Adrien Cohen. Post-Exit Purpose of a 2x Unicorn Founder
Episode - 3
Adrien Cohen. Post-Exit Purpose of a 2x Unicorn Founder
My guest today is Adrien Cohen, a remarkable entrepreneur. He built and sold his first business, Lazada, for $3 billion and led the rapid growth of Tractable, a multi-billion-dollar AI company for accident and disaster recovery. In our conversation, Adrien candidly shares his journey to finding his life's purpose, why he quit a lucrative job at Goldman Sachs and prefers venture philanthropy over impact investing, his tips for a happy marriage, and the intriguing story of his parents keeping their wealth a secret until he made his own mark. Adrien lived in France, China, Vietnam and the UK.
What We Discussed:
00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:44: Early Motivation
00:03:28: Relationship with Judaism
00:04:36: Being a spoiled rich kid
00:05:20: What parents did right
00:06:07: The world is competitive
00:09:41: Defining success
00:10:52: Leaving Goldman Sachs
00:14:21: Starting e-commerce in Vietnam
00:16:33 Motivation
00:17:32 Critical Thinking
00:18:19 Exit from Lazada
00:19:43: Current stage of his new venture
00:23:58: Dealing with feelings of being an imposter
00:25:25: Discussing financial success and its responsibilities
00:27:13: The responsibility of exited founders to make a difference
00:30:02: Discussing the unique time in history for young, self-made individuals
00:31:58: Channelling guilt and insecurities into action
00:32:48: The mission to cure paralysis
00:34:10: Sharing personal tragedy and its impact
00:38:11: Introducing the concept of venture philanthropy
00:42:24: The structure and aim of the venture philanthropic fund
00:45:22: Choosing people to surround oneself with
00:47:16: The Secret Superpower - Using Empathy and Acceptance
00:50:00: Rules, Principles, and Lessons for Creating a Unified Relationship
00:57:10: Dealing with the Control Freak Aspect
00:59:16: Balancing Work, Life, and Family
01:01:12: Raising Children with Integrity and Humor
01:02:07: How to Be Remembered - Leaving a Lasting Impact and Legacy
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Anastasia Koroleva: [00:00:00 - 00:00:01]
You built two unicorns.
Adrien Cohen: [00:00:01 - 00:00:14]
Two unicorns. Brilliant. I really loved the people there. I really hated the job. The hardest time in my life.
I will never, ever do that again.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:00:14 - 00:00:16]
I really want to dig deep.
Adrien Cohen: [00:00:16 - 00:00:35]
My wife is going to watch this. That is a very spooky question. And now I have an additional feeling of being an imposter. I need to discuss that with a therapist, I guess. Or maybe you will send me the bill.
Thank you for having me. It was a deeper conversation than I initially expected, but yeah, I definitely enjoyed it.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:00:36 - 00:00:49]
Welcome to the Exit Paradox podcast. Here we meet remarkable exited founders to uncover what comes next. After selling a business, did they sustain success and find fulfillment? Let's learn together. Please subscribe to join our community.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:00:56 - 00:01:42]
My guest today is a rare blend of ambition, productivity, humility, and love. Adrian Cohen built and sold his first business for $3 billion. He went on to build another multibillion dollar company at an even faster pace. Then at the age of 36, he discovered a new purpose, eradicating paralysis in the next ten years. Join us as we explore Adrian's incredible journey and how he routinely turns the feelings of guilt and being an imposter into energy and motivation.
Adrian is one of the most inspiring people I know. You are in for a treat spending time with him today. Adrian, thank you so much for joining me today.
Adrien Cohen: [00:01:42 - 00:01:43]
Thank you for having me.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:01:44 - 00:02:01]
You achieved enormous success early in life. You've built $2 billion businesses in two different countries, each of which was foreign to you. You've been working extremely hard your whole life. Yet every time I see you, your positivity and optimism shine through. How do you do that?
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:02:01 - 00:02:09]
Where do you get this source of energy? Looking back at your life, what was the earliest source of motivation you remember?
Adrien Cohen: [00:02:09 - 00:03:28]
If we want to start with the childhood, you have to start with my parents, which both had the same story. They both immigrated to France from Algeria when they were five and when the Arabs took back their country. And so they arrived in France with nothing, they really, you know, built an entire life for themselves, starting from not much, which strongly impacted me, because on my end, I had everything I needed. So I was really overprivileged. I had access to everything I needed.
But somehow, just comparing my childhood with their childhood, it always felt like it would never be enough, in a way, and that I had it too easy. I think it's the opposite of what they wanted to achieve, but somehow that's how I felt about it. They deserved so much for being so successful, given their sort of start in life. And for me, it was just anything I would do would just not be enough, given the easy conditions I had. So I would say that's really the sort of primary driver for me.
I guess the second thing about my childhood is that I was raised in a jewish family, not very religious, but both my parents were jewish and practicing.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:03:28 - 00:03:43]
Actually, this is very interesting. In my observation, a close connection to a particular religion or spiritual practice can help people a lot during the time of big changes in life. What is your relationship with Judaism now? Do you practice?
Adrien Cohen: [00:03:44 - 00:04:36]
I do the sort of basics. So I want to make sure my kids understand the sort of jewish culture and understand what it means to be jewish, what the key values are. I personally don't have faith, so I'm not very religious, but I want to make sure they understand this part of their identity. And I guess what it meant for me and my brother was the importance of education. In fact, it's absolutely crazy when you think about it, but all my grandparents were teachers, all of them.
So it's really a family of teachers. And so education, the importance of going to school, being very good at school, doing your best and reading and learning has been strongly and deeply rooted into me from a very young age.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:04:36 - 00:04:43]
You came from a wealthy family. How did your parents avoid you being a spoiled rich kid?
Adrien Cohen: [00:04:43 - 00:05:20]
Because I didn't know we were wealthy. And my mom still jokes about it, that I would tell my parents, oh, you probably won't be able to support me when I get older, not like my friends at school. And because I didn't realize, I thought, okay, we're okay, but nothing crazy. And I realized that they're actually wealthy and in a great spot very, very late in life, at which point it didn't really matter anymore anyway because I was already taking care of myself. Right.
And same with my brother.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:05:20 - 00:05:25]
What do you think your parents did right and what did they do wrong?
Adrien Cohen: [00:05:25 - 00:06:06]
I mean, what they did right, I think, is giving me confidence that I was capable of doing anything. I hope I'll instill the same level of confidence in my kids. My mom would always say that, I don't care what you do, as long as you're the best at it, which, whether you become a musician, you work in construction, you're an artisan, you're a scientist, I don't care. You do what you like, but you have to really work like crazy to be in this field, in your field, you have to be the best.
I don't mind what the field is. It's hard to tell if it's good or bad to think like that.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:06:07 - 00:06:16]
I think It's very realistic because. The world is competitive. And when people say, let's not raise our children competitive, then we are not raising them to live in this world.
Adrien Cohen: [00:06:17 - 00:06:40]
It's made me very competitive. I know some friends think it's a bad approach to life, as you said, because it's too competitive. Maybe the emphasis should be put more on being content with what you have, being happy. But you can see that I don't really believe that. I feel like this is actually a good approach and I think I will probably reproduce it with my kids.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:06:40 - 00:06:43]
So you blame them for your success?
Adrien Cohen: [00:06:43 - 00:06:44]
I guess so.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:06:44 - 00:06:47]
So you got your education and you had a corporate job.
Adrien Cohen: [00:06:48 - 00:09:41]
Yes. Oh, wow. That's a big jump. I decided to go with the sort of most generalist, you know, sort of simple way in France, which is to go to business school, prep school eventually made it to a top business school in France, and I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life.
Very immature. And as you said, I started investment banking and consulting, sort of the traditional jobs you do after school when you don't really know what you want to do. I had no clue what it meant to be an investment banker, but it was supposed to give you social status and wealth and impact. So that's the only thing I knew. So I studied at Goldman Sachs here in London.
I really loved the people there. I was incredibly impressed by the caliber of the people I met. I really hated the job. And what I mean by that is, after a few weeks, I was already sort of challenging everything and criticizing everything. I felt like the long hours made no sense.
I was angry at staying until five in the morning to write a deck that no one would read. And so I was saying that to all my fellow analysts, and people started to agree with me. And so we'd go and eat sushi on the top floor of the building, and I'd just say, wow, we're not saving lives. Why are we here? And why are we doing those slides that no one cares about?
And people would be like, yeah, you're right. And I got reported to HR by one of them, and to this day, I don't know who, but someone reported me. And so I got reported to HR and they gave me a very strong feedback that my performance was very good, but my behavior was to be watched, that it was not appropriate, et cetera, et cetera. And so I really felt the importance of culture and the fact that those organizations will not keep you if you don't sort of become like them. In a way, I think that's the first thing that I remember from those months at Goldman.
And then I think the second thing, I guess, is that at Goldman, you're not like, even if you're just writing PowerPoints, you're actually really included in the team. And so you go to the client, you sit in the room, you don't say anything, but you're part of the whole process. And so I would see all the CEOs and entrepreneurs and I would see all the bankers around them trying to advise them, and I'd feel like I'd much rather be this guy or this girl than the person sitting next to them and advising them. And so I think advising can have a ton of value, don't get me wrong. But I felt like if I have to choose, I guess being the decision maker is going to be much more exciting.
And so that's more what I want to do with my life. I didn't know how to get there.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:09:41 - 00:09:46]
So do you remember at that time how you define success?
Adrien Cohen: [00:09:48 - 00:10:44]
I would say I didn't know what success was before, but for sure, when I started in banking, I realized what success wasn't. So having those people opening your door of the cab at 09:00 p.m. And giving you free sushi and this sort of financial power you get from making so much money at such a young age and so much more than everyone else at this age, right. I knew that was not success. I felt it really deep down inside.
I don't think, as I said, money has never been an issue for me because my parents really succeeded in life. And so we always had what we wanted and needed. And so it's never been a driver for me. But of course, when you start having sort of financial success, that can change your perspective. In my case, it just confirmed that this wasn't it.
I didn't know what it was, but I knew this wasn't it.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:10:44 - 00:10:52]
But I'm sure at Goldman you were surrounded by people who associated success with money, financial freedom, but it didn't affect you.
Adrien Cohen: [00:10:52 - 000:14:15]
I mean, deciding not to pursue with Goldman was a very difficult decision. And at the time, even my parents, my mom, so she did all her career in finance, in banking, and then private equity, which are things that she didn't even understand when she was a kid, but she sort of landed in this sort of word. And so for her, obviously, investment banking at Goldman is like the best thing you can get to the dream. And in my business school, I guess the top five people get in, right? So if you have a chance, you should seize it.
But I knew I didn't want to go back. So I took a gap year, traveled to China, studied in China, and then when it was time to go back and really just continue with Goldman, I refused their offer and decided not to continue there, which was a big shock. And I was really stressed because I didn't know what I was going to do next. But I just knew this wasn't it. And a few years later I ended up having this opportunity to finally do something much more entrepreneurial.
Sorry. I met this crazy german guy, Oliver Samuel. He's, you know, built rocket Internet, which is a big sort of investor and incubator that's essentially looking at the best ecommerce models in the US and launching them in emerging markets. And he told me I was 27. He said, look, we're going to launch Amazon in Southeast Asia.
I'll give you 10 million, you go with two of your friends, you go to Vietnam and you build Amazon in Vietnam. And this felt like the opportunity I was waiting for. I was this sort of insecure overachiever where you're looking for something bigger, but you're still not ready to take a lot of risk. And this felt like 10 million. Building a company, what's the risk?
I have no kids. If I fail, I can always go back to McKinsey or whatever it is. I'm going with two great friends from business school. It's going to be insane. And so I jumped on a plane and traveled to first I went on YouTube and I checked what life looks like in Saigon because I had never been to Saigon.
I saw all those motorbikes everywhere and it felt amazing. And then I decided to go. And so I ended up being 27 on the ground in Vietnam, being one of the three co-founders of the entire operation in the country and driving the country and setting up all the operations from scratch with 10 million on the bank. I had not done much on ecommerce. I had no clue.
I had never lived in Vietnam. I didn't know where to start. I was extremely stressed. I was asking myself whether I was even qualified to do that. But at the same time I felt like this is only going to be a fun learning process.
And to be fair, I felt this might fail, but then I'll just backpack in the neighborhood and then come back to me. I was always thinking, worst case doesn't look that bad anyway, so let's just enjoy and have fun. And I ended up staying four years and we took it from zero to 3 billion and eventually sold it to Alibaba, as you know. So it became way bigger and way more successful than anything I had initially expected.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:14:15 - 00:14:20]
That's absolutely incredible, especially given that you did it all in a new culture.
Adrien Cohen: [00:14:21 - 00:16:32]
There's so many crazy stories, if you think about it, like starting e-commerce in Vietnam in a country where people have no payment systems, so they have no credit cards, they all pay cash on delivery, they have no addresses. It will be like, oh, it's the pink house on the left at the end of the street. There's no logistics or delivery system. There's no Fedex, there's no Ups, there's nothing. There's no infrastructure to do online retail.
And so we had to sort of deal with all of this complexity, create our own delivery company, find ways to get cash on delivery, find ways to deliver products to people on the ground. We had no clue what people wanted to buy. You're right. Which meant that the first few weeks, what we did was, I will always remember that our decision was, we put all of the products online that we scrape online. We see what people click on and what people buy.
Then we'll just send a driver to the store in town, we'll buy this product, we'll repackage it, and we'll reship it to the customer. And then once we see what actually sells in this country, then we'll find actual supplier. We'll establish the right sort of sourcing method, we'll close contracts, and then we'll actually start purchasing the products from a proper supplier. But step one is we just go and buy it from shops and we lose money every time. But we learn, yeah, this actually lasted way longer than we wanted because it was impossible to find suppliers, which meant that at some point, we had, like an army of riders, maybe 40 or 50 bikers that were just constantly driving in the city.
And they'd go to the electronic stores, they'd get the product, they'd repackage it, then ship it. Some of the stores started to realize what those drivers were doing, so they would be looking for them and forbidding them to enter the store. So it ended up being this crazy, chaotic operation. But that's just one example of the sort of things you have to do when you're in a country you have no clue about, to just sort of learn the market.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:16:33 - 00:16:38]
On a personal level what motivated you to go through all of this, especially given that money was not an issue?
Adrien Cohen: [00:16:39 - 00:17:32]
I guess I felt this was a way to see what it means to run and build a company with limited risk, because the money was already raised, we had funding, so it was an opportunity to build and at a young age have a lot of impact and power. I've always wanted to drive and have impact. I didn't really know what I meant by impact, as you probably don't know much, but I felt I wanted to make a difference and do something that impacts as many people as possible. And bringing e-commerce to this part of the world where access to goods is so hard, it's very fragmented. We were delivering products to very remote areas in Vietnam and giving them this access and changing the way people shop and access products was extremely exciting.
Extremely exciting.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:17:32 - 00:17:38]
So being exposed to a foreign culture like this after you already lived in China, what did it give you?
Adrien Cohen: [00:17:40 - 00:18:13]
Being exposed to different cultures, I guess, first of all, really helps with critical thinking because you realize that the same event seen by different eyes and different people can look very, very different. And that is something that I've experienced very young, and that has become so clear. When you're living with another culture and other people, you realize that everything can be seen from different angles. And that's sort of. Yeah.
The fact that you live in a different culture really forces you to take this distance and have critical thinking.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:18:13 - 00:18:18]
Yeah. And then it trains you to think independently, doesn't.
Adrien Cohen: [00:18:18 - 00:18:18]
Correct. Absolutely.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:18:19 - 00:18:45]
So let me recap. You quit your dream job at Goldman Sachs just to go to China for a while to learn the language and take a break. There you ran into a crazy german billionaire who offered you $10 million to build the Amazon of Southeast Asia, which, of course, you successfully did just a few years later. That brings us to your exit from Lazada.
Adrien Cohen: [00:18:45 - 00:19:43]
Yeah. So, as I said, this was a Rocket Internet funded company. We had an incredible exit. It was definitely a great financial outcome for all the founders. The reality is the best outcome was for the Samurai brothers, which was sort of the agreement from the get go.
They have pushed a lot of people to entrepreneurship and to building big things and trusting their abilities and skills. And at least that's how I felt. And as a follow up to exiting Lazada, I felt like, yeah, I can never go back to the corporate world. I have to build things. And this time this will be my own company, not Rocket Internet's company.
So it will be the same. I'll build everything, but the difference will be that I actually own the business with had this. It was completely opportunistic. I had met Alex at Lazara in Vietnam. He traveled back to London to study what at the time was deep learning.
Adrien Cohen: [00:19:43 - 00:20:06]
And his idea was to bring deep learning to the real world and bring AI to automate some of the visual tasks in enterprise. And I was really excited to see how we could bring this technology to the real world. And so, yeah, we decided to build a company around this tech with Alex and Raz and see how we could make a difference with this kind of technology.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:20:07 - 00:20:09]
So what stage is it on right now?
Adrien Cohen: [00:20:10 - 00:20:27]
We just closed the series E. We became the first computer vision unicorn in the UK two years ago at the series D. So in six years, we went from zero to a billion, which was incredible. Journey.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:20:27 - 00:20:28]
You built two unicorns.
Adrien Cohen: [00:20:28 - 00:20:29]
Two unicorns.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:20:29 - 00:20:30]
Brilliant.
Adrien Cohen: [00:20:31 - 00:21:52]
Yeah, I would say it sounds crazy when you say it. It definitely is. I think founders get a disproportionate amount of attention.
In my opinion, a lot has to do: A - luck, B - timing, and C - the people you surround yourself with. And I think I've always been surrounded by people way smarter than me and way better than me. And that has been sort of one of the main reasons for my personal success. In the case of tractable, what was really exciting is we were one of the first AI companies to actually build a commercially viable product.
So I was not so excited by just the pure tech or the pure sort of research side of things. Most AI companies at the time were just research projects. I was much more excited by the ability to build the product and bring this tech to the real world for people to actually use it, which had failed over and over again. So most of the AI companies were just acquired, hired by Google and Twitter for the sort of research team. We were actually building a product, selling, selling it, getting it in the hands of people to use, which I thought was really exciting, and we were one of the first companies to succeed in doing so.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:21:52 - 00:22:05]
So for you, is it this fact that you succeeded better than everybody else, like sort of this competitive thing, or is it the activity itself? Because it's so fascinating to work with, a product like this.
Adrien Cohen: [00:22:05 - 00:23:43]
Both Lazara and tractable, I think the common drive for me has always been to make an impact. And it was very hard for me to actually define what I meant with impact. In hindsight, I think I've always tried to find a way to connect this with social impact and meaningful social impact, but I would sort of rationalize what we're doing, if that makes sense, to see the sort of social angle to it, even though it was definitely not the entirety of the mission. So if you think about Lazada, anecdotally one of the top sellers of the products we were selling, in Vietnam was medical devices like thermometers, blood pressure product, because we realized that some villages and places in the country had no access to medical devices and had to. If you're living in Sapa, you'd need to drive for two days to get to the main city to actually access this kind of product.
And we'd be delivering that to you in a day at tractable. We're using AI to help people when they have an accident. And essentially, if you have a car accident and you have a claim process, it's a very stressful moment. And so with AI, in a few minutes you can really settle the claim and just get back to normal. But I guess deep down inside I was still feeling that this was not the sort of social impact I was looking for.
I was looking for something bigger and entirely focused on a big social mission, not a byproduct of this. And so I've had this journey of like, impact to, is there some social impact to let's really focus on something much more meaningful?
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:23:44 - 00:23:55]
Do you still have this feeling, I guess you can call it guilt, that you have it too easy, what you mentioned in your childhood.
Adrien Cohen: [00:23:55 - 00:23:57]
And now I have an additional feeling of being an imposter.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:23:58 - 00:24:09]
I really want to talk about it, because imposter syndrome is such a common thing that among the most successful founders who exit their business.
Adrien Cohen: [00:24:09 - 00:25:23]
I had such an incredible alignment of conditions and support and help. And sometimes I'm like, okay, well, I guess even if you've had an easy childhood and you went to good schools, et cetera, doesn't mean that you're going to build very large businesses automatically. So that's the rational way of thinking about it. But the reality is I still don't think it's anything special and I can't explain it. I need to discuss that with a therapist, I guess, or maybe you will send me the bill.
But I still feel it's not enough and I still think it's the main driver that I have to do more. Yeah, it's a weird feeling. And I also don't know if I really deserve the sort of financial success I've had. And I'm just 38 and in a ways I have three kids, I love my family, everyone is healthy. And so when I see people that work so hard and work much more than me, and it's just like not comparable in terms of the sort of financial independence they can get to and they still even struggle to pay the bills, it's hard to find this sort of justifiable.
Adrien Cohen: [00:25:25 - 00:26:28]
And I guess one thing that really resonated with me on sort of this path to financial sort of success and independence was Jack Ma from Alibaba, who, when he acquired a business, I think he said something like, when you get to 10 million, your family is secured. The first 10 million is for your family, and when you get to 100 million, then actually it's not your money anymore and you have a responsibility to, it basically means that you're uniquely positioned and better positioned than most to reallocate this money to make it more productive and make a difference for society. So your job becomes, how do I reinvest and reallocate those resources to make the world a better place? And I think this thinking has really helped me to see money and myself as a way to sort of use it both time and money to make a difference in the world rather than just make it grow for no reason.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:26:28 - 00:26:36]
Yeah, I can very much relate to it. The way I think about it is it's leverage. It's basically leverage for something. For your purpose, for something that really matters.
Adrien Cohen: [00:26:36 - 00:26:37]
Exactly.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:26:38 - 00:27:13]
Because I think people go from salaries to maybe passive investors, and then most people stop there. But if you keep thinking about where you want to go personally in terms of your purpose and meaning, then inevitably you come to this philosophy that Jack Ma, you clearly share that money and time is your leverage and so is your social circle. By the way, all these connections, relationships you have built, you can use them to achieve meaningful impact. Would you agree with that?
Adrien Cohen: [00:27:13 - 00:29:43]
I completely agree. And I think if you're in a fortunate position to have capital skills, network time young, so you have the energy that you don't have anymore when you're 60, if you're still in your 40s or 30s, for some of the sort of lucky exited founders, you have an opportunity to actually contribute to changing the future and working on really high impact but very difficult initiatives. And in some cases, you could even argue there is a moral obligation to do so. I think there was an investor, actually, from Thunders phone, I guess, who wrote a post about good quest and bad quest. I don't know if you've read it years ago, but it really resonated with me.
He was essentially arguing that there are good quests and bad quests in the word. Good quests are quests that obviously make the world a better place. And bad quests either leave the world as is, or in some cases make it worse. And his thesis was that exited founders top operators have a duty to now choose a good quest and allocate their energy and time to and whatever it is, there's just so many good quests in the world, like education, energy, health care. You can make a difference in so many cases, specifically on initiatives that are by definition very big problems, very difficult problems.
So it requires a lot of experience, a lot of money, or difficult to raise money for. Difficult. So by structure, they require this kind of people that are very capable. And the bad quest that most people actually end up choosing for the wrong reasons are to build one more derivative software startup, to just do investment, join a prestigious VC just for the social status, or just because others are doing it, even if you're not interested in it. So those are more like the bad quest.
And that really stuck with me, that it'd be amazing to see this sort of like, yeah, maybe the new generation of entrepreneur can take on this one more fintech app, and that's great, and they'll learn and they'll build jobs and they'll create wealth. But then the second generation, the repeat founders, they have to start thinking more about what's shaping the future and what's shaping the world they want to see. And I think we have a responsibility.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:29:44 - 00:30:01]
Last time we spoke, I absolutely loved how you said that now is a very unique time in history when actually there are lots of people who are young and they're self made. Right. I would love you to talk a bit more about how you see this moment in history.
Adrien Cohen: [00:30:02 - 00:31:58]
It's fascinating if you think about it. I think it's the first time in the history of humanity where you have such a big groups of young, driven individuals, incredibly capable, well resourced, with the best network, the best skills, that suddenly overnight go from building massive businesses, they exit and then suddenly they fall in this void and they don't know what to do with their lives. And historically, wealth would be sort of generational. And so you'd have a lot of young, very rich people not doing anything with their lives. But that was very different because it was over a long time period.
Now you have people who are extremely capable, their brain are wired differently because they've been so used, we've been so used to working constantly. So I think work life balance is definitely not something that's well calibrated in our brain when you just constantly work. And if you think about it, this community of people now, if we'd find a way to point those people to big problems like climate change, or the list is so long, we could make such a big difference so quickly because of the amount of talent and resources you have in this pool. But the frustration and I think you share this frustration is when you meet with these communities of ex founders and exited founders, they're just without purpose and they don't know what to do and they end up choosing the bad quest that we described. Sometimes for sure, sometimes.
And I'm not judging in this sense. They just don't know. And they're not allocating their time to this. They're, for the most part, unfulfilled. And I think there is an opportunity here to see how we could just steer more people towards big problems that they care about and that will also contribute to society.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:31:58 - 00:32:28]
Yeah. What I found is quite often people are stuck in their own insecurities, including impostor syndrome. Syndrome, as you mentioned it, and then they can't get out of it. What I find absolutely fascinating about you is that you seem to be able to channel your guilt, your insecurities into action. And that is what I'm really trying to understand because I want to see if we can reverse engineer that so other people can do it.
Adrien Cohen: [00:32:29 - 00:32:48]
Yeah, I think you're right. That action really defines me. I don't like to think about things too much. I really like to act and do and see where it takes me. And my recommendation is, yeah, it's great to sometimes stop and think, but reality is you learn by doing.
Adrien Cohen: [00:32:48 - 00:33:46]
If you go after very, very big problems, it makes it easier to accept to fail. In my case, I'm trying to find and support technologies that can cure paralysis. So my hope is to contribute to a world where paralysis doesn't exist anymore. And I think there are things we can do to get to this place in a decade. It's incredibly hard.
Like most scientists will tell you, that you're given one central nervous system. If you break it, you're paralyzed. Game over. You can't repair it. And so if you accept status quo, it's a very hard problem, and most people tell you it's impossible to solve it.
So if you go after this kind of problem, you don't really think about failure in the same way because you're trying to address something so big and so hard that anything you do about it makes a difference. And in a way is a win and in a way is important.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:33:46 - 00:33:50]
So you basically allow yourself to fail. You accept failure.
Adrien Cohen: [00:33:50 - 00:33:56]
You accept failure, even start, because it comes with the fact that you're going after something really ambitious.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:33:57 - 00:34:10]
That brings us to your brother, which is the very central topic. So can you talk about him and also his accident and how it affected your life?
Adrien Cohen: [00:34:10 - 00:38:11]
Yeah. Fabrize, my older brother. He's 41 now, has two kids much smarter than me, went into some of the best engineering school, did quantum physics in Princetone, Big brain. He three years ago had a very bad accident, fractured his spine, ended up with complete paralysis from the waist down, which was a massive shock. Massive shock for him, obviously.
But I think people tend to underestimate the impact these kind of injuries have on the sort of broader family and network. I would probably compare that to a black hole. It really sucks in all of the sort of surrounding, and it really affects everyone around the person that's injured, because your life really changes, your mood changes, and everything around it changes. So that has been a massive trauma and it's still very fresh. It's not even three years.
I think when the accident happened, I was still driving tractable at the time, but I spent quite a bit of time with my brother. And initially there's not much you can do, right? Like, he went into rehab and you can just be around, but you can't do anything, which makes you feel extremely powerless. And, you know, being an entrepreneur, when you're an entrepreneur, you have this edge to solve the problem. And so after a while, I started thinking about whether there is anything I could do to solve the problem.
And so I went on this journey that actually many people in this space, in the spinal cord injury space go on, which is to get a sense of who is working on what. Like step one is how far are we from any sort of cure? And it felt good to start being proactive. So I got on a call with maybe 35 scientists, like Europe, Israel, US, everywhere. After all those calls, I got Kennedy so disillusioned and so frustrated.
It just really felt like we're absolutely not on a trajectory to a cure. It felt like people were working on very incremental innovation, and I'm used to moonshot and step change type of technology, and it felt like people were working in silos. It was extremely fragmented. So I would be on a Monday on a call with a team in Germany that was very excited by a new molecule that they know testing on rats to regenerate nerves. And then on Thursday, I'd be on a call with a team in New York that had tested the exact same molecule two years ago, completely felt was moving on, and they didn't even know, and I knew, and it was driving me nuts to see this being so inefficient.
And the third thing I really observed in the sort of ecosystem that was missing to get us to a cure is the lack of funding, the lack of capital for early stage biotechs. So there was a ton of really cool innovation in sort of pure discovery science in the labs, in academia, but none of it was getting out of the lab to people living with the injury. So translating. And that's because VCs didn't really care about the space. So that's the role of venture capital, to take a risk, invest in early stage companies, give them the sort of capital and network to build the product, and then bring it all the way to the clinic.
Adrien Cohen: [00:38:11 - 00:41:43]
And VCs was just not playing its role there for many reasons. So that gave me the idea of setting up a fund that would be targeted at this condition that would really spark more innovation and eventually attract the attention of more investors to just attract much more capital to the problem. And that felt like the most efficient way to drive systemic change, which is to actually make sure that an underfunded market gets activated, and that you get much more private capital to care about the topic, so that eventually you have more companies being generated, some fail, but there's just much more activity which eventually gets you to a cure. And so that's what I'm working on now. I got emotionally detached from my own company and baby tractable because I started obsessing about what I could do to drive this kind of impact.
And so I decided to exit and really spend my time and energy and capital on this initiative. I don't know if you're familiar with, maybe at this stage, it's important to sort of set the scene on this initiative, but I don't know if you're familiar with venture philanthropy, but that's an incredible concept that we're basically replicating to cure paralysis. In 1999, there was the cystic fibrosis foundation. So cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that attacks the lungs. It's very nasty.
And this foundation, which has now become the father of sort of the father of the model, realized the problem I'm describing for spinal cord injury, that there was just zero options for people living with the condition and the disease. And the main issue was the lack of funding for companies. And so they had adopted the traditional model of giving grants to academia, but it was just leading to more papers being written, which is useful, but doesn't help people living with the condition. And so they set up a fund. They raised 20 million.
I think Bill Gates matched it with another 20. So they raised a 40 million seed fund. They started investing in companies addressing specifically cystic fibrosis, and one company became incredibly impactful. In 2014, was acquired by Veritex, and the share that the foundation had was worth 3.5 billion. Yeah.
So now they have a balance sheet with 3.5 billion, and they can say they're going to get the job done, and so they now have much more leverage to really get the mission done. And now you have a number of other condition specific funds that have been created in juvenile diabetes and multiple myeloma Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Like, same situations, very specific conditions, where an expert fund really is set up, activates the market, lowers the risk for other investors to come in, because they're already expert fund, and eventually you get to much more options. Juvenile diabetes in six years. Now they have the first disease modifying therapy that was just FDA approved, and there are many examples of that.
So basically, I'm replicating this model to find a cure for paralysis.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:41:43 - 00:41:50]
Yeah. So it's such a beautiful illustration of the idea how money can be leveraged and not just source of more money.
Adrien Cohen: [00:41:51 - 00:41:51]
Totally agree.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:41:52 - 00:41:54]
Completely different thinking, completely different mindset.
Adrien Cohen: [00:41:54 - 00:42:36]
Yeah. And even more, because the way you think about this fund is it operates like a VC, but it's philanthropic, so exactly as you said, in the sense that it's an evergreen fund, so all of the profits are reinvested into the mission and into more companies until you get the mission done. So it's a way to think about money, as you said, as leverage, and you're not going to get back your money. You're going to put some money there. People who care about the mission will put their money together, and this leverage will shape the market and create a market that doesn't exist.
So that eventually, 5-10, 15 years from now, the world looks very different. So that's one example of how philanthropy can really sort of prime the pump and play a big role.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:42:36 - 00:42:38]
And you structured your fund that way?
Adrien Cohen: [00:42:38 - 00:43:15]
Yeah, it's structured as a charity. It's backed by foundations in the US, in Europe, because the goal is to not be fragmented. So it's to really bring together all of the key players in the space, and all of the sort of money that comes in are donations, and then all of the profits are reinvested 100% into more companies until we get it done. And the foundations pay for the operating cost of the team I'm building. I think this model is very transparent and very accountable, and that's what I like about it.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:43:16 - 00:43:40]
Brilliant. I like it, too. In my experience, post exit founders who do manage to build meaningful, fulfilling lives find their calling in one of three paths. They either teach or they build a new business, or they do philanthropy. If you had to choose between these three, which one would you choose?
And most importantly, why?
Adrien Cohen: [00:43:40 - 00:44:29]
I mean, I sort of chose already. I do a lot of mentorship. I think it's brilliant. But you don't have the leverage and the scale that you get with business and philanthropy. So I would probably take out teaching.
It's either philanthropy or business. As we just discussed, in the case of venture philanthropy, certain missions are not yet ready for capitalism to do its magic. And that's where philanthropy plugs a gap, where government are not ready or too slow, and businesses don't yet see the sort of financial incentives to get in. And so that's where philanthropy is so important. And then I think once those missions get to a place where it becomes more investable, is where businesses and sort of the traditional capitalism can sort of take over.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:44:29 - 00:44:32]
But it sounds like you're running your philanthropy as a business.
Adrien Cohen: [00:44:32 - 00:44:33]
Agreed. Yeah.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:44:33 - 00:44:44]
Because this is your core competence skill, right. You probably feel that this is what you. It's also a leverage, right? The skills you've acquired over your lifetime.
Adrien Cohen: [00:44:44 - 00:45:21]
Agreed. Yeah. I guess it's more like conceptually, sometimes it needs to be philanthropic money, and sometimes it can be private capital. But then the sort of vehicle you use within philanthropy is a different question. To not just go for the sort of warm and fuzzies of just donating money, but to actually care about the impact you're having with this philanthropy and the venture model.
The venture philanthropy model is one way to think about it. There are other ways. As long as indeed, you're really focused on the impact and the leverage you get with this money to really drive, make a difference.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:45:22 - 00:45:43]
Amazing. Can you tell me about how you choose people to surround yourself with? Because you sound as someone who does it quite deliberately, understandably, because your time is very limited, you're dedicating your life to very big purposes. How do you choose those people?
Adrien Cohen: [00:45:44 - 00:46:24]
Yeah, I have this super non objective criteria of I meet the person and I have to see this sparkle in the eyes. I don't know if you've felt that when you were running your business, but has this individual achieved incredible things? And I don't care where they are, as long as they've shown that they've managed to get to sort of an outstanding place in a specific field. I think this is a big flag and signal that this individual, he or she, is really able to achieve a disproportionate impact.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:46:24 - 00:46:37]
Do you think your ability to identify those people comes from the fact that you exposed yourself to all these different types of people and cultures in your life.
Adrien Cohen: [00:46:37 - 00:47:16]
I think one thing that's always been a strong part of my personality, if you ask my friends or wife, is I have a ton of empathy. Even if you look at our management team, I would always be much more on the sort of empathetic side. And that's been part of me since I was a kid. And I suspect this plays a big role because that helps me really understand people's motivation and whether there will be the right level of connection. And so I would say that's sort of my secret superpower.
Is this empathy?
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:47:16 - 00:47:19]
I love that you call empathy your secret superpower.
Adrien Cohen: [00:47:19 - 00:47:20]
I guess so.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:47:20 - 00:47:26]
Another superpower you definitely have is your clarity of purpose. How do you achieve that?
Adrien Cohen: [00:47:26 - 00:48:43]
I think one secret sort of superpower that people should use more is to accept, to stop and reboot. So instead of, I would get started and do things. But if you see you're in the wrong direction, not to fear stopping and starting something again fresh with a different perspective. So accepting that you'll try things and that it will fail and that you start again. On the clarity side, what the people that really helped me to realize that that has happened are actually two persons that know, find myself always calling, and I get clarity in five minutes.
My wife and my mom, are those two, you know, attractable. I used to joke that my wife Julie, was the secret sort of CEO of the company, or at least head of HR. Every time I'd have a big decision to make or a tactical or HR related, like those things where it's 10:00 p.m. And you have to make a decision and you're like, in this fog and you don't know what to do and you're super stressed and you're tired. And literally, I would just explain the situation to my wife, and in 1 minute, she would resolve it, like, 1 minute.
Like, incredible, incredible.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:48:43 - 00:48:45]
How lucky you are.
Adrien Cohen: [00:48:45 - 00:50:00]
And she keeps on saying to this day that those were easy and she doesn't realize how hard those questions are. But the moment she gives me the answer, I'm like, wow, for sure, this is the way to go. Like before a big town hall where you have to address the team and take hard decision. I'd always consult her, and she'd always really put me back in the right direction.
And she's honestly never failed at that. So in my case, my wife is this incredible partner, and you're in the kitchen and you're cooking, and she's just telling you, well, just do this and this and this and that's it. And that sense of clarity. So my wife. And then for more, like business specific decisions or more strategic decisions, I find that just a short call to my mother, who has much more experience and who also, incredibly, has this incredible business acumen and sort of also has seen so many more situations.
By definition, same thing. In a few minutes, she's really able to. So I don't know if she comes up with the solution or she makes me realize that I sort of already knew what the solution was, but she makes it clear. I honestly don't know. But two minutes, I know what to do.
I hang up. I'm confident. I know what to do.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:50:00 - 00:50:10]
So are there any rules or principles or lessons that you could share with people to help them create this kind of union?
Adrien Cohen: [00:50:11 - 00:50:31]
You definitely, especially when you have kids, you definitely want to have moments, just the two of you, and that needs to be very frequent. So at least every week, just going for a walk or going for lunch even, it's just having those moments. This is really a key part of the recipe, I'd say.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:50:31 - 00:50:51]
So your three superpowers are empathy, the ability to stop to reassess your direction in life, and your relationship with your wife and your mother. So when you stop to reassess your direction in life, how do you actually do that? How do you think about introspection, intentional solitude?
Adrien Cohen: [00:50:51 - 00:50:52]
It's super important.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:50:52 - 00:50:53]
It is super important.
Adrien Cohen: [00:50:53 - 00:51:42]
I'm sort of somewhat extrovert, and I really like to spend time with people, but I really need the time with myself, which I guess is what you mean with introspection and solitude. I like to just go for a long walk or just be on my own and read a book or play chess. That really helps me, and I think it helps me more with creativity. Like, I get more new ideas and fresh ideas when I'm like this, and I sort of get a lot of my energy back, and I really need those moments. And again, my wife knows when I need those moments and she pushes me out.
Have this weekend for yourself. And then when I'm back, I'm fully recharged.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:51:43 - 00:51:46]
Do you meditate?
Adrien Cohen: [00:51:46 - 00:51:47]
I don’t. I've tried.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:51:47 - 00:51:48]
Doesn't work for you. That's okay.
Adrien Cohen: [00:51:48 - 00:52:01]
I'm too impatient, and I get all those thoughts that cross my, and I just can't focus and I can't let it go.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:52:01 - 00:52:07]
How about changing your geographical location? Like, if you go travel, do you get more clarity out of that?
Adrien Cohen: [00:52:07 - 00:52:49]
For sure. Yeah. Or if I'm on a business trip, I'll add a day before I go home. And that also helps a lot, I think.
There's actually an expert who recommended to force people to be with themselves and sort of be more creative, to see those sort of moments of solitude as business trips, to sort of take out the guilt and force them to go on a business trip. So I don't do that, just for the record. I actually really go for business. But I will try to add like half a day or a day at the end or at some point just to have time for myself before I come home to the sort of back to the day to day.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:52:51 - 00:53:18]
So let's jump to practical question. To focus completely on your purpose. I assume you've built this stability in your system and security in your life, and it sounds like it comes from your mother, your wife. It comes from the fact that you have the financial means to support your family, and that probably gives you a peace of mind.
Adrien Cohen: [00:53:18 - 00:53:19]
Yeah, for sure.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:53:19 - 00:53:22]
But how do you manage your portfolio? How do you go about it?
Adrien Cohen: [00:53:22 - 00:53:23]
How do I manage mine?
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:53:23 - 00:53:26]
Your portfolio, your assets?
Adrien Cohen: [00:53:26 - 00:54:59]
Yeah. So I have no interest in day to day sort of investment management. I'm not good at it. I have no interest in the financial markets. I have no interest in the sort of latest instruments and blah, blah, blah.
It is not what I'm good at, and I'm not interested. Outsource that to a good private bank. And so whoever you trust, family office, private bank, I don't care. My decision was, I am going to put most of it in a sort of nest egg, which with very simple guidance on the sort of return and risk I want to take on this. So I just don't feel that there's ever going to be an issue with my kids and family.
And then I took three buckets out of it. One was lifestyle, one was sort of fun and risky stuff I like to do. So in my case, I do a lot of mentorship. Sometimes I do engine investment in teams I like based on the radar. And so I have a pool that I just allocate to this and then a pool to philanthropy.
I obsess about allocating my time efficiently, which in my case is building this operation. And it's actually much more rewarding when you put in time into an initiative than just money, I find.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:54:59 - 00:55:00]
But you invest your money as well?
Adrien Cohen: [00:55:00 - 00:55:55]
I invest. It's time and money, obviously, but I could also choose to just put in money and be happy personally, and maybe it's something for sort of your community to reflect on. I find that when you put in your time into an initiative, I'm sort of obsessed with control, so I know it will be done better if I do it at this stage and drive it and control it. And then, second, it's much more rewarding, and if you've contributed your own time to it, on top of money, there's some smaller initiatives on the side that I don't allocate time to, which is more, how can you make a difference to your community or the initiatives that are important, where you need to donate? That's sort of, like, more the ongoing side of philanthropy.
But most of my philanthropic activity is really this fund and this mission.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:55:55 - 00:56:03]
So you mentioned that you're a control freak. Where does that come from, and how did it help you in life or not?
Adrien Cohen: [00:56:06 - 00:57:10]
All my friends would confirm that, and my wife as well. I'm definitely a control freak. I think this control freak sort of mindset definitely comes from my mom. When we were younger, there was this book that she used to talk a lot about, which is, I think the title is only the paranoiac survive. Like, you need to be paranoiac in life and to sort of always hope for the best, but always anticipate the worst option and just plan accordingly and control everything.
And I think she's used this approach in business to always think about the worst case scenario and always anticipate, because if there's the tiniest little thing that you think is going to go wrong in a big sort of contractual agreement, a big deal, a product issue, chances are this will happen. And so you have to be on top of it. You have to anticipate, you have to plan for it.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:57:10 - 00:57:13]
Would you like your children to be control freaks?
Adrien Cohen: [00:57:13 - 00:57:57]
No, I think it's the balance between the sort of energy and exhaustion that you get from it. Actually, my wife is not like that at all. She's the opposite. She's much more of the kind of thinking that time also will fix things. And if you let things flow the way they are, sometimes they get resolved by themselves.
And, like, the opposite of that, I see the things, and I need to go. Yeah. And honestly, I think it's been a key to my success in business, but I don't know if I want my kids to be like that. Actually, I think it would be worth exploring other ways to have this kind of impact without having to check and control everything. Yeah.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:57:57 - 00:58:01]
Okay. To continue reverse engineering.
Adrien Cohen: [00:58:01 - 00:58:01]
Okay.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:58:01 - 00:58:15]
I want to hear about single focus versus multitasking. The reason I'm asking is because you said you resigned from being actively involved in tractable in order to focus on your venture philanthropy.
Adrien Cohen: [00:58:15 - 00:59:15]
It was not a single or multitasking. It was like more emotionally not being as attached to it as I used to be because of the accident. That's the trigger. That was the event that really changed my perception to your question, which is, I think, separate and different, single task, because when it's very hard problems, you have to really focus on those to get them done. I find that otherwise you don't move at the right pace.
And so I usually would allocate 80% of my energy on one big thing. I find that if you don't do that, it's very hard to make those things emerge from the ground, potentially. Arguably, if your initiative can be done with 20% of your energy, then it's maybe not that ambitious or not that hard. I will always do a bit of other things on the side because that's how I sort of get more creativity and ideas. But I'm single task focused.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:59:16 - 00:59:34]
So talking about obsession, help me understand your work life balance. So I know you are very disciplined about spending time. You are obsessed about your venture philanthropy.
Adrien Cohen: [00:59:34 - 00:59:34]
Yeah.
Anastasia Koroleva: [00:59:35 - 00:59:43]
You're very disciplined, it sounds like about spending quality time with your wife. So tell me about the rest.
Adrien Cohen: [00:59:43 - 01:00:20]
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think that's one of the benefits or one of the many things I get from this relationship with my wife is that she forces me to be much more balanced. I think without her, I would be probably working all the time or I think my wife is very good at making sure that I have enough balance and enough time spent with the kids, with the family. So not. She knows I work a lot, and she respects that and she supports that, but she's really helping me to be balanced enough on those elements.
Anastasia Koroleva: [01:00:21 - 01:00:27]
So you didn't feel this need to just enjoy life for a while after you?
Adrien Cohen: [01:00:27 - 01:00:38]
I've always enjoyed life. I think that's the reality. And we've built the companies while building the family. I don't feel like I made massive trade offs.
Anastasia Koroleva: [01:00:38 - 01:00:39]
Okay.
Adrien Cohen: [01:00:39 - 01:01:05]
I think the key things that are important to me I have managed to do while building my company. So we've built this wonderful family with three kids at the same time. We had our twins when I was raising the be around for tractable, which was the hardest time in my life. I will never, ever do that again. But we did it right.
We didn't postpone key things. And so I'm quite grateful to her for this.
Anastasia Koroleva: [01:01:05 - 01:01:06]
Incredible.
Adrien Cohen: [01:01:06 - 01:01:12]
Yeah. So that's the superpower. The superpower is find the right partner.
Anastasia Koroleva: [01:01:12 - 01:01:20]
Absolutely. In your case you clearly achieved it. Incredible. What values do you absolutely want to instill in your kids?
Adrien Cohen: [01:01:22 - 01:02:05]
Wow. I think there's a few things that come to mind. First is what's really important to me is that they're sincere and honest and that they do what they say. So when you say, oh, I didn't have time, you actually chose to allocate your time differently. And then second is they have to have a really big sense of humor.
Yeah. This ability to sort of make fun of yourself and not take yourself too seriously, I think is extremely important. And I would really love for my kids to have that. And I can already see my daughter, Alex, is like this already, and that makes me very happy.
Anastasia Koroleva: [01:02:05 - 01:02:06]
My last question.
Adrien Cohen: [01:02:07 - 01:02:07]
Okay.
Anastasia Koroleva: [01:02:07 - 01:02:09]
How do you want to be remembered?
Adrien Cohen: [01:02:14 - 01:03:15]
That is a very spooky question. I have never thought about this. Two things that come to mind. One more like as an individual, like the values we just discussed, that I was actually true to those values, that I was sincere, that I was loyal to my friends, to my family, is actually quite important. So I hope I'll be remembered for someone that was sort of consistent with what he was saying, and obviously at a higher level.
For me, what's crucial is impact and impacting people and leaving a legacy. And so if, in hindsight, paralysis doesn't exist anymore in the world, or at least people living with paralysis have life changing options and have played a role in getting there, I think this can be an incredible way to be remembered for. For sure.
Anastasia Koroleva: [01:03:16 - 01:03:18]
Thank you so much.
Adrien Cohen: [01:03:18 - 01:03:18]
Thank you.
Anastasia Koroleva: [01:03:18 - 01:03:25]
This was so beautiful, and you opened up so beautifully and authentically, and I so much appreciate it.
Adrien Cohen: [01:03:25 - 01:03:32]
Thank you for having me. It was a deeper conversation than I initially expected, but, yeah, I definitely enjoyed it.
