking about paid ticket volume being about even. The average ticket price is moving up right now. For the first time in several years, we're seeing a kind of low to mid single digit increase in the average ticket price. And then, the other key components of the revenue outlook are we will annualize the organizer fees, which really went into place in the fourth quarter of 2023. They were $6.5 million, $6.6 million in the fourth quarter, and we'll have that for 3 incremental quarters, plus what we get to in the fourth quarter of next year. And then the continued growth of Eventbrite Ads, which is a small but really rapidly growing revenue stream. It was $2.5 million in the quarter, up almost 30%, quarter-over-quarter, which is a strong annualized revenue growth rate. And that growth on Eventbrite Ads is coming from more of our event creators buying ads and contributing a slightly larger spend per event to the Eventbrite ad product as we're improving performance.

You mentioned the 2 tailwinds that you'll have in terms of growth from the 2 nonticketing elements. But as we think about reaccelerating growth back to that kind of longer term 20% level that you mentioned earlier, what do you -- what can you do? What are you doing to reaccelerate that growth as we move through '24 and look ahead into '25 even?

Yes. So we're thinking about 3 things. The first is our self sign-on business. Again, it's a 90% very low cost of acquisition flow-through for us in terms of the supply side, and 99% of our creator base comes through our self sign-on channel. It's an engine, and I think it's driven by SEO, it's driven by our ability to engage people through our onboarding flow, and it's driven by paid marketing. And so, we continue to focus on the velocity and the volume that we enjoy through that channel, and we'll focus on really on simplification and on making sure that when we're finding the right creators who are higher volume, higher value through that channel, that they're getting on board in a way that suits their needs. And then everyone else is getting thrown into the chute very quickly to publish and get on with it. Whether it's through AI auto generation of events, which is getting great adoption, or it's our ability to be able to quickly get someone up and running and help them sell tickets to many types of events. These are all like the kind of very specific ways that our product-led growth drives a big portion of our business. On the sales front, that's a totally different motion. We'll go out and spearfish the most productive deals that we can find. And what I mean by that is we now have a marketplace model that informs which metros we care about, which categories consumers want to go to, and which events we know we can help sell through faster. And so we're using that data and that model to go after specific accounts that we know will sell well in our marketplace. That very sort of targeted approach with a 50% increase in sellers that are using that approach, is going to yield goodness this year. There's some low hanging fruit and then some places where we can be more competitive, where we've really kind of -- we're like clutched on that part of our business, and now we can lean in with marketing tools, with ads, with ticketing, with our ability to be more aggressive in promoting and marketing those events and really see a different outcome. And we're already starting to see the fruits of our labor there. And then finally, sell-through. A big portion of our focus reinvestment is around this opportunity that's existed throughout time with Eventbrite over the last probably 5 to 6 years, which is how can we engage our consumers to repeat buy? Where are they coming back and finding more things to do? Who's our target consumer? Our target consumer is someone that we call a social scout. They go out, they love to find the best events, they love to find the best restaurants. They love to bring their friends. It's a 1 to many approach. And so, we're focused on building a consumer app that actually meets their needs that is a much better version of what we have today. And then it combines the search and relevance work that we've been doing now in earnest for over a year to put the right event in front of the right person at the right time. So that's the 3-pronged approach is, simplifying SSO and continuing to drive high volume, getting very specific and granular and aggressive in sales to drive marketplace liquidity; and then the third, is sell through, connecting with the consumer to drive repeat purchasing behavior once they come through Eventbrite, either through 1 of our channels or through our creators channels.

Great. My next question was going to be whether you still thought of this as a 20% growth business. Lanny, you already reaffirmed that. But what makes 20% the right target for you in terms of growth over time?

Well, we look at the overall size of the live experiences economy, which is growing. It's one of the healthier parts of the overall economy right now. There's a generational shift that continues to go on. We have enormous overseas opportunities. Our business is very heavily English-language countries, and that gives us a global growth opportunity over time. And then, you look at the sort of developing opportunity to have nonticketing revenues, which a year ago were 2% of revenue and they're now 10%. And when we look at where the hallmarks of success are on becoming a demand-generation partner in an advertising-driven marketplace with really strong promoted listings business, there's a big sideline growth opportunity for us to continue to improve revenue per event, revenue per creator, even as we're gaining share, growing globally and riding along with the growth of the overall live events economy. So as we look at all those different opportunities, we think that's a reasonable growth rate to be targeting.

Yes, that makes sense. Last question on the listing fees, I swear. But as we try and think about the creator response, what element or what kind of segment of the creator base are you seeing sensitivity from? You talked about kind of some people, that -- it's really just about the going from 0 to anything and that kind of knee jerk. Is there a particular segment of the creator universe that you're seeing a pattern in, or in terms of looking at that reaction, like who is -- where are you seeing that sensitivity?

Not yet. I mean, my pithy answer would be price sensitive creators. But no, I mean, at $10 an event, that's not -- we're not changing the game, right? So it's really about we're seeing less tickets in general coming into the marketplace than we expected. Again, not to be overly pedantic about it. So when we pull that apart, we understand that in order for Eventbrite to thrive, we have to continue to drive the engine of self sign-on growth. We need to continue to make sure that the long tail can thrive. That's the basis of our growth story. We also need to sharpen our focus on some of the -- what we call, strategic inventory. So the categories like Nightlife, Entertainment, Music, Food and Drink, the things that people really want to go to, and then the events that drive distribution. So the events that are bringing a higher proportion of customers with them, consumers with them, those do really well in our marketplace because then we're able to help them even amplify further. And also, we're able to capture that consumer and re engage them. So those are the focus areas, if you think about what's going to drive paid ticket growth. We're going to focus in our -- really a lot in our 7 core countries and make sure we're getting paid ticket growth up to the level we want to see, before we go expand our efforts. But Lanny is right. I mean, prior to COVID, we were in 19 countries, and we have a lot of great adoption in non-English speaking countries, where we're not even focused right now.

Yes.

So it is an opportunity, pulling the focus into the now to make sure that we get the fundamentals really humming with this new marketplace model. And then we can look at where we can go from there. And then finally, I'd say that we've only started on our capacity to meet our customers needs through things like advertising. They really want the eyeballs, and they really want the audience generation. And we're just -- it's like, this is just the first baby step into that. So I have high hopes that we can bring that to a place that's really scaled. It has to do with personalization and relevance. We have to be able to marry the 2 to make it hyper relevant for consumers. But it also has to be something that drives the collective outcome that both us and creators want to see, which is more paid tickets or more tickets in general, sold to these events. Our customers, they make their money not in the ticket. More typically, they make their money from what the people do at the event. And so, we want to make sure that we can maximize the audience for them and maximize the people who would be spending money with them. It's Sponsorships, it's Food and Bev, it's Merchandise. And we know that those are also categories that we can help drive for -- down the future. But at this time, our biggest value proposition for them is that we can help them sell more tickets.

Yes, that makes sense. I want to move on to the nonticketing opportunity. Lanny, you mentioned the $6.5 mil (sic) [ $6.5 million ] that you generated in 4Q from listing fees out of the gates. Is there opportunity to grow that as we move through '24 to grow off of that base? You mentioned just annualizing on '24, but is there an opportunity to sequentially see that grow as we move through the year beyond just the kind of run rate?

There is. I mean, I think the biggest driver is going to come back to creator volume growth and new creators coming onto the platform and paying the fees to be part of our marketplace. So it will grow with creator volumes and with event volumes to the extent that we drive subscription revenue and that starts to build a little bit deeper relationship that leads to improved customer retention over time, there's an opportunity there. So far we've seen really great adoption -- or sort of retention on the subscription product. It's been really encouraging. So I would say for the next 12 months, the bulk of the story is going to be annualizing in the rate that we're at. But by the time we get to a quarter -- a year from now, and we're lapping, it'll be about the growth of the creator base and event volume base at that time.

Do you think that there's room for the share of events that are currently generating listing fees to increase over time? Or is the current split in terms of just the fraction of events generating those fees a reasonable place or kind of an expectation going forward?

I think, it's in a pretty reasonable place right now. I mean, really what the fees, look, it's a large revenue stream, $25 million or so, but it's not a couple of hundred million dollars that we're going to see out of organizer fees. But I think most importantly, it shifts the dynamic around Eventbrite to, I'm paying to be part of a marketplace. It's a price of an entry. And what comes with the marketplace is the demand generation that we provide. And after you've paid your $10 fee, if you want more of that demand generation, we've got this advertising product, where it's up to you to figure out when you want to advertise, how much you want to advertise, where you want to advertise, what your return criteria are in terms of how much you want to spend and giving them more flexibility. But you've already changed the conversation to being about demand generation and marketing services. So I think that in time the advertising revenue should eclipse the organizer fees and become on a per customer basis, already today, what people are spending on advertising versus organizer fees is 5 to 1 or more on advertising versus organizer fees for people who are paying both of those. And I think there's opportunity for that sort of discretionary spend on the incremental demand to continue to grow, because for many creators the incremental ticket sales have extremely high incremental profitability for their business. And so their willingness to spend to create that next ticket sale is really, really high.

How many people who are hosting a new event are engaging with the boost products and functionality?

It's a -- we're in about a mid-teens percentage right now, of usage of -- after we rolled it out to everybody, we've jumped up to about a mid-teens percentage of all the creators using those tools. And right now, when we look at the penetration of advertising and we look at that a little bit differently, we look at the advertising revenue in terms of the event revenue, and we're at about 11% or 12% of the event revenue is buying Eventbrite Ads. A year ago that was 5% or 6%. So I think there are -- there's data there that is -- and financial benefit to the company, that's real about the shift to becoming more of a demand-generation partner is extracting new value for us. And frankly, it's the reason why we had record revenue last quarter. And it'll be a big reason why I think we'll have record revenue this year.

Yes, those 2, between ads and listing fees, they're over 10% of overall revenue in 4Q. How should we think about -- do you have a target or kind of maybe just help us contextualize, how high do you think that contribution from those 2 products can go in terms of their contribution to overall revenue over time?

I mean, you I know, look at all kinds of companies that have built marketplace models, as do we -- and it's not uncommon. I'd say the more successful ones have gotten to a quarter of their revenue coming from demand generation. And boy, that's a long way from where we are today. And those are the revenue from advertising has probably 20-plus point higher gross margin than from ticketing. So the value created in that kind of a shift in the overall mix is really, we think, exciting and something we're going after very, very aggressively. What we're seeing right now on a per advertiser basis is about a 20% lift. When they start to buy ads, we get about 20% more revenue from those customers. And that number has grown a little bit, over time, as we've improved the performance, we've gotten a little bit more of their ad spending. So that gives you some of the parameters about how we get there. And it's a matter of getting more of the participants in the marketplace to appreciate and buy into Eventbrite Ads, improving the performance of those, and so that with [ that improved ] performance, we stand up well against all the other opportunities they have, to market their event, where we've got known ticket buyers and we can drive premium rates of return on their advertising spending and thereby get more of their ad budget.

Yes. Driving efficacy of both tools ultimately really relies on the product. And I know you guys highlighted on the Earnings Call that there are a lot of product investment plans for 2024. Could you maybe talk about where you guys are focused product-wise this year?

Yes. So the first is around creating relevancy for the consumers that we know are buying more tickets and how we can continue to strengthen Search, continue to strengthen Distribution. We have in the past seen a lot of success and will continue to see success in keeping the principle of putting the right event in front of the right consumer at the right time, wherever they are. So if they're searching on a social media platform for events or following a favorite influencer, we want to make sure that the event creator is able to easily distribute that event listing and that purchasing action, and really lean into that opportunity. We also know that when a consumer comes to Eventbrite and is looking for something to do, they should be able to easily find hyper-relevant events that are suited to the needs, or what they're thinking about doing. And so, a strong concerted effort for us this year is around the consumer app. If you think about the highest engagement of a consumer, you think about where we see highest conversion and the sort of "stickier surface". It's in our consumer app. It's also the place where you get your ticket. So there's a nice Trojan horse element to that. And so, we're focused -- we're being very disciplined to focus on that surface area first, because we'll see the highest return, but also because the surface area of Eventbrite is pretty massive. And so that could easily balloon into a much bigger investment. So we want to really tie that to ROI. Second thing is about strategic inventory. So we're focusing, as I spoke about earlier, around how we find the right events for the right market that drives that consumer demand. We now can build those models and understand at any given point during the year, what kind of event inventory do we need to have in each metro that we really care about. And we're focusing on a subset of the metros that we're in, but like the top 30. And then the third thing is our -- is the brand. And sort of how you -- and I know you all love to hear about brand, but how you relate to Eventbrite today. Eventbrite is a loved, ubiquitous brand, right? If you ask 10 people on the streets in New York, do you know Eventbrite, 7 of them will say yes, and it'll range from, I think I buy tickets to my yoga class on that. Or, of course, I know Eventbrite. Are you crazy? And if you ask the same 10 people, where do you go to find things to do, 0 of them are going to say, Eventbrite at the top of the list. So the ubiquity to relevance sort of mission for us is about making sure that the best events are on Eventbrite, that we're amplifying those events to the right audiences, that we're really picking off our target consumer and driving high frequency and engagement, and that we're building relevancy in the metros that we care about. And so, 2 of those are consumer-driven, 1 of those is supply-driven, and that's really what we're focused on this year in terms of investment.

Got it. I want to drill into the self sign-on question for a second. Is the opportunity there in your mind more the driving people to the platform more effectively? Or is it the stickiness in driving that once they're on the platform, how are we making sure that they're having a good experience, they're creating an event, and everything is going smoothly?

I mean, I think that returning is really important. So retention for the creators who are coming back to host more events, first of all, there's a wide variety of behavior there. Events are ephemeral. You're sometimes hosting the event, sometimes you're not. Sometimes you decide to never host the event again. But for those creators who are frequent creators, and we understand their usage patterns, absolutely, we want to drive retention because the value of us understanding how we can help them builds over time, and we can start getting -- we can get smarter about the products that we're suggesting they use. We get smarter about our ability to actually drive audience to their event, and that happens and compounds in strength over their lifetime value within -- really, within the first year. But that signal gets stronger and stronger. So retention is key. On the new front, we feel we just scratched the surface because we have penetration in -- low penetration in lots of categories that we can move up into. We're focused on the ones that drive that consumer behavior that we know we want to see in the marketplace, like Nightlife, like Music, like Food and Drink events. But we also enjoy the element that Eventbrite is for everyone. So we don't want to do anything that breaks that flywheel of growth where anyone, for any event, can come to Eventbrite and find success. And so that's -- our focus on new is really on high quality creators while not breaking the engine that I think is really important to uphold our notion of being open for everybody.

Great. I want to make sure to get to profitability, you guys, I think, updated on the Earnings Call that you no longer expect to reach 20% adjusted EBITDA margins this year. I presume, that's just a byproduct of the slower revenue outlook. What is the magnum or the magnitude of growth that is required to kind of get to that, that's been your target kind of, that you've been speaking to for a while? What kind of growth do you need to get there?

Well, I think that this year, being a -- in our outlook at 10% to 14% is below where we think the long term growth is. And I think last year we were at 25%, if you put the growth into the low-20s, the pathway to that 20% EBITDA margin comes in pretty considerably. We've gotten, over the last couple of years, our product and development expenditures relative to revenue, right into the sweet spot of where we think they should be in the long term. This year, they may grow a little bit faster than revenue, as we're investing in the things that Julia just talked about. Our sales and marketing investment relative to revenue has come down from where it was a couple of years ago, but still a couple of points above our long term range. And our G&A has come down by more than 10 points from where it was a couple of years ago, and it's got a couple more points to come down to get into the long term range. And that long term range adds up to a 20% or better adjusted EBITDA. And then on the other side, we pay a lot of attention to stock-based compensation, depreciation, amortization, and want to be a net income positive company. And I think that aligns well with being at a 20% EBITDA margin for the business. When we originally laid out those targets, we said that D&A and stock-based compensation would be, I think, 22% or 23% of revenue, and those 2 together are today below 20%, and that's largely because of progress we've made on reducing stock-based compensation, which will keep coming down through things we're doing to target more carefully or more narrowly who we give the equity to. So it's in the hands of people who are really making a big tangible difference in the overall value of the business. And frankly, those employees who value it most. And there's plenty of employees who value in the short run, cash more than they do the equity. And so we've been substituting more cash incentives for equity incentives. We've also relocated portions of our workforce to parts of the world where there is equity interest, but not the same equity intensity that there is here in the United States. And all those things give us a path to sort of collectively -- revenue reaccelerating is the path back to 20% EBITDA growth -- EBITDA margins sooner. And in the meantime, we're also working on, when we get to that place, being in a position to be able to deliver net income profitability at the same time.

You gave some pretty specific ranges for OpEx intensity at the Investor Day a while back, any changes in terms of the build to the 20%?

I don't -- we haven't updated that. I think, it's directionally pretty accurate, and we'll leave that in place for the -- until we update it. But it seems pretty reasonable. I mean, I think one of the questions we get asked a lot is, as you're focused on the consumer, is there a big consumer marketing expenditure out there? Is there a big brand campaign or something like that? And in our analysis of the long term strategy, we don't really see that being a critical part of the business, because we have this very fortunate thing that when popular creators come onto our platform, they bring with them the 53% of demand that they drive themselves. And so you could look at that and say, we have a negative CAC on half of our consumers. And that puts us in a wonderful position where our best focus isn't going out and trying to compete with those creators for attendees. Instead, it's to get the creator, the attendee of one creator's event, to consider the next creator's event, to consider the next creator's event, to consider the next creator's event. And that is a product marketing and a product motion rather than a big marketing. And we're already making that product investment. And we've worked hard over the last couple of years to free up resources from prior investments on the creator side of the platform, to be able to fund proportionally greater investments on the consumer side of our platform. And so I think, looking into the future about investments, I think the layout we've given you is about right. And I think it's worthwhile in saying, like, on the consumer side, the place we will invest is in the product rather than in marketing spending.

Got it. We're almost out of time, but maybe we'll end on each of your most anticipated Eventbrite events for 2024.

Oh, my gosh. All right. I'll just say the first thing that came to mind, which is there's a show called Drunk Theater, where you have 6 comedians that get called to do Improv, and one of them has to take 5 shots of whiskey before the Improv starts. And I just find that's emblematic of the creativity that is on Eventbrite. The other one is a Brewfest that's going to be happening right outside of our office, which I think is amazing. That is all microcraft breweries. So lots of alcohol. I think, I'm drinking through the pain of the stock so, and eating small cupcakes.

After the week that I have had, or we have had, and some of our shareholders have had, St. Patrick's Day events [ already. ] All right. That's great. Thank you guys so much for joining us.

Thanks, Cam. Thank you.