After years of working in the corporate world, Mo Sloan saw a need. Online ordering systems that were available to restaurants had a glaring problem. They do not integrate with the restaurant's current point-of-sale systems. This causes many restaurants to forego offering any sort of online ordering, even though the demand is very high.

Mo set out to create a solution: EZ-Chow. The company found early traction and is growing fast.

Entrepreneurs like Mo are a great example of how the "Third Wave" of growth of the Internet is happening. Specifically, people like Mo with industry experience are spotting problems and creating solutions with current technology.

Learn how Mo saw the opportunity, how he got started, and where EZ-Chow is headed in this MetroStart podcast interview.

 

Transcript (Machine transcribed so please forgive the many typos.)

Hey everybody. Welcome to the MetroStart podcast. This is Alan Grosheider and on this podcast I interview local people that are involved in our startup community to learn a little bit more about how they got started and how we can all work together to improve our startup community. And today I'm interviewing Mo Sloan, he's the founder and CEO of EZ- Chow. It's a company that gives restaurants a better way to run their online ordering and delivery solutions. I've been hearing a lot more and more about Mo and his company and seeing him around a little bit more. In fact, I just saw him speak yesterday at venture connectors, so I'm excited to learn a little bit more about your company.

Mo, thanks for coming on. Oh, it's great. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about EZ-Chow.

Yeah, I'm excited to learn more about guys like you that aren't, you know, a 20 year old with a Hoodie that people kind of expect to be startup guys. You know, you're a guy that has experienced in an industry and saw a great idea while you were working in the corporate world and, and then went out and made it happen. So I, I think that's going to be kind of, it kind of fits Steve Case's vision for the third wave of the Internet. I think it's going to be a really important part of the startup world in the future. So, um, yeah, I I'm, I'm excited to learn a little bit more how you got started.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. You're, you're, you're right. I mean we are, we are very different than, um, then your typical probably start up, um, entrepreneur. Um, I do have lots of experience, uh, which in my opinion is a good thing and I never, I didn't wake up one day, I was like, Hey, I want to be entreprenuer, hey, I want to do a startup.

It was more of this gradual, gradual shift for me as my career progressed and got to the point where I realized, um, there was a glass ceiling and um, my ideas, it could be of great value, but I wouldn't necessarily benefit proportionally to the idea. Right. So, uh, started looking around and, and was working at Humana at the time and, and realize that one of the solutions that I was, oh, an architect on a was a very poorly written solution, um, but was generating tons of cash for the person that looked at solutions. So I was like, well, if they can do it in this code is substandard, then I should be able to do that with well written code. And it was just a matter of kind of leaning on some of the experiences I had in the past. Finding something that I can do that wasn't necessarily, um, okay, well it wasn't necessarily a large, uh, okay.

Okay. Well, the cost of entry, the barrier entry was he, so that's kind of like kind of stumbled upon what I was doing, what I've been doing. Because for example, logistics businesses, you kind of have to have a lot of money to start up. You can have a lot of money invested getting that health insurance goes without saying. So banking goes with Elsa,