Renaud Visage, CTO And Co-Founder Of Eventbrite

Renaud Visage is the founding technical architect and CTO of Eventbrite.

Living In A Bubble

Fascinated by the Internet, Renaud Visage joined Zing networks, one of the first photo-sharing company, in 2000. “It was a brand new world. We were creating things and millions of people were using the site. We had a real impact. It was in the early days of digital photography, so it made us feel like we were pioneers,” he says.

But 2000 was also the height of the dot com boom, and after raising $50M (mostly with KPCB) and hiring like crazy… the bubble burst.

When it burst, there was massive layoff and Renaud Visage was one of the few survivors.
“I was in the last ten they kept. Every time they fired someone, I got a promotion. I was first junior engineer, then senior engineer and became eventually director of engineering. They would take people into different rooms — there was the room that kept its job, and the room that didn’t.”

It was tough time but Renaud learned a lot: “I learned a lot about what not to do, about how not to spend $50m. I knew after a few weeks we weren’t going to make it. I stayed because we had a good product, we had an excellent team, but its management was unfortunately too focused on capturing eye balls instead of building a sustainable business.”

The Eventbrite Journey

In 2006, Renaud Visage joined forces with Kevin & Julia Hartz to found Eventbrite. In the early days, Renaud was based in Paris and the two other co-founders were working from San Francisco. Renaud was coding when his co-founders were asleep, and they could speak about their challenge and their respective advancements when the day ended in Paris and just started in SF.

“It was like having a 24–7 shop really with only three people. I think it works out if you’re aligned, have clear responsibilities, and really into the product which you are building. You’re going to make it work wherever you are.”

And it did work: Eventbrite is used in 187 countries, 2 million events are held and 100 million tickets are processed per year using the solution. It has processed more than $5B in ticket sales and has nine offices around the world.
Eventbrite is now the world’s largest self-service ticketing platform. It is used for music festivals, marathons, conferences, hackathons, air guitar competitions, political rallies, fundraisers, gaming competitions and much more.

Their initial idea was to provide a platform for small to medium-sized events and their user base has grown from early adopters in the tech industry to… almost everyone.

“Part of our success has come from a shift of social habits: Millennials are more interested in paying for live experiences than for stuff.

Millennials are more interested in paying for live experiences than for stuff.

We were well positioned when that phenomenon started and communicate towards that direction”.
Renaud adds: “One of the key formula was to mix a reliable product, the inherent virality of live events, and a global service that has a local feel.”.

As the company began to scale, it became important to preserve the reliability of the core product, while trying to add new strings to its bow.
“I think the challenge for any fast-growing company is how do you stay innovative, stay fresh but still maintain the quality that your current users rely on to run their businesses.” While the core events management product hasn’t changed, Eventbrite’s customers base, habits and needs evolve, we constantly develop new features and options to enrich our product offering”.

Renaud Visage, The Photographer

Son of professional wildlife photographer, he fell in love with photography. He too became an accomplished photographer, specialized in travel, architectural and location stock photography. His work, used in magazines, books, movies, brochures and advertisements in more than 20 countries, is represented by various stock photo agencies around the world like Getty Images, Age Fotostock or Alamy.

Discover his portfolio: www.renaudvisage.com