Julia Hartz Took Eventbrite Public at $23. She Sold It at $4.50.

Julia Hartz did not sell Eventbrite at a peak. The deal she signed in December 2025 paid shareholders $4.50 in cash for each share of a company that had priced its IPO at $23 a share seven years earlier — roughly 80% less than the price at which she and Eventbrite’s other co-founders, Kevin Hartz and Renaud Visage, first offered the company to public investors. The part that makes this a founder story rather than a stock-chart story is the other number in the same announcement: that $4.50 was an 82% premium to Eventbrite’s 60-day average share price as of December 1, 2025. The market had already made its judgment. The decision in front of Hartz was what to do about it.

She had been here before, in a different shape. Eventbrite went public on the NYSE in September 2018, raising roughly $230 million at $23 a share, per Global Venturing and Business Insider, and Hartz — who had taken over the CEO role from her husband and co-founder Kevin, TechCrunch notes — was one of the few women founder-CEOs to lead a company through an IPO. Then came the thing no one on the roadshow had modeled. In April 2020, live events stopped. Hartz announced on an all-hands video call that Eventbrite would lay off 45% of its workforce, as part of a plan to save at least $100 million a year, Demand Gen Report and Pollstar both reported, and that her own cash pay and the executive team’s would be cut too. The business, as she later described it to Fortune and again to TechCrunch, was processing more refunds than revenue.

Eventbrite survived that; the stock never fully came back. By the time the company’s board formed a special committee on November 26, 2025, the question was no longer how to restore a $23 share price. It was whether a private owner could do something a public company with a $4.50 stock could not. Eventbrite’s board unanimously approved the sale to Bending Spoons, the Italian software company, per the proxy materials MarketScreener summarized, and the two sides announced it on December 2, 2025, with a closing expected in the first half of 2026. It closed on March 10, 2026, MarketScreener and Wikipedia both report, and Eventbrite became privately held.

Hartz’s statement in the company’s announcement framed it as a bet on speed and resources: “I’m energized by the speed, resources, and innovative power of Bending Spoons to propel Eventbrite into its next chapter.” She added that “there has never been a more important time to bring the world together in real life.” The release said Eventbrite served creators and attendees in nearly 180 countries and had distributed more than 83 million paid tickets to over 4.7 million events in 2024. Those are the numbers she was selling, not the share price.

What happened to her afterward is in TechCrunch’s August 2026 Build Mode episode, which calls Hartz Eventbrite’s “co-founder and former CEO” and says she describes the decision to take the company private as a painful one. The company’s announcement had not said what her role would be once the deal closed, and we have found no public statement from her beyond that podcast about what she is doing next.

It is the same shape of decision Jennifer Hyman made at Rent the Runway, another woman founder who took a company public and then watched the stock fall far below its IPO price — Hyman’s lost 98.5% by March 2024 — before choosing a moment to hand it off. The difference is the direction of the exit: Hyman stayed through a debt restructuring and left the company public, while Hartz let the company go private along with the shares. And it echoes Elizabeth Stein’s sale of Purely Elizabeth to Ferrero, where a founder handed the brand she built to a much larger buyer — except Hartz was selling a business with millions of customers on the other side of every ticket, to an owner whose pitch was speed.

The lesson for founders is not that $4.50 beat $23. It didn’t, and no one involved claimed it did. It’s that an exit price is measured against the alternative in front of you, and in December 2025 the alternative was a public stock the market had already priced. Hartz took the 82% premium.