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Seth Goldstein is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. A "pioneer of internet marketing practices," he has founded six companies, including Crossfader, Turntable.fm, SiteSpecific, SocialMedia, and Majestic Research.

Early life and education
Goldstein was born in Waltham, Massachusetts. His father, Larry, was a software engineer, and his mother Faye, was an entrepreneur. He started acting as a child, and began to perform professionally at the age of 10. He appeared frequently at the ART, an Avant-gard theater in Cambridge, where, among other productions, he performed in Six Characters in Search of an Author, with Tony Shalhoub, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,and Robert Wilson's The Civil Wars.

Goldstein went to Newton South High School for three years and then spent his senior year at Interlochen Arts Academy, a private boarding school focused on the performing arts in Interlochen, Michigan. He attended college at Columbia University, where, as a student, he founded the Columbia Theater Network (CTN). Goldstein graduated in 1992 with a degree in Dramatic Arts.

1993-2001: Riverbed Media, SiteSpecific, Flatiron Partners
Following his graduation, Goldstein worked as an archivist for Robert Wilson's Byrd Hoffman Foundation and then founded Riverhead Media with multi-media artist Paul Kaiser and publisher Joost Effers. In 1993, as his interest in digital media such as CD-ROMs developed, he received a fellowship and moved to Frankfurt, Germany where he was the first multi-media artist-in-residence at the Center for Art and Media Technology, and later initiated the creation of a production and research laboratory for multimedia applications at Jeff Shaw's ZKM Institute for VisualMedia. While in Frankfurt, Goldstein also worked for the Frankfurt Ballet and collaborated with its director William Forsythe on the creation of Improvisation Technologies, the CD-ROM that illustrated Forsythe’s choreographic method. He returned to New York in late 1994, and worked briefly as an HTML producer for agency.com, Wolff New Media, and at Condé Nast. While there, he he heard about an opportunity to create an internet presence for Duracell, and began working on a presentation for the company. He won the account, and in 1995, Goldstein founded SiteSpecific, an interactive marketing company.

Launched in Goldstein's apartment with computers financed through credit cards, SiteSpecific's initial focus was on Duracell. With a staff of three, the company developed a brand awareness campaign which included seeding images of the batteries on major internet sites. One of the first agencies to implement narrowcasting, SiteSpecific later won a Clio for their work on the Duracell corporate site. With Goldstein's long time friend Clay Shirky serving as its Chief Technology Officer, SiteSpecific grew to 35 employees, and billed more than $2 million by the end of 1996. It was acquired by CKS Group in May 1997 for $6.5 million.

In 1998 Goldstein joined the VC firm Flatiron Partners, founded by Fred Wilson and Jerry Colonna. An entrepreneur-in-residence and investment principal, he he built and managed a $75 million new-technology portfolio of pervasive computing investments.

2002-2010: Majestic Research, Root Market, SocialMedia
After the dot-com collapse of 2001, in 2003, Goldstein, seeing the rise of hedge funds, launched Majestic Research, an investment research company which used ComScore and other data to generate proprietary guidance for buy side funds. He served as the company's founding CEO and then chairman until 2010, when the company was acquired by Investment Technology Group for $75 million.

In January 2005, with Lou Ranieri, Goldstein founded Root Markets, the first financial exchange for buying and selling mortgage leads. In late 2006, he and his family moved to the Bay Area, and in 2007, he launched SocialMedia.com, a social advertising platform for publishers. With Dave Gentzel, a 24-year-old programmer, Goldstein developed an app that let people throw virtual items of food at one another. To acquire the virtual food, users paid with virtual currency; to acquire the currency, users answered questions posed by marketers. Called FoodFight, it rapidly attracted 2 million users. FoodFight was followed by several successful apps, including, Happyhour and Appaholic, and SocialMedia quickly earned an audience of 13 million users. The company was sold to LivingSocial in 2011 for an undisclosed amount.

2010-Present: Stickybits, Turntable.fm, Crossfader, DJZ, LiveAds
In 2010, Goldstein launched Stickybits with Billy Chasen, an artist and programmer he had met in 2006. Orignally envisioned as "digital graffiti," it enabled users to attach digital media to real-world objects using barcodes which could be read by smartphones. Stickybits launched at SXSW in 2010, but struggled to become sustainable. Chasen and Goldstein subsequently orchestrated what Inc. described in a cover story as an "audacious pivot, scrapping their service and betting everything on online music" and launched Turntable.fm. An "egalitarian online social music platform," it attracted more than 600,000 users in four months and raised $7 million in funding at a $37 million valuation. The New York Times' Sam Grober wrote that Turntable had upended how he listened to music, stating: "Spotify is great, but Turntable.fm is amazing." In early 2012, after disagreements over Turntable.fm's direction, Goldstein began to shift his focus towards new projects while remaining chairman of the company.

A lifelong music fan, Goldstein was exposed to Electronic dance music while at Turntable.fm and at festivals such as Burning Man. In September 2012, he launched DJZ, a content site which combined editorial, videos, DJ mixes, interviews, contests, and links to pages for popular DJs. It also offered a free iPhone app, called DJZTxT, that allowed users to create dance music through text messages using emojis. It was funded by Index Ventures, True Ventures and Google Ventures, in addition to Troy Carter and Shari Redstone.

While at DJZ, Goldstein developed an app with iOS engineer Ilias Karim. Called Crossfader, it allowed users to create their own music. An iPhone based remix and DJ platform that uses loops and filters controlled by a gyroscope and accelerometer, Crossfader became "one of the most buzzed about apps in the App Store," and "slid neatly into the creative gulf that existed for the casual dance music fan that doesn’t reside in a major scene or have the cash for a hardware setup."

In July 2016, he founded LiveAds, a creative agency and production studio that "turns brands into broadcasters." In addition to other projects, the company activated a live Facebook broadcast during the 2016 Rio Olympics on behalf of Visa.

Activism, philanthropy, and related work
Goldstein was the founding co-chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's User Generated Content and Social Media committee, which set standard definitions, common metrics and industry best practices for the social media advertising industry. He has been an active advisor to the US State Department Global Entrepreneurship Program, and has traveled to Egypt, Greece and Turkey to as part of the part of the programs mission to foster entrepreneurship. In 2005, he co-founded the non-profit organization Attention Trust. It distributed free software designed to act as an interface between Web users and marketers and educated internet users on issues related to the marketing value of their online activities.

Goldstein co-authored The Secret to Raising Money with Michael Simpson. It was published in 2012. A frequent speaker, he has delivered keynote speeches at conferences including Billboard magazine's FutureSound, the IAB Annual Leadership Forum, Big Omaha, and O'Reilly Web 2.0.

Personal
The father of two sons, Goldstein iives in Marin County, California. He is an outspoken critic of the Trump Administration, and writes frequently on the subject.

Investments (partial list)

 * Betaworks
 * bit.ly
 * Brit + Co.
 * Del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo!)
 * Etherpad (acquired by Google)
 * Gumroad
 * Joyride (acquired by Google)
 * Philz Coffee
 * Poshmark

Boards and affiliations

 * Attention Trust, Founder, 2005 - present
 * Director, Valassis, June 1999 – April 2006
 * Director & Co-Chair, Social Media Committee, Internet Advertising Bureau, April 2009 – April 2011