Do You Want To Have Dinner With The Guy You Want To Hire? Christos Cotsakos, Founder Of ETrade And CEO Of EndPlay (Part 5)

Sramana: What is the price point of the product?

Christos Cotsakos: It is a SaaS licensing arrangement along with professional services associated with it. It goes anywhere from $250,000 to $2.5 million a year.

Sramana: Is it a user-based model?

Christos Cotsakos: It is done on a client basis. Our clients publish their media on our technology and engage with their clients. We help them to understand that client engagement with our dashboard and analytics. Our price depends on the number of TV stations our clients have, the products and services they need, and the partner ecosystem they want involved. There are a lot of components to pick and choose from.

Sramana: What does the competitive landscape look like for you now? Who do you run up against?

Christos Cotsakos: We are not replacing anybody. We are taking the competitive landscaping and upping the ante by building a more robust and mobile-enabled architecture. With social media, mobile, and all the different components you can have in a gaming system, you can have a much better platform than you could have had a few years ago.

Sramana: How does the TV media marketplace work? Do they use platforms like WordPress?

Christos Cotsakos: There are enterprise systems and open source systems. Open source is excellent, but when you get to large-scale enterprises open source has a difficult time scaling.

Sramana: Over the past 10 years, media companies have had to adopt new technologies such as blogging and user-generated content. What is happening in your customer base in those areas? What systems have they been on?

Christos Cotsakos: There are about 1,400 different stations. The industry is fragmented. There are a lot of home-grown systems and some enterprise-wide systems, but there is not one single system that allows you to bridge all the social media platforms and bridge it with data modeling that they need. They need to scale across a large customer base in almost real time.

Sramana: What lessons do you have for young entrepreneurs?

Christos Cotsakos: The first thing young entrepreneurs have to have is a strong sense of self. You have to be able to have your own moral compass and your own belief system to stick to through both the good days and bad days. When you are an entrepreneur, everything is on the line.

You must surround yourself with good, smart, honest people. There is a collective team of entrepreneurs. Even if you are the person who has the original idea, you need a team of smart people around you to nurture the idea. The concept itself will grow and develop over time.

The third piece is to make sure you understand the type of money that you want invested. There is smart money and there is dumb money. There is venture capital and then there is vulture capital. You need to understand what partners you want to have from a financial standpoint who can help you to build your business as opposed to those who want to take a large stake and then sell the business. You want to find partners in your space as opposed to investors only. You also have to be very thick skinned, all the time. You get hit from everybody from all sides.

Sramana: Let’s break down your comments on building a strong team. How do you gage people during the recruitment cycle?

Christos Cotsakos: I have a simple philosophy: Do I want to have this person over to my house for dinner? At  the end of the day, you need a combination of intelligence, good chemistry, and an understanding what it takes 24/7. If you are going to work with someone that much, you want to make sure they check their ego at the door, check their salary grade and paycheck at the door, and go to work. The people you want to spend time with at dinner are the same people you want to spend time with every day.

Sramana: Does this philosophy lead to your hiring people who are a lot like you?

Christos Cotsakos: I find the best dinner conversations are ones with people who challenge how you think, who bring value to the conversation with an alternative point of view, and who respect each other’s thought processes.

This segment is part 5 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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