Hello Everyone -
It’s always fun, interesting, and thought-provoking to record another podcast episode. Adding to those elements, recording a conversation live! And that’s what I did. I booked time at NYC’s Lower East Side Bookstore and Podcast Studio, P&T Knitware. If you love books, especially ones about NYC or authors based or from NYC, this is your store. Want to record your own podcast episode? Their studio is open to the community!
On this episode, I had my friend Jonah Goodhart join me. I met Jonah back in 2016 when I attended his company’s, MOAT, conference in Montauk. This was when I was helping run digital marketing for Prestige Brands and we hired MOAT to help us understand our advertising analytics such as engagement and viewability (did someone actually see our ad?? What a novel concept!)
Jonah is very self-aware both as an operator and angel investor over his 25+ year career starting from his days at Cornell in the late ‘90s launching an early affiliate marketing company, Colonize.com, which built large email lists of consumers who wanted to be alerted about free items from brands in the early aughts of the world wide web. Big brands, such as Barnes & Noble caught wind and paid Jonah & Noah to refer them customers.
After Colonize.com led Jonah & Noah to become the first outside check into Right Media which at the time in 2002 was the first digital ad exchange marketplace. Once Right Media sold in 2007, they took a break to angel invest and use the 3 years between the exit and founding MOAT to decide the next step in their career journey.
“And my brother and I have tried to do this throughout our, I guess almost 25 year career at this point, is we've tried to pause and say, you know, what are we? What's happening? What do we understand? What do we not understand? What are the trends that we're seeing? And we paused and we said, you know, there's gonna be a lot more innovation, a lot of companies that, uh, we can potentially be involved in, that we could support.”— Montauk Labs Co-Founder, Jonah Goodhart
Fast Forward, MOAT sells to Oracle in 2017, Jonah stays on for 3 years and just as he was going to travel the world with his wife in 2020 the world shuts down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jonah took the opportunity to use this time, with Noah, to evaluate what’s next.
“And we said, you know, but yet the satisfaction and fulfillment we get from being a part of a company, which you know, for us is about the people that we get to work with and is about waking up and having that feeling of, ‘yes, I want to go do something that inspires me and that feels good and that feels like I'm making a positive difference in, in other people's lives.’ And so what it led to for us was creating a venture studio, which is what we're doing now. And that concept was all right, how do we take technology? Which is, you know, there can be technology for good and there's technology for not so good. And we've seen lots of examples of, of both. How can we take technology for good and use it to make a positive impact on the world in some way? You know, in my mind it's about building sustainable businesses.”
Jonah and Montauk Labs are pairing the same entrepreneurial zeal that’s been omnipresent throughout Jonah’s career with public issues affecting a large amount of Americans, such as access to healthcare.
“The US has a lot of things in the healthcare space that are great. It has some other things, perhaps some of the incentives that are not so great. How do we sort of think about building a business in this, in this world with a clear vision? And our vision was, how do we use our background data and analytics to improve health outcomes?”
Click to listen to the full conversation on YouTube
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