In this CEO Wisdom podcast, host Charles interviews serial entrepreneur and Sopheon CEO Greg Coticchia. Greg outlines three core lessons from his many startup experiences: (1) the paramount importance of product‑market fit and timing—being too early or too late kills a venture; (2) the value of rapid, low‑cost “sneaky little experiments” (MVPs) while avoiding endless “experimentation hell” by deciding on a good‑enough point to act. He shares his own practice of testing ideas with cheap cold‑email campaigns. The conversation then shifts to AI, where Greg describes ChatGPT as a democratizing force, acknowledges its imperfections, but remains a technology optimist, noting the long history of AI hype and its current practical utility. When asked about managing a 200‑person, globally distributed team amid AI‑related anxiety, Greg stresses relentless, multi‑channel communication tailored to generational, cultural, and geographic preferences, repeated in varied formats to achieve alignment. For aspiring entrepreneurs, he advises taking action despite fear, taking smart risks, and building a trusted mentor network. Finally, Greg reveals Sopheon’s strategic vision: positioning the company as the leader in “InnovationOps,” operationalizing innovation to capture the trillions spent on R&D and dramatically improve ROI over the next five years.
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Guys, welcome to another CEO Wisdom podcast. We have Greg Coticchia. I'm trying to have that name right. He's CEO, member of the board of directors at Sofians. We're gonna discuss software dev CEO stuff. That is going to be exciting. Greg, can you briefly introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about Sofian?
Sure. My name is Greg Coticchia. Thanks for having me on, Charles. I am a serial entrepreneur. I've done about 14 different startups over, well, since dinosaurs roamed the earth, and And some of them have been wildly successful. Some of them have been wonderful learning experiences and some of them have been everything in between. Anchored my whole career on enterprise B2B software and technology businesses. And Sofion is all about innovation management. We help companies go from idea to commercialization.
Love it. Okay. So let's start with all of these defeats. What have been the main lessons that you've learned? You can give us a top 3 of all these lessons from all these defeats that I had too over the years.
Yeah, I'll tell you what, there was a poll that came out a few years ago that summarized what was the number one reasons why startup fails, and it wasn't the wrong team and it wasn't money, it was, uh, there was no market. People didn't want to buy what you had to sell.
Yeah, product-market fit, right?
And, and it really comes down to that. Now, I will put a corollary to that, um, because I think it is important, which is you can be too early to that market and of course you can be too late to that marketplace and that market timing is really key. So, you know, you can, until you get product market fit, you can spend too much money on trying to build the right sales team prematurely, you can go after a market too late. So that's another thing. But at the end of the day, if you're not solving a problem that people are willing to spend money on, a real pain or problem, then, you know, then you just have an idea, right?
And that's the reason why I run my lab at Top Leads and constantly test out new product variances with a bunch of markets/industries on a daily basis. I'm testing about like 10 new ideas on a daily basis, and that's pretty much wonderful because if I get product-market fit, I just double down on it and there you go, I have a business. So I'm trying to crack that problem that I faced multiple, multiple times over the years. Back in the days, I would put the carriage in front of the horses you know, I'd say like, oh yeah, let's just start this Facebook ads agency for realtors and I'm going to try it for 3 years and I'm going to see if there's a product market fit there. While I could have tested the actual thing in a couple of days rather than in years. What do you think about that?
Yeah, well, a lot of people do that. They put, you know, they try it out for a number of years. But I like this idea, actually. I heard it, you know, everyone talks about MVPs, minimum viable product. I heard this the other night and I'd never heard it before. Evidently, it's been around Stanford University for a long time, which they call it a an SLE, a sneaky little experiment. And I love that idea. I think that's, that's a great way to do it. How do you actually test that idea in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of money? And yeah, how do you make a— how do you do a valid experiment so that you can, you know, test and quickly get there? Now, I'll say one other corollary to that too. I've seen some people spend some time in what I call experimentation hell. They're always experimenting and they're never doing. At some point you got to say, okay, we've experimented enough. Now, you know, does dog eat the dog food? Let's, let's go. We got to take some action now. So, you know, you'll never have 100% of the information you need. What's the good enough? And you got to move forward.
Right, right, right. In my case, you know, I've been using cold email. I've been trying to add at least 1,000 contacts to my campaigns and the cost is so minimal. That's why I love, you know, this cold email lab. It probably cost me like $3 per experiment. And in terms of the area I focus on, for example, there's been some themes in my actual business life. So last year it's been my mastermind, my podcast, and this agency. So these are my three main activities. You could add coaching to that. I want to SaaSify this year. I want to go very deep into AI. And the next question I have for you is that we've seen like everything that's been happening with AI. People call it AI anxiety. There's A new app every day, there's a new GPT every day. What do you do with that? How do you adapt to that new landscape?
Yeah, great question. You know, certainly I think what has happened is ChatGPT has made accessible and democratized AI. What used to be kind of this discussion about, oh, artificial intelligence and stuff we saw in movies or read about in books, all of a sudden had a distinct way we could get on our browser, type something and go, oh, that's what they mean. So it became very real for a lot of people. I, you know, it's a good fire starter. Is it perfect? No. I mean, one of the things you'll learn if you, if you know, if you like used to Google yourself, if you ChatGPT yourself, you'll see that there's a lot of places you work that you didn't work at and schools that you went to, attended that you didn't attend. And yeah, it'll make— it's going to make a lot of mistakes. On the other hand, what a great way of saving time to get something done and get a starting point. So it's going to get better. It's going to— it's another part of automation in our lives through another means. I think it's wickedly— I'm a technology optimist, though. You know, I know that there is always a dark side to every technology and things, but in general, I'm a believer. You know, AI, by the way, I'm old enough to remember when there were 5 companies that were involved in AI in the late 1980s, and people built these things called LISP machines, special dedicated machines, and built knowledge bases and systems and all this stuff. And people were scared way back then. And, uh, guess what? It, you know, it's 40 years later and it's still not scary. It's— it— now we're, we're advancing things, and this is a, this is a great opportunity for people to, to use it and other technologies like it.
Yeah, I— nerds tend to undervalue, uh, psychology and social sciences, but one main observation regarding to all AI doomers is that the calculus has pretty much stayed the same, you know, the rationale behind the AI fears, just that the anxiety and the noise has like 10x since that time. You know, 1980s was a very peaceful time. I mean, there was, yeah, the Cold War and so forth, but the anxieties were so few. We didn't have this smartphone, this in our pocket, like hurling us with bad news and all the— this type of things. I wrote an article about that, could be somewhat controversial, of BuzzFeed, uh, closing down today, and also Insider, like, uh, slashing employees. But big media is like really a good part of the response, has a good part of the responsibility behind all this anxiety. And then TikTok, you know, and people talking about banning it. Well, I think it's mostly a good decision because TikTok is just like lobotomizing our brain. So I think that creates a lot of worries. And it's cool to talk with a veteran like you that have seen other colors throughout the years talking about that, because the time is tight on both of our ends. You're CEO of a $200 people's company. How do you manage people's anxiety and how do you keep them aligned towards your main vision?
Yeah, you know, I think it comes down to communication, communication, communication. You've got to, and you've got to communicate a lot of different ways and across generations. I mean, a person of your age or someone younger, how they want to consume information is different than a person of my age. You got to think about gender, you got to think about location. I have employees worldwide, and so I've got to understand how a person in the Netherlands is going to interpret information different than someone in the UK, different than someone in Australia, different than someone in California versus New York, right? And so you've got to be sensitive to all those different issues in how they want to consume things. And, you know, some of the old rules though are still the same. You can't just say something once or twice or even 3 times and expect people to understand it, consume it, and practice it. It's got to be something that is repeated often in different formats so that makes it easy for them to consume. So that's how you're going to get that alignment. That's how you're going to get that shared vision and the shared goal of what you're trying to achieve, right?
You've got like a very impressive career and accomplished a lot of things. What would you advise younger folks of around my age that want to start a business? I mean, you're a teacher as well, and I think it's in your heart to educate younger folks and kind of guide them. Where do you see the misguiding happening and what general guidelines would you have for younger folks that want to start in entrepreneurship?
Yeah, two things. Don't be afraid to act. You know, it's nothing is ever as— don't let the fear control you. It's never as bad. The failure is never as bad as you think it's going to be, and you're going to learn a lot from it and it's going to help you. The other thing is be smart about those risks that you take. There are a lot of wonderful people out there that are happy to be your mentor, your coach, advice. Build a network of people that you trust, that you can get advice from. Listen to programs like this. And I mean, the sources today are marvelous in terms of learning things. Go out and, you know, get yourself involved. And people in general, most people, if you ask them, they'll take 10 minutes, they'll help you out. So just ask and you'd be surprised what people come back with. So take the risk, get the coaching, move forward.
Love it. What's next for Sofian? Where do you want to bring the company in the next 5 years considering everything that's happening in AI?
Yeah, we're a leader today in innovation management. Our goal is to be the leader in innovation management. We are reacting to the message that's in the marketplace. Like a lot of other marketplaces, there's, you know, there's DevOps and ProductOps and SecurityOps. Well, of course, there's now InnovationOps. And so we see people operationalizing innovation because there's trillions of dollars spent in innovation. And half of it is wasted. 94% of executives don't think they're getting the value out of their innovation investment. Well, we'd like to help cure that. And so we look at ourselves as being in the next 5 years the leader in helping people bring the reality of InnovationOps.
Well, I love it. I think it's such a big thing because indeed, like, people just consider innovation like just a creative process that they should do because others do it while it's the main— it can be the main driver of ROI. And we've seen lately with businesses such as Google, when you stop innovating, when you rest on your laurels, or when you come with not BS programs, but I would say it like, yeah, vanity programs to create innovation doesn't work, you know. So yeah, I would love to extend this interview and talk about how OpenAI like over-innovated and created this massive beast of a product lately. But yeah, we're gonna keep it to this. Where can people find out more about you, Greg?
Well, they can go to Sophion, which is at sophion.com, and they can certainly connect with me on LinkedIn, uh, and I like to communicate there, and I'd like to connect with you. So look me up at Greg.Coticchia, and that's C-O-T-I-C-C-H-I-A, on LinkedIn, and we can connect in both places.
