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CEO doubles his duties in fraction of time
Most of us have to manage the daily juggling act of work, home and family, but for most of us the work component doesn't mean being chief executive of two different companies.
That's the case with Jonathan Stern, chief executive officer at Corex Technologies and president and CEO of Eliyon Technologies Corp.
But heading Corex, maker of business card scanner CardScan, and Eliyon, a subscription-based database company, hasn't proved unmanageable for the 49-year-old Israeli native.
"My wife pointed out that at Corex I used to get home at 7:30, and now with Eliyon I come home at 7:45," Stern said. "Funny that you can run another whole company in 15 minutes. But you have to have a really great team around you."
One of Stern's first teams was the Israeli army, where he spent five years after getting his master's degree in computer science from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. He worked in the Intelligence Corps and received a medal for his technical achievements
and contribution to national security.
"(Military service) is a requirement in Israel, so you don't have a lot of choices," Stern said. "There is an option called academic reserve, where you first go to school and then go into the army. But I spent five years doing professional work."
Stern's next quest was for a Ph.D. to become a professor, but a friend lured him to the business world with a proposal for a software consulting company.
"He said to try the business for a year and if you don't like it go back to school. Clearly I never went back to get the Ph.D. because life on the outside was much more interesting, but I didn't want to stay in consulting either."
Stern next co-founded Rosh Intelligent Systems, developing sophisticated software tools to help field service engineers perform diagnostics, repair and maintenance on complicated equipment. Customers included the field service operations
of companies such as Xerox, Philips and Siemens. And with many of Rosh's 2,000
clients in the United States, Stern found it impractical to run the company from Israel, moving with his wife to the United States in 1989. Rosh set up shop in Needham but maintained R&D in Israel.
Stern left in 1992 and started Corex.
"I thought for sure we would be the leaders in (business-card scanning technology), but when I went out to license it they were laughing at me," Stern said. "So I went back to (Corex chief technology officer) Dexter Sealy and he said, 'If we can't be the first let's be the best.' "
And while CardScan wasn't first out of the gate, the company now claims 80 to 90 percent of the market.
Eliyon Ñ Stern's "fourth career," he calls it Ñ began with an exploration into how Corex could profit from the late-'90s Internet craze, which Stern observed as "a tremendous amount of hype but very little value."
Having ruled out the connectivity end, Stern focused on information, and how to better deliver it to users searching for two-word terms and pulling up 5,000 websites, each with snippets of information.
"That's the area where I thought we could do some very good work, and that's how Eliyon came about," he says. But, he adds, Corex was not about information services, so the board advised spinning off Eliyon.
Eliyon provides a streamlined database of information on 16 million business professionals and more than 1 million companies. It adds 450,000 records monthly, and serves companies in recruiting efforts, compiling sales leads and enhancing competitive intelligence.
And Stern's not only keeping normal hours, but stressing them for those around him as well.
"I do like to keep a very sane company."
By Jay Rizoli, Mass High Tech
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