Hi, I'm Dan for mac and welcome to axios recap. Today is Friday February 19th power is still down for hundreds of thousands and Texas gas prices. Keep going up and we're talking about an unexpected player in the effort to vaccinate America.
Florida's Brevard County sits on the state's mid-eastern Coast home such things as Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, but despite all of those rocket scientists. No one in Brevard thought you create a website or an app for setting up covid-19 vaccination appointments a job that the state left up the local County Municipal governments instead Brevard figured it would just use a telephone system within days though the county realize that it's obviously bad idea was a bad idea.
So it's scrambled quickly deciding to replace the phones with Eventbrite which is best known as the tech platform for buying tickets to concerts and other Live Events. The immediate results were mixed. Yes people got appointments, which is the most important thing but there were also some vaccinations event setup that weren't real Eventbrite meanwhile wasn't part of the planning. In fact, it didn't even really seem to know was being used until newspaper reports including of some of those fake events, which it turned out seem to be because of user error.
Our not because of fraud nearly two months and lots of other system failures and frustrations later and Eventbrite has now been adopted not just by other Florida counties, but by governments in dozens of other states why it matters is this episode reflects how poorly state and local governments plan for a massive logistical exercise. They knew was coming for months and how some off-the-shelf solutions had been sitting there all along so we want to speak to Julia Hearts event brights.
Under and CEO who were joined by now.
Julia let's start with this I guess when did you first learn that Eventbrite was being used in some cases as a vaccine appointment scheduling
tool we became aware of this at the very end of 2020 and really in Earnest at the beginning of the year in 2021. You know, we'd seen many different organizations use Eventbrite for its ease of use and self-service capabilities to do things like set up testing.
sites and you know other help people really get access to services that they needed throughout this this Global pandemic, so it wasn't necessarily a shock to us that folks were turning to Eventbrite for this need but I think we definitely were taken by surprise by the immediate acceleration and volume of of these vaccine registration events that were happening, especially as January got
going
And this was being done not you know by say a private Clinic necessarily, you know, that would say doing, you know, testing as you said, but this was being done by municipal or county level governments, right?
That's right. So Brevard County in Florida was one of the first Departments of Health in a county to adopt Eventbrite and really what happened was they receive their vaccines on time they set up a platform to sign up their residence in that county over a third of the of their residents are over.
Five and within 24 hours that entire plant had crumbled because the platform itself had failed to perform it had crashed and so somebody on their team actually on the social media team turned to Eventbrite as a solution and set that up in under three hours. They had it completely approved and ready to go and we're registering people for for their vaccine appointments because of the the sort of immediate failure didn't have a long
Time to really turn to vet all their options but also the residents were waiting in lines for hours. So this was something that they had to absolutely correct within a short period of time and they've been using it ever
since I have used Eventbrite for both, you know, work things and personal events in the past, but I have never had all the complexities of vaccinating people and all the added things that come with that. Did they call you? I mean, I understand anyone can create an event bright site it would seem there are
Whether it be pre-screening for certain medical conditions, whether it be Insurance Etc things that aren't part of a normal Eventbrite
platform, right? So when we started to see this this use case pop up on the platform and we understood that these organizations were desperate. I mean, you know and you've reported on some of the big fragmented just huge disasters that have happened in this in this roll out when we started to understand how many organizations were turning to a vamp right? We immediately
Italy went to work to get in touch with the HHS and understand, you know, were they going to extend this type of provisional use toward platforms like Eventbrite because obviously we're not HIPAA compliant. We don't store medical records were not a meta electronic health record platform, but we knew was that because there was such a failure in this in this lack of a unified, you know Health Care system and an ability to be able to handle the
Manned that these departments are seeing for these limited supplies that we needed to step up and help in any way that we could I mean, it's just it's about doing the right thing. So we did seek out and receive that provisional allowance to be able to register people for appointments to get their vaccine now, we're not registering people for Health Care records by any stretch, but we are giving people access to come to those appointments get registered and received the vaccine.
Internally last summer
last fall when we didn't yet have vaccines but it looked like they were coming either by the end of last year by early this year. Was there any conversation side Eventbrite that you know, what we should help on the scheduling or was a feeling well states must be planning for this. We're not needed. They must have this ready to go by now.
Well, I remind you that in the summer. We were still working to save her own company given the fact that freedom of assembly something that is no longer, you know something we freely enjoy as a population based on good.
Zen right. So we really needed to focus on how we were going to be the strongest company and platform coming out of this but I definitely think that included in that has been where could we help how can we get the most amount of people back out Gathering safely as possible? And that is you have to be vaccinated in order for that to happen. We also focused a lot of our effort and continue to do so on how to help people connect online and virtual events because we're all dying on
A Vine are you know not being able to be together and connect socially social isolation mental health. These are huge huge societal problems that we're facing alongside battling back does global pandemic loss of life and everything that's come from it. So this was yet another challenge in a host of just massive challenges for us as a company and I'm really proud of how we decided to step forward and help which is really to help people understand how to use the system how to access their time slot.
And really how Departments of health and organizations could turn to Eventbrite help close this Gap because there have been other platforms that have rolled out and unfortunately many of those platforms are ill-equipped to handle big demands for limited Supply. That's something that Eventbrite does really well and we're here to help in any way that we can the secondary impact of that is obviously the faster we can get to vaccination here in herd immunity and put covid in the rearview mirror faster.
Can get out to live experiences
there were some headlines in the early days of them bright being used for vaccinations in Florida and they weren't the most flattering headlines. They basically suggested that there was some fraudulent vaccination events that were appearing on Eventbrite and that people were signing up for them and there was no vaccine because they weren't real events. What happened
there? Yeah, that was really unfortunate. You know, we take trust and safety and fraudulent event, you know detection very very seriously. And when we looked into it, it actually was user error, so it we did not discover any
Malicious intent frauds or scams on the event right platform related to vaccines. It was rather confusion on how to use the platform. So people were signing up thought they were signing up for a time slot. We're actually creating an event listing. Sometimes they were putting a price to a ticket, you know, and that makes for a good headline obviously, right?
Am I correct in saying that there was some public statements from public officials in Florida, they didn't call you but they did call reporters to complain about
you which they've now, correct.
It
so where are we now in terms of where Eventbrite is being used in Florida or maybe Elsewhere for vaccinations
Eventbrite is currently being used in over 40 States and eight countries so far. We've helped nearly half a million people access a vaccination registration appointment and we'll continue to support this use case again. It's the right thing to do or not profiting off this we are absolutely here to be able to help people get you know their vaccinations
Lightman my parents went through, you know, three-hour-long phone time waits and working and parking lots at the end of the day to try to get vaccinated and they're both, you know in their 70s, so we certainly don't want this to continue to happen. We want people to be able to access what they need, you know, when their turn is up. We want them to be able to get vaccinated and that's what we'll continue to focus on
without you say you're in 40 different states. And I know some of the a lot of this is you say Eventbrite kind of some of the genius of it is the self-serve. Peace.
But that said what if anything are you seeing in terms of the big picture differences between either way the states are using Eventbrite or what? You're just seeing in terms of the vaccination appointment processes in different
states. Yes. Certainly. I mean, I think without a doubt Florida was was an early adopter. They really think set the trend and were fast movers on using using something like Eventbrite, right? So they were able to kind of cross the private public sector quite quickly and I commend them for that. I think that the other place that we're seeing if I'm right be
In a way that's really helpful is in that in the sorry Mass vaccination sites. So for instance City College in San Francisco where they're they're seeing about 3,000 people a day using Eventbrite allows them to quickly scan a barcode on a ticket and get that person to the next stage, you know, and so that's something that that we think will continue to happen. And again, it makes sense. If I'm right is a platform that helps fuel, you know, Big Life Experiences small live experiences. And again, it's
the genius of that self-service that's making it easy for these teams to turn to the platform and we're not trying to replace an electronic health record. So we were quite flexible and working with any system that ultimately registers that patient to you know to track whether or not they got their vaccinations and when they need to get the second dose,
I will say I did look up I went on to Eventbrite site to look up vaccinations in my top 10 results to were in abandoned Sears buildings. Do you know how many Sears has are on the event?
That form being used for
vaccinations. I will find out because that is a strong childhood memories going to Sears of my family. So I would like to find that out. Thank you for the tip.
You can't do a giant Halloween warehouse sales right now. So this is its vaccinations for Sears Julia Hearts. Thank you so much for joining
us. Thank you Dan. Thanks for having me on
this is Noah Feldman. Listen to my show deep background from Pushkin Industries in each episode. I interview policymaking public figures like Stacey Abrams or activists.
Like Mark Bittman to explore the historical scientific legal and cultural context behind the headlines Listen to Deep background on Apple podcasts Spotify or wherever you like to listen brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
Welcome back. What we're watching. Today is Fallout from the house hearings on GameStop in which Congress mostly lived up to its reputation for grandstanding and asking questions of witnesses that Google could have answered but we did learn one big thing Silicon Valley has overtaken Wall Street in terms of being Washington DC's Public Enemy Number One particularly among Democrats. How do we know because no one yesterday receive more?
It's or rhetorical arrows Dan did Robin Hood CEO Vlad tentative, even though two of the country's biggest hedge fund managers were also on the witness list now in the end. This didn't become a hearing about stock shortening or how trades flow through a complex web of dark pools and exchanges or even The Narrative of retail investors versus professional money managers. It really became about how mobile technology has upended Financial Services in investing and a pretty clear preference for the Old Guard.
The bottom line where you find scrutiny in Washington some sort of Regulation is sure to follow even if the path isn't direct and finally today. We are watching Zoe. She's a horse at the Bradford stables in Middleboro, Massachusetts. She's also a tick tock star. How come well because Zoe needs to take dozens of pills each day to treat a tick-borne Illness, but Zoe doesn't like pills so her owner decided to stuff them inside of jelly donuts from Duncan and
When each morning and there is nothing apparently that Tick-Tock loves more than a horse who runs on Dunkin.
And we're done big. Thanks for listening. It's my producers. Tim sure was Naomi shaven. Have a great National tartar sauce day, but don't put them on jelly doughnuts because that's disgusting and we'll be back Monday with another axios recap.
