Before Guillaume Cohen-Skalli and Marina Tarasova had a company together, they had a LinkedIn exchange. He had looked into her professional experience and contacted her. In 2018, they co-founded Paloma Health. It is an agreeably ordinary beginning for a consequential working relationship: someone read a profile, saw a reason to talk, and sent a message.
The detail suits a career that has moved between starting businesses, developing them, and working in venture capital. Cohen-Skalli, also known as “G”, arrived at Paloma with several professional lives behind him. The titles changed along the way. CEO, business development director, adviser, partner. Then CEO again. A business card collection could have done quite well out of him.
Today, the New York-based executive’s title is co-founder and CEO of Paloma Health. Tarasova is its co-founder and COO. Put their names side by side and the company’s beginning becomes more interesting. One person could bring experience of founding and investment. The other could bring a different body of industry knowledge. The message connected two careers before the company gave them a shared heading.
When the bargain hunters moved on
His entrepreneurial record reaches back to Smap In, where he was co-founder and CEO from 2010 to 2013. The French service gathered local deals. Its proposition combined the discovery of nearby offers with a community element: useful information about bargains, organized around where somebody happened to be. A good deal several hundred miles away has a certain literary charm and limited practical value.
In June 2013, the Danish deals aggregator Bownty announced a transaction involving Smap In. The plan was to stop the Smap In service and direct its users to Bownty. For the Danish business, the attraction included an existing understanding of French users and a way into the market. An audience already assembled could make an international expansion less of a cold introduction.
There is a concrete business story inside that small transfer. A service may matter to an acquirer because of the relationships and local knowledge gathered around it. Code is one part of the package. Knowing how a particular group of customers behaves can be another. In this case, the destination for Smap In’s users was part of the announced plan.
For Cohen-Skalli’s biography, Smap In establishes an early encounter with the practical work of a consumer business. People had to discover a service, understand its usefulness, and find a reason to return. Those are plain questions. They become less plain when a company has to answer them every day. An offer can be attractive while the business of distributing it remains demanding.
- 2010Smap In
Co-founder & CEO - 2013Admoove
Business development - 2016Interplay
Partner - 2018Paloma Health
Co-founder & CEO
A different view of the customer
In 2013, Cohen-Skalli became business development director at Admoove, a mobile advertising company. The role followed the Smap In chapter into another business concerned with reaching people in a particular place. His listed tenure ran into 2014. Here, the commercial question involved advertisers as well as the people carrying phones.
Admoove’s technology supported location-based mobile campaigns, including promotions intended to bring customers into physical shops. A phone could become a connection between an online message and an offline visit. The appeal to a retailer is easy to grasp. Someone nearby might actually come through the door; someone elsewhere might merely admire the advertisement.
HiMedia acquired Admoove in January 2015, after Cohen-Skalli’s listed business development tenure. That sequence matters. It places his work within a company that subsequently became part of a larger advertising group, while keeping the dates in their proper order. A biography is more useful when the chronology does some work instead of simply providing decoration.
His education had already brought together finance and management at EDHEC Business School. His subsequent work brought those subjects into contact with consumer services and commercial development. The career offers several angles on business: the service somebody uses, the customer an advertiser hopes to reach, and the organization that has to make the numbers work.
A further period, in 2015 and 2016, involved digital marketing and startup advising. That work belongs in the picture because it sits between the operating roles and his later investment role. The route was accumulating different kinds of responsibility. Founding a company, advising one, and helping it develop a market each create a different relationship to its decisions.
A seat on the other side of the table
From 2016 to 2018, Cohen-Skalli was a partner at Interplay. Venture capital gave his professional record another perspective. A founder has a particular company to build. An investment role involves considering businesses as possible commitments. The same presentation can look rather different depending on which person will have to act on it afterward.
There is a useful tension in moving between those positions. A business needs a story that people can understand quickly. It also needs operations that continue to function once the presentation is over. The deck has a last slide. The company keeps going. Somebody still has to decide what happens next, and who is responsible for doing it.
His record also includes a 2016 co-founder role at Harvey Blake. Taken together, the entries resist the neat picture of an entrepreneur advancing along one fixed track. Cohen-Skalli worked through several roles before Paloma. The recurring connection is participation in young businesses, with changing proximity to the work of starting, developing, advising, and investing.
By 2018, he was founding again. With Paloma, he took the CEO role alongside Tarasova as COO. The chronology gives the partnership a particular shape. This was a return to building after a period in venture capital, with earlier operating experience already behind him. There was a new company to organize and another person with whom to organize it.
Two people in the founding photograph
Tarasova’s account of their first connection places Cohen-Skalli in the role of the person making an approach. He researched her background and contacted her on LinkedIn. She brought experience that included sales, marketing, and work at established organizations. The resulting partnership joined different professional histories rather than reproducing the same CV twice.
A co-founder’s experience deserves more than a courteous mention. The division of CEO and COO responsibilities puts two people in the company’s leadership from the start. A profile organized around one founder can easily make the other disappear. Here, the opening message and the continuing leadership partnership keep Tarasova in the frame.
In early public advice about building Paloma, the founders favoured hiring people ready to do practical work. They cautioned against being dazzled by impressive résumés and long corporate careers. For a young business, the ability to take on the task at hand carried weight. A handsome title is pleasant company until somebody needs the work completed.
The preference offers a useful counterpart to their own varied backgrounds. Experience can help a company, but the question is how it gets used. An early team needs people who can turn a decision into something finished. The founders’ advice put attention on that relationship between a person’s history and their willingness to work inside a growing organization.
The photograph of the two co-founders is a helpful pause in the chronology. It puts faces beside the roles. The formal account has dates, organizations, and titles; the working relationship has two people who decided to join their experience together. Both belong in a personal business story. Neither requires a legend about a solitary founder.
Choosing who stays in the room
In December 2020, Paloma joined TheVentureCity’s Product-Led Growth Program. The relationship added another group of people to the company’s story, this time on the investor and operating-support side. For a founder with venture capital experience, choosing a backer also meant choosing a working relationship that would continue beyond an introduction.
“The team, the team, the team!”
Guillaume Cohen-Skalli, on choosing TheVentureCity
His explanation was emphatically about the people. The repetition gives it a little comic force, as though the first two mentions might somehow have left room for ambiguity. Skills and connections mattered, but so did the prospect of enjoying the collaboration. He included the quality of the due diligence and the attention to data in his assessment.
Enjoying a working relationship can sound like a soft consideration until the relationship becomes a regular part of company life. An investor meeting occupies a slot in the calendar. A partnership occupies many more. The person across the table may later be discussing a difficult decision, a change of plan, or a task that needs another attempt.
Cohen-Skalli’s route gives that choice some context. He had founded, worked in commercial development, advised startups, and held an investment partnership before returning to a CEO role. Paloma brought those entries together with Tarasova’s experience. The beginning was a message; the continuing work belongs to a team. For all the movement in his career, choosing the people remains a remarkably concrete place to start.