Scott lynn biography
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Why Masterworks CEO Scott Lynn Pivoted from Ad Tech and Ecommerce Finance to Art Investing
Every entrepreneur has an engaging story that explains their rise. Scott Lynn, the founder and CEO of Masterworks, a startup that offers a fractional art investing platform, is no different. Although he’s known these days for changing the way retail investors view art as an asset class, Lynn’s story is one of successful pivots from one nascent opportunity to another.
Best of all, he has used existing ventures to inform future moves. Here’s how Lynn has pivoted in the past while staying true to his entrepreneurial vision.
Leveraging the early internet
The late 1990s was an exciting time for technology entrepreneurs. That era saw current giants like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk establish their first ventures. Lynn was no different. However, instead of venturing into retail or establishing payment networks, Lynn went with a venture close to his 15-year-old self, in the online
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Scott Lynn
Scott Lynn, Founder and CEO of Masterworks.io – the first platform to allow investors to buy and trade shares in blue-chip art – is a serial entrepreneur and one the country’s top art collectors.
Scott grew up in Kansas City, MO where he started his first company at 15. Subsequently, he dropped out of college his first year to start Virtumundo, which later became Treeloot.com, the most popular game on the Internet and the largest advertiser online during the dot.com era. By age 19, it had grown to over 100 employees and was a MediaMetric (now Comscore) top 25 website.
After learning about gaming, Lynn founded Adknowledge, which quickly became the fourth largest advertiser marketplace behind Google, Yahoo and MSN. The company had over $300mm in revenue and 450 employees. Following, he started, acquired and sold several other companies in the adtech, martech and content spaces. He also founded, and still owns Payability, which has provided more than
$3B in fin
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Masterworks CEO Scott Lynn’s Pivots from Gaming to Ad Tech to Fractional Art
Scott Lynn is best known these days for moving art investing access from select wealthy circles to everyday investors. His company Masterworks is the most successful fractional art investing platform, boasting over 811,000 members and over $880 million in artwork under management.
While Lynn's journey to growing Masterworks from a fledgling startup to a unicorn is compelling, few know that he is a serial entrepreneur and that Masterworks isn't his first rodeo. In fact, after examining his story, his founding of Masterworks seems almost pre-ordained.
Gaming At 15
Lynn's entrepreneurial journey began when he was 15. In the late 1990s, the internet was new and there weren't many games online. Lynn channeled his enthusiasm for gaming by creating a sweepstakes game, titled Treeloot, with a friend.
"Everyone from that time remembers these 'punch the monkey' banner ads," he says, "and we became the number o