Trace Cohen

Builder

2024 - Current

Tech, startups and venture capital - back to basics!

Senior Manager - Solutions Enablement and Distribution (SE&D)

2022 - 2024

SE&D drives scale for AMEX's digital products and provides a seamless enablement-enabled experience through collaboration and iteration to save time and increase revenue.

Board Observer

2022 - 2022

Angel Investor

2015 - 2022

30 investments currently at pre/seed <$10M valuations to start with $150M+ in follow on *Fi - Smart dog collar raised $30M Series B (invested in seed) *Turing - CPG formulation in the cloud raised $16.5M Series A (invested in seed) *Uizard - No code design raised $15M Series A (invested in pre + seed) *Upstream - DAO in a box raised $12M Series A (invested in pre + seed) *Tattle - Customer experience improvement platform raised $5.5M Series A (invested in seed) *Superhi - Decentralized education raised $5M Seed (invested in pre seed) *Minverva - How to guide for web raised $4M Seed (invested in pre seed) *Hedgehog - Shopify rollup raised undisclosed at a multiple (invested in pre seed) *Hank, Character, Popchew, Accelpay, Otherside AI

MBA 2020

2019 - 2020

Pursed my Executive MBA in 20 straight months, while working full-time as well. EMBA Americas 20 is a unique program made up of 40 students mostly from around the world that fly in every month for a week of classes https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/programs/executive-mba/options-locations/emba-americas Key Features -Program length: Five semesters over 20 months, beginning in January. -Class meets approximately once a month during the core, in a weeklong format, primarily in New York City. -You will be provided full accommodations while completing the first three semesters of core courses and cohort electives. -During your first year, there will be three weeklong meetings, one each in: Seattle, Toronto, and Latin America. -After completing the core curriculum, you will have access to the pool of global electives (weeklong format), as well as weekend electives and international seminars.

Committee Member

2015 - 2019

We discuss CTA policy priorities, review previous CES activities and provide an overview of upcoming promotional and media engagement activities in support of the coming CES next year.

Founder and Head of Product

2014 - 2015

I’m obsessed with trying to find the newest and coolest gadgets - having attended CES for 10 years and reading every publications I can daily to find them all, I knew there had to be a better way. In order to keep up to date on them the rest of the year (CES is in January), I wanted to build an app that would have all of them in one place. I began specing out the design, functionality and back-end of SPOT, while vetting dev shops to build it. I then worked with an amazing team virtually from around the world, to build the app in a course of three months to simultaneously launch on iOS and Android. I ran bi-weekly meetings based on the agile development model, to launch the app right on time. SPOT, a new tinder like app for cool, geeky products just launched publicly for iOS and Android at the same time using the cutting-edge Famo.us framework. SPOT is the best way to discover the newest and coolest products! Easily swipe through product cards that we curate and that your friends spot to let everyone know how you feel about each one We achieved over 250,000 product swipes in first three months and grew out weekly newsletter to over 5000 consumers.

Co-Founder and Head of Product

2011 - 2015

After working in PR for a few years, I wanted to scale the business by building a digital platform that would be the central source for all things new. In the PR industry there are “wire services” that haven’t changed in decades that are glorified email lists and I wanted to bring that into the present times with a robust, social and analytics driven platform. Over the course of a year, I speced out and built, with the help of a dev shop, the publishing platform. I ran multiple alpha/beta testing groups with designs, wireframes and mockups, while giving numerous presentations to PR professionals and agencies to get direct feedback and incorporate into the final product. We launched on stage at the NYTM (NYCs largest meetup) in front of 1000 people, with the vision to create the largest searchable database for all new products, services and ideas to make sure they can be found, discovered and shared. We ended up pivoting a few months later when we stumbled upon a much larger opportunity in the event space, to help them digitize all of their efforts. Our "Event News and Information Management Platform" was being used by a handful of conferences/events to create a central location for all their exhibitor and partner news. Essentially we replaced the press kits and flash drives that they would normally have to spend a lot of time preparing and distributing with an online social environment that had analytics and directly engaged the attendees and media through our customer facing site with search capabilities. The best part was that the exhibitors do this all themselves and pay to be apart of it, so for less effort, events make more money because we do a revenue share with them. Our first show partner was the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that was the biggest in the entire industry and #1 on our list. We then proceeded to sign up the #2 show CONEXPO and a dozen others in every vertical from Sweets and Snacks, Telecommunications to Travel.

SVP and Co-founder

2010 - 2011

"Creating understanding for a complex world" was our slogan as this is the problem that Public Relations tries to solve. I ran strategic PR for numerous NYC funded tech startups across multiple verticals. ComiXology, the leading distributor of digital comics, was my flagship client who I ran all PR for from when they were 5 employees, working directly with their CEO, to 50+, a year before they were acquired by Amazon. I ran bi-weekly meetings with their team that involved story generation and placements, securing speaking engagements, managing partnerships relationships (Marvel/DC) around announcements and built the foundation of their social media presence. I was able to get them press in every major publication, through pitching and embargoes like the NYT, WSJ, TechCrunch, Verge, VentureBeat, Wired (3 page print spread!) to their trade comic press that helped make them the leader in their space.

Founder and Chief Marketing Officer

2007 - 2009

I started this company with my roommate out of our college dorm room. We were trying to get summer internships/jobs, never heard back from any and finally ended up Googling our names to see what came up... It wasn't us! So based on this experience and revelation, we began to build websites for friends to help them manage their online reputations (your first impression) and eventually built out a Saas platform so they could DIY and scale it. We spent six months putting together a business plan, specing out the site design, functionality, UX and potential revenue streams. In order to build the site, we brought on another co-founder, who actually lived down the hall from us and had his own dev shop. With his help and expertise, we spent all semester building the platform and launched it to the Syracuse campus initially. As the Chief Marketing Officer it is my responsibility to do market research and create effective marketing campaigns. Our goal is to help facilitate the hiring process and make it more efficient by allowing employers to get more information about a potential employee. Manage and maintain the company blog at http://blog.brand-yourself.com, which received over 30,000k unique visitors a month and was one of the top 60k most trafficked sites in the world. •Oversaw the writing and editing of 10+ guest bloggers. •Managed two interns who helped me publish stories, put together a PR pitching schedule and put on monthly webinars •Maintained a bi-weekly publishing schedule based on industry SEO terms using the Google Keyword Tool to target specific terms and phrases to drive organic traffic