 On Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. Over on, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here for a special conversation on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield's 50th anniversary, part of their People First Network. I'm here with Jonah Goodhars, co-foundering CEO of Moat Now with Oracle, sold their company in 2017. Entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me, John, excited to be here. So we were talking before we came on camera, you've been an entrepreneur since you were a small kid, doing all kinds of hustles and side things. What's happening with you now? Obviously you sold your company in 2017, part of Oracle. Oracle not known for the entrepreneur activity, but you brought that company in, still going on. Give us an update. So, started Moat back in 2010, like you said, in 2017, Oracle decided to make us an offer and we decided to sell our company. And it's been frankly exciting for me to be part of a company that has a 40 year history in Oracle, to have a company that has played a pretty pivotal role in Silicon Valley. We're sitting here right in the heart of Silicon Valley and to be a part of a company that I think is so important to the future development of software and databases and hardware, I think is interesting and exciting. And certainly not the path that I thought I would be on, but I'm excited to be here today. It's always nice to have an entrepreneurial success at the level, you guys had great exit, the numbers was reported, almost close to a billion dollars in value that Oracle saw and the company started. But you had a unique journey, you started with your brother, was in New York. Take us through that journey, what was some of the things that you did and how did it get started? What was the main drive? Sure, so I gotta take us back a little bit. So I've been in business with my brother, Noah, for 20 years. So we started a company in the late 1990s when I was an undergrad at Cornell and the internet was going crazy. E-commerce companies were going public and the first of everything was starting, the first internet credit card, the first of X, Y, and Z fill in the blank. And so we decided sort of haphazardly at the time that we would start a business and we started by helping companies acquire customers using the internet. And so we really built, I think in sort of looking back on it now, it was somewhat of a marketing agency but at the time we were building- What year was that? This is 98, 98, 99. So right in that boom, things going crazy. Things are going crazy. We're in college, we were building email lists, we were essentially trying to figure out how do you tell stories and advertise online but we didn't know we were doing that. We were just trying to simply make some money. I was working for $5 an hour at the computer center in Ithaca, New York at Cornell and I didn't know at a computer. And so I'm sitting there, part of the reason I worked at the computer center was because I got 24-hour access to the internet and to a computer. And so we started our first business there and things went really well almost out of the gates, 98, 99, and then 2000 happened and 2001 happened and the world changed. Business certainly changed the so-called sort of bust of a lot of I think the ideas that people had. I think people realized that there was gonna have to be real businesses that were built and eventually those businesses were built in many cases but I think it didn't happen the way that people expected and we were certainly surprised by it. We were 21-year-old, I was 21 at the time. My brother was two years older than me and so we had this business that was going really well and then we sort of ran off of a cliff and so we were profitable growing on top of the world and then hit a challenge. It was one of the first business lessons that I really learned back in 2000, 2001 which is that you have to have something that is sticky that's gonna be able to stick around through the tough times. It can't only work when things are going up. It can't only work when people are spending money and so we learned a lot of lessons about how do you build a long-term sustainable business. In 2002 someone that we had done business with for a couple of years called me and he said I'm gonna start a new business and I think there's an opportunity to build a business to trade digital advertising and to do it more effectively and efficiently than has been done to date. This guy said I think there's something to be done and I think now's the time to do it. My brother and I decided to partner with him. We decided to write a check to become his first client and to help him start a company that he started in 2002 called Right Media. Right Media ended up becoming a big success. It was the first big ad exchange, the first platform to trade digital advertising inventory. Yahoo ended up acquiring the company in 2007 and so we were sort of on our way as entrepreneurs slash now investors but enter the world of 2008. Once again, the economy changes, the world changes and we start to think, all right, maybe when the market goes down, when everything crashes, maybe that's the time to start thinking about starting a new business. Maybe when competition dries out a little bit is the right time to get back into building companies and so Noah and I, my brother and I decided, all right, let's go start a new business and we got started with Moat in 2010 and it's been a pretty fun ride. And how long did you work on Moat for? So we started in 2010, we spent a year or two trying to figure out what we would do, really got started in earnest in 2010, invested the initial amount of money ourselves through myself and Noah and our third partner, Michael Alrath, the guy from Right Media and in 2011, raised a friends and family round. 2012, we're fortunate to get Mayfield to invest and at that point was when our business really took off. So we ran the company from 2010 to 2012 with zero dollars in revenue. Mayfield invested in us when we had zero dollars in revenue and things started to go well from there. So from 2012 to 2017 when we sold the company we built a pretty sizable SaaS business. So interesting experiences obviously, the Mayfield, no revenue, that's the way they like it, like the build businesses, take a piece of the action. You also did that early on, but I think what's interesting about your story and I want to get your thoughts on this is that entrepreneurs sometimes, they hit a wall and sometimes they can't get back up. You hit multiple kind of market timings, obviously the bubble crash, 2001, 2002 timeframe, you mentioned 2008. Seeing transitions is a big part of having that entrepreneurial antenna, if you will, having a feeling for the market, knowing what the wave is, when to start, when to invest, invest in down markets. As you grew from that first venture and you're on top of the world, college, that first crash, how did you figure out the market transition kind of dynamic? What was, did it jump out at you? Was it just scar tissue? What was some of the feelings there? Yeah, I mean, my view is that, so the market changed and we had all these expectations about our revenue was gonna continue to grow forever and our profits were gonna continue to grow forever and when the market changed and outside dynamics changed our business, this is colonized, I'm talking about our first company, all of a sudden we went, uh-oh, what do you do now? And I think it was more having lived through that experience that we said, all right, we need to figure out when we build businesses, how do we build them to be sort of full proof or as much full proof as we can be? How do we have something that's sticky, sustainable that can't simply be turned off with the ebb and flow of the market? And I think it, for me, taught me something which was you need to build something that's long lasting, something that is not driven by market conditions. If your business is driven by external market conditions, that should be a big signal that there's potentially a problem because if those conditions change, you're gonna be in a tough spot and so we decided then and there, all right, we need to really build businesses that are here for the long run. We sat on the board of Right Media, helped start the company, but we didn't operate it. Mike ran this company and we watched and we watched very closely and carefully and he did something else that was interesting is that he learned how to storytell. He learned how to think about where we were going as a business in Right Media, not where we were. And so I combined with my brother, these two themes, sustainable, sticky business with storytelling. Think about where you're going, not just where you are. And I think as we created Moat, we thought, all right, how do you actually turn that into a long-term business? And part of the way you do it is by trying to project forward, trying to think, all right, not what are we doing today but where are we going into the future? And that really became a critical part of product development, a part of our vision, of where we want it to be as a business. And I think it was a critical part of our success. What can other entrepreneurs learn from that? Because I think I see a lot of entrepreneurs here at Silicon Valley and around the world now that entrepreneurship's kind of gone global is they get stuck in with dogma and they're gonna make this work. And sometimes they might not be self-aware that they might have to just take their head up and look around and get a feel for what's going on around them. What's your advice to those guys? I think you have to be honest with yourself. You know as an entrepreneur in your heart of hearts is what's happening to you real. You know, you should know, I think, whether or not what's happening to you is because of some conditions, because of one customer that's doing something that's good or bad or because of a broader trend or a broader movement. I try to ask questions about not just what does it look like a year from now, two years from now, three years from now. I think about the world 10 years from now. What do I know to be the case? 10 years from now. I think this is something that Jeff Bezos talks about which is what do you for sure know is gonna be the case with your business 10 years from now? If you can plan towards that, you can build something that's sustainable. And so we knew 10 years from now marketers are still gonna wanna reach people. They're still gonna wanna storytell. They're still gonna wanna measure how effective it was in order, how effective it was to actually reach those people. And so we knew that wouldn't change. What might change are the mechanisms, how they reach people, how they storytell, what platforms they do it on, whether it's Facebook or Snapchat or Pinterest or whatever the next new platform is, that may change. But the fact that marketers will need to reach people won't. And so we felt really confident that 10 years from now that's gonna still be the case. And I felt if you know that, then you can build towards this vision. Medium and the channels are all gonna change all the time. But the stories need to be told. That's right. And interestingly, I think that when you start a business you come up with a theme. You come up with a vision. And so for us it was how do marketers tell their stories increasingly in a world that's digital? That's not something that's gonna change overnight. And I felt like over the long haul that's not gonna change very quickly. Increasingly we're gonna be digital consumers and marketers are gonna have to tell their stories. Now the business that we started at Moat in 2010 ended up changing dramatically. We started a crowdsourced creative marketplace. We ended as a measurement and analytics company, pretty different place from creative. The vision was still the same. The vision was still about helping companies, marketers tell their stories in a world that's increasingly digital. And if you look at successful businesses they tend to have the same vision from when they started. Now the underlying business may change. Hopefully the underlying business iterates and finds the right path. But the overall, the high level of where you're going ideally doesn't change. And I think that's part of the key to success. You know that's a great point. I think I was getting a debate here among entrepreneurs and investors. The word pivot versus adjusting. When you have a North Star or a mission you just gotta kind of tack with the wind and make it a tailwind not a headwind versus a full pivot which might be hey, there's no business here. We have to do something different. Can you talk about the nuances between what a pivot is and how you find that tailwind that the wind and the sails if you will for the entrepreneur. Hit that vision. Yeah, so first of all, any successful business that I've ever seen never starts off how it ends. In other words, there are always iterations that go through. Pick any company that you can think of right now. They've iterated. They've started off with one theme and they've gone in a slight different path. So I would argue that every good business is gonna iterate. Now, whether you wanna call it a pivot or not I think is more nomenclature or semantics. My view is you're gonna iterate. The key is having that North Star. So in 10 years, what do we believe to be the case? Forget about what do we believe? What do we know to be the case? What do we know this is gonna be the case 10 years from now? And if you're right about that then it can qualify as your North Star. By the way, if you don't know 10 years from now this is gonna be the case then maybe that shouldn't be your North Star. Maybe that shouldn't be the guiding light for your business. Once you get that part right then it almost frees you to be flexible. It frees you to say okay, so if the world's moving this way or that way I'm gonna adjust. One of the things that I learned from Moe was actually somebody gave me advice early on. They said go have a thousand meetings. Go have a thousand meetings in your industry, in your category. Go meet with every single person in the business. And I did that. It took me probably 18 months but I went out and met with everyone who would take my meeting. What I learned from that is that in the B2B world we have an advantage. You can talk to your customers. Your customers will literally tell you here are the issues we're having, here are the things we're trying to solve for. If you can help us solve for this we will pay you money to provide a service to us to actually solve this problem. And so I learned, wow, that's pretty amazing. If you actually meet with enough people you get a sense of the market. You get a sense of what people are buying. You get a sense of the trends. As my oldest brother says the world kind of slows down a little bit. Markets move in slow motion when you really get into it. And so if you go out and have 1000 meetings in your industry you actually learn what's happening in that business and you can tweak your business accordingly. I walked away with Moat feeling like if you're not in a meeting talking your story, telling your pitch, telling your vision and they're not nodding their head going yep, yep, yep, 100% on the same page then you're not in the right place. I love that comment about slow on the game down. It reminds me of baseball. Batters up there, slow that game down. Watch that ball come in really slow. And I think that's a good advice because you want to slow it down. You want to make sure you're kind of capturing the right things that's happening at the right time not try to go too fast. That's right. Things don't happen overnight. I think oftentimes when you're not in an industry and you just read the headlines you think oh my God that's crazy that this thing happened and that thing happened when it's your space it doesn't move quite that fast. There's work that has to be done. Contracts have to be put in place. You see it evolving. And so I always tell people when you want to get to know an industry read every single piece of content there is about the industry. Read every article that comes out about it and take as many meetings as you can possibly take in the space and it'll slow down. It'll move at a pace that you can kind of go got it. It feels like if we do this and this then we can actually start to build a business here. And again, I think there's a bright line test and B2B if you walk into a meeting and you start telling your story and you're not getting the nods and you're not getting the yep, yep, yep that's an issue for us. If that's not happening then you're not in the right space. Doesn't mean your North Star's wrong but it means that you got to iterate a bit. You got to find your groove. I want to change gears a little bit and talk about this people first network concept that I love because you know you hear mobile first cloud first and the notion of people first we live in a very social world now you're seeing a lot of stuff happening where you know we're connected now almost with digital 100% everyone's kind of got mobile even in emerging countries you got connections. Yet there's a lot of new dynamics emerging on the social scene and checking around you're well known for networking you're known for connecting with people certainly in your area and beyond and so there's two things I want to get your thoughts on one is networks, who to work with how do I make decisions on how do you want to spend your time with other entrepreneurs or other peers and social entrepreneurship there's a lot of emphasis around mission driven things. These are people dynamics where you start to see the role of the relationships between people start to take a really important role in entrepreneurship not just let's hire and fire fast certainly some basic business knowledge that's common sense but as you start to see this next generation of entrepreneurs emerge there's an eye on social mission driven but spending time with the right people what's your thoughts on that? So first of all businesses are about people in the end of the day you want to do business with people that you like with people that you trust with people that you want to hang out with that was one of the lessons I learned somewhat early on and I think it's critical businesses are not automated businesses are about all right a group of people come together with a shared idea of what they can do and they can hopefully go support a group of other people who are trying to get their vision done and so once you realize that you realize it's about people you want to build relationships you want to build connections you want to figure out all right how can I help people and hopefully with good karma something will happen in my favor at some point and so I always operate under the idea that you just try to do good you try to help people and hopefully as a result good things will happen in terms of social entrepreneurship what I would tell you is that having a mission that you feel deep down inside of you that is not just we're going to make money and we're going to deliver on behalf of shareholders yes of course that's important but when you wake up and you go to work or you get online you want to feel something for it you want to feel like all right this is something that I feel good about doing when you do that when you know that you've done it right it doesn't feel like work it doesn't feel like a job it feels like you want to wake up and you can't get enough of it and I think that's when you know you've done something right so I think the more that we can lead mission driven businesses mission driven lives the better that will be in the end of the day I think that life and business converge I think in the end of the day when you do it right it doesn't feel like work and it doesn't feel like you're working or not working it just feels like you're trying to do good you're trying to help other people and hopefully good things happen great stuff the thing I love about digital is you start to see that blending of analog and digital where lives are now part of each other if you could go back and be 18 and 20 again with all the tools we have out there now get open source at a whole new level you have everyone's connected what were some of the things that you would do if you had to go back and talk to your 18 year old self going into Cornell with your brother a lot more on the table to play with certainly it's easier to do ventures easier to come up with ideas maybe you know leaner what are some of the things that you'd do if you were in your 20s yeah I guess if I went back I would tell myself to make big bets and make them on where you know the future is going to be 10 years from now I think often times particularly when I was a young entrepreneur you were living day to day or week to week where you're going all right we need to get this thing done by this day so that we can do this tomorrow and so we need to fly and stay up all night and you know end up eating and sort of doing things that are not the best sort of health wise in order just to try to get things done or what you thought would just get things done I think I would play a longer game and I would encourage myself to think about all right what do I know to be the case 10 years from now and how can I focus on that if we go back 20 some years two or three of the biggest companies in the world were really created in Amazon in Apple in Google and I think the opportunity existed back then so if I could go back to my... You could buy some Apple stock for sure You know I don't know if I would buy Apple stock but certainly I would have made longer term bets but those companies do that I think is phenomenal is they think about where the world's going not where the world is today I think that's great advice and it's interesting too you know you go back and you know everyone has those experiences in life where they say I could have been there there looking forward is the key and I think one of the interesting things about your journey is you had the I'm in college make some money got some put some dough in your pocket then you go out and you have some cash you make an investment you ride the way with right media and then you go and do the venture back startup talk about the dynamics and specifically the venture back startup because now the dynamics are changed I mean hell I might be able to do an ICO something like a subpoena subpoena if I did that but you got all kinds of new opportunities to get funded either to venture capital either with Mayfield different venture architecture there you mentioned no revenue but funding to go build it out what was different about doing the venture back startup versus the other ones yeah I guess what I would say is first of all we have to step back and realize that when we're in these industries we have a hard time understanding what they're doing what venture capitalists do is just what any money manager does they're doing allocation of capital so that they can get returns for their investors and so in the end of the day they're trying to make bets now the bets that a venture capital makes are different from someone who's buying public equities for sure but the same sort of ideals are there which is they want to make bets on the right companies on the right people so that they can drive profits and returns and hopefully make a difference in the case of Moat you know we were really impressed by Mayfield we were impressed by the way that they approached the conversation with us the way that they lean forward I tell entrepreneurs you know when you have venture capitalist meetings if three out of ten of them go well you're in the hall of fame it's like baseball most of the time you're not going to get that perfect chemistry you're not going to get that feeling where ah there's something interesting here the other thing I tell entrepreneurs is if they're not leaning forward if they're not going you know what we could do we could do this this and this I could connect you with so and so we could build a business doing this you should think about this if they're not doing that they're probably not the right fit I think about it I'm happily married for many years with four kids when you meet your spouse you tend to know that that's the right person if you have to go home and say all right well why don't you send me some reasons to try to justify why you might be the right fit for me maybe that's not the right spouse I think it's the same thing with venture capitalism you ultimately want to have chemistry again it comes back to people and so Mayfield I think does a really good job of thinking about people and putting people first in that conversation and it's also a team environment almost because you want to have a spouse and a venture partner who's going to be there for the good bad and the ugly and be there and that's I think a lot of people don't get that they want the valuation oh I got a better deal there's no better deal when you look at the long run impact of potentially making the wrong decision one of the first things that Navin Chata from Mayfield said to me when I first met with him as he said this is going to take you seven to 10 years to build this business and I thought wow that sounds like a long time I'm going to do it in three yeah that seems crazy but he was right and one of the things that he said to me after they had invested and we had gone through a couple quarters of working I came in and I actually had pretty high expectations of what we could do as a business I said well if we really pushed the accelerator I think we could do this number instead of this number and he said relax we have plenty of time don't try to knock it out of the park and you'll make mistakes if you do that just try to deliver on the numbers that you think you can deliver realistically and focus on building the business and he was right having that approach is smart it's not about can I make this work next quarter it's about can I make this work over the long run and I learned a lot in that process well John I really appreciate the conversation your inspiration to a lot of entrepreneurs out there and congratulations on all your great success I guess the question is what's next for you you get the 10 year vision what's going to happen in the next 10 years which wave will you be riding well I think increasingly we're going to live in a connected society where data is information and data is knowledge and I think for me I'm excited about a future world where will we use more or less data to make decisions I think more will we make smarter decisions over time hopefully smarter decisions over time will we be able to catch diseases earlier I think so will we be able to leave longer lives I think so and so some of those things end up being themes great John a good heart he's been our call now for the founder entrepreneur serial entrepreneur here's part of the cubes people first network series I'm John Furrier thanks for watching