EP266 - Minoan CEO Marc Hostovsky on Native Retail  Marc Hostovsky, CEO of Monoan an innovative “Native Retail” concept. Monoan makes it easy for consumers to natively purchase products that they have tried and loved during hospitality experiences. Such as buying the bedding used in a boutique hotel room you are staying at. Marc founded Monoan after previous commerce experiences at Jet.com and Walmart. Marc can be reached at sayhello@minoanexperience.com Episode 266 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday June 11, 2021. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 266 being recorded on Thursday June 10th 2021 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners here at the Jason and Scot show headquarters we are always on the lookout for exciting new startups that are innovating around some of our favorite topics of e-commerce payments. Drones AV are all that good stuff one of our favorite Trends is Brands going Direct one startup with a very Innovative approach on this trend is called minoan and we are very excited to have the founder and CEO mark hostovsky on the show Marc welcome to the show. Marc: [1:17] Thanks great to be here it’s nice to hear I’ve heard the intro many times as a listener so cool to hear it as a guest now. Jason: [1:25] We are honored to have you as a guest and Mark this is not your first rodeo in Commerce so do you want to tell our guests are our listeners a little bit about your e-commerce background and how you. You came to start at the company. Marc: [1:44] Yeah sure so I was an early employee at jet.com. Yeah I met basically Scott Hilton and some of the early team at an at a lip Uncle tedium I never know how to say it but the sandwich shop in New York City when I was working actually at a. Research firm yeah and got sold on sort of the mission of. Fixing the economics of e-commerce you know specifically like. Looking at how Amazon had built this entire infrastructure Optimizer I’m getting you one package as quickly as possible which is very consumer friendly but economically challenging, and so creating this new e-commerce model where you can incentivize. [2:38] Yeah customers basically to take actions that improve the economics of the order like bundling more items together different for slower shipping and basically after listening to Scott and team talk about jet for like. 30 40 minutes I went back to my old job at the time and was like how could I possibly you know keep selling keep this job of selling research I know there’s this awesome company, really shaking things up and yeah join the company pre-launch was there. For the growth from zero to a billion dollar annualized run rate, ten months got to work really closely with Mark lies on greater leading there and then yeah through the Walmart acquisition took over a pretty large p&l in hard lines which is sort of where. My interest in this concept of native retail came about. Scot: [3:34] Brickell and then. I’m always excited to you know when folks go from kind of having a job to starting a business was this something you always want to do to take the entrepreneurial plunge or did you just kind of say I’ve got this killer idea and I can’t not do it or what led you to entrepreneurship. Marc: [3:54] Yeah I’ve always wanted to start something I’m a big student of Entrepreneurship and I love reading Memoirs of entrepreneurs I did. Before my now and I did start a company called tail your which was, pretty much a virtual tailoring which is my first run-in with the entrepreneurial Buzz I think in this case, like it was always on