Comscore Founder's Floor-to-Success

A story about how Jack Abraham's father immigrated to America and founded Comscore.

"My dad was an immigrant who came to the US literally without a dollar to his name from Lebanon. He went to college in France studying science, engineering and math, then came to the US to get his PhD in math at MIT. He was so poor he slept on a concrete basement floor at MIT in a sleeping bag. I was born while he was there in Boston.

He took math and applied it to business, inventing new forms of marketing which were revolutionary at the time. He won international marketing awards, got promoted in the company he joined, and eventually became president. Then he decided to become an entrepreneur.

When I was 12 or 13, he said 'Jack, I'm going to start a company that's going to measure everything everyone does on the internet and make sense of it. Do you want to join?' I joined as the third person as a software engineer and learned how to code. When he offered me compensation, I chose equity over cash. The company ended up going public and at its peak was worth a billion dollars. He grew it on his own, took it public, and 2-3 years after going public, he decided he didn't want to be a public company CEO anymore and moved into investing and board work.

I got to see it grow from just an idea in my parents' sitting room to a 1000+ person public company, and I just got hooked. I started founding companies at age 15, and it's been in my DNA ever since."