Trust Your Instinct
Years of questioning can become the judgment that a difficult moment demands.
2 minute readBegin reading"In order to get out of that room, that dark room, I had to go on instinct completely."
That's Julia Hartz in the spring of 2020, when COVID took Eventbrite's quarterly revenue from $80.8 million to $8.4 million, and she had to make almost every decision with no precedent to guide her. There was no handbook for a pandemic.
She had been CEO for four years by then, and spent three of them doubting herself. Her husband and co-founder Kevin had run the company for its first 10 years, and she kept wondering whether she was qualified for the job or just doing it the way he would have.
In hindsight, those three years of doubting herself can look like wasted time. They also gave her instinct. You cannot make 100 fast decisions in a crisis unless you have already spent years working out, slowly and with some doubt, what your company is and what your job in it actually is.
She did her second-guessing in the calm, when the company was growing and went public, so by the time the crisis hit, none of it was left to slow her down. Most founders never get to work through it that early.
Her instinct pushed the company through its crisis. Revenue fell to $106.0 million for 2020 and climbed back to $326.1 million by 2023, and in March 2026 she sold the company to Bending Spoons for roughly $500 million.
I wonder how many people quit somewhere in year two of that feeling, just before the years of questioning start paying off.
