Josh Misko and Daniel Mastropietro Create a Human-Centric Approach to Event Ticketing with Seatfun
Why is something as fun as going to a concert preceded by something as awful as securing tickets? This includes waiting in digital queues that are thousands of people deep, making sure you have the right code to get early access, logging in at the right time, and paying exorbitant fees—if scalpers don’t buy up all the tickets first. And this is just the fan experience.
“In today’s live events landscape, venues are carrying more pressure than ever,” says Berklee Online alum Josh Misko. “Since Covid, artist fees haven’t gone down, but bar sales and ancillary revenues often have, and that gap falls almost entirely on venues and promoters.”
Misko and his business partner Daniel Mastropietro knew this firsthand, working in music event management, and they wanted to do something about it. In 2025, they started Seatfun to challenge everything that’s wrong with ticketing, creating a platform that works for music fans, venues, and artists. After reaching a multi-million dollar valuation, the Seatfun app launches March 4, allowing users to create and manage events, sell and scan tickets, accept payments, build loyalty programs, track customer data, and more. The app also includes a marketing suite and fraud prevention systems.
“What started Seatfun was us wanting to help venues,” says Misko, who earned his master’s degree in Music Production from Berklee Online. “It was seeing a hole, and seeing dysfunction, and seeing Covid destroy them, and ticketing companies not having any equity within that. That’s the reason we wanted to be the change, because we didn’t see the change.”
Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged in 2010, have faced years of scrutiny over their dominance in live entertainment. Following the Taylor Swift Eras Tour presale debacle in 2022, Ticketmaster executives testified before Congress, and in 2024, the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, alleging monopolistic practices. Recently, a federal judge rejected a bid to delay the trial, with jury selection set to begin in early March 2026.
For Misko, those headlines only reinforced what he had already seen on the ground. Originally from Springville, California, he started his music career in LA, attending the Musicians Institute and playing guitar with different country bands around the city. When he discovered that he had a knack for the business side of music, he set his sights on Nashville.
“It took me a long time to become full-time in LA, and then I left it, and I was like, ‘How do I fix this?’” he says about finding work in Nashville. “And I was like, ‘Well, I understand booking and I understand management.’”
After working some odd jobs around Nashville, Misko became an assistant for an event production company and worked his way up to head talent buyer.
“That was really where I started to get my relationships and my understanding of the network and how I could see what was wrong with ticketing and what was wrong with the sensitive relationship between agents and talent buyers,” he says.
Misko eventually founded Incubate Talent Group and pivoted into artist management, where he currently manages Grammy Award-winning artists and producers Damon Little and Trae Pierce, as well as the internationally recognized Americana band Rose’s Pawn Shop. But Misko still maintained his relationships in event production, including with Mastropietro.
“Dan and I just kind of hit it off working with an EDM artist together,” says Misko. “At the time, he had developed a very boutique ticketing operation and I told him, ‘Man, I really think that if we do this for real, I can scale this. If we come together with both of our skill sets, we can make a difference for venues and promoters and event organizers, because we are organizers.’”
Right as they were launching Seatfun in 2025, Misko was in the middle of his Music Production master’s program, while also running Incubate Talent.
“It was chaos,” he says. “I never brought it up in school, but when I was in classes, I was burning the candle at both ends—it was brutal. But I wasn’t going to complain. I was just grateful to get the credential and to be affiliated with Berklee.”
Misko mostly kept his music business background to himself, but it was in the Business of Independent Music Production course where he put it all out there.
“I had built some great relationships,” says Misko. “In the music business class, you couldn’t not tell them who you are. It was a requirement. So within our project we had to create a résumé, so I showed some of the things I was doing, and I couldn’t keep it a secret. Not that I wanted to keep it a secret; I just didn’t want to sound like I knew better than anybody else. I was in there to learn just as much as the next person.”
In June 2025, Misko earned his degree and walked at graduation.
“I felt really grateful to be working face-to-face with folks like Enrique Gonzalez-Müller and David Bendeth,” says Misko. “My goodness, what a powerhouse that guy is. He was so hard on me in the best way. I learned so much from him. And Enrique was the biggest support. When I saw him at graduation, I just gave him the biggest hug.”
Within a few months of graduation, Seatfun started to get the attention of private capital, and Misko got a crash course in fundraising.
“It happened really quickly,” he says. “I’ve witnessed it with people in my network, and I’d even helped facilitate it before, but I had never been on the receiving end of it, so it was a really extraordinary experience. I learned a lot. I feel like I got a PhD in private equity.”
The Seatfun app is invite-only so that Misko and Mastropietro can personally vet every event creator, ensuring the events are real and the people behind them are, too.
“Go to the website, request an invite, and you’ll wind up on a meeting with me or Dan, or one of our team members,” says Misko. “One of our big priorities is that no matter how big we get, it’s very important to Dan and I that we stay this available at all times. By being invite-only, we are able to prevent a serious amount of fraud, because you can’t just go sign up and start listing stuff. This decision was made to protect event quality, protect buyers, and protect venues in an ecosystem littered with ticketing scams on marketplace platforms.”
Even as the co-founder of a tech company, Misko is still a musician at heart. In fact, this year he plans to put out an album of the tracks he created in the Music Production program. In many ways, Seatfun is just another way of supporting the music he’s always loved.
“My experience at Berklee was everything I hoped it would be, and I was in a unique time in my career, too, where it was really strategically helping me,” he says. “I’m going to be dropping my record sometime in the next year—I’m excited about it, and I’ll always be a musician first.”
