Prior to joining Citrix, Cohen was involved in strategic development and finance at a number of technology companies, including Parametric Technologies and Digital Equipment Corporation, and spent four years as a technology venture capitalist.   During his career he has completed over $1.5 billion of merger and investment transactions. Andy currently serves as a Director on the Boards of IntervalZero and Kaviza and is a board observer with five other companies.

Cohen earned a Bachelor of Science in International Relations and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School and earned his Masters of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Austin.

Linda Mason was originally going to make a case study of Bright Horizons, her $1.3 billion, early childhood care business, but reconsidered in light of the current economic crisis — to the benefit of her audience. Instead, she takes up her own story as a recession-era entrepreneur who built several hugely successful, socially oriented ventures, navigating very real pitfalls and challenges along the way. Her “nonlinear path” yielded important life lessons, which she shares in this talk. Some highlights from her story:

Mason took a major detour from a planned career in management consulting when she and Roger Brown, who was to become her husband, left Yale in 1979 with their MBAs to work in Cambodian refugee camps. After a year, they returned to corporate life. But some time later, she and Brown experienced a watershed moment at a New Year’s Eve party, realizing their years of accumulating money and frequent flyer miles left them “depressed.” They determined that night to make a change.

Soon after, Save the Children called, looking for help dealing with the terrible famine sweeping western Sudan. Mason and Brown had 24 hours to make up their minds: There was “no time to make a list of pros and cons. It was a fork in the road, and we knew it was the path we were to take,” says Mason. This experience taught her, “It’s sometimes important to leap before you look.”

Management skills came in handy as the team set up a complex food distribution operation, one that challenged relief organization orthodoxy. This experience, which at the time “seemed crazy and risky,” fueled Mason and Brown’s next move in 1986: addressing the shortage of high quality child care in the U.S. The couple turned their Cambridge home into a start up headquarters, and developed a business plan, which they sold to enthusiastic VCs. But corporations balked at buying in, viewing the fledgling Bright Horizons team as “flaky Peace Corps types.” Mason, reflecting on this period, counsels “do your homework extremely well, then be very, very stubborn.”

As New England sank into a recession, and their idea faced collapse, the duo transformed crisis into opportunity. They summoned all their energy for a final effort, marketing onsite childcare to real estate developers looking to attract businesses. In 1990, four years after starting, Bright Horizons was in the black. The two ran the business for 15 years, when they moved onto other interests. “Discover your passions,” Mason advises, and combine them with your skills “to give your life meaning.”

About the Lecture

Chances are good that Bhavya in Bangalore will read your next x-ray, or as Thomas Friedman learned first hand, “Grandma Betty in her bathrobe” will make your Jet Blue plane reservation from her Salt Lake City home. In “Globalization 3.0,” Friedman contends, people from far-flung places will become principal players in the marketplace.

In his latest book, The World is Flat, Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world, and “accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors.” Today, “individuals and small groups of every color of the rainbow will be able to plug and play.” Friedman’s list of “flatteners” includes the fall of the Berlin Wall; the rise of Netscape and the dotcom boom that led to a trillion dollar investment in fiber optic cable; the emergence of common software platforms and open source code enabling global collaboration; and the rise of outsourcing, offshoring, supply chaining and insourcing. Friedman says these flatteners converged around the year 2000, and “created a flat world: a global, web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work, irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly, language.” At the very moment this platform emerged, three huge economies materialized — those of India, China and the former Soviet Union –“and three billion people who were out of the game, walked onto the playing field.” A final convergence may determine the fate of the U.S. in this final chapter of globalization. A “political perfect storm,” as Friedman describes it — the dotcom bust, the attacks of 9/11, and the Enron scandal — “distract us completely as a country.” Just when we need to face the fact of globalization and the need to compete in a new world, “we’re looking totally elsewhere.”

About the Lecture

Few companies have endured such hardship, or risen to such heights in a brief span of time as Akamai Technologies. Paul Sagan tells how he became the CEO of this young firm, and helped it survive and then flourish despite “unimaginable adversity.”

Brought up in a Chicago newspaper family, Sagan trained for a life in journalism. He cut his teeth as a broadcast news producer and executive in the 1980s, and in the 1990s. He helped launch New York 1, a cable news network pioneering digital video technology, and later, an interactive TV project in Orlando that featured video on demand and customized newscasts. Over the years, says Sagan, he picked up critical lessons on running a business: Don’t count on the permanence of any customer, job, or venture. He also “glimpsed the digital future,” realizing that if “you married the interactivity and openness of the web with the bandwidth available from cable…you could change the way the internet worked.”

In 1997, Sagan met a group of MIT computer scientists, including Tom Leighton and Danny Lewin, who had the “crazy, big idea” of applying mathematics to improve internet performance. Businesses frustrated with breakdowns of fragile central servers could rely instead on a network of servers coordinated by sophisticated software. It was “air traffic control” for internet packets and routing. Venture capital money poured in, and Akamai Technologies was born in 1998, with Sagan as chief operating officer. But all was not well: While “everyone wanted a piece” of Akamai, the company was hemorrhaging funds. Then in early 2001, the internet economy burst, and Akamai’s customers vanished.

“We were feeling sorry for ourselves,” says Sagan, who recalls laying off 2/3rds of the employees. “Then the unthinkable happened:” Danny Lewin died in the crash of Flight 11 on September 11th. “Few believed a business, especially ours, could survive a blow like that.” Sagan was determined to shepherd the company through the twin disasters of economic collapse, and the loss of Danny Lewin, the “driving force” of Akamai’s culture.

He slowly rebuilt the customer base, focusing on selling services to larger corporations that promised greater stability. Some clients “turned out to be real businesses,” such as Yahoo and Amazon. The year 2003 saw Akamai’s first positive cash flow, and the first profits came a year later. As he closes the books on 2009, Sagan proudly cites revenues approaching $900 million. He’s unshaken in his conviction that the “internet is the biggest business idea of our generation.” Akamai, says Sagan, “will hopefully face a little bit less adversity” in its second decade.

About the Lecture

Bill Gates’ talk at MIT provided an optimistic view of the next generation of computer science, now that the “rough draft” is done. Gates finds a paradox today in that computer science is poised to transform work and home life, “but people’s excitement level is not as high as it was five years ago during the Internet bubble.” Because most sectors of the computer industry—from microchips to storage, displays to wireless connectivity— continuously improve in performance, Gates predicts a flood of new products and applications. He sported a wristwatch that receives data wirelessly, as well as keeps its user on schedule. Gates describes “rich, new peripherals” such as ultra-wideband digital cameras and he demonstrates software that allows pictures to be archived using a 3D visual interface with a built-in time, date, and keyword database. He says that computer science is merging with and making over such fields as astronomy and biology, by unifying vast, unwieldy data collections into easily navigable libraries. And Gates appears confident that technological breakthroughs will ultimately resolve urgent problems of computer and network security.