Craig Follett
Founder, operator & advisor. Building at the intersection of technology and culture.
↓About
Welcome. I’m a two-time co-founder & CEO and a product & engineering executive, with 18+ years spent taking ideas from zero to one and then to scale, including through an acquisition by a Fortune 500 company, and the integration work that followed on the other side.
I care about craft in three forms: products people love, teams that compound, and the occasional well-executed dinner party.
Now
- Co-founder & CEO, Peggy. The platform for discovering and collecting art.
- Advisor. I work with founders, boards, and acquirers on M&A, strategy, and applied AI, having sat on every side of the table: founder, acquirer, banker, and board member.
- Investor & mentor. Board member, LP, and angel across 100+ venture-backed startups (including AI unicorn Ada); mentor at Creative Destruction Lab, Techstars, and NEXT Canada.
Patents
- US 12,477,213 B2 (granted 2025): AI/ML for digital fingerprinting & object recognition.
- WO 2024/197393 (pending): AI/ML-powered authentication & landmarking.
Previously
- Co-founder & CEO, Universe. Social ticketing marketplace, scaled from concept to acquisition by Live Nation (Ticketmaster); the core platform has driven $1B+ in incremental sales.
- Vice President, Live Nation. Member of the senior leadership team; led a 100+ person organization that continued to build and scale Universe while unlocking the platform synergy of distributed commerce, which lets fans buy tickets inside Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok on infrastructure serving 100M+ monthly users.
- Earlier. Management consulting at BCG across Toronto, Montreal, Vienna, and Rome; technology investment banking at Credit Suisse in San Francisco. Software engineering degree (Western) and HBA (Ivey).
Selected writing
- Raising Startup VC: The Pitch Deck
- Crisis vs Innovation: harnessing product & strategy in times of change
- How to Win at Remote Work: an operating system for team goals
- Hiring: how a “Recruiting Summit” can help build your dream team
- 13 lucky haikus: advice for entrepreneurs
- Why I did a 10-day silent meditation (“vipassana”)
More on Medium.
Outside work
You’ll find me:
- immersing in nature
- working out, skiing, working on my padel WPR score, exploring
- writing & illustrating a book for my niece & nephew
- playing chef in my kitchen
- paying homage to chefs at restaurants
Contact
The best way to reach me is craig at craigfollett dot com.
Elsewhere: LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Medium · Peggy.