Eventbrite cofounder Kevin Hartz joins Founders Fund as partner

Serial entrepreneur Kevin Hartz has joined the San Francisco-based early-stage venture fund Founders Fund as a partner, he revealed earlier today in a post on Medium.

Hartz was most recently the co-founder and chief executive of event and ticketing startup Eventbrite. He’s the second high-profile hire that Founders Fund has made so far in 2016. Earlier this year, it also brought aboard as partner renowned angel investor Cyan Banister.

Eventbrite, founded a decade ago, has raised roughly $200 million from investors over the years, shows CrunchBase. The privately held company, which was valued at more than $1 billion at its last financing round in 2014, has been run for some time by Julia Hartz, Hartz’s wife and Eventbrite’s cofounder. She was president until last November, when, citing a non-life-threatening medical condition that needed attention, Hartz handed over the reins as CEO on what he said at the time would be a temporary basis.

Partly, he may have just needed time to decompress.

Eventbrite is Hartz’s third business, having previously founded Connect Group (sold soon after it was founded in 1998), and the money transfer company Xoom Corp, which went public in 2013, a dozen years after its founding. It was acquired last year by PayPal.

In his post today, Hartz noted his considerable experience making angel bets, including on Airbnb, Pinterest, Thumbtack, Yammer, and PayPal. He also shared that “after founding and operating two companies day-to-day for 15 years, I’m looking forward to a new chapter where I can prioritize an old and growing passion of mine — investing in people and transformational technologies. I can’t wait to get to work on finding and supporting the next generation of great founders.”

Hartz remains executive chairman of Eventbrite.

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Founders Fund closed its sixth venture fund with $1.3 billion in March.

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