Do You Want To Have Dinner With The Guy You Want To Hire? Christos Cotsakos, Founder Of ETrade And CEO Of EndPlay (Part 1)

Christos Cotsakos is the founding chairman, CEO and president of EndPlay, a Software as a service provider of web content management solutions to enterprise clients in media, entertainment, and education. After enlisting in the Army in and serving a tour through Vietnam, he began his career as a package handler at Federal Experss. In 1988 he became the VP of European operations and served in that role until 1992 when he left to begin work at ACNielsen. In 1995 he was promoted to co-CEO and served in that role until leaving in 1996 to become the CEO of E*TRADE. His full bio is available at https://www.wpunj.edu/ccob/about-us/cotsakos.dot

Sramana: Christos, let’s discuss your background first. Where do you come from? What led you down your career path and toward entrepreneurship?

Christos Cotsakos: I come from Paterson, New Jersey. My parents moved there from Greece. It is a town that is famous for the silkworm factories and the manufacturer of the Colt 45.

I was a very restless kid in school. I would always challenge what my instructor or teacher would talk about. I would always try to find a different way to get to the right answer or an alternative answer. My first 12 years of education were very tough because the school was geared toward teachers having a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude.  For someone who is young and has an entrepreneurial mindset, that is a very difficult environment to work in.

In the early days they had greeting cards in comic books that you could order and sell, or you could work at the circus to earn extra money. We would organize the neighborhood and figure out ways for everyone to pool their money on the front end and get leverage by having 20 kids sell. We would share the profits, and I was doing that at eight years old.

Sramana: What were you helping 20 kids sell?

Christos Cotsakos: We would work at the circus selling snacks. We figured out different ways to get the snacks and work different parts of the audience via team selling. We also sold greeting cards. Instead of just selling the cards to your family, we would grid off the neighborhood, and every kid sold their assigned block based on ethnicity. It worked well for us as kids.

Sramana: Did you continue with that same mentality into your teens?

Christos Cotsakos: We did the same thing. We would organize the neighborhood to do computer projects. We would just organize and do business selling. We all grew up from immigrant families. Nobody had a lot of money, so we figured out whatever way we could to pool our resources. We would use everybody’s skill set individually, and when you put it all together collectively you would have a better consciousness. We tried everything; some things worked and some things didn’t.

Sramana: What about college? Where did you go?

Christos Cotsakos: When I got out of high school I was not sure where I was going to go. I went to summer school every year because I never paid much attention. I had more detentions than anyone else in the school system. My English teacher saw me loading trucks a local grocery store one night and came up and told me that he should fail me but that he was going to pass me because I was out doing what I
probably should be doing, being a part of the working society. He passed me, so I graduated.

I was not sure what to do next. My godfather was a member of the 101st Airborne in WWII, and he always talked about the military discipline and how it helped him in his life. I went down to the local post office, and I went to the Air Force recruiter and told them I wanted to fly jets. The recruiter asked if I had a college degree and I said no. He asked how I did in high school and I told him I did poorly. He said, “Son, you will never fly jets. The Navy is down the hall,” and that is a true story.

I got smart enough in that 20-foot walk down the hall that I suddenly knew I liked jets taking off carriers. I said the same thing and the Navy recruiter asked the same questions. I gave the same answers and he told me I would never fly for the Navy, but that the Marine Corps was 20 feet down the hall. The Marines were out, so I went down to the Army recruiters and asked them how it was to fly helicopters. I ended up talking to him and enlisting in the military. Unfortunately, just before I was headed off to become a copter pilot, the war started and they took everybody who was in the 82nd Airborne and put them in the infantry and shipped us to Vietnam.

When I got my orders they said ‘IN’ and I told myself that even though I wanted to be a pilot I would do OK in intelligence. Those orders were cut on an old machine and the ‘F’ had fallen off. What I thought was going to be intelligence was actually Infantry. I served with Bravo Company 2nd 501st Airborne Infantry in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. That took the entrepreneurial side of me and married it with the discipline side of me in the military. When I got out I was luck to go to Paterson State College, which let me in primarily because of my military service. Thirty years later, they named their business school after me.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Do You Want To Have Dinner With The Guy You Want To Hire? Christos Cotsakos, Founder Of ETrade And CEO Of EndPlay
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