Jonah Goodhart started his entrepreneurial journey while still in college at Cornell University. What started out a bit haphazardly with an email list turned into solid learning opportunities that have informed his business decisions along the way.
After the acquisition of his second company, Right Media by Yahoo in 2007, Goodhart decided to go in a different direction and started investing in other people. This angel fund, WGI, helped to fund numerous data and next generation location companies.
But Goodhart missed creating and running a company. In 2010, Moat was launched to make digital a more effective medium for brands to reach consumers via measurement and analytics.
Building on the belief that people and culture are the core of the company, Goodhart set out to bring in team members that were both positive and paid attention to detail: two key ingredients to a successful start-up.
Throughout the process, Goodhart acknowledges the challenges of raising capital and the importance of finding investors that have the right chemistry.
“One of my conclusions throughout that process is that raising money is sort of like baseball. If three out of ten like you and there’s a fit, then you’re in the Hall of Fame. I think venture investing is hard to do because there’s a lot of signals that investors are juggling. There’s groupthink challenges. There’s a reality that each firm is different and has different goals and not every entrepreneur is a fit with every firm or every partner within every firm, but you have to find the right chemistry. That’s really the key,” Goodhart said.
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