Friday, October 30

How a UCLA student built a party promotion empire with his event planning app


Jack Schwartz and Zane Harwin lean on a car. Schwartz launched MyPlots, a ticketing and event-planning platform, in January 2025. (Courtesy of Jack Schwartz)


This post was updated Oct. 29 at 8:48 p.m.

A UCLA student’s party-throwing platform has amassed more than 1.5 million users, boasting celebrity-studded collaborations and sold-out events across the country.

In January 2025, Jack Schwartz launched MyPlots, a ticketing and event-planning platform. Schwartz, who was a second-year business economics student when he founded the platform, said the idea grew out of his experience organizing parties in high school. At 17, he began exploring how to turn event planning into a business, and today, the MyPlots Instagram account – where the team posts event recaps, documentary-style videos and promotional graphics – boasts 44,000 followers.

Harwin and Schwartz sport shades in front of a city skyline. MyPlots has hosted events with artists including Playboi Carti, Don Toliver, Nettspend and Gunna. (Courtesy of Jack Schwartz)
Harwin and Schwartz sport shades in front of a city skyline. MyPlots has hosted events with artists including Playboi Carti, Don Toliver, Nettspend and Gunna. (Courtesy of Jack Schwartz)

“I’ve always liked building things and bringing things together, and the second I threw an event, I never really wanted to go back,” Schwartz said. “I’ve been at more parties than anyone, probably 99% of people my age, … but I’ve been the organizer at most of them, not really the partier.”

At UCLA, Schwartz said he joined Theta Xi fraternity as a freshman. He added that organizing the fraternity’s pledge party earned him praise from his fraternity brothers and helped him further recognize his aptitude for event planning. Schwartz said college also allowed him to strengthen the organizational skills that are necessary to run a company.

The MyPlots founder said entrepreneurship and marketing also come naturally to him. During the pandemic, his apparel brand, Loonar Clothing, drew attention from celebrities such as Post Malone and Emma Chamberlain.

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Schwartz said his experience organizing events dates back to his junior year of high school, when he began throwing parties and later branded those efforts under the MyPlots name. After meeting a developer through Instagram, Schwartz said he created the MyPlots app, hosting around 50 after-prom events in a month for high school students across Los Angeles.

Schwartz launched those events with the help of Zane Harwin, a friend from his high school who is now MyPlots’ chief marketing officer.

“When Jack was in high school, he was the one throwing all the parties,” Harwin said. “Everyone knew who he was.”

Harwin and Schwartz are pictured behind microphones. Schwartz said his experience organizing events dates back to his junior year of high school, when he began throwing parties and later branded these efforts under the MyPlots name. (Courtesy of Jack Schwartz)
Harwin and Schwartz are pictured behind microphones. Schwartz said his experience organizing events dates back to his junior year of high school, when he began throwing parties and later branded these efforts under the MyPlots name. (Courtesy of Jack Schwartz)

Harwin said the team recently launched Paradise Entertainment, a brand that acts as an extension of MyPlots specifically for EDM events. MyPlots remains the hub for ticketing, though, and Paradise handles event production and promotion. While many of MyPlots’ events have featured hip-hop and rap artists, the team is shifting to market EDM and DJs to college students.

MyPlots has hosted events with artists including Playboi Carti, Don Toliver, Nettspend and Gunna. Additionally, Schwartz said MyPlots has hosted EDM DJs including Ian Asher and TWINSICK, and he hopes to one day host EDM festivals with tens of thousands of attendees.

Luc Ward, the company’s president of sales, said because of the high costs of artist events in LA, MyPlots also targets colleges outside LA such as Indiana, Michigan and Duke, drawing a large turnout at a lower cost. The team also hopes to host events catered toward UCLA, Ward added, such as a festival in the area or an après-ski weekend in Mammoth where students can buy tickets to enjoy skiing during the day and DJs at night.

[Related: ‘Anything is possible’: UCLA alum celebrates multicultural identity through fashion, law]

To market to these college towns, Ward said the company uses Meta Ads Manager. The team targets locations by dropping pins on colleges and sending out ads within a 10-mile radius, a strategy he said yields speedy sellouts.

“Being Gen Z … even though we’re younger, we’re all really experienced in running social medias, using our computers to run ads,” Ward said. “It makes it really easy, honestly.”

Although Schwartz is currently taking a gap year from his education at UCLA to dedicate more time to growing the platform, he said he plans to return for his fourth year next fall.

“We’re all very hungry to work, and we get things done very quickly,” Schwartz said. “There’s a lot of things that differentiate us, but it’s definitely the players on our team that’s the most differentiating factor.”


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