Dubai's ticketing king reveals his masterplan to turn Platinumlist into a unicorn on The Hustle

Dubai: Cosmin Ivan is a self-confessed reluctant leader. Twice, when his boss offered him a promotion, he said no. Twice, he was talked into it anyway. Today he runs Platinumlist, the Dubai-born ticketing and events platform that has quietly grown into a 20-plus-country operation — and he wants it to become the region's next unicorn.

It is an unlikely arc for a man who, twelve years ago, was scanning tickets on the door and picking up the second phone line whenever the founder was too busy to answer the first.

He spills the beans on the latest episode of The Hustle.

From Romania to Dubai

Ivan was born and raised in Romania, where he spent almost eight years in the ticketing and entertainment industry before his sister — who worked for Emirates Airlines — spent two years trying to convince him to visit Dubai. He finally did, and fell for the city. While job-hunting, he spotted a Platinumlist listing that read like a description of the job he already knew.

He was mid-conversation with his mother on Skype at the time. "I need to stop. I need to apply for this job," he told her. "It was like God sent, you know." He applied, heard back the same day, and sat through what he describes as a three-hour conversation rather than a formal interview. He started the next day.

Ticketing, back then, was a niche skill and good people were hard to find. Ivan began as a cashier — scanning tickets, working customer support, sharing phone duty with the company's founder, Vassiliy Anatoli, in an office of four or five people.

Platinumlist now operates across more than 20 countries, spanning six business areas from ticketing to marketing, business events and team management — what Ivan calls "a full ecosystem."

The promotions he didn't want

Ivan's rise through the company was gradual, and by his own account, not something he actively pursued. However, Ivan said company leaders kept telling him to simply do good work and the rest would follow — advice Ivan admits he didn't understand at the time.

When he was first offered a move from ticketing manager to operations manager, he turned it down, unsure he was ready. He was talked round, took the job, and the pattern repeated itself years later when Anatoli proposed making him CEO. Ivan eventually agreed.

His philosophy on work, he says, is simple: commit fully or not at all. "If you give your word, do it. And if you don't want to do it, don't just do it half measure... if you give your word, you will do something, do it 100%, care about it like it's yours."

He describes working odd hours out of genuine care rather than obligation, checking on ticket sales and event set-ups late into the night simply because he wanted to know things were running smoothly.

Day in the life of a CEO

That same restlessness shapes his mornings now. His day starts around 6am with a phone check for overnight issues, followed by breakfast with his wife — he usually makes the coffee — before getting into the office early. "I like a day which is full, and there are things to do, problems to solve," he says. "It makes you feel like you did something, and it's really fulfilling."

Ivan's first ever event was a music festival at a golf club in Abu Dhabi in 2015, where part-time staff Arif and his brother Aziz taught him how the ticketing system worked.

He liked how one of them handled the job so much that he offered him a full-time role — the same person now heads Platinumlist's operations team.

He is candid about how demanding the events industry is. Long nights and weekend work come with the territory, and he notes that studies rank events among the world's most stressful industries, alongside aviation and marketing.

"Whenever everybody is off, we are on," he says, describing a post-event low that hits staff once the adrenaline — and the people they worked alongside — disappear. For Ivan, surviving that grind requires genuinely loving the work, not just tolerating it.

From paper tickets to predictive AI

The transformation Ivan has witnessed in the industry is stark. As recently as 2013-14, tickets in the UAE were paper, requiring government stamping before sale — Platinumlist once hired part-time staff for a single day just to stamp 30,000 tickets by hand.

That changed when Dubai's tourism authority rolled out a centralised digital ticketing system and gave companies an ultimatum: integrate or stop selling.

"Sorry guys, we can't wait for you anymore," was the message, as Ivan recalls it. Platinumlist was first to connect, even embedding a staff member inside the government office to troubleshoot the launch — a move Ivan credits as the turning point that shifted the company from a nightlife-focused platform into one covering concerts, sport, fashion and family events.

That data backbone now feeds Platinumlist's newer AI tools, which use 18 years of first-party sales data to help organisers forecast how well an artist might sell and where to direct their budgets.

Rebuilding after the region's tension

When regional tensions disrupted the events calendar, Ivan says the company's first move was to get on the phone with every client and organiser, offering to reschedule, postpone or cancel as needed.

Bookings dropped, then plateaued, then began climbing again roughly a month and a half before this interview, helped along by government backing across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.

By his account, around 70 per cent of Platinumlist's shows are now selling out — citing sold-out nights for Angham and Rashed Al Majid in Abu Dhabi, and a sold-out 14,000-seat Majid Al Muhandis show at Coca-Cola Arena.

International productions have been slower to return, largely due to logistics around shipping and flights, but Ivan says most acts have simply asked to reschedule rather than cancel — with the bulk of postponed shows now expected across the third and fourth quarters of the year, alongside regular season fixtures like Soul DXB and Off Limits.

What people will — and won't — pay for

Cost-of-living pressures haven't dampened demand as much as one might expect, according to Platinumlist's internal data.

Willingness to pay has dropped for certain genres — EDM ticket prices, Ivan says, are down by roughly half — while demand for Arabic and classical concerts has pushed average spend up by around 30 per cent. A company survey found roughly three-quarters of respondents still intend to go out for live events.

The takeaway, in Ivan's words, isn't that people have stopped spending — it's that they've become choosier about what they'll spend on.

Fighting scalpers and fake tickets

Ticket resale and scalping — a frequent complaint on social media — is something Ivan says the company tackles in partnership with Dubai's cyber police, meeting weekly to flag fraudulent websites and Instagram accounts impersonating Platinumlist and its clients.

Over the past year and a half, the company says it has helped take down around 350 fake sites and pages.

Regionally, reselling tickets above face value is illegal, and Platinumlist has built its own "Ethical Resell" fan-to-fan exchange, allowing ticket holders to resell at the original price through the app, with funds released automatically once a sale completes.

Combined with an encrypted QR code that refreshes every 10 to 15 seconds, Ivan says the company has seen an 85 per cent drop in fraud since the tools launched.

The unicorn ambition

Platinumlist is quietly building a new product line Ivan won't yet name, three years in development, which he claims addresses a market three times larger than entertainment itself — with an announcement expected within a couple of months.

The company has also launched Platinumlist.ai, a suite of roughly 27 AI agents built to help organisers run events more efficiently, and continues expanding beyond its current 20-plus markets, having opened in the UK two years ago, followed more recently by France and the Netherlands.

The long-term goal, Ivan says without hesitation, is unicorn status (a privately held startup valued at over $1 billion) — potentially ahead of the five-year horizon most start-ups aim for. "With the blessing of God, and with hard work, and the right moves, Inshallah, we will reach there," says Ivan.

The hardest lesson

Asked what being CEO has taught him, Ivan doesn't point to strategy or growth targets. He points to people. Good talent, he says, is out there but hard to find — and even harder to hold onto without genuine investment in them.

"A great leader, it's not a great leader without the people," he says, adding that the pace of change — particularly around AI — now demands constant curiosity from anyone leading a company.

Off the clock

Away from the office, Ivan describes himself as a committed foodie who never misses the Dubai and Abu Dhabi food festivals.

He's also a fan of Soul DXB for its offbeat crowd and line-up, Off Limits for its outdoor scale, and Abu Dhabi's Al Hosn Festival — a living-history event staged at the historic fort that was once Sheikh Zayed's home, where craftspeople recreate life from a century ago.

His next event to watch is one he can't yet name: "an unannounced show heading to Coca-Cola Arena." Dubai eagerly awaits.

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