Margo on Clubhouse

Bio

Margo T. Drakos
Founder & CEO, ArtistYear
Committed to a life of service that harnesses the innovative power of technology and the transformative potential of the arts, Margo Drakos is a former concert cellist turned entrepreneur, and a proud U.S. active duty Military spouse. She is a founder and CEO of ArtistYear.

Margo has spent the past decade working with private and public sector institutions leveraging technology and strategic alignment to realize scale, revenue generation, and sustainability. She has a track record of driving and growing emerging software product and service management lines. Her specialties include go-to-market strategies, vertical campaigns, fundraising, operational process design, and release roll-outs. She has recruited, led, and motivated matrix and dispersed organizations of engineering, product, marketing, and growth teams while maintaining high-quality standards. Until 2017, Margo spent four years as Chief Technology Officer at McChrystal Group LLC and its spin-off, CrossLead, Inc., an enterprise software and services company working with leaders to optimize organizational performance by leveraging real-time data to understand their human networks and align strategies to daily execution.

Margo began working as a professional musician at age four, performing on national radio and television commercials. Over the course of her career as a cellist she performed as a soloist, chamber, and orchestral musician on the world’s preeminent stages on five continents. Margo entered music conservatory at fifteen as a double major in cello and composition and graduated from Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1999. She served as Artist-in-Residence and Cello and Chamber Music faculty member at the Aspen Music Festival and Manhattan School of Music from 2002-2008. Margo’s positions included cellist of the American String Quartet, Principal Cellist of the Oregon, San Diego, and Seattle Symphonies, and Associate Principal of Pittsburgh Symphony. She toured regularly with “Musicians from Marlboro” and has recorded and produced for Sony Classical, Naxos, Arabesque, and Longhorn Records.

In 2007, embracing the power of technology to democratize access to the arts, Margo co-founded and led her first start-up, InstantEncore.com, the world’s leading provider of web and mobile technology to the performing arts. In that role, Margo executed strategic partnerships to enable some of the first live web and mobile concert streaming and download events from Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House. In 2011, she was made a Partner at the SwitchCase Group, the lead investor in InstantEncore. Margo has gone on to advise and invest in early-stage startups and serve as venture advisor to Otto Capital Partners LLC.

In 2010, Margo was honored as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a community of extraordinary global leaders under forty. Through the Forum and Clinton Global Initiative, Margo founded AppBridge, an SMS mobile application platform and competition designed to bring education and economic opportunity to communities in Pakistan and the Philippines. Margo has been invited to speak on technology, entrepreneurship, and the arts at institutions and events including Americans for the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, the Global Competitiveness Forum of Saudi Arabia, TechVenture in Singapore and the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Margo received a Masters in Human Rights from Columbia University and holds Executive Degrees in Global Leadership and Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Her publications have appeared in the Aspen Institute Magazine, The International Affairs Review, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Cornell International Law Journal.