Tom Coburn and the business of paying attention

At Logan Airport, Tom Coburn noticed something that advertising executives would rather passengers kept to themselves: he wasn’t paying attention to the ads. The screens were doing their job. The audience was declining to do its part. Somewhere in that small, ordinary failure of persuasion, a Boston College student found a business idea.

What if an advertiser could ask a question, check that someone understood the message, and pay for a correct answer? It was an unusually literal approach to buying attention. An impression could drift past unnoticed. An answer required somebody to show up. Coburn and his fellow students took the idea into their university’s venture competition in 2011 and tied for first place.

Thirteen years later, BlueConic bought the company they had started, Jebbit. By then, it helped brands ask customers about their preferences through quizzes and other interactive experiences. Coburn’s next job would be running Waking Up, the app founded by Sam Harris. The change invites a pleasing question: how does someone go from helping brands capture attention to running a company that asks people to examine it?

The fifth idea gets an office

Before there was a company, there was a recurring appointment. Coburn’s roommates were studying business, and the group began meeting on Tuesdays and Thursdays to work through possible ventures. Jebbit was their fifth idea. The origin story gains something from that detail. A founder can look wonderfully decisive once the unsuccessful drafts have been removed from the photograph.

He had arrived at Boston College in 2009 and studied biology and theology. A marketing software company was a departure from the syllabus. Yet the desire to build something had become a project with its own timetable, fellow participants, and eventually money behind it. He continued running the business while enrolled, rather than immediately making departure from college part of the business plan.

The competition put him in front of Peter Bell, a Boston College alumnus working at Highland Capital Partners. Bell pointed him toward Highland’s summer accelerator. Coburn joined the 2011 program, gaining somewhere to work and people who understood how an idea might become a company. “That program changed the trajectory of my life,” he later recalled. A student competition had opened a door into an actual office.

Four years between rounds

The early milestones arrived in a sequence that could have made the rest seem inevitable. Jebbit entered Techstars Boston in spring 2013. That July, it raised a $1.3 million seed round. The team had a competition result, accelerator experience, and investors. Those are satisfying items to put on a slide. They still leave the inconvenient business of finding the right product.

In his account of the company’s early years, Coburn described two significant evolutions before the platform launched in April 2017. A $6.8 million Series A followed in July. Between the seed round and that financing sat four years of meetings, revisions, and work. Asked whether the road had been smooth, his answer was economical: “Never a smooth road.”

That interval belongs near the center of his story. The public milestones are easy to arrange neatly; the distance between them is where a team has to keep operating. Coburn’s own telling makes room for both the early encouragement and the long stretch before the next substantial financing. Getting picked for a program had helped Jebbit start. Customers would determine what it became.

The customer gets a speaking part

By 2016, Coburn was describing Jebbit as subscription software that helped marketers build interactive experiences around their web content, especially on mobile. Its customers included sports organizations, retailers, and publishers. A sports marketer might want fan engagement; another business might want a new customer or a fuller understanding of an existing one. The same interaction could serve different purposes.

There was a recognizably local personality beneath the product description. Asked which three athletes he would want with him on a desert island, Coburn chose Tom Brady, Bill Russell, and David Ortiz. His explanation began, “I’m a Boston guy!” The island’s emergency planning might have needed work, but the sporting loyalties were settled.

The product’s later logic is straightforward enough to describe without a marketing glossary. A customer answers questions and receives something useful, perhaps a product recommendation. The brand learns what that person actually says they want. A click can tell a business where someone went; a considered answer can supply a reason. Jebbit made that exchange something marketers could build into an experience.

By the time of the acquisition, customers included L’Oréal, PepsiCo, and the NFL. Coburn explained that many clients used the answers to segment and personalize their emails. The quiz was the visible part. Its commercial usefulness continued after the final question, when a marketer decided what to send someone next. A little curiosity at the beginning could change a much more ordinary email later.

The sales channel with a new desk

Some of Jebbit’s growth came from an event beyond the company’s control: a satisfied customer changed jobs. A marketer who knew the product could introduce it to a different employer, carrying experience across an organizational boundary. Coburn said that, during peak growth years, customers bringing Jebbit to their new companies accounted for 30 percent of new bookings.

The team also recruited retired Fortune 500 chief marketing officers to an advisory board, offering equity and gaining introductions. Those relationships helped a young company reach enterprise buyers. But the job-changing customers reveal another kind of introduction: a person who had already used the software could explain why a new employer should consider it.

Coburn described giving salespeople training, useful customer stories, and freedom to try approaches of their own. The management choice fits that growth pattern. People needed enough knowledge to represent the product and enough discretion to respond to the person in front of them. A script has its uses. It is less helpful when the conversation takes an interesting turn.

“Never a smooth road.”

Tom Coburn, on Jebbit’s early years

An office borrowed, an invitation returned

In 2014, Coburn went back to Bell with a proposal. They could help other Boston College founders get the sort of start he had received. The resulting Soaring Startup Circle, now SSC Venture Partners, began as a nonprofit accelerator and developed into a venture fund. Coburn became someone who could offer an opening to the next student with a company in mind.

By fall 2025, SSC had raised and invested more than $5 million in over 68 companies founded by Boston College alumni. Its network included 150 alumni mentors. The summer program gave selected founders $10,000 and twelve weeks of workshops, coaching, and contact with other entrepreneurs. Coburn served as a general partner alongside Bell, Christina Quinn, and Duncan Walker.

The scale gives the return visit some substance. An accelerator can provide money, but also a reason to keep working on a problem among people doing the same. Coburn’s experience had included both. His continued involvement made the original introduction at a student competition part of an ongoing exchange.

Another long relationship reaches back further, to eighth-grade teacher Evren Gunduz. Coburn co-founded Enjoy Life Education, whose work includes leadership education for teenagers. The organization’s account of his involvement credits Gunduz’s teaching as a formative influence. The connection persisted well beyond the classroom: former student and teacher became collaborators.

The Enjoy Life Academy names Coburn as a co-founder and director, with a focus on teaching resilience, setting a vision, and achievement. These are subjects a founder who spent years revising a business can discuss from experience. They also give his working life a setting beyond enterprise customers and financing rounds: a room of teenagers considering what they might do next.

The exit, then a text

BlueConic announced its acquisition of Jebbit on July 10, 2024. The combination joined a system for collecting customer answers with a platform for organizing and using customer data. BlueConic’s chief executive, Cory Munchbach, was also a Boston College alumna. The businesses had complementary jobs: learning something useful about a customer, then making that knowledge available for marketing.

For Coburn, the prospect of joining a larger platform was familiar. He had expected that Jebbit might eventually become part of broader marketing infrastructure. The deal’s financial terms were undisclosed. Its significance in his career is clearer: a company begun while he was a student had reached a new owner after thirteen years.

He moved into a board role in October 2024 and expected to take substantial time off. Then Paul Falzone texted. Falzone had led Jebbit’s Series A and spent seven years as a board director; he also advised Harris and the Waking Up team. He knew Coburn’s enthusiasm for the app, which Coburn had used since its 2018 launch.

On March 24, 2025, Coburn announced that he had become Waking Up’s CEO. He was taking responsibility for a product he had already made part of his own days. His stated aim was to help advance its mission of making lessons and conversations about the mind and consciousness more accessible. Another relationship built during Jebbit’s life had produced an unexpected introduction.

The airport idea had begun with a person declining to watch an advertisement. Years of revisions followed, along with customers, colleagues, and teachers who continued to matter after the original meeting. Coburn had planned a pause after selling Jebbit. The people he had worked with evidently hadn’t finished sending him interesting questions.