Joe Cohen, founder of Seatwave, on the challenges of scaling marketplaces & learning from mistakes
On this week’s episode of This Much I Know, Carlos welcomes Joe Cohen to the hot seat. It would be hard to find someone with more experience in building ultra-successful consumer, entertainment and leisure marketplace businesses than Joe who founded Seatwave (acquired by Ticketmaster) after having served as the global COO of Match.com, and served as GM at Ticketmaster and Citysearch to name just a few. Joe is now an active angel investor and sits on the board of Sofar Sounds, Spektrix and Freda Health. Tune in to hear Joe walk us through his incredible journey - from attempting college six times to no avail and producing a documentary film before getting a job at Disney where he pitched a web-based product for the first time to his boss, all the way to founding and exiting Seatwave, the UK’s leading fan-to-fan marketplace. Joe reflects on the challenges he faced in dealing with fundraising from leading investors, the crucial issue of balancing supply and demand in the formative stages of a marketplace business, as well as the effect that different leadership styles and levels of transparency has on company culture. Links: Joe Cohen - twitter.com/Cohen_Goes_HAM Ticketmaster - www.ticketmaster.com Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com