>> From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Everyone, 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 Goodhart, co-founder and 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're talking before you 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 entrepreneurial activity, but you brought that company in, still goin' on. Give us an update. >> So I 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 the level you guys had. Great exit, the numbers that was reported almost close to a billion dollars in value to Oracle, sorry, the company you started. But you got a unique journey. You started with your brother. Was in New York. Take us through that journey. What were some of the things that you did? And how did it get started? What was the main drive? >> Sure, so I got to 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 1990's 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 sort right in Internet boom. Things are 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 own a computer. So I'm sitting there. Part of the reason I worked for the Computer Center was 'cause 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 gate. So '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 going to have to be real business 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 were profitable, growing, on top of the world, and then hit a challenge. And 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 going to 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 years called me. And he said, "I'm going to 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. "I think now is 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, "Alright, 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 "it's the right time to get back into building companies." And so Noah and I, my brother and I, decided, "Alright, 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? How many years? >> 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. Raised, invested the initial amount of money ourselves through myself, and Noah, and our third partner, Mike Walrath, the guy from Right Media. And in 2011, raised the 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 off from there. So from 2012 to 2017 when we sold the company, we built a pretty sizable SaaS business. >> So interesting experiences as to Mayfield, no revenue, that's the way they like it. Like to 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. I'll say the bubble crash, 2001-2002 time frame. 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 going to continue to grow forever, and our profits were going to continue to grow forever. And when the market changed and outside dynamics changed our business. This is Colonize. I'm talking about our first company. All of a sudden we went, "Uh oh, what do you now?" And I think it was more having lived through that experience that we said, "Alright, we need to figure out "when we build businesses, how do we build them "to be sort of fool-proof? "Or as much fool-poof 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, 'cause if those conditions change you're going to be in a tough spot. And so we decided then and there, "Alright, 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. We watched very closely and carefully, and he did something else that was interesting. It's that he learned how to story tell. 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, "Alright, 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, "Alright, 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 wanted 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 in Silicon Valley and around the world, now that entrepreneurship's kind of gone global, is they get stuck in with dogma and like, "We got to 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 goin' on around them. What's your advice for 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 or two years from now or three years from now? I think about the world ten years from now. What do I know to be the case ten years from now? I think this is something that Jeff Bezos talks about. Which is what do you for sure know is going to be the case with your business ten years from now? If you can plan towards that, you can build something that's sustainable. And so we knew ten years from now marketers are still going to want to reach people. They're still going to want to story tell. They're still going to want to measure 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 story tell, 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 ten years from now that's going to still be the case. And I felt if you know that then you can build towards this vision and so-- >> Medium and the channels are all going to 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 going to change overnight. And I felt like over the long haul that's not going to change very quickly. Increasingly we're going to be digital consumers, and marketers are going to have to tell their stories. Now the business that we started at Moat in 2010 ended up changing dramatically. We started a crowd-sourced 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. >> That's a great point. I think, I always get in a debate here among entrepreneurs and investors. The word pivot versus adjusting. When you have a North Star or a mission, you just got to 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, the wind in the sails if you will, for the entrepreneur to 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 this slight different path. So I would argue that every good business is going to iterate. Now whether you want to call it a pivot or not, I think is more nomenclature or semantics. My view is you're going to iterate. They key is having that North Star. So in ten 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 going to be the case ten 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 ten years from now this is going to 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 going to adjust." One of the things that I learned from Moat 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 a thousand 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 slowing the game down. Reminds me of baseball batters up there slowing that game down, watch that ball come in, really slow. And I think that's 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 the 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 that 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 in 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, yeah, "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 is wrong, but it means 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 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 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're starting 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're starting 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, "Alright, 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, "Alright, 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, "Alright, 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 that we have out there now, 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 more lean. What are some of the things that you would do if you were in your 20's? >> 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 ten years from now. I think oftentimes, particularly when I was a young entrepreneur, you were living day to day or week to week where you were going, "Alright, 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 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, "Alright, what do I know to be the case "ten 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'd buy some Apple stock for sure. (laughs) >> I don't know if I would bought Apple stock, but certainly I would've made longer term bets. What 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 go back, and you always, everyone has those experiences in life where they would say, "I could've been there "or there." Looking forward is the key. And I think one of the interesting things about your journey is you had the time in college, make some money, put some dough in your pocket. Then you go out and you have some cash. You make an investment. You ride the wave with Right Media, and then you go the venture-backed startup. Talk about the dynamics. Specifically the venture-backed startup, because now the dynamics are changed. I mean, hell, I might go do an ICL and suddenly get subpoenaed 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 a venture-backed 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, we were really impressed by Mayfield. We were impressed by the way that they approached the conversation with us, the way that they leaned forward. I tell entrepreneurs 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, "Alright, 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. >> That's right. >> 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 Chaddha from Mayfield said to me when I first met with him is he said, "This is going to take you seven to ten 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. (John laughing) But he was right, and one of the things that he said to me after they 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 push 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, Jonah, I really appreciate the conversation. You're an 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 got that ten year vision. What's going to happen in the next ten 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-- (no audio) >> Great, Jonah Goodhart, at Oracle now, first a founder, entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, here as part of theCUBE's People First Network series. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)