Peter Cohan Explained

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 3, 2025, 12:54 AM

Peter S. Cohan is an American businessman, author and teacher.[1] He is the founding principal of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He has completed over 150 growth-strategy consulting projects for global technology companies and invested in seven startups—three of which were sold for over $2 billion and his most recent—Sofi Technologies—went public in July 2021... Cohan is an Associate Professor of Management Practice at Babson College. He teaches business strategy, entrepreneurship, leadership, and management consulting to both undergraduate and graduate students.[3] RETHINK Retail selected him as a Top 100 Retail Influencer in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 and a...

Cohan writes the Start-up Economy column for Forbes.com where he is a senior contributor,[5] and "The Hungry Start-up" column for Inc magazine,[6] Wall and Main, his Worcester Telegram & Gazette column, helped its Business... He was a member of the Wharton Blog Network, which received the Gold Award in the 2013 Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) District II Accolades Awards program.[7] From September 2004 to September 2008, Cohan served on the board of the Alzheimer's Association, Massachusetts Chapter. He is the brother of William D. Cohan. He has also contributed to six compendiums of modern management.[which?]

Peter Cohan became a Forbes contributor in April 2011 and was named a senior contributor in September 2023. In 1994, he started a management consulting and venture capital firm (http://petercohan.com). He is an associate professor of management practice at Babson College where he teaches strategy and entrepreneurship (https://www.babson.edu/about/our-leaders-and-scholars/faculty-and-academic-divisions/faculty-profiles/peter-cohan.php). His 17th book -- published in July 2024 -- is "Brain Rush: How to Invest and Compete in the Real World of Generative AI." (https://rb.gy/b8hhbj). He previously worked as a case team leader for Monitor Company, a consulting firm co-founded by HBS professor Michael Porter. Progress Software has beaten expectations and raised guidance for the last three quarters, so why is its stock down 36%?

Is it a bargain? Meta’s use of Variable Interest Entities to fund a $27B data center off its balance sheet raises transparency concerns and recalls Enron’s accounting tactics. The top growth stock picks for 2026 include shares in companies leading the AI boom and benefiting from growth in quantum computing. Eli Lilly stock has risen 36% this year to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization—the first health care company to hit that milestone. Peter S. Cohan is an Associate Professor of Management Practice at Babson College.

He teaches strategy, leadership and entrepreneurship to students in its undergraduate, Master of Science in Entrepreneurial Leadership, Master of Science in Advanced Entrepreneurial Leadership, MBA, and Executive Education programs.He is the founding principal of... Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He has completed over 150 growth-strategy consulting projects for global technology companies and invested in seven startups--three of which were sold for about $2 billion and one of which went public at an $18... He is a senior contributor at Forbes and a contributor to Inc. He is a frequent media commentator who has appeared on ABC's Good Morning America, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, Fox Business News, American Public Media's MarketPlace, WBUR, WGBH, New England Cable News and the Boston ABC,... He has been quoted in the Associated Press, the Christian Science Monitor, the London Evening Standard, the Times of London, the New York Times, Nikkei, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post,...

He also appeared in the 2016 documentary film, We the People: the Market Basket Effect.Prior to starting his firm, he worked as a case team leader for Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter's consulting... RETHINK Retail chose him as a Top 100 Retail Influencer of 2021, 2022, and 2023, a Top Retail Influencer of 2024 and 2025, and a Top AI in Retail Influencer in 2024. Peter earned an MBA from Wharton, did graduate work in computer science at MIT, and holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Swarthmore College. Peter Cohan is the founder and principal of The Second Derivative and the author of the Great Demo! and Doing Discovery methodologies, focused on helping software organizations improve their presales, sales and marketing results – primarily through improving organizations’ discovery and demonstration skills. The bulk of his experience is with complex, enterprise software and strategic systems sold to varied audiences in a range of vertical markets.

He has enjoyed roles in technical and product marketing, marketing management, presales and presales management, sales and sales management, senior management and the C-Suite – as well as serving on Boards of Directors. He has executed and delivered thousands of discovery conversations and demos – and has been on the receiving end of thousands of discovery calls and demos from a broad variety of vendors around the... In 2003, he authored Great Demo!, a book that provides methods to create and execute compelling demonstrations. The 2nd edition of Great Demo! was published March 2005. In July 2004, he enabled and began moderating DemoGurus®, a community web exchange dedicated to helping sales and marketing teams improve their software demonstrations, which was subsequently transitioned to the Great Demo!

LinkedIn Group in 2010-2011. Peter Cohan, Associate Professor of Management Practice, teaches strategy and entrepreneurship to undergraduate and Master of Science in Entrepreneurial Leadership students, including courses such as Strategic Problem Solving. Scaling Strategy, Strategic Decision Making, and Global Entrepreneurship Experience – Sweden. He is also a faculty advisor for undergraduate student teams in their consulting work with companies through the Management Consulting Field Experience (MCFE) program. He created and led the Hong Kong/Singapore Start-up Strategy Offshore elective for MBA students. For undergraduates, he created and ran the Paris, Israel and Portugal/Spain Start-up Strategy Offshore electives.

He also served as a visiting professor at Barcelona’s EADA and Tel Aviv University. Cohan started a consulting and venture capital firm in 1994, and he has completed over 150 consulting projects aimed at boosting the growth of high-tech companies and has invested in seven startups. Three of these failed, three were sold for over $2 billion, and one went public in July 2021 at an $18 billion valuation. He is a senior contributor at Forbes and writes a column for Inc. Cohan has authored 17 books and contributed to six management compendiums. His most recent book is Brain Rush: How to Invest and Compete in the Real World of Generative AI (Apress: forthcoming 2024).

He also wrote Goliath Strikes Back: How Traditional Retailers Are Winning Back Customers from Ecommerce Startups (Apress, November 2020), Scaling Your Startup: Mastering the Four Stages From Idea to $10 Billion (Apress: 2019), Startup... Prior to that he authored Disciplined Growth Strategies: Insights from the Growth Trajectories of Successful and Unsuccessful Companies (Apress, February 2017) and Hungry Start-Up Strategy: Creating New Ventures with Limited Resources and Unlimited Vision... Cohan is a frequent commentator on developments in economics, technology, and finance. He has been a guest on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” CNN, CNBC, PBS’s “Wall $treet Week,” and New England Cable News (NECN). He has been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Barron’s, Red Herring, Time, Business Week, Fortune, and Newsweek International. Tagged Faculty, Research, Tech Entrepreneurship, Technology, Artificial Intelligence

Tagged Company Culture, Corporate Innovation, Management, Advice, Commentary Tagged Books, Commentary, Global, Entrepreneurship Ecosystems During a recent webinar, Lee Berkman of CloudShare and guest Peter Cohan, author of Doing Discovery, took attendees on a deep dive into the art and science of mastering discovery calls for software sales. This blog post provides a summary of the subjects covered and you can view the full webinar here. Also, check out “Better Discovery, Better Conversion” – an ebook that we co-authored together with Peter, which provides a concise and informative guide to catapulting software sales with masterful discovery. Experienced salespeople know that inadequate discovery leads to a bunch of problems, including delayed decisions, unwarranted discounts, and demos that go nowhere.

Gartner reports that nearly 45% of forecasted opportunities in B2B software companies end in a big fat “no decision.” But if you’re able to nail your discovery, you’ll have a good chance of gaining... Think of effective discovery as rainfall on a mountain range: the more thorough and wide-ranging the discovery, the better the results downstream in your sales process. Without it, you’ll end up with a dry riverbed at the bottom. According to Peter, sales professionals should master seven levels of discovery skills.

Peter Cohan Explained

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