My Event Full Life is your chance to take a peek inside the lives of some of Eventbrite’s most seasoned organisers as they share the secrets behind their success. What lessons have they learned along the way? What advice has been the most valuable? And what keeps them up at night? Get ready to be inspired by the honourees of our inaugural Brite25 list.
“My father always said to me, ‘create, don’t complain’—so that’s what I did,” says social entrepreneur Radha Agrawal. After investing in a New York club, she became so disillusioned with many of the negative aspects of nightlife that she founded Daybreaker—a morning dance party focused on joy, connection, and wellness.
Eleven years later, Daybreaker has grown into a global brand spanning 33 cities, and nearly a million people have rolled out of bed to boogie.
Here, Radha shares how her vision to reinvent the traditional dance party has created transformative experiences for an intergenerational community, and reveals what happened when Daybreaker caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey…
We wanted to build a movement that was really focused on joy. We wanted to keep all the positive aspects of nightlife—the dressing up and the glitz and the glamour, the music, and the dancing—but take away all the negative aspects that make us feel really crappy, like the alcohol, the drugs, and the mean bouncers.
The idea was to replace all the negative things with positive things, so the mean bouncers were replaced with hugging committees, the alcohol with green juice, and we added performative elements instead of just a bored DJ. Not to mention, you don’t really meet anybody at nightlife events—it’s usually in a haze of whatever. And we wanted to create an environment where people can make friends, connect, and belong.
What I’m most proud of is we’re intergenerational. We’ve had mothers with babies in their bellies, newborns on their boobs, all the way up to Jane Goodall, who’s come to Daybreaker with her friends in their 80s and 90s. We span the gamut of humans! In this day and age, everything is so compartmentalised—millennials, Gen X, Gen Z—but there’s so much magic that comes from an intergenerational community.
When we finish an event, there’s a massive line of people who are there to talk to me. Every person in line wants to share their story of transformation with me. Then they’re like, “This is my seventh time coming to Daybreaker, and feeling people’s self-expression and the level of openness and sense of belonging has given me the courage to come out to my family,” or “I was suicidal, and I came to Daybreaker, and it walked me off the ledge.”
I always joke that we’re in the game of schlepping. As event producers, we’re in the game of just schlepping one speaker, and stage equipment, you know? We’re in the business of just moving things. There are days when it’s so exhausting, and also the margins compared to other businesses are razor-thin.
But what keeps us coming back is just that feeling of what the hell else is there in life than creating experiences that will shift someone, that will transform someone, that will bring them joy? When I think of what else I could be doing in my life, there’s truly nothing else that I would rather be doing than throwing what are basically adult birthday parties.
I previously started an underwear company with my twin sister and a friend. I’ve always been really interested in problem-solving. This underwear company was about solving women’s menstruation management problems with pads and tampons that were just not supportive.
Thinks Underwear is underwear you can bleed into, and the idea of that project was to solve a problem for women, designed and created by women. We launched on Kickstarter with our all-female community who funded the project, and then we built it and sold it. As a social entrepreneur, with Daybreaker, I just found that nightlife was overrun by all these things that I didn’t care for, so again, it was a problem I wanted to solve.
I thought Daybreaker’s first event would be ‘one and done’. We launched in December 2013 in Union Square, and I’ll never forget, it was the first snowfall in New York City. It’s 6 am and there’s snow, so I was like, no one’s coming. But 180 people showed up that morning, and I’ll never forget the euphoria, the magic, and the juiciness of that morning. I still look back on those videos and I can’t believe we’re still doing it 11 years later.
I think a lot of the sober-curious movement came from Daybreaker. I used to say that kind of quietly and shyly, but I’m more confident saying that now. I really feel we pioneered a whole new sober and sober-curious movement that brought festival nightlife culture and wellness together. I’m really proud of that.
We even have our own Daybreaker anthem. We recorded this with our Daybreaker community, our MC, our horn section, and our resident DJ. We all got into the studio one day together. I creatively directed it and called it Open Your Eyes. The idea was that you open your eyes to life, but you also open your eyes first thing in the morning to go and dance. We’ve played Open Your Eyes at every single Daybreaker event since we launched the song ten years ago.
Opening a nine-date stadium tour with Oprah was an incredible moment for us. For the first three months of 2020, we were touring sold-out stadiums with Daybreaker on Oprah’s tour. She asked us to open each stop, not just with energy and excitement, but also to create a community inside of it.
So it was a design challenge for me as an experienced creator and community architect, in a stadium environment where you have 15,000 people and 25 minutes to connect everybody and give them this experience of belonging and dance, to celebrate and play before Oprah came on. It was incredible being asked by such a luminary to help, and we continue to be friends with her and the work she’s doing.
Every year I come up with these wild ideas to bring the community together in new ways. Last year was election year, and I had an idea called the Purple Tour—let’s bring red and blue together to create purple and make voting fun and a celebration. During a 50-city coast-to-coast tour, we pied piper-ed everyone from the dance party to the polling stations. It was a fun civic engagement-type moment for us to reinvigorate our pride, and sense of excitement to be part of these elections and have a voice.
Find out who else made it onto Eventbrite’s inaugural Brite25 list
