The founder who told colleagues: Let’s go make a billion dollars
IN PUBLIC, Eric Baker boasted of being on a mission to make ticket pricing fairer for the ordinary consumer.
But in private, the Viagogo founder told colleagues: ‘Let’s go make a billion dollars.’
The Harvard graduate has all but achieved one of his goals, now living in a £4million flat at 15 Central Park West in New York, dubbed ‘the world’s most powerful address’. In Britain, he and wife Nicole owned a Knightsbridge flat which they sold for £7.2 million.
Los Angeles-born Mr Baker started his career in private equity in Boston before helping to set up the Stubhub online ticketing firm – now Viagogo’s bitter rival – in 1999. He had already made £20million from the company before moving to London in 2006 to replicate Stubhub with Viagogo.
He frequently appeared in the media to promote the company, boasting he was ‘on the side of the customer’.
He said: ‘We are helping to get rid of the street touts and the people selling fraudulently, and that is a good thing.’ But one former employee recalled: ‘He’s a very forceful American who says, “Let’s go make a billion dollars”.’
And as criticism of the company grew, he turned from showman to virtual recluse. Mr Baker’s right-hand man in Britain was Ed Parkinson, 38, a smooth media performer who regularly appeared in the spotlight to sing Viagogo’s praises as a ‘guaranteed resale service’.
In the early days of Viagogo, the Oxford graduate made regular media appearances where he presented the company as the responsible face of ticket resales rather than ‘risky’ eBay, where consumers risked getting ‘ripped off’.
The married father of two repeatedly insisted that Viagogo was an ‘absolutely’ safe and reputable company.
Mr Parkinson resigned as director of Viagogo’s parent company, VGL Services, in March 2016.
Despite growing complaints against Viagogo, director Danny Rimer was awarded an OBE just over a year ago for ‘services to business and charity’. San Francisco-based Mr Rimer qualified for the honour by virtue of his Canadian birth. During a stint in London during the launch of Viagogo, Mr Rimer lived in an exclusive Notting Hill town house now worth £10 million.