What is Eventbrite and what is your role?

Eventbrite’s mission is to bring the world together through live experiences. 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. Eventbrite’s powerful, broad technology platform was built to enable creators to solve many challenges associated with creating live experiences. We aspire to be the indispensable marketplace for live experiences.

I am the Associate General Counsel for Eventbrite, based out of Nashville, Tennessee. I lead the commercial legal team at Eventbrite, which handles sales contracts, vendor contracts, and partnership contracts globally. Within our legal team in the US, we work very closely with our sales teams internationally including in the UK. We strive to empower them to effectively collaborate with and bring in new event creators to our platform.

What are the challenges your legal and sales teams were facing?

Our legal team is based in the US and because of the time difference, it was challenging for us to effectively support the UK-based sales team on fast-moving negotiations and achieving their revenue goals. We were looking for an experienced UK legal partner who specialized in fast-paced deal negotiations and, at the same time, who could be pragmatic and creative when drafting contracts. We’ve found that Accelerate Law is a perfect fit for this profile.

At first, we planned on having Accelerate Law work on contracts in the UK but when we realised that their team were very knowledgeable, quick to adapt to our complex systems, and very responsive to our stakeholders, we also asked them to help us on overflow work in the US on non-UK agreements.

Why did you choose Accelerate Law?

We were introduced to Simon by Raphael from the Startup Lawyers Germany. Speaking with Simon, it was clear that he had a deep understanding of both commercial contracts and the tech world generally, with expertise in supporting very active sales teams to close deals.

As an international organization, we have many unique aspects to the way we work, with complex templates, finance terms and bespoke legal protections. Simon promptly learned the details of those terms and how to apply them when negotiating agreements. This included getting super familiar with our sales playbooks and diligence frameworks, plus he has even helped enhance our negotiations with his practical approach and deep commercial legal expertise.

Accelerate Law provides a fractional in-house lawyer service for us, but even so Simon still integrates within our internal systems, and has also gotten used to our digital tools very quickly without asking for much support, like Salesforce and Zip. That is very valuable for us.

How has Accelerate Law helped you solve these challenges?

When it comes to responsiveness to our stakeholders, Simon takes the time to understand each individual deal and its needs. Then he will make sure that the deal itself is aligned with Eventbrite’s legal and financial requirements. Simon is very thoughtful and fast-paced. He is very reliable and we know that when we ask for something, then he and his team get it done to a high standard. The result is not only that we save time, but we feel more confident in closing revenue driving deals quicker and more effectively.

Simon interfaces seamlessly with lots of people - our legal and procurement teams, sales reps, event organizers, vendors, and other team members, which just makes our work smoother and easier.

What aspect of Accelerate Law’s services did you find most useful?

We appreciate Accelerate Law’s startup mentality and commercial approach to risk when drafting and negotiating contracts which mirrors our own working philosophy. In our business, we move decisively and we take smart risks, and we need our legal partners to emulate that. Simon knows how to thoughtfully balance risk and opportunity so that we can drive revenue with strong agreements with impactful legal wording.

It’s fantastic how he can focus on the points that really matter in a contract to keep a deal moving forwards without getting stuck in legal markups which slow things down. That way, we can protect Eventbrite’s interests while still keeping agreements reasonable and ready to close in short timeframes. We know that companies who work with outside counsel generally get the ‘correct’ legal answer. But those answers can be too theoretical, or they’re not tailored to the company’s risk appetite, so we don’t see the impact. This doesn't happen with Accelerate Law. Their team really understands our needs and goals as a growing business.

Where do you see the biggest impact that Accelerate Law has in your business?

The biggest revenue impact is on our sales team. They greatly appreciate having direct legal support in their own time zone to help them close deals quickly - and they even asked for more! Accelerate Law enables our UK sales team to flourish and move quickly, especially as they grow, evolve their strategy and work towards their revenue targets. As part of our legal team, we really value having a fractional law partner in the UK that gives us flexibility, experience and peace of mind. Accelerate Law is business savvy and fit the puzzle perfectly for Eventbrite.

Simon is a gem and Accelerate Law is a key partner for our success in the UK!