For this entrepreneur interview project, I aimed to reach out and learn from an innovative business owner that I can potentially emulate in the future. I spent a lot of time looking for an entrepreneur that started his business/company sparked from his own creative mind. Interviewing someone that had their own restaurant, ice cream parlor, or dry cleaning business definitely would have sufficed, but I don't believe I would have benefited greatly from that. I was fortunate enough that my friend's dad, Jon Coss took the time out of his day for me to interview him. Jon Coss incorporated his technology resources and his innovative mind to create Pondera, a fraud detection company that has been around since 2011. .
Mr. Coss's path in creating this ingenious firm was not only intriguing, but also inspiring. Listening to his path from a regular worker to a preeminent CEO was very neat. He informed me that starting a business can be extremely stressful and difficult at first which is evident by his first attempt at starting a business. His first business did not find the rapid success he was hoping for and was eventually bought out. Obviously this disappointed him but he did not let this deter him from reaching success. Google later offered him a consulting job and the exposure to the Google technology is what gave Mr. Coss the idea of starting a fraud detection company. He licensed the Google software and started his own fraud detection company in a week. I asked how he was so confident this company was going to succeed and it was because he believed that there was a true demand for this on the market. With the economy being down and having many unemployed men and women, this economy is prone to many different types of fraud.
According to Mr. Coss, there were many challenges he faced in starting a business. Pondera would be virtually unknown to every customer since he created it himself. Competing with the likes of big name companies such as IBM, Palentir, and SAS; he had to make sure that his product would be marginally better than these bigger names.