A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The reason why professors want to see how you are proceeding is because they can’t partially mark you. If you’re going in the right direction and somehow made a mistake and got the wrong answer, they can still give you partial points for how you were moving. That’s, I think, the thinking behind showing the steps.

Aviram Jenik: I totally agree with you. Here’s what we teach students when we do that. Number one, the professor has a problem. The students have to change their way of doing stuff. The second one, which is more problematic is, if you do your way correctly and reach your own conclusion, it’s not okay. When you do anything practical in life and if you reach the wrong result, you’re out. That’s one million times more true with startups. Startups are pretty binary. You either make it or don’t.

Sramana Mitra: You quit Technion?

Aviram Jenik: No, I completed my studies in Technion. Once I had it, I could then recommend everyone else not to do it. Funnily enough, I did an MBA with Tel Aviv University. It was the same thing with my MBA. I said, “It’s about time I learned business management.” With my MBA, all I did was fight with my professors, because they would tell me the proper way to do things. I would say no, not according to my experience.

Sramana Mitra: Especially in business, there are other ways of doing it. You finished Technion. At 19, you were done?

Aviram Jenik: At 19, I was in the middle of my Technion studies. This is when I realized that Technion is not going to teach me anything. I started my startup while finishing Technion in the background.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Aviram Jenik: This was 1993.

Sramana Mitra: That is the beginning of the Internet, roughly speaking.

Aviram Jenik: It was two years before the Internet came to be. One of the co-founders was an ex-teacher. We all had a nice spot for teaching children about computers. We weren’t the only ones thinking about it. If you remember, Apple was doing the same thing. We mainly focused on the sciences through a computer software. We got a little bit lucky, because we started those products.

We were making money selling software which was great, but on the other hand, it didn’t take off. That was the challenge that entrepreneurs always have. If you’re not making money at all, you got to do something. If you’re making just a little bit of money but not a lot of money, you have to sit there and think what to do. We took the brave decision and we said, “We have to get out and find something else.”

Internet was just starting. I remember when we connected, you would go on the Internet and you literally had all the websites of the Internet on a single page. You had hyperlinks to all sites. This was before Yahoo! Our decision was to move out of education and into this new thing which is the Internet, but we didn’t really have any idea what we were going to do.

This segment is part 2 in the series : A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik
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