Adrien Cohen. 2x Unicorn Builder Talks Purpose After a Business Sale

0:28Welcome to the Exit Paradox Podcast. and love. Adrian Cohen built and sold his first business for$3 billion. He went on to build another multi-billion dollar company at an even faster pace. Then, at the age of 36, he discovered a new purpose, eradicating paralysis in the next 10 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're in for a treat spending time with him today. Adrian, you achieved enormous success early in life. You've built$2 billion businesses in two different countries, each of which was foreign to you.

1:16You'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? Where do you get this source of energy? Looking back at your life, what was the earliest source of motivation you remember? If we want to start with the childhood, you have to start with my parents, which, you know, 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, you know, strongly impacted me because on my end, I had everything I needed.

1:58So 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'd 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.

2:42Not very religious, but both my parents were Jewish and practicing. 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? 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.

3:20And I guess what it meant for me and my brother was the importance of education. In fact, you know, 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, reading and learning has been strongly and deeply rooted into me from a very young age. You came from a wealthy family. How did your parents avoid you being a spoiled rich kid? Because I didn't know we were wealthy. Okay. 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.

4:15And because I didn't realize, I thought, okay, we're okay, but nothing crazy. And I realized that you'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 like taking care of myself, right? So, and same with my brother. What do you think your parents did right and what did they do wrong? 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.

4:55Okay. Which, whether you become a musician, you know, you work in construction, you're an artisan, you're a scientist. I don't care. You do what you like. Yeah. 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. But for sure, it's stayed with me. 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. 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.

5:37Maybe 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. So you blame them for your success? I guess so. So you got your education and you had a corporate job. Yes. Oh, wow. That's a big, 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, you know, a top business school in France. And I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life.

6:17Very immature. And as you said, I started in 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 started 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.

6:59I felt like the, you know, the long hours made no sense. I was angry at, you know, 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 you know we'd go and eat sushi on the like 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 you know my performance was very good but my behavior was to be watched, that, you know, it was not appropriate, etc, etc.

7:47And 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, you know, months at Goldman. And then I think the second thing, I guess, is that, you know, 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.

8:24And 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, it's 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. So do you remember at that time how you defined success? 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, you know, having those people opening your door of the cab, you know, at 9 p.m.

9:06and 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.

9:45But I'm sure at Goldman, you were surrounded by people who associated success with money and financial freedom, but it didn't affect you. 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 in 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 world and so for her obviously investment banking at Goldman is like the best thing you can 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 like you should seize it yeah but I would just I knew I didn't want to go back so I you know took a gap year traveled to China studied in China And then when it was time to go back and, you know, really just continue with Goldman, I refused their offer and decided not to continue there, which was a big shock.

10:43And 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, you know, a few years later, I ended up having this opportunity to finally do something much more entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial. Sorry, I met this crazy German guy, Oliver Sammler. He's, you know, built Rocket Internet, which is a big sort of investor and incubator that's essentially looking at the best e-commerce models in the US and launching them in emerging markets. And he told me, you know, I was 27. He said, look, we're going to launch Amazon in Southeast Asia. I'll give you 10 million.

11:25You go with two of your friends, you go to Vietnam and you build Amazon in Vietnam. And this felt like this, like the opportunity I was waiting for. I was, you know, this sort of insecure overachiever, like where you're looking for something bigger, but you're still not ready to take a lot of risk. And this felt like, you know, 10 million building a company, you know, 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 like motorbikes everywhere and it felt amazing and then I decided to go and so I ended up you know being 27 on the ground in Vietnam being you know 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 you know 10 million on the bank I had not done much on e-commerce 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 only thing 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?

12:55To me, I was always thinking, worst case, it 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 three 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. That's absolutely incredible, especially given that you did it all in a new culture. 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.

13:31They 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, They, you know, 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.

14:15We 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 you know establish the right sort of sourcing you know method we'll you know 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. This actually lasted way longer than we wanted because it was impossible to find suppliers.

14:55Which meant that at some point we had 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 and 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. So on a personal level, what motivated you to go through all of this, especially given that money was not an issue?

15:34I 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 yeah I didn't really know what I meant by impact I 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 you know 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.

16:27So being exposed to a foreign culture like this after you already lived in China, what did it give you? 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.

17:07Yeah, and then it trains you to think independently, doesn't it? Correct. Absolutely. Absolutely. 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 dollars 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. 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.

17:50The reality is the best outcome was for the Samwell brothers, which was sort of the agreement from the get-go. They have pushed a lot of people to entrepreneurship and to like 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 my co-founders and you know I had this it was completely opportunistic I had met Alex at La Zala in Vietnam.

18:28He traveled back to London to study what at the time was deep learning. 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. So what stage is it on right now? We just closed the Series E. We became the first computer vision unicorn in the UK two years ago, the Series D. So in six years, we went from zero to a billion, which was an incredible journey.

19:17So you built two unicorns. Two unicorns. Brilliant. yeah it's I would say it sounds crazy when you when you say it it definitely is I think founders get a disproportionate amount of attention in my opinion a lot has to do with a luck be timing and see the people you surround yourself with and I think I've always been surrounding by 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.

20:03So 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 a 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 companies were just acquired 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 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 both Lazada and Tractable I think the 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 you know villages and places in the country had no access to medical devices and had to, you know, 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.

21:49And we'd be delivering that to you in a day. Attractable, 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, you can, 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 do you still have this feeling I guess you can call it guilt that you have it too easy.

22:39Oh, yeah. What you mentioned in your childhood. And now I have an additional feeling of being an imposter. 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. 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 like an easy childhood and you went to good schools etc 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 send or maybe you will send me the bill but I still feel it's not enough I and I still think it's the main driver, that I have to do more.

23:32Yeah, 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 way, you know, I have three kids. You know, I love my family. Everyone is healthy. And so, you know, when I see people that work so hard and, you know, work much more than and it's just 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. 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, you know, when he acquired a business, I think he said something like, when you get to 10 million, you know your family is secured like you the first 10 million is for your family and when you get to 100 million then you 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 yeah and I think this thinking has really helped me to see money as uh and myself as a way to sort of use it both time and money to make a difference in the world yeah rather than just make it grow for no reason yeah I can very much relate to it the way I think about it is it it's leverage it's basically leverage for something for your purpose for something that really matters because I think people go from you know 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 and you clearly share that money and time is your leverage.

25:45And so is your social circle, by the way. All these connections, relationships you've built, you can use them to achieve meaningful impact. Would you agree with that? 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 there's like 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 a an investor actually from founders phone i guess who wrote a post about good quest and bad quest.

26:39I don't know if you've read it years ago, but it really resonated with me. He was essentially arguing that there are good quest and bad quest in the world. You know, good quest are quests that obviously make the world a better place. And bad quest either leave the world as is, or in some cases make it worse. And his thesis was that, you know exited funders 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 like 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 yeah 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 you know it'd be amazing to see this sort of like yeah maybe the new generation of entrepreneur can take on those you know 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.

28:23You know, 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 are self-made, right? I would love you to talk a bit more about how you see this moment in history. 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, you know, young, driven individuals, incredibly capable, well-resourced with the best network, the best skills that suddenly overnight go from like building massive businesses, they exit and then suddenly they fall in this void and they don't know what to do with their lives.

29:08And, you know, historically wealth would be sort of generational. And so you'd have like 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 you know work-life balance is definitely not something that's well uh calibrated in our brain when you just constantly work and if you if you think about it this community of people now if you if you know if we'd find a way to point those people to big problems like climate change or like we can just 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 yeah uh but the frustration and i think you shared this frustration is when you meet with these communities of ex-founders and ex-edit funders they're just they're just without purpose and they they don't know what to do yeah and they end up choosing the bad quest that we described Sometimes, for sure.

30:14Sometimes. And I'm not judging in the sense that 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. What I found is quite often people are stuck in their own insecurities, including imposter 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.

30:57And 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. Yeah, I guess 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. If you go after a very, very big problem, it makes it easier to accept to fail. In my case, I'm trying to find and support technologies that can cure paralysis. So, you know, my hope is to contribute to a world where paralysis doesn't exist anymore.

31:44And 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 you know 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 so you basically allow yourself to fail, you accept failure before you even start because it comes with the fact that you're going after something really ambitious that brings us to your brother which is a very central topic so can you talk about him and also his accident and how it affected your life yeah so Fabrice my older brother he's 41 now has two kids much older than me went into some of the best engineering school did quantum physics in Princeton 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 uh massive shock for him uh obviously uh but i think people tend to underestimate the impact this kind of injuries have on the sort of broader family and network.

33:29I think some people, I would probably compare that to a black hole. It really sucks in all of the 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, you know, I spent quite a bit of time with my brother. And, you know, 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.

34:23and you know being an entrepreneur uh when you're an entrepreneur you have this itch to like solve the problem solve the problem uh and so after a while i started thinking about whether there's anything i could do to solve the problem uh and so i went on this journey that actually many people in this sort of in this space in the uh 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 like being proactive so i got on a call with maybe 35 scientists like europe israel us everywhere after all those calls i got candidly so disillusioned and so frustrated it just really felt like we're absolutely not on a trajectory to cure you know it felt like people were working on very incremental innovation and you know i'm used to like moonshot and you know step change type of technology and it felt like people were working in silos extremely fragmented so you know i would be on a Monday on a call with a team in Germany that was very excited by a new molecule that they were testing on rats to regenerate nerves.

35:46And 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 it 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 occur 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 injury. So translating.