Ian Hogarth

TL;DR

Ian Hogarth, cofounder of Songkick, shares lessons from seven years building a concert-discovery startup, emphasizing that success in entertainment requires partnering with consolidated rights holders. He frames startup success as a multiplicative function of gratification, growth, and economic engines that are all interconnected.

Key insights

• The vast majority of creators in entertainment struggle for a long time, making them willing to transfer rights to middlemen for financial stability, which leads to consolidation among a small number
• Consolidation in an industry determines startup strategy: highly consolidated industries require partnering with incumbents; fragmented markets allow full-stack competition.
• The three engines of startup success (gratification, growth, economic) are multiplicative—each failure reduces "unicornness" by an order of magnitude—and they depend on each other.