SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as "may," "will," "appears," "shall," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "could," "intends," "target," "projects," "contemplates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," or "continue," or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions that concern our expectations, strategy, plans, or intentions. Forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K include, but are not limited to, statements about our future financial performance, including our revenue, costs of revenue and operating expenses; our anticipated growth and growth strategies and our ability to effectively manage that growth; our ability to achieve and grow profitability; the sufficiency of our cash, cash equivalents and investments to meet our liquidity needs; our ability to maintain the security and availability of our platform; our predictions about industry and market trends; our ability to attract and retain creators; our ability to successfully expand internationally; our ability to maintain, protect and enhance our intellectual property; our ability to attract and retain qualified employees and key personnel; our ability to comply with modified or new laws and regulations applying to our business; our ability to successfully defend litigation brought against us; the increased expenses associated with being a public company; and our outstanding debt under our term loan facility.
The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors described in the section titled "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. We caution you that the foregoing list may not contain all of the forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.
All forward-looking statements are based on information and estimates available to the Company at the time of this Annual Report on Form 10-K and are not guarantees of future performance. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.
Item 1. Business
Overview
We founded Eventbrite to bring the world together through live experiences. We believe live experiences are fundamental to fulfilling a human desire to connect. Our company serves event creators—the people who bring others together to share their passions, artistry and causes through live experiences—and we empower their success.
We built a powerful, broad technology platform to enable creators to solve the challenges associated with creating live experiences. Our platform integrates components needed to seamlessly plan, promote and produce live events, thereby allowing creators to reduce friction and costs, increase reach and drive ticket sales. By reducing risk and complexity, we allow creators to focus their energy on producing compelling and successful events.
We succeed when creators succeed. Our business model is simple: we charge creators on a per-ticket basis when an attendee purchases a paid ticket for an event. We grow with the creators as they plan, promote and produce more events and grow attendance. In 2018, we helped more than 790,000 creators issue approximately 265 million tickets across approximately 3.8 million events in over 170 countries.
Creators face numerous challenges in planning, promoting and producing events. These challenges stem from complex and interdependent workflows required before, during and after events. Creators have historically relied on a fragmented set of online and offline tools that inhibit, rather than enhance, these workflows. While some of the largest professional event creators have access to costly technology systems for event management, many creators lack the budget and staff necessary to benefit from these legacy technologies. Our comprehensive platform is designed to be easy to use and intuitive while providing sophisticated capabilities to the widest range of event creators.
We designed our platform for all creators, regardless of category, country, size or type of event. We enable events ranging from fundraisers, seminars, wellness activities and music festivals to classes and cultural celebrations all over the world. Anyone can create or discover events on Eventbrite. This allows more creators to produce original and compelling experiences, attracting more attendees to these experiences. As a consequence, we believe we are expanding the global market for live experiences.
Our platform meets the complex needs of creators through a modular and extensible design. It can be accessed from Eventbrite.com, our mobile apps and through other websites. This modularity facilitates rapid product development and allows third-party developers to integrate features and functionality from Eventbrite into their environment. Our platform also allows developers to seamlessly integrate services from third-party partners such as Salesforce, Facebook and HubSpot. Importantly, we have designed our platform to produce consistent and reliable performance, handling both surges in traffic and transaction volume associated with high-demand on-sales and the load associated with supporting millions of events each year. This approach gives creators a platform that can scale to their needs, offering everything from basic registration and ticketing to a fully-featured event management platform.
This platform approach has allowed us to pioneer a powerful business model that drives our go-to-market strategy and allows us to efficiently serve a large number and variety of creators. We believe our business model will enable us to achieve and grow profitability as we increase our scale. We attract creators to our platform through multiple means, including prior experience as attendees, word of mouth from other creators, our prominence in search engine results, the ability to try our platform for free events and our library of content. More than 98% of creators who used our platform in 2018 signed themselves up for Eventbrite, and in 2018, we derived 56% of our net revenue from these creators. We augment this model with a highly-targeted sales team that focuses on acquiring creators with events in specific categories or countries. Substantially all of our creators create and manage events without the need for service or support.
Trends in Our Favor
We believe live experiences are fundamental to fulfilling a human desire to connect. This interest in human connection drives the creation of more diverse events today than ever before, ranging from consumer-focused experiences such as music concerts and beer festivals, to cause-related events like marches, fundraisers and political rallies. According to an Eventbrite survey conducted by Crowd DNA, four out of five adults surveyed in our top four geographic markets in April 2017 attended a live event in the past year, indicating broad interest in events.
A combination of trends in consumer behavior and technology is increasing the role and importance of live experiences and provides a tailwind for our market opportunity. We call this the “experience economy.”