Founder Interview - Eric Clelland

Q&A with the CEO of COBO

Company Quick Facts

Founded: 2018

Industry: Networking

Location: Santa Rosa, CA

Tagline: We Make Networking Simple

Website: coboinc.com

Social: @COBOINC

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 from Santa Rosa, CA

ZK: Tell us about the moment you knew you had to launch COBO.

EC: I’ve had the privilege in my career of working with some cutting-edge companies based  here in Sonoma county in and around our local telecom cluster. Most recently was Cyan, where we introduced new categories from a hardware and then software standpoint. We developed an incredible solution, but I came to realize only the largest carriers in the world had the resources to adopt this innovation.

We were leaving behind small and medium sized customers with infrastructure they weren’t going to tear out. And I thought if I had the chance to do it over again, I’d bring to market a solution for the smaller players who remain underserved. New innovation is great, but sometimes incremental improvements can make a bigger impact for businesses, and there is a massive untapped market for these improvements in the network management space. We set out to develop a solution to serve that mass market and that’s where COBO was born.

ZK: I like the practicality of your approach, which sometimes can get lost in the quest for innovation for innovation’s sake. With COBO, you’ve built a cloud-based network management solution (NMS) for SMBs – can you talk more about what’s novel with your approach?

EC: Our number one priority is to make network performance metrics consumable by a larger audience inside of an enterprise. With existing solutions on the market, only one or two people in a company had the expertise to operate them. What we’ve done is rip out all of that complexity and replace it with an easy-to-use dashboard. So now, CIOs can have a single screen in their office that tells them how their network is operating, whereas before, they had limited visibility.

ZK: This seems so logical - why has this type of dashboard typically been an afterthought for network management solutions (NMSs)?

EC: The challenge with traditional solutions is that everything is run locally, so to produce this, you must maintain the platform as well as the infrastructure to ensure a quality UI. By bringing all of this into the cloud, we’re simplifying the operation and making it much easier to have real-time insights into the network. 

The SolarWinds hack was a wakeup call to so many, and I believe this will give a boost to players like us who are cloud-native solutions versus those stuck between the locally-hosted and cloud-based models. We’re offering network management as a service, with security as a deeply-embedded feature, which is an improvement for customers who previously had a host of concerns around operating a secure local infrastructure.

ZK: Switching gears, as you mentioned earlier, you played a key role in many Telecom Valley success stories here in Sonoma county. What lessons are you carrying with you from those experiences into building COBO today?

EC: I was fortunate to receive such incredible mentorship from Telecom Valley leaders, such as Mike Hatfield, over the years. One of the biggest things I learned is that you don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room or an industry visionary to succeed – you just have to ask good questions. It’s shocking how successful you can be if you just listen to what your customers want and build that. What a concept, right?

When we started Cyan, I toured the U.S. and had over 40 sit down visits with prospective customers. We shared with them what we were thinking of building and asked them their thoughts and what pain points they needed solving. You have an advantage as a startup because everyone loves to tell you what they don’t like about the incumbents, and you can be very successful if you’re nimble enough to listen and then go execute.

ZK: A lot of founders still forget this piece.

EC: I know we both had the privilege of working at Cisco and under the leadership of John Chambers. After Cisco bought Cerent, I was at an off-site that John led and all he talked about was needing to be entirely focused on what our customers wanted. We understood this at Cerent, but I was shocked to see such focus on this at a company of Cisco’s size. Other large companies I’ve worked with over the years seem to forget this point. Too many engineers like to work on stuff just to perfect it – it takes a lot of discipline to know when to stop.

ZK: Eric, I know you lost your Santa Rosa home in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. How did this shape your desire to not just build a new startup company but to return to Santa Rosa to do so?

EC: This was certainly a seminal moment in both my professional and personal life. I was out of town for work when the fire came, and as you might expect, I took some time off and really slowed down right thereafter. We temporarily relocated up to Lake Tahoe, and this coincided with Cyan being sold, so it was a time of uprooting for so many we were close to in Sonoma county.

After the shock settled, I knew I wanted to contribute, and I had learned along the way from other Sonoma county busines leaders that if you have skills to offer, and can help lead and help people grow, that you have an obligation to jump back in. We had this idea of an unmet market need that I mentioned earlier, so we moved back to Santa Rosa, got COBO off the ground in a hurry, and brought some of the band back together to build this company. I like to think some joy has been put back into people’s lives because we’re here doing it.

ZK: That’s an incredibly powerful story and such a testament to the role local startups have to play in the rebuilding of our community. Can you talk more about what it means to you to build your business in Sonoma county?

EC: Many of the companies I’ve been a part of here over the past twenty-plus years were ultimately acquired, and this led to many jobs that were once here ultimately moving down to the South Bay. I’m a big believer that you should be able to find a quality job no matter where you live and that you shouldn’t uproot families and require people to relocate as a requirement for them joining your business. This is part of our ethos with COBO, where we are not only employing people here in Sonoma but also have remote workers in a variety of locations.

With the pandemic, more and more talented people are moving to Santa Rosa because they’re putting their family first. Now that they’re here, they should not just be able to work remotely from this community, but they should also be able to find a quality job here that gets them more embedded in the local community. My hope is that, as we grow in the years ahead, COBO can play a part in fulfilling that goal for some of our newest arrivals. It’s also a big reason why I’m such a believer in the Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures model and movement – I’m very excited to see the levels our local startup community can reach as we push forward.

Zachary Kushel is Founder & Managing Partner of Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures.

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