 Hi and welcome to school puzzle. I'm your host Sarah and this is the show where we chat with everyday entrepreneurs about everything that goes into starting a new venture. Any episodes of this show I've interviewed entrepreneurs in all stages of their journey and today I am thrilled to introduce a serial entrepreneur that has achieved an elite level of success not commonly achieved. Alan J. Cohen is the CEO and co-founder of op-net technologies which he built from the ground up and eventually sold for one billion dollars. He's an inventor on more than 60 patents relating to software, networks, electronics, algorithms and simulation and has a degree in electrical engineering from MIT. He went on to become the CEO and co-founder of bubble up and co-bro ventures plus sits on the board of directors at C4 Therapeutics. Today we're going to sit down with him to learn how he built his empire and what advice he may have for aspiring entrepreneurs. Welcome to the show. Hello nice to meet you. I mean it is such a pleasure to meet you because I'm so familiar with one of your ventures which is bubble up. I use it literally every day so thank you so much for creating that. I'd love to just hear your story because you've achieved the level of success that most entrepreneurs really dream of so can you just tell me like how did you get started? I'll tell you that as a child I was already interested in business. I was just like a lot of kids. I had the proverbial lemonade stand and I enhanced it and started selling arts and crafts. I wanted to make more money at my lemonade stand. It's so funny you started that way. I love that. It's like so typical and now look at you. And then eventually my family moved back to France where I was born and there I took up stamp collecting and I would go to the I would go to the stamp market in Paris by myself you know I was a seven or eight year old and I'd go and I'd buy stamps and then I would sell them to other kids who were interested in stamp collecting of course for a profit. So how old were you at this point? Seven, eight, nine. So you really entrepreneurship runs in your blood it seems. And then you know I always had it in the back of my mind that I like this idea of running my own business. And so I guess it was just a matter of time before I found another idea. And when I was in school at MIT I was in a class I had a graduate project on data networking and it was kind of the early days of the internet and networking was a really hot field and I thought what could I do in this field that would be innovative. And I came up with an idea for a project the class required a project and that eventually became my thesis and then after I graduated I told my brother I said you know there's something here we can start a business with this and I'm very lucky to have my brother Mark with whom I do everything we do all of our businesses together we're a team. Yeah you guys have co-founded three businesses together is that correct? We've had quite a few businesses together and and continue to do that and so we decided that we would make a you know we could have a go at turning this project that I had started in school into a into a business and then we just slowly grew the business and one of the points I'll make later talking about how to get how to get started in the beginning we took on a few investors. Yeah how did you do that how did you get the investors and I believe you started this business in 1986. Yes that's correct so um well you know we talked to people we knew you know some people weren't interested some people felt we were crazy and then but we weren't asking for that much money we were trying to we were trying to get twenty twenty five thousand dollars together. And what did what was that funding for initially just um investing in equipment or what did you use the funding? Yeah buying buying some equipment buying some computers um it's a it was a software project so we needed some computers but for about a year we worked on trying to get into a product and then of course we needed to do a little marketing but everything was done on the shoestring budget. So this is for OpNet can you briefly explain what OpNet does in the most simplistic terms Well in the very beginning OpNet was a product buy geeks for geeks it was apparently something we would sell to other engineers and it was used by people who were working on the fundamental technologies of the internet and of data networks and so in order to develop those things they needed a way to prototype and simulate those those capabilities that they were creating without having to build the real thing at first and right because it's way more expensive to do that whole thing yeah kind of like when engineers build the bridge they build a model of it first you see that's exactly what i was thinking of yeah it's like architecture you build a miniature version of a skyscraper and then once you're you like the idea you build the real skyscraper exactly you got it so so here you're you're testing how the system is going to work and run and behave and so people use it a lot you know in the beginning to engineer everything from telephone networks to networks on the space station to networks on an on an airplane and the internet itself some of the what we call protocols that are in the internet itself and in fact GoDaddy was a customer of ours really yes absolutely oh look at that it comes full circle yeah so we and then we grew it and then our products started um take you catching on and all the big service providers like GoDaddy like AT&T like Verizon they were all using it and so we grew and grew and we started creating new products so by the time we were done we probably had about a dozen products including hardware products that were used to monitor networks etc so um so how long did this take from your first customer to your first 10 customers oh well that probably took about a year and then eventually we found some people were invest interested in investing in our company we were interested in going public as a company and we knew that to go public it would be good to have some people who had had that kind of experience before so we brought on some late-stage venture capital okay obviously near what they were doing in terms of taking a company public how many years did that take you to go public about a dozen years before going public okay and then and then after we went we went public in 2000 during the time where the stock market was having a huge crisis uh the bubble was the bubble was uh at that point uh you know popping once we did get out onto the market we did great and we were one of the top 10 IPOs of the year and you know we had a we had a lot of a lot of interest in the company so in 2012 you actually sold the company for one billion dollars which is unreal congratulations on that thank you how let's just tell me everything about that please well um there were people interested in buying the company we also felt that it was a good time for the company to maybe be part of a bigger you know part of a bigger platform so we could have sales worldwide for example we had only we had been selling worldwide but not as much as we could there's so much more market share we could take in japan in china in australia where we had a small we had a small presence overseas so to be part of a bigger platform would create value can you talk about a few of those things that you think are absolutely essential to bringing a business from literally your mom's house to a one billion dollar company you were the real garage shop that yeah i love that yeah well um i mean like i said you know all of those steps that went in between of course i think some of the key things that happened along the way are the people that you add to your team you're not gonna get there you're not going to get there by yourself you might have some companies where i think you know the management or the ceo is um you know has let's say uh a style which is very draconian and it's my way or the highway and and i think that that probably lessens the chance of success it can still work if you have an incredible vision everybody's working on and if the market is right and people are there for the money and they see that it's happening and people might stick around but not every business has all of those things and in some businesses you know you need the team to persevere through tough times like you were saying you're if you have crisis you have to go through and so having that team dynamic to me is going to increase the chance of success and having people who get along and work well together and aren't so ego driven but are wanting to be part of a bigger something how do you find them that's for me hiring people has been such a process for my business do you have any advice on how to hire the ideal person for a specific role first of all we never have an interview that lasts less than a day i mean it's always at least a day um and and how do you make it last that long because i feel like most interviews today are 30 minutes 30 to 60 minutes and then how can you get which is why a lot of the time things don't work yeah because you haven't really gotten to know much about that person right no first of all the last thing you want to do is go over their resume and ask them to repeat what's on their resume right so what you what you want to do what you want to do is dig into some of the things that are on their resume that you think were the most important and see if they can talk about them in an articulate way in a way that proves they really did those things and they were really involved in those things and they weren't just part of some group of people who did it and they were just kind of a bystander i think you have to also do some kind of a mock situation at least one or two where you have to do what they're going to do in their job okay yeah so you can observe and you can see how they react it might be a little bit contrived it's okay in our case a lot of our products are tech products we're we're doing you know we're creating software and so so do you have them do a test yes absolutely we have you usually do around three or four during the day where we have some interviews where it's not a test but then at least three or four problems that they have to solve in real time we give them 30 minutes go do something and then we talk about it it's not about getting it right or wrong it's about how they their thought process you know turns out to be oh interesting so for you if they get it wrong it's not an end game it could be explained to me why you did it this way right and can you think of a better way to have done it and if i point out a problem to you can then you maybe you couldn't see the flaw in it yourself but then if i point out a flaw or an improvement could you then take it to the next level by yourself so like yeah just to kind of just to have a discussion with somebody and you see if you know we're kind of similar not necessarily similar thinkers but if they have they're familiar with those kinds of thought processes that are important in your company yeah so what about this situation they're really good at what they do but you just don't get along with them this is a problem i mean i guess you'll have to decide if it's fixable and and maybe give a few attempts at fixing it i have definitely fixed some situations yeah you have to get to the heart of why it's not going well in terms of interpersonal usually the problems i've had to fix would have been interpersonal among other people not with me do you have any tips on on managing people and working through challenges like that yeah well first of all if you do have a challenge like that i would say like i said you gotta find out what's really what's really going on people what's the issue yeah what's the what's the real rub between these different people you know and sometimes it could be an ego problem sometimes you have to read you have to kind of separate people and have them work separately i've done that successfully have them work on different areas of the company and then they each have their own little turf but ideally you want to avoid these ego these people with huge egos to begin with okay if you can you also well before we had this interview you mentioned the importance of staying motivated and growing a company yeah sometimes this can be really hard especially when you don't see successes or if you have so much success like what you had that you're kind of like why even could like why do more i just made a billion dollars why not retire right right why not retire well and i don't get to do fun so how do you remain motivated is the question yeah you know what keeps me motivated is what has always kept me motivated from the beginning is i still haven't lost that interest in taking an idea from its inception all the way to reality and then you know testing it out there in the world so that that whole process of the creative process is what gives me the biggest high that i can have yeah you know you have an idea it all starts in one moment it's incredible to believe i can still remember the moment i thought about the idea that launched the company that we sold for a billion dollars it only takes a second and then be careful because in one second you could determine the next 20 years of your life it's so scary when you put it like that that is true it's true it's true right and that's true for so many things in life but oh my gosh you got so you got it you got to be careful what you think about during that second yeah so yeah so how do you how do you direct yourself to the right decision i mean there's so many ideas that happen our heads as entrepreneurs and how do we know when we're pursuing the right thing and what should we pay attention to when we're starting a business i mean yeah you have to have hopefully you know you have a good head on your shoulders and you can reason about whether or not this idea has really has legs can it get somewhere is there a mark you know is there a market will people be interested why are they gonna be interested test it with other people talk to people don't live in isolation uh you know you want to um you want to uh challenge yourself don't just drink your own kool-aid so for a while in the beginning you need to be thinking does this really have an opportunity to succeed and then what about the competition there's so many things that can cause you to fail and then there's another problem of course which is raising money and you know do you have it yeah it's very challenging for most people raising money absolutely and another another word of advice to early entrepreneurs i i think is uh that i think is really important is you know are you be skeptical about your own plans everybody has like a two-year plan and a five-year plan and so on well first of all when you're in the very beginning five-year plan is not very meaningful you know the first two years are going to change your five-year plan so see see if you can get out to market and selling your product you know that's maybe a two-year plan depends on what your business is of course but you need to be skeptical of your own plan and everything takes longer than you think and everything is harder than you think and everything is more expensive than you think so you can just go ahead and multiply everything by two or three right off the bat you know it's just so true so sad but so true so what are some specific pitfalls that people should look out for when they're starting a business yeah i think i think that that's one of them i i think another one is that's that's pretty important is if you get investors and people who believe in you some people are so grateful to have those investors and that they're ready to give away the farm and so they start they start giving away so much stock in their company that they don't even realize that there's going to be another round of investment later and then probably another round of investment later and by the time they're successful they might own such a small percentage of their own company that they're not even really in the control position anymore and so as a result other people could actually take your baby away from you to what extent is success and entrepreneurship about the financial rewards money is good for many things as you know it's a universal currency obviously so it's good for many things part of it is your own lifestyle there's no doubt but also part of it is what you can then do with it on the next round you can start new businesses okay and then okay so you might say well that's just kicking the can down the road you're just getting more money what are you gonna do with that and but the point of it is that you can you can have an impact on the world in various ways there are so many great causes in the world you know there are so many people who are less fortunate there are so many people who unfortunately have been afflicted by a disease there are people who need help with so many different situations in their life and it is a tremendous tremendously satisfying thing to be able to have an impact on other people's lives so what are you doing to give back well some some of it is in purely philanthropic and some of it is philanthropic investing so with my brother mark we've funded quite a few biotech companies that are working on cures for important diseases uh cancer several different types of cancer well i'm certainly thankful that you're doing all of this research and you've created so many helpful things that impact my life directly you're the co-founder of bubble up which is a cloud-based software i like to explain it to people it's like a combination of pinterest and google drive so it's very visually easy to use but it also has all of the features that you would need like in google drive kind of for those that aren't familiar with it if if you don't know what it is you should download it's actually free to download and there's different levels of storage space that you can purchase um now uh why did you decide to get into that whole thing so the the idea was like with many entrepreneurs i think to relate back to entrepreneurship i think what a lot of entrepreneurs rightfully think about when they want to start a business is either because they stumbled on it or it was something that was very present in their life or they noticed other people were having some kind of a problem some kind of some kind of uh improvement that was possible i was thinking about something that i wasn't completely satisfied with and i felt for me with bubble up the the initial thought was that this activity that we perform online all the time which is a cycle of like searching for information and then trying to save it somehow hang on to it and then maybe sharing it with other people and that that cycle is not satisfactory because the reason it's not satisfactory is each of those things is separate it's kind of disorganized and i think bubble up made that whole process really easy and that's why i use it every day like literally i'm not even exaggerating what bubble up does also besides having very powerful features for organizing is to try to make it intuitive by making it very visual so you have pictures associated with everything and so and that's why i like to explain it as a kind of like Pinterest in a way visually right visually it's a lot like Pinterest because pictures are the way you identify things right but then when you dig into those things you can put any kind of information so you can put documents you can put web links you can put photos you can put your own notes so it's a it's a anything you want so what it tends to do is to get you to think about your organization in terms of topics another thing i didn't even mention with bubble up is the name the reason for the name is that oh yes please share all of the content you save as long as it's public content we never look at your private content okay as long as you say public content like a web page okay because it's public anyway all right we will look at that content and we might we'll give you suggestions based on the fact that you've saved that in your folder so what would you say is one thing that has made you successful like the top thing knowing why you want to do this that you are doing right now always have a clear connection with your reasons for having this business why because you're going to run into a lot of problems and as you run into those problems and you're gonna have a lot of days where you're saying why am I even doing this oh my god just go get a job where somebody else makes the decisions and I just have to do what I'm asked to do it's so much easier but it's so less satisfying well there's that satisfaction but you have to know like why maybe maybe you're doing it just because you want to prove it to yourself and that is important that's okay but if you can figure out the top one two or three reasons why you are doing this and always keep them in your mind write them down put them on a put them on a on a bulletin board something you know have a note somewhere and just remember I'm connected to this for a reason and and hopefully that motivation stays with you the whole journey because it's gonna be important otherwise that's kind of like your seat belt when you get into a bumpy bumpy right otherwise you can veer off the road and go in the wrong direction yeah you gotta have your compass right so I would say number one number one thing is have your compass a hundred percent that's very very important what's one thing that you learned along the way that you wish you knew when you started the part about really truly understanding my market you know like I feel I feel like you can never do enough research I think like sometimes it's too easy to just go on your gut feeling and feel like people don't want this people are gonna like this and not ask enough other people for their input on that what is one piece of advice that you would give to an aspiring entrepreneur I would say that you are going to meet many people in your journey as an entrepreneur you are going to work with probably investors unless you already have your own capital you are going to have employees and you are going to have customers and all of those people are going to want to know what your business is about and what makes it special and what makes it interesting and why it provides value and that means that you have to be on point and you have to be articulate about answering that question when anybody asks well that is very helpful this has been so eye-opening and informative and I just feel like I'm going to go and start a billion dollar company right now so thank you so much for speaking to me today and to sharing your advice with all of us here um so it's it's just been wonderful having you on the show along thank you so much it's been an honor to be on the show and let me know what your billion dollar idea is because I want to invest oh well then I sure will as soon as I think of it and do a lot of research and ask a lot of people yeah and make sure I have all of the things you just said be ready to answer all my questions oh I want to be so ready for it thank you so much and thank you to everyone who tuned in today if you want to learn more about bubble up you can go to bubbleup.com and that is all for this edition of school hustle now if you want to check out our other episodes you can watch them on youtube or you can listen on google podcast apple podcast spotify or wherever you can stream and download a podcast and if you like what you heard please consider sharing with a friend and leaving a review I'm going to see you next time thanks for watching bye