Full transcript: Laurent Sellier on London Real
0:00 Brian Rose: In London, technology is the silicone roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. Silicon Real. Okay, thanks so much for coming today to the EventBrite Space. My name is Brian Rose. I host London Real, where our mission is putting the BBC out of business.
0:42 Every week we introduce kind of extraordinary people and we introduce you to them online. We’ve had guests like celebrity astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who tried to wrestle me to the ground. We had Tim Ferriss doing the four hour everything and we’ve also had the marijuana smuggler, Howard Marks. So that’s what I do, there you go, you know him. And so I do that in my spare time.
1:05 I also shoot a show called Silicone Reel, which is the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene, and it’s right around the corner. I was actually lucky enough, we had Mr. Mike Butcher from TechCrunch on last week, and we just had someone from Index Partners on, and we’ve got Uber on tomorrow, we’re streaming live. Sorry, there’s no tickets, sorry Eventbrite, it’s free, but you can watch that, and we’re gonna be grilling them about all the fun things that they do.
1:34 So I was lucky enough to have the CEO of Eventbrite, Kevin Hart’s on my show about three months ago. He’s a really fascinating guy, really introspective guy. When I asked him the question, I’m gonna ask Laurent at the end of this, the advice he would give to his 20-year-old self. He said, take some risks, make an impact on the world, and do something really incredible. And then he went on to say that he thought he was a late bloomer, and he was getting really frustrated with himself.
2:00 And he said, I didn’t start my first company until I was 25. And he was like, I didn’t pull a Zuckerberg. So I thought that was really funny. And yeah, it was great having him on. So thanks to Eventbrite and the space, you’re making Old Street a little more beautiful.
2:14 I don’t know if you’re familiar with this area or if you are, but about a year ago, this would not have happened here. So it’s kind of making this whole space, the whole space great. So let me introduce you to my guests. This is Laurent Celier, who is the recently appointed VP of products at Eventbrite, which is the world’s leading self-service ticketing platform. Last year, Eventbrite processed over $1 billion in gross ticket sales, over 1 million events.
2:43 You’re experiencing double digit growth, and you’ve raised over $200 million in VC. Laurent was the director at Twitter and product management for two years, and before that he was at Amazon working on the Kindle product for seven years. So fresh from Silicon Valley, Laurent, welcome to Silicon Real at Eventbrite.
3:03 Laurent Sellier: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
3:05 Brian Rose: Thanks. Thanks for being here. I always wonder, when people come to London, especially in tech, when you’re on the plane and you’re like, I’m about to fly to London, what are you thinking? What are you thinking about the city, about the people, about the UK?
3:21 Laurent Sellier: I mean, England, in particular London, is a unique place in my heart, because when I moved to the US 15 years ago, I actually had to wait for my visa, and I waited in London for about six months.
3:33 So, I did get to work here and work in the tech community. I mean, we’re really proud that I’ve been brought to be part of this community here, and I think it’s a thriving area, a thriving space for technology in general. And London is just a wonderful city. It’s a city with a lot of energy and I love the English sense of humor as well. So it is just exciting to be here, yeah.
3:59 Brian Rose: And when you mentioned the words London and tech, when you’re in Silicon Valley, what What do people say to you? What do people say?
4:09 Laurent Sellier: I think it’s a place that I think aspired to become another area of thriving, you know, startups, a thriving ecosystem. I think you guys are going to get there. I think there’s all the ingredients to be doing things like what we do in the Seacon Valley.
4:27 It’s just a happening place in technology. We have a great office here. All the jobs that I’ve had in the past, we’ve had really great engineers and designers and talents in London. So London, to me, is just an extension of the Second Valley in many ways.
4:45 Brian Rose: And how does it feel, does it feel, say, like the Silicon Valley did 10 years ago, or if you ever went to New York like five years ago?
4:55 Because I feel this real kind of sense of there’s something really building. I mean, even the roundabout and all the tech places here. I mean, does it have a certain kind of a buzz or feel to it? It’s different than when you were getting your visa when you were here.
5:07 Laurent Sellier: Oh, completely.
5:08 No, I agree with that. Yeah, I think it’s, technology is a key ingredient in the city at this point. Beyond finance and all the traditional industries, I think tech is happening here. It’s exciting to see.
5:19 Brian Rose: So why make the move from Twitter to Eventbrite?
5:22 And what are your plans, you know, for the future on this product?
5:26 Laurent Sellier: I think we have an incredible opportunity to build something that nobody else has done, which is this marketplace for live experiences. And that was a challenge that I was very excited about when I heard about it when I was being interviewed. And what drives me in my career at this point is the ability to innovate in a space that, you know, like ours, where I think innovation is gonna happen.
5:52 It’s going to happen around how you find and discover events. It’s going to happen around when you’re at the event itself, the type of experience that technology allows. I think it’s just a space where innovation is going to be skyrocketing over the next few years, and I wanted to be part of that. The team that I talked to when I was interviewing was of really high caliber, so all the ingredients were there for me to be excited to join the company. And mobile is going to be a big piece going forward.
6:25 Brian Rose: I mean, when people say that, it always seems obvious, but I guess it’s not obvious to some companies.
6:31 Laurent Sellier: I mean, mobile is a big part of our business today, and it’s the fastest growing part of our business. I think we have this incredible device in our pocket, whether it’s an iPhone or an Android device, that knows about where you are, that knows about who your friends are, and that knows about your tastes, and carrying that device around is very powerful, and for us to be able to leverage that platform to tell you about cool things to do over the weekend, cool things to do when you’re traveling, the sky is the limit in terms of what we can do.
7:03 Brian Rose: And your new product that’s coming out, the idea is that you can kind of empower the people running the event and the consumers in order to use that to not run the event, right?
7:14 Laurent Sellier: We just launched Neon, so it’s our new app.
7:16 Brian Rose: Is that why we have the Neon signs here?
7:19 Laurent Sellier: Exactly. I got it.
7:20 It’s all organized. It’s all figured out. So Neon is our app for event organizers. It’s focused on enabling organizers to, you know, checking people at the door when they come to an event to sell them tickets, but also to track their sales. So it’s actually a very addictive product for all the customers that use it.
7:40 I mean, we got a lot of feedback since we launched it a few weeks ago. People used it every day before the event starts because they can see how they’re doing in their sales and, you know, they might do a little bit more marketing to get more people to attend. And then, you know, at the door, they can have multiple doors staffed with the neon products. It’s usually working on an iPhone or an iPad. And you can see your sales evolving or the check-ins evolving over time.
8:02 It’s just a really cool new way to do basically things that an organizer, a venue organizer would be wanting to do. It used to be kind of stuck in the old world. Now we’ve brought it to the mobile world. It’s exciting for the customers using it.
8:20 Brian Rose: Okay, talk about the UK.
8:22 Brian Rose: I mean, my show’s called London Real. We’re in London, but I think 71% of your sales are in the greater UK, so it’s not really about the urban centers all the time, is it?
8:32 Laurent Sellier: That is, today we are definitely, I mean, London’s a big business for us. I mean, it’s actually our third largest city in terms of places where we sell tickets. But you’re right, most of the tickets in the UK are outside of London.
8:46 We think there’s unique opportunities outside of London. There’s a lot of relevant and big cities. But London is a fast-growing market for us as well.
8:56 Brian Rose: You know, you’re a product guy, a guy that really specializes and the product experience. And we had a guest on, his name is Debu Percasawa.
9:05 I don’t think I’m killing his name there. And he worked for Google for six years in new business and corporate development. He’s now the entrepreneur in residence at Octopus. And he said that in San Francisco, they have very specialized product guys like this one, that probably spent 10 years working on developing products. And here, we don’t have that depth of experience.
9:23 Brian Rose: And I was wondering if you could tell us what makes a product person or experience, as opposed to what I might just think of as a tech person or a programmer, what makes someone who can actually specialize in a product?
9:35 Laurent Sellier: That’s actually a good question, because at Evenbright we have a lot of people joining the company every week, and every month I actually present to the company around what is product management to the new hires. Because most people don’t actually really understand what the concept of product management is.
9:52 Arguably it’s a foreign concept to a lot of people, But, and it used, I mean it started in the Silicon Valley. That’s probably why it’s very prevalent in that region. But the concept is it’s a person in the organization or a group of people that are gonna be in charge of representing the voice of the customer. So for us it’s gonna be organizers or attendees, but we’re gonna be working closely with engineering, with design, with all the different functions in the organization to make sure we build the right product for the right audience.
10:25 Often, you have to make some trade-offs between going down a path that might be easier to do from a technical standpoint, but that’s not going to lead to the same great customer experience. Or you might take more time, and it’s going to be a better customer experience, but it’s going to take more time. We helped find the right trade-off in the organization. You asked me what type of people make good product managers. In general, it’s people that are curious, that never stop to learn, that are technical in the way they can actually discuss with an engineer or designer, be part of a technical conversation and understand what’s happening.
11:03 It’s going to be somebody who is going to learn a lot about the technology world that surrounds them, so that they can actually bring new trends into the conversation and say, hey, have we seen this technology? Should we embrace it and go after it? It’s somebody that’s analytical. You cannot do that job if you don’t know how to manage a lot of data and make decisions based on data.
11:26 Brian Rose: Do you have to be obsessed with the customer experience and customer feedback?
11:31 Laurent Sellier: I don’t know if you need to be obsessed. Creating a great customer experience is a lengthy process and it’s a work of art. You have to balance different things. You have to balance schedule and quality of the product and technical feasibility. And so, yeah, it’s being able to find the right trade-off and to build the right experience, but not spend five years on something you could have done 95% as well in six months.
12:05 That’s usually the complexity of the exercise.
12:08 Brian Rose: So the iPhone 6 just came out, and I’m still waiting for mine. I won’t mention the carrier, but Apple has a very distinct way that they develop products and say Google has a very, maybe an opposite way, but a very different way. And I was wondering if you could tell me about those states. I mean, Jobs famously said, I don’t ask the customer what they want.
12:27 I tell them what they want. Is that the way you think as well?
12:31 Laurent Sellier: So it’s actually interesting you ask. I actually teach a class at USF, it’s a school in San Francisco, it’s a university, around building products. And I’ve actually been lucky enough in my career to be exposed to kind of the two ways you just described.
12:48 There’s kind of the Apple way, Apple started with this concept of building products by thinking long-term, like if you build an iPhone, you kind of need to think about it almost two years before, like what will a customer want two years from now. And at Amazon, we embraced a lot of that approach as well, which was kind of the working backwards process. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this, but the idea is when you start working on a product, you write the price release first.
13:13 So you actually think about what customers are going to be exposed to two years from now, and then you try to work to that vision. You often kind of, yeah, I think you can get to 95% of it if you do your homework well at the beginning. So that’s kind of what I would describe as the Apple way of doing things. Then Google and places like Twitter, where I was exposed to that, and Facebook, and a lot of what we do at Eventbrite is about quick iteration on improving the product.
13:40 So you’re going to say, you know, how I want to make the sign up process easier for customers to be able to sign up faster. So you’re going to try different approaches. You’re going to A-B test those approaches. You’re going to measure which ones work better. You usually measure on the percentage of your users.
13:58 You don’t do that on all of the users. So you have some control and some tests. And then at the end, you see what approach works better. And then you ship it to everybody. And those can be done in a very quick two week, three week type of sprints and you can get to iterate really fast on your product.
14:13 So that’s more of the Google approach, like your search page on Google, they do that every day. They run dozens of experiments on that page, they move things around, they add some specific features for you to see if you’re interested in them, and then they’ll ship the ones that work well.
14:31 Brian Rose: So these are two very, very different approaches that arguably require two different types of brains to work on that. Which one are you?
14:40 Laurent Sellier: I’ve learned to be proficient in both.
14:42 I mean, it’s been something that, yeah, I’ve learned how to do both. And I think for our business at Eventbrite, we need both actually, because there are areas where we have an established business. So the organizer side has been very successful. We, last year we ticketed a billion dollar tickets. Organizers have very positive feedback on what we do.
15:08 And I think we can do better, so we’re gonna continue iterating in a quick way to see what works better for our audience. And then there’s areas where we have to be breaking new grounds. I think on the mobile side, the app you have in your pocket, I think we have opportunities to do things that are very disruptive. And those, we’re gonna launch them and dream new experiences and launch them and see how they do, but I don’t think we’re gonna be able to test our way into it.
15:37 Brian Rose: Talking about social, I read that someone was three times as likely to buy a ticket if they saw their friend buying the ticket, and how do you incorporate that into the Eventbrite platform?
15:50 Laurent Sellier: So on Eventbrite, you can sign up to Facebook, so you can actually, at that point when you’ve done that, I mean it’s a one-click action. You can see what your friends are gonna be attending. So it’s a very powerful feature that you’re in the home page, you just clicked on Eventbrite and you can see what events your friends are gonna go to.
16:14 You can also do that when you run a search query, you can see that on your mobile app. It’s just been extremely successful for us and you’re right, because events at the end of the day are a social experience, you probably will have more fun going to a concert with a friend than if you go alone. it’s been incredibly successful for us.
16:34 Brian Rose: It’s strange, I was talking with your CEO, Kevin, and in this world where we’re all connected online, we still all wanna get together, which is what Eventbrite’s all about, right?
16:44 People still wanna touch each other and see each other and share experiences, right?
16:49 Laurent Sellier: We have this belief that, and I think a lot of data these days proves that, that people need human interactions. Just being in front of your computer or your phone all day long is not fulfilling as a human being, and being able to go to concerts or cooking classes or an event like this with all the great people attending today, just prove that you need those type of women interactions and that’s part of our DNA.
17:16 Brian Rose: Your audience is really big in the US right now. How is it different when you try to roll out in Europe and roll out in different languages and different countries and then go even further into Asia? Is that something that’s very complicated or very important for Eventbrite?
17:31 Laurent Sellier: So the US is about 80% of our business today. England is actually a big part of our business as well.
17:36 And we, especially given from where I come from, I have a unique sensitivity to making sure we build products that work for our global audience. We generally ship features that are international by nature. They are localized in, I think, 17 different languages. They work for a large part of the world. I think we’ve sold tickets in 187 countries so far.
18:05 We’re actually pretty hot in Southeast Asia. I was there earlier this year, and Eventbrite was actually pretty popular, but here in the tech community, a lot of people were using that to organize events like this. So we try to roll out internationally as quickly as possible. hopefully on the day anything launches, otherwise it just comes a few weeks after. But for example, we just launched Neon in the US three weeks ago, I believe, and we’re launching it in the UK any day now.
18:37 It’s in the matter of, it depends on Apple pushing the right buttons to authorize the app at this point.
18:42 Brian Rose: Right. If anyone here is listening and they wanna develop a product, which is pretty much everyone these days, and maybe you cover this at your class in San Francisco, but is there a few tips of advice that you can give people, even three things, to think about how they design their product. And if they didn’t do that, then they might design something that’s completely useless.
19:01 Laurent Sellier: There’s some basics. I think the first thing I would do is mobile is so prevalent these days that I would build a product to be mobile first. So it doesn’t mean that a website is not important. For example, for our business, the web is actually critical to our success. But you need to make sure that the features you conceive work well on mobile.
19:22 And then you bring them to the web. In the past, you used to do the other way around. You used to build for the web and then try to squeeze it to make it fit on the mobile screen. I think you need to do the other way around these days. But that’s more a tactical detail.
19:37 In terms of building a product that can succeed, I think you wanna think of ideas, think of problems people have in their lives. That’s usually the way I start thinking about products, is analyze a market, understand what are the pain points people have in that market. I mean, you mentioned Uber a few minutes ago. They did a good job at identifying it’s really hard to get a cab in Paris. I think the idea actually started there, like what can we do?
20:05 And identify those pain points and build a product around that. Build a very simple user experience. I do think that if it takes people five clicks to do something, they usually don’t go that far. So really simple experience, mobile first, Solving very clear problems for mankind. That’s the way we’d start.
20:24 Brian Rose: Are there companies that impress you? Is Facebook kind of a gold standard in the Valley, or anyone else as far as that kind of iterative user experience of designing better products?
20:35 Laurent Sellier: I mean, the funny thing about the approach of iterating quickly is that for a lot of people it’s actually transparent. Unless you’re working there, you don’t necessarily know that those iterations are happening. And I think there’s quite a few companies that do a good job at that.
20:53 One of them that I think has been very good at it is Instagram. I think they do a good job at being true to a very simple and powerful product, yet they do iterate in the background on making the product a little bit more easier to use or with new capabilities. That’s one thing that I think they’ve done well. I think we’re doing really well as well. As a company, we have a really strong engineering team that builds really great features and we try to roll them out fast and in an iterative fashion, as I mentioned to you, and also sometimes in just we launch them when we think they are the right thing to do.
21:33 Brian Rose: I have to ask the question, everyone wants to know, what’s a Frenchman doing in San Francisco? How did you get there?
21:41 Laurent Sellier: How did I get there? That is a good question. So I’m from France, you said that.
21:47 Brian Rose: Whereabouts?
21:48 Laurent Sellier: Paris. I was born and raised in Paris, lived there for 25 years, something like that, 23. And then, so I’m an engineer by training, and I went to business school as well. And as part of my engineering training, I was able to live in Los Angeles for one year.
22:06 I had a one-year exchange program with UCLA. So I discovered the web during that time, it was 95, I remember it really well. I was living with a roommate at that point and I walked into his room one day, he had just installed this brand new computer, I mean 95 computers were gigantic, if you remember that. No flat screens. No flat screens.
22:33 He was like, hey look at this, this is pretty cool and he showed me, that was the first time I saw the web. Like, you know, 95, it was the beginning of it. Actually, I think Netscape celebrated the 20th anniversary of the browser two days ago.
22:44 Brian Rose: Right, okay. So it would’ve been a Netscape browser you were on.
22:47 Laurent Sellier: It was a Netscape browser, and it showed me this page from the Disney website, and it was actually playing little videos, and I just thought it was the most interesting thing I had ever seen, and I thought there was something very powerful with it, and I think that day I just thought there could be something to do career-wise in that space. moved back to France after spending a year there, a year in LA, got an internship when I was in business school with an internet service provider, and then I got hired out of, for a French company that shipped me back to Menlo Park. I kind of wanted to go back to California.
23:21 I enjoyed the weather and just the energy, and also, I mean, in technology, I just thought California was probably a good place for that. And so yeah, I moved there 16 years ago, And I’ve lived in San Francisco the whole time.
23:36 Brian Rose: You ever attempted to go back to Paris?
23:39 Laurent Sellier: I go back for family reasons. I’m actually going back next.
23:43 This weekend, my grandfather’s turning 100, so we’re having a little party for that. But yeah, I usually go back a couple times a year. And when the kids are going to get older, we’ll go more often. I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old, so it takes a big production to go anywhere.
24:00 Brian Rose: And that must have been a complete like mind frame change going from Paris to San Francisco, especially in the tech industry at that time.
24:08 I mean, did it just feel like people were thinking differently or was it just kind of an exciting time when things were changing?
24:17 Laurent Sellier: Well, there’s a lot of, San Francisco is probably one of the most European cities in the States. It’s not very big, it’s actually very approachable.
24:28 It’s not like Los Angeles where you have to drive everywhere. You can actually walk places. It’s on a hill, but other than that, it’s pretty walkable. Steep hills. Steep hills. Multiple hills. I just like the open-mindedness of Americans. You can come and within an hour or within two minutes, you feel at home. There’s no barrier. People are very friendly, very open-minded. I think the willingness to try new things and willingness to accept change is also something that’s very unique to to California. I mean it’s such a fresh and new place that I think that that goes with the territory. But that’s probably one of the reasons technology the technology industry has been so successful there is that you know you got to be willing to break things and try new things and people are just okay with that in that part of the world.
25:20 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about the future of Eventbrite. Competition, Ticketmaster, big organizations like that, that have been around for a long time, that don’t necessarily have the tech plays that you have.
25:32 Brian Rose: When you think about products, and I guess it does come down to you, because you’re thinking about for five years out, what do you think about when it comes to competing, kind of like these big established ticket companies?
25:46 Laurent Sellier: I mean, on our side, we have really three priorities. Our first priority is to build that live event marketplace that nobody arguably has built so far, where you can, on your phone or your desktop, find compelling things to do in your real life.
26:01 I think we’re really well positioned to be the leader in that space, and we’re moving in that direction. Our second priority is to make sure that we continue serving our existing customers. We have thousands, tens of thousands of organizers that use our platform, and we want to continue serving their needs and innovate for them. The third priority is very dear to my heart. We want to use our mobile apps, so that we have two.
26:31 We have the Evenbright app and Neon, but on the consumer side, the Evenbright, our app is, we want to use that as our showcase of innovation. We have, I think, on mobile platforms, unique opportunities to build things that you could not do on the desktop. I mean, your phone knows about your location, it knows about your address book, it knows about your tastes, and we want to leverage that to be creating disruptive experiences. So these are our three priorities.
27:00 To be honest with you, I don’t wake up every morning thinking about the competition. I actually think about what can we do for our users, what can we do for the organizers. We listen to them very carefully. We actually have a very simple process internally where every eight weeks we have different teams in the organization share their findings with the different people they talk to, so our customer support team will come back to us saying, hey, these are the top issues we’ve heard about over the last eight weeks.
27:29 The sales team will do the same, the marketing team, and we gather all that input and form basically a roadmap of what we want to build, but competition is not something we focus on too much.
27:40 Brian Rose: So there’s a class at Stanford right now that they’re broadcasting on podcast form. It’s called How to Start a Startup. I don’t know if you heard about this. Peter Thiel, who created PayPal and now runs Palantir, he has a class he calls Competition is for Losers, and he’s minding me what Laurent was saying, and he says that you should be going for a monopoly when you’re designing a product, and you should go to just completely own the space.
28:05 And if you’re competing with someone else, then you’re changing all your priorities. And I was wondering if you agree with Peter in those statements.
28:14 Laurent Sellier: No, I mean, maybe I wouldn’t be as bold as he is statement-wise, but I do agree. You want to focus on serving the customer needs and not on being distracted by what other competitors are doing. I think it’s already a full-time job to be, you know, your eyes on the ball, building great things.
28:31 And, yeah, competition is not our top priority.
28:34 Brian Rose: What was it like at Amazon for seven years? I’m always curious. I was reading two books right now. One’s called In the Plex about Google.
28:42 Great book, and you kind of figure out how they started. And then one was The Everything Store, and it sounds like a very intense place to work in Amazon. It sounds like you constantly have to prove your worth every month.
28:56 Laurent Sellier: To be honest with you, I read those books as well, and I did not recognize the company that I worked for in the latter book. I think he’s taken a more dramatic approach to describing the company.
29:09 I was there, I started in 2005, I was there for seven and a half years. I was actually hired not knowing what I was going to work on, I got hired through a friend of a friend, it’s always like that, you find jobs in the Silicon Valley, I find. And he was like, yeah, we’re going to build this thing. It’s going to be really great, but I can’t tell you what it is. And I still took the job.
29:37 And after day one, they told me that I was going to be working on Kindle. And I was basically employee number 12. They were 10 engineers, my boss, who ran a product and myself. And I was in charge of thinking about the services side of Kindle. Services meaning like, what can I do when I have a network connection on a little device to buy a book?
29:57 So I was in charge of the store, of the periodicals experience. I spent actually a lot of time in London getting newspaper providers and magazines to be part of the platform when we launched. But so I was, it was a small team. It was a team of 12. We eventually grew to about 100 when we shipped the first device.
30:16 But it was never a really big team for many years.
30:20 Brian Rose: Did the iPad exist yet?
30:22 Laurent Sellier: The iPad did not exist. We were the first device on which you could buy something wirelessly like nobody had done that before. We you know it was an incredible place to work working with Jeff Bezos is better than business school.
30:40 Brian Rose: Can you do his laugh?
30:42 Laurent Sellier: I can’t do his laugh.
30:44 Brian Rose: Is it really like maniacal? Is it?
30:47 Laurent Sellier: I mean he’s a really bright person I learned a lot from him.
30:53 I was lucky enough to spend quite a lot of time around him. I mean, he’s very passionate about Kindle for good reasons and we had really good discussions around the product and he was very instrumental in making it what it is today. So, seven years, seven and a half years spent there, I would. That’s a long time. I would not give away, I mean, I think they were incredible years.
31:20 Like some of the best times in my life. So I really enjoyed it and I never saw any of the stuff that was described in the book.
31:27 Brian Rose: What was your biggest takeaway from working on the Kindle for that amount of time from a product standpoint? What do you think you learned the most?
31:35 Laurent Sellier: That’s a good question.
31:36 I think my biggest learning has been that you have to trust people around you, Especially, you know, the technical team, if you want to make big bets, if you want to take big steps, as I mentioned earlier, you have to think two years in advance often for those products. You have to close your eyes and believe it’s going to work out, because often we were building breakthrough technologies, like the paper-white technology, I don’t know if you have a Kindle people might have seen one, but the one with the light that shines from behind, two years before we dreamed that it was possible, we had engineers work on it, and there’s times where we’re like, oh, we’re never going to cross the finish line, it’s not going to ship, but good engineers can pull magic, and they did.
32:31 So yeah, trust your surrounding, trust your team that they can do amazing things, and it’s going to be all right.
32:38 Brian Rose: Do you miss working with hardware? Are you glad that’s over?
32:41 Laurent Sellier: We actually do a little bit of hardware at, yeah, because we have a little dongle you can use to buy things. And we’re looking at all the things.
32:50 But yeah, it’s a tiny piece of our business right now.
32:53 Brian Rose: And just finishing off with your CV.
32:56 Laurent Sellier: By the way, to answer your question, what I miss about it, it’s very different to build software and hardware. Hardware, you actually can dream of something, work with the design team. And within a few days, you can actually hold the product in your hand.
33:11 It’s not a working product, but it’s a product that looks like what you’re gonna be building, that has the same fit and finish. And so it’s this really bizarre experience where you can have a conversation on Monday and on Thursday, hold a prototype of that in your hand. Again, it’s not working, but it looks like what it’s gonna be at the end. Whereas software, you kind of need to discuss, dream it, then you’re gonna see a document that describes what you wanna do, then it’s gonna be some mocks, but it’s gonna take a while for the software to be working.
33:41 And so it’s just a different type of time horizons in terms of when you can interact with the product. Obviously hardware takes, as I said, between nine months to two years to build. But again, you get to feel it really quickly in the process.
33:55 Brian Rose: And just finishing your CV out, I have to ask you about Twitter. You were there for two years.
34:01 Brian Rose: What kind of did you do there and what did you learn from that company?
34:06 Laurent Sellier: I was hired initially to run the mobile product management team, so we were in charge of the iPhone and Android app, and a few other things. And then towards the end, I worked on our emerging market strategy, so how to make Twitter be even more successful in places like Brazil and India, Indonesia and Philippines, I mean. Non-smartphone or just low a lot of the those those markets now have a pretty high penetration of smartphones You can actually buy I was in Jakarta and in Manila and in middle of the year this year before I joined the even bright And you can buy a pretty good Android phone for $70 like it’s I mean, that’s a lot of money for a lot of people But it’s about the same price point as a lot of feature phones, you know, the phones that don’t do a lot So people tend to buy those Android phones instead.
35:03 And so you asked me what I learned at Twitter. I actually learned a lot about this quick iteration process, how to build features really quickly, test them on a small percentage of your users, and look at data and basically ship the variant that you created that works the best. I learned a lot about the social space, obviously. Yeah, you know, the caliber of people at Twitter, the caliber of employees that work there is just really high, and I read from all of them every day I was there, it was just a great experience.
35:42 Brian Rose: So I was looking through his LinkedIn profile, and like most people, they have the jobs, then they have the university, and then at the bottom of Laurent’s LinkedIn profile are his six patents. So I was like, what the hell? Could you tell us how you have patents and I hope you have so many patents, and can I get some patents?
36:00 Laurent Sellier: Sure. It’s actually, I actually have a funny story around that.
36:04 So my wife works for the Google department at Adobe. So Adobe, you know, the software company that does Photoshop and so many other things. And I used to work, so we met when the company was called Micro Media. Actually, Micro Media was bought by Adobe. Micro Media used to do Flash and Dream River.
36:22 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That brings us back really, You were this tall at that point
36:27 Laurent Sellier: and so the funny story is that there’s still patents that I filed when I was at Macromedia that are basically getting granted at this point. Finding patents in the Seacon Valley for any tech company you work at is kind of part of the daily habits like you grab coffee in the morning and then you work with your team And then at some point, you’re going to have a meeting with a lawyer that’s going to be like, OK, what patents are we going to file this week?
36:58 Because it’s actually important to build a portfolio among all the reasons to be able to protect yourself against all the companies that might be suing you for many reasons.
37:10 Brian Rose: Right. Jeff Bezos patented one click. For instance. For a while.
37:14 Laurent Sellier: I have a few patents at Amazon that are pretty good. But yeah, that’s part of the cycle. I wouldn’t say you do that every day, but you do that on a regular basis. Maybe once a quarter, you sit down with lawyers and look at all the stuff that you’re working on and what could be patented out of that. Not all of them get to be granted, but you can often apply to patents.
37:39 It’s not very expensive, and it’s just the right thing to do in a tech company. So I think I have six. I actually don’t really know if I have six or three or five, but my wife was adamant about me putting them on the website because she spent a lot of time, she gave me those little plaques you can put in your office, which I don’t have because I find them tacky, but she was very passionate about giving that to me, so I felt like I had to put them on LinkedIn.
38:05 Brian Rose: That was only fair. I’ve interviewed 200-some people and I’ve never seen that before, so it’s a first. One question I always ask everyone on Silicon Real is I should ask a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Laurent Lier and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Where was he and what would you tell him?
38:28 Laurent Sellier: I think there’s two things. I mean, I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old, so it’s not the conversation I have with them yet, but I think I will have it at some point. I think you want to follow your passions. I mean, that’s a pretty vanilla statement, but I think it’s important to work on things that you’re passionate about, because you’re going to do it every day. You’re going to spend 10 to 12 hours every day working on it, and it’s so much easier if you work on something you’re passionate about.
38:56 And I was lucky enough, as I mentioned to you in 95, to discover what the web was, and it’s been a passion ever since. Like, I wake up every morning, I’m excited about going to work, I’m excited about working with what I’m working on. I think technology is just a wonderful space and applying what I’ve learned and building great things that even bright is just fun every day. So work on your, think about what you’re passionate about and work in that field. The second one I would say is I actually would learn how to code.
39:31 Like I know it sounds kind of difficult for a lot of people to code, but I think it’s gonna become almost essential for everybody in the future to be able to know how to write code, because our world is so much about, technology is so present everywhere. It’s in everything we do, and I think it’s gonna be like writing or math. Like, writing code is gonna be an essential tool for everybody. So I really encourage any young kid or teenager to learn how to code. I mean, it’s so much easier when you’re 15 to learn that than when you’re old like me right now, so.
40:10 Brian Rose: So you wish the 20-year-old would have done both of those things?
40:14 Laurent Sellier: I actually did learn how to code. I was an engineer for a couple years. I was not, I liked it. I was one of these people that would spend 12 hours straight until they solved the problem, so I could realize it was like three in the morning, I had not eaten or had any water, and because I was trying to fix my code, so I realized that was maybe not the best job for me and I moved to do product management, but I didn’t know how to do that at some point.
40:42 I would be hard pressed to use that skill at this point, but yeah, I was reasonably good at that at some point.
40:50 Brian Rose: Second part of that question is, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received? Could be business or personal over the years.
40:59 Laurent Sellier: I think the best advice I’ve ever received is, I mean, I think it’s realizing I only have one life. It’s a bit philosophical by nature, but it’s live your life fully because you really, you know, you only have one and once you realize that and you, you know, in your life you have events that remind you of that, whether you’ve lost somebody that you cared about or you got sick, like remember to live your life fully and to enjoy it and don’t do things you wouldn’t want to do, you know, if you’re in a career that’s not exciting or at a job you don’t like, go find something else.
41:41 Like don’t get stranded doing something you don’t like. You would regret it when, you know, when you get a bit older, so remember that. You’re only here for a short period of time.
41:51 Brian Rose: It’s good advice. You gave the advice about coding earlier to someone that’s watching us or listening to us around the world It’s not in an urban environment like they can’t go to one of these events What’s the best the best way that they can get involved in technology or get involved, you know in tech startup?
42:07 Laurent Sellier: Well, they can watch you on the on you too, right? That’s all you have to do I mean there’s incredible online training these days most of it being free you can I mean that did not exist five years ago you can I mean Can Academy comes to mind but there’s so many other places I have a good friend of mine that works at Google that actually for one year you know he takes the bus the Seacon Valley bus that goes from San Francisco to Mountain View and he wanted to learn about robotics I think I mean it was a very interesting topic that he was interested in learning And every day on the bus, going there and coming back, you would take some classes and take some tests. I think all those online trainings have some form of diplomas they can give you at the end.
42:54 And you learn about robotics basically in your spare time, in times where you could not be doing his normal job. So yeah, I think online you have incredible resources and you get a leverage stat. I mean, Harvard and so many other schools have classes online as well. I mean, in this case, the limit in terms of finding great material all these days.
43:17 Brian Rose: Yeah, they call it meta-learning.
43:19 I think Tim Ferriss calls that. Like, anytime I get an email from someone saying, like, how do I do that, how do I do that? It’s just, yeah. You just ask Google and YouTube how you do it. And you will definitely find a way.
43:29 Laurent Sellier: That’s true, yeah.
43:30 Brian Rose: That’s it. Thanks so much for being here. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you.
43:34 As we say on Silicon Real, it’s about the people. I wish you all the best on your journey. Thanks to Eventbrite for the space. And thank you all for being here. Thank you.
43:44 Thank you. Any questions for either one of us? We’ve got a mic coming around, so if you just raise your hand, you can ask us anything about patents. Yeah. All right.
44:03 Audience member: Where you talked about two things. One is integrating mobile into your thinking, and the second was integrating social into your thinking. And I was wondering, in terms of, I was looking at starting up an event business, mixing up a range of different platforms. What would be like the first step? Should I, because I was always thinking face to face and I was thinking about the conventional way like advertising, creating fires and word of mouth and so on.
44:34 So I was thinking like, is it, if I’m thinking social and technology before, shouldn’t I be first thinking about the content and the audience before thinking social and technology? It was more about when should it come into my thinking of product development.
44:53 Laurent Sellier: Well, I mean, I think social, it’s actually a very powerful platform for us. People find a lot of events they want to go to by looking at their Twitter feed or their Facebook feed, but you need to have compelling stuff for people to do before you present that information.
45:12 So I would think social is a channel for you, but it shouldn’t be the first place you start. It should be a channel like Google Search is a channel or other types of vehicles. But yeah, think about compelling content first.
45:29 Brian Rose: There’s also a great article out there called Do Things That Don’t Scale. He was actually one of the lecturers at the Stanford piece.
45:39 And the whole idea is that as tech startups, you think everything I ask to scale. So for me, like I could walk out and hand flyers out at Old Street to watch Silicon Real or I could try to get it on a scalable platform like Twitter and reach 10,000 people. But I think as a founder, it’s important to do things that don’t scale because you’re sitting there and you’re actually talking with the people and they’re like, I don’t want anything to do with your flyer or they’ll answer a question and you’ll learn so much about the product and the experience by just targeting a small number of users.
46:06 Brian Rose: So don’t know, and it’s a cop out sometimes when you don’t wanna get out there on the streets. So sometimes you need to do things like that, you know, too, before you just go to a scalable platform.
46:19 Audience member: Yeah. I’m a specialist on India and trade with India. I just wondered how Eventbrite was doing in India, which is a market which has kind of leapfrogged the PC and is right into mobile.
46:31 And that’s a society which is much more stratified and less open. And I just wondered, you know, how you were doing with your, you know, anyone come to an event kind of platform?
46:44 Laurent Sellier: I know we have organizers using our platform in India. You’re right that most people don’t have a PC, and you’re completely correct in the fact that they’ve gone mobile first. Android is the prevalent platform over there.
47:01 And so we have an app on Android that actually, as I mentioned earlier, is really important to us to iterate on and improve. because I think for markets like India or the Philippines or a lot of emerging markets, we have to provide a compelling experience on mobile and on mobile first. That would be the way we address that market right now. We don’t have a team in India at this point. We have teams in many parts of the world and emerging markets is something we’re gonna be looking at at some point.
47:32 Right now we have a product that works well on mobile mobile and works internationally, but the specific Indian needs are not something we’re focused on at this point. I think we’ll get to it soon though.
47:45 Audience member: I’ve got a question. I wonder if I can take a selfie here with all of you in the background. Is that all right?
47:52 Brian Rose: Is that kind of like Academy Awards, kind of over? You want me to take it? No, it’s going to be you and me.
47:59 Ready? Hold on, hold on. There we go. You’re misfired. Okay, ready? How’s that? Okay, smile or something.
48:09 Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. We’ll be around here.
48:16 Thank you.
