Jeremy Seitz Joins the SfA Board

We are incredibly happy to welcome Jeremy Seitz—tech leader, developer, hacker, and experienced team lead—to the Space for Arts advisory board.

Hailing from Switzerland where he has lived with his wife and daughter for the last fourteen years, Jeremy was recently named Chief Technology Officer at TX Markets, the biggest classifieds and marketplace platform in Switzerland where he’ll create “next-level” approaches to how marketplaces work. It’s a big job, one that has him excited about bringing various marketplace entities within TX Markets together under one cohesive system.

Jeremy is no stranger to marketplaces. Four years ago, he became the CTO of Ricardo, one of Switzerland’s largest marketplaces, similar to eBay. While there, he oversaw a huge team, updated the company’s outdated tech, and turned them into to a very modern, very streamlined company with 100,000 transactions a week and over a million users. His work at Ricardo led him to TX Markets where the job is even larger in scope—taking TX’s various brands, in real estate, second-hand, classifieds, jobs, cars, etc.—and devising ways for them to share the same systems, all in the name of marketplace innovation and cohesion.

Before Switzerland, Jeremy lived in New York City as a partner in the design firm Atomic Fridge where he first met Betsy and Van—our fearless leaders here at Space for Arts! Back then, Betsy and Van ran ArtID, an online marketplace for visual artists. Jeremy and his team designed the back end of ArtID, and they formed a long-term working relationship that has lasted almost twenty years.

I had the pleasure of talking to Jeremy last week from his home office just outside of Lucerne.

Jeremy, congrats on your new job at TX Markets!

Thank you! It’s been really great.

Your job creating a cohesive marketplace platform for all the various marketplaces under the TX roof is quite a large undertaking. Can you share a little bit about how you plan to do it?

Well, it’s pretty simple. It’s about empowering people to get together and make decisions about how they can help each other. It doesn’t work from the top down. You know, as the CTO, I don’t want to say ‘everyone has to use Java’ without the input of the teams involved. So, it’ll really be about bringing the engineers and people who have been working on this stuff separately into the same room. And, it’s about standards and coming up with standards that can be used across the board. Then once we’ve got the standards in place, we’ll be able to clean up some of the dead weight and make it a smarter system. And to me, that’s the endgame, having a super smart marketplace where it knows about the people and the products.

Can you talk about the value of marketplaces for users?

Well, I like to remember that marketplaces offer moments of connection or, moments of joy, as we call them. The buyer and the seller share similar interests, they meet, and there is a connection. I know I’ve made friends when I’ve sold my synths on Ricardo—which I often do. We’ve even heard stories of people getting married from a marketplace exchange. But also, marketplaces like second-hand are about sustainability, it’s about sharing items that are no longer in use so they can be put to use, which, for me, means more than just commerce.

Marketplaces as sustainability practice makes so much sense. I never thought about it that way before.

Yeah. Well, there is so much waste. We throw away old things for new things when we should be using technology to prevent that waste. In fact, we are doing a campaign right now where we are tracking all the CO2 saved from the products we’ve sold. It’s pretty staggering.

Let’s switch a little to talk about Space for Arts. What’s exciting to you about what this company is doing?

As a vertical company that is solving a very focused need, I think it’s great. And I think it’s a natural progression from the work Betsy and Van were doing before, helping artists sell art. I’m excited to see what they’ll learn as they move forward, in terms of the needs of their users. And, I think it’s important to support artists. Those two have been doing that for a long time, and they do it well.

You’ve worked with Betsy and Van before. Can you talk about that?

Sure. Those two are like a dynamic duo! When I first met Betsy, while I was at Atomic Fridge in the 90s, she walked in the door, and she was this exuberant force—excited and passionate about what she was doing, and her energy was bouncing off the walls. She passed my litmus test for who I wanted to have as a client right away. For me, I believe in working on things with a sense of passion, and I won’t work with people if they don’t love what they’re doing.

And then what impressed me about Van is his ability to nail right into the heart of any matter and bring people’s attention to it. And his ability to make decisions and not hesitate. He’s also the kind of person who’s fearless when it comes to injecting himself into situations and going to bat for the team. The combination those two have is pretty rare. Plus, they’re just off-the-charts smart. But, yeah, we created the prototypes for them and then worked with them for about 10 years. After that, I became a consultant for things when they needed me.

Tell me more about yourself, outside of your career.

Well, I do a lot of experimental art projects of my own, usually electronic or music, designing synthesizers, circuit boards, LED light installations…things like that. I tinker for hours and hours in my basement on my workbench and then try to get them manufactured. Nothing to do with my career other than it’s about getting something to market, getting something done, finishing a project.

I noticed in your bio, you used the word tinker too.

Ha! Yeah. The thing is I’m addicted to learning. As soon as I master something, I’m immediately looking for something new to do. In the last five years, I’ve taught myself electronics, I’ve built synthesizers, I’ve taught myself guitar and bass. And I like to mix art and technology. So, how it works is that I get a crazy idea, buy a bunch of stuff, try to put them together, then find a person who might like to make it happen, and suddenly I have a deadline for a new synth performance or something like that, and then I feel good!

I have a friend who is a CTO of a big company, and he does that same kind of thing. Is it part of the way you guys think?

Maybe. I think it’s about systems-level thinking, putting things together in such a way that they  work and are beautiful. It’s no different than working with teams, or complicated architecture. But it’s that systems brain. Forty years ago, we would have been the model railroad crowd. But, I’d say that technical engineers are makers, essentially. We love to imagine something and then see if we can make it work. It’s the way we think and the way we see the world.

We’re excited to have you on our team. Welcome!