Cris Miller, doesn’t give many interviews but the online secondary ticket market he helped pioneer, and the company he’s global MD for, Viagogo, have been taking a reputational battering. Over the last twenty years, he’s faced a range of crises from an initially sceptical market, to a major rival announcing a competitive service… to a global pandemic shutting down the world.

In this interview we talk about:  

• Why his first employer, StubHub, was set up because its founder couldn’t get tickets for a date 
• How the company saw the opportunity in a fragmented, untrustworthy secondary ticket market 
• Why it’s the buyer that sets the market value of a ticket, not the seller 
• The “constant hustle” to find and secure partners to help get the start-up off the ground 
• Why the company wasn’t “really ready” for government scrutiny 
• The £300 million hit they took during the covid pandemic, and how they survived 
• Advice on when the best time to buy a ticket on the secondary market might be 

For more news, interviews and analysis, read the Evening Standard newspaper or go to standard.co.uk/business. 

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