Do You Want To Have Dinner With The Guy You Want To Hire? Christos Cotsakos, Founder Of ETrade And CEO Of EndPlay (Part 4)

Sramana: How did you finance such an expensive advertising campaign?

Christos Cotsakos: We raised about $50 million with our initial public offering. We raised $120 million from our second offering and we raised $400 million in our private placement offering. Before our IPO we were advertising selectively. A full-page ad in the WSJ will get noticed today, but it will get lost a bit. Back then, if you did a full page ad in the WSJ it was huge. We also ran ads that showed a huge dog’s face or big “Boot Your Broker” text. It was so anti-establishment that a $90,000 ad provided substantial viral reach.

Sramana: Where does your story go after E*Trade?

Christos Cotsakos: I did a lot of different things. We have a family trust and do a lot of scholarship work, landmine removal in Vietnam, and a lot of faith-based donations. I also have Pennington Ventures, which has been around since 1999. We do a lot of angel investing and strategic consulting work for digital media. I do all of that very low-key, under the table. We have had a couple of startups, some of which went well and some of which did not go so well.

I was on the board with Fox Entertainment Group for eight years. When they were deconsolidating some of their digital media businesses we looked at one that was a CMS system they had built internally for their own TV stations. I thought it could be a jewel in the crown, so I brought in some outside investors and took the company. News Corp retained a significant percentage of the business. We built it out in a wide range for not only media clients but for financial and educational verticals as well. We have been spending a lot of our time in that portfolio company, EndPlay.

Sramana: What is the value proposition of EndPlay?

Christos Cotsakos: The Web content management business has been around for a long time. Just like a lot of other industries, it is ripe for transformational disruption. Right now we do the Web content management (WCM) for 80 television stations. We have a good platform with which to work. With mobile technologies and tablets there is a new way to look at how you render content on your site to other form factors like mobile and tablets.

That also changes dig data, which is the behavioral information you have in your modeling and analytics. You can tie it all together to make consumer media engagement across all verticals a key in how you look at behavioral and trend data. It lets you create lifelong customer and loyalty for your website customers. The website as we know it today is not dead, but it is tired. The question is how to leverage Web 1.0 technology into a Web 2.5 environment. Our intelligent rendering technology does that.

Sramana: Are the 80 television stations that use your platform doing all their online content management with it? 

Christos Cotsakos: We do all of the Web content management for their television stations.

Sramana: Why the emphasis on television stations? Is it because of the Fox roots?

Christos Cotsakos: Yes. It was born though Fox Entertainment Group, which gave us an established base to grow from. Media clients are the most complex and demanding in the environment today. If you can generate architecture and a technology that can service that vertical, it becomes a lot less complicated to do it in other verticals. Media is a demanding real-time client base.

This segment is part 4 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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