Ep. #14, Navigating Restaurant Tech’s Roadmaps with Anthony Presley

Isaac Nassimi: Do you go by Anthony or Tony?

Anthony Presley: I think that's assigned at birth. I'm an Anthony.

Isaac: Okay.

Anthony: I respond to a lot of things though, and most of them are worse than Tony, so.

Isaac: All right, Mr. Presley. So I did some reading on you and you have some very fun and unusual roots that got you into this industry in this career track.

I saw you started in game development. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Anthony: I did. I actually started, prior to that, I started in game hacking.

My dad was stationed in Cairo, Egypt. He was a Navy entomologist and was studying and building vaccines, which is a very controversial topic now, but in 1990 it was not so much.

This was pre-Internet, pre-iPad, all dial up modem stuff. And in the summers we'd come back to the States and buy games on floppy disks or CDs, at some point, and I'd take them back.

My friends and I, we'd take them from the States back to Cairo and then we'd figure out how to swap them around.

And there was inevitably some sort of copy protection, which anybody who isn't as old as I am, that would be, you know, "on page three, paragraph six, the third word is" whatever.

And you'd have to fill that in. And that's how they would keep you from distributing copies of these games.

And so we would figure out how to hack the games and remove that copy protection.

So I started there and then I got into game development with various engines and I had a very fun seventh grade teacher who was one of the inventors of the mac OSand he was on sabbatical and so his wife was teaching at the school I went to in Cairo.

And he kept me entertained, because there was no TV, no Internet, and I was a very bored American running around Cairo, Egypt.

Christine Spang: Wow. I'm pretty sure I benefited from some of your cracking, early in the days, because I used to download the games with the enclosed, "we included what you need" to actually make it work.

Anthony: You found it. Yep.

Christine: My folks wouldn't buy me the latest computer. I just had to use the old family computer which meant you had to find old games that would work on it.

Anthony: Yeah, I get that.

Isaac: Did you have a hacker name, Anthony?

Anthony: I didn't have a hacker name, not that I can recall. But that's been, gosh, that was 30 years ago. But yeah, not that I remember it.

Isaac: Don't worry, you're beyond the statute of limitations. I'm pretty sure one way or another.

Anthony: It's true. Nobody's coming to get me, I guess.

Isaac: So you said you worked on game engines, things like that. Can you tell me a little bit more about it?

And the reason I'm really curious about this is because I actually learned to program by working on games myself and it was a great experience.

Anthony: Yeah, the gaming.

I would recommend anybody actually go learn how to do software development on games. Just the algorithms, the technical stuff that you have to learn, whatever the technique is.

Especially when you think about how you have to do game development or graphic design and graphic elements inside of a small, resource-constrained computer, which, now my iPhone is way more powerful than anything I had at the time.

But yeah, I got into game development and then ultimately was doing demos where you would actually go through and build a fly through or fire effects or any of that kind of stuff.

And how you did that on a 16-bit computer, you know, a 286 or 386 computer. And yeah, I built some. None of them were of any success whatsoever.

But my friends and I would play them and tweak them a little bit and it certainly made you learn a lot of things that I would say most modern software developers coming out of a university have no idea how to do outside of a visual editor and so it really made you learn a lot of the fundamentals.

Isaac: That's awesome. And like I said, that's how I got my start as well.

So I remember that it was a really wonderful feeling that you could feel when your code was slow, you could feel when things were inefficient or you'd done something incorrectly.

And that's something that, in the web development world that we live in today, you have to bring something to a mass ivescale that you can't really do on your own personal computer.

So you don't really get that immediate feeling for it. You have to benchmark it and whatnot.

I agree. Everyone should screw around with it. Great experience. So what happened after that?

Anthony: Yeah, I was in college. I had actually been a software consultant in high school because, with my background in computer programming, I didn't want to work necessarily at a retail store like most high schoolers do.

And so I had joined up with a software consulting company, and we split the company up when I went to college.

Somewhere around my junior year, I had about 60 employees working for me. And I realized really quickly that they did not care about me getting my degree and I didn't care that much about going to school.

So I dropped out of school and kept on with the software company for a couple of years. It was a good time all the way until my clients did some stupid stuff and got in trouble with the federal government. And then I found out that you should have a product and not a consulting company.

Christine: Wow. Did you just say you had 60 employees while also going to college?

Anthony: I did, I did.

Christine: How did things take off so fast?

Anthony: The company took off really quickly. My customer did. I started in the software space.

We built custom ERPs, vertical software ERPs for an attorney. And he had an advertising agency and did some other things in the patent and invention trademark space.

And he had an advertising company that worked, and they were giving him horrible leads.

He was spending a whole lot of money, his cost of acquisition was through the roof, and I just thought, "hey, if I could beat what they're doing, would you give me your business?"

And I beat them. And I picked up all of their advertising business, and next thing I knew, I had an advertising and media company and we were shooting Super Bowl ads. It was a little crazy.

Christine: It sounds like you acted with a ton of agency. What made you feel like you could just go and start something while you were in college?

Anthony: I was just dumb.

Nobody told me I couldn't do it, so I thought I would try it. It's one of the reasons I like working with startup incubators. You've got young people who don't know any better.

Like, "here, I'm gonna run through that wall."They'd never run through the wall, they're just gonna do it.

And so I unfortunately or fortunately went and did it. But, yeah, I saw a problem that a customer had and thought I'd fix.

Christine: I love that. So you mentioned that you learned this lesson from building this company where it sounds like things got a little crazy in terms of your product roadmap. What happened there?

Anthony: So we started as a services company, and were really just building for a couple of clients. This would have been 1998 to 2006, somewhere in that range.

You know, SaaS wasn't a thing. I didn't know that you could charge by the drink or by the month. And so we were just billing hours like a regular services company, or by the project or by the milestone.

And then when our main customer, it was 90% of our revenue, got in some trouble, I went back to the drawing board and went, "okay, well, how do we diversify our revenue? How do we spread that around? How do we not have this problem again?"

And so we went to building products.

Isaac: What kind of products did you build?

Anthony: We started building a couple of different things. We built a warehouse management product for a bit.

We partnered up with another group and built something called Smart Crop, which was these little sensors that you would put out in an agriculture environment, and they would monitor your soil temperature and humidity and water and let you know when you're supposed to water, that kind of thing.

And ultimately we settled on a product called TimeForge, which is a workforce management product.

And we built that and didn't know you could raise VC money. That was not something that I knew about while I was in Lubbock, Texas. There's not a big VC group there.

And so we built it with the services company on the side and then focused a bunch of our efforts building this product and started leveraging all the SEO and all that kind of stuff and managed to get paying customers.

And then they told us why all of our software was the worst thing on the planet and we needed to improve it. And then they started providing feedback. And so we did that.

Isaac: First of all, the Smart Crop thing sounds really cool. It sounds really ahead of its time.

Anthony: Very much so.

Isaac: Which I know can be a bummer in retrospect because if you started that maybe five or 10 years later, something like that, it would have been really the right time to bring it to market. So I'm sorry.

Anthony: I appreciate that. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.

And by the way, making hardware is very expensive. That partner went through a whole lot of cash trying to build circuit boards. It's very expensive.

Isaac: Yep. I'm glad that we get to play in the world of software where you can ship changes to your customer every day and kind of build the airplane while it's in the air sometimes, especially when you're taking that MVP to market.

So tell me what happened after that.

Anthony: I mean we'll fast forward a little bit around some of the stuff but yeah, we grew, we learned, we went to our customers and we thought we had the coolest idea on the planet.

We were going to build this automatic scheduling software that you would just sit down and a restaurant manager would have a pre-built schedule and it'd be done.

And we went and showed it to the first couple of customers and they told us, "we pay our managers to build schedules. I don't know why we would also pay you." And that's what we were told in 2007 and 2008.

And so we said, well what do you need? And they went "oh, we need HR compliance and we need clock enforcement. We need all these things."

And so we went out and built those things and managed to get some customers in the restaurant and grocery space.

And then you know, fast forward seven or eight years we did go raise a series A and we got yelled at in our first board meeting a little bit because we we didn't grow fast enough.

We couldn't spend the money fast enough. And so we went and grew and then we ultimately sold the company in 2016.

And then after selling the company went to go work for the strategic acquirer who did that for four years and had nine mergers and acquisitions under our belts there.

Yeah, it was a good time. In 2020 we spun the company back out and after spinning it out, I went to go work where I work now which is at Custom Business Solutions where we make software for restaurants and places that sell food.

And so I got to do a lot of things and still get to run a workforce management SaaS company as well.

Christine: So this is actually your second restaurant industry business?

Anthony: It is. Or third. Yeah, the strategic acquirer. I went to go work for a company called Truno and love those guys, still good friends with their whole team.

But we serviced and supported pretty much every grocery chain in North America. So, yeah, lots of fun.

Christine: What drew you to the restaurant business? It sounds like you found it interesting enough to stick around for a while.

Anthony: It is, it's a low margin, high turnover industry.

The thing I like about the restaurant business the most is that, we have this phrasing that says operators are going to operate. You guys have all been to restaurants on a Friday night where something breaks and you probably have no idea it broke because whoever's running that restaurant is just going to figure out how to make it work. And so that may be by sending a carrier pigeon to your table, because that's just what they do. And so, the gumption, I guess my dad would call it, of everybody in the industry is appealing.

Christine: In that all sorts of crazy stuff is going to happen and you just kind of got to figure out how to roll with it and make it work and make people still have a good experience.

Anthony: That's exactly right. Like in the kitchen, half the pizza line may be broken and the grill may not work and they may run out of tomatoes and maybe half the staff called out sick and your favorite flavor of vodka isn't on tap.

You know, all these things happen. And yet they've still got to figure out some way to smile and come bring you your food and hope that they did well enough, you want to tip them.

Isaac: I think there's something really interesting about that because in the software world, what's the worst thing that can happen? It's worse than an error, is an exception. Right?

Like, "hey, we actually have no code to cover this thing that's happening right now." And the way you deal with that is you just return a 500.

Generally, you know, you might crash the page if it's the front end and show some sort of error, but you can't do that in real life. You can't just kick all the customers out of the restaurant.

So with these chaotic operations-heavy real world things, building software for them is really hard to make it flexible enough to handle the exceptions that actually come up day to day.

So I'd imagine you got your butt kicked a little bit in the early days of building this kind of software. I mean, you said as much.

I'd love to hear about the process of building to the point where you could actually handle all of those exceptions, all of those edge cases, whatever the team decided to do to overcome the challenges of the day.

Anthony: You are correct. You are correct. Because in software, you know, short of building Software for hospitals or pacemakers or something like that, maybe autonomous vehicles now, generally the bad thing that happens is the page doesn't load.

And generally speaking in, at least in B2B SaaS and software, if it's down for a day, it's okay, that buyer will come back tomorrow. Or you could probably get them back.

But if you're hungry at lunchtime on Friday and you show up at a restaurant and they're down or something's not working, they don't get a chance to remake that. It's not like you can hang out for three hours and then they can boot back up and away you go. So they actually lose that revenue. That revenue is gone. It doesn't get to get dipped back into.

And so yeah, I would love to tell you there's a silver bullet, but a lot of it is just grit, determination and being around for a long time.

CBS has actually been around for 30 years. I'm not the founder. I stepped in to help out some friends and become part of the team here.

But Art and Jeremy Julian started this company, Art did 31 years ago.

So there's a lot of blood, sweat and tears in solving those problems of what happens on a Friday night and how do you fail over for a second printer and what happens when the kitchen display system doesn't work.

And, to your point, how do you engineer those things? You can whiteboard a lot of it out, but as we've spread across to about 11,000 restaurants, they always come up with new ways to break the software.

Users come up with new stuff and there's always a new integration that needs to be built and we've got 100 plus of those now.

Our ISV partners also find ways to break our software.

So it's a constant thing in trying to build engineering guardrails to minimize disruption from third parties.

Christine: I definitely identify with that. At Nylas, our first product was a unified API for email. And email has been around for like 50 years.

And if you're talking about long tail of exceptions, there's everything when it comes to connecting to any email provider in the world.

So I really identified when you were just talking about all the crazy things that happen in the restaurant industry because I feel like we still discover new edge cases after 10 years of building Nylas every single day.

And I can't actually imagine getting to the end of the bottom of the barrel, which is just like, you know, the people reason that people buy platforms.

The reason that people buy your restaurant software, is because you've accumulated that expertise and have learned the hard way.

And hopefully, you know, people can also get some streamlining, get some efficiency, get some best practices, even from starting to use the platform that you all have built.

Anthony: Yeah, no, I think that's valid. I'd love to actually hear. You've been around for a long time. You're not a Silicon Valley startup. You've been around for 12 years.

I'm just curious, have you learned anything in that time frame, being around for 12 years that you wouldn't necessarily know had you started over brand new tomorrow in the first two years?

Like, is there some learnings there? Just the longevity of being at it for so long.

Christine: I mean, a hundred thousand things. But I would say, one of the first ones is just that, like, the best way to avoid dying is to not give up.

Anthony: Yeah.

Christine: You know, you just keep showing up every day and hammering away at the problem and trying to help people build great products and having the grit and determination to just keep figuring out the next problem.

And the next problem is what leads you to success eventually, at the end of the day.

Obviously tons of things have changed over the last 12 years. LLMs barely existed 12 years ago and no one had ever heard of them.

And it was kind of the golden age of SaaS. And we're also a developer platform. And developer platforms were really just kind of getting started then.

So I think we've kind of evolved through to like, there's ways that people know that are a great way to be an API and to be a provider, on the software tooling side for other companies that just didn't really exist 12 years ago.

I'd love to understand just a little bit what the software ecosystem looks like in the restaurant space, because you have to essentially bridge between the real world and the software world.

So I read your website a little bit. It sounds like you have some pieces of your product that are SaaS.

And then I don't know if you ship actual hardware or just integrate with other hardware.

But what's the ecosystem of all the things that you have to integrate with?

Anthony: It's really difficult and I don't know if it's more difficult to sell to restaurant folks or if it's more difficult to sell to developers.

I did a stint there for a little bit trying to sell to developers. And inevitably some developer goes, "I can build that. Why would we buy that when we can build it?"

Christine: But do the restaurant people pick up the phone?

Anthony: Generally not. Generally not.

Christine: Developers don't. They hate picking up the phone.

Isaac: Wow, who knew these two groups had so much overlap?

Anthony: There really is a lot of overlap. It's kind of crazy.

The hard part about the restaurant ecosystem from a platform perspective is the amount of money that goes through payments rails.

And so a developer ecosystem like Stripe owns the world. They've got all this, but they're also very pricey from a per transaction basis.

And so when you look at the restaurant ecosystem, there's four or five credit card processors that essentially own the market. And those credit card processors have a particular types of hardware and they certify the hardware.

So the hardware is from a different manufacturer than the processor. Then they certify those. And there's different security levels with PCI that, depending on the volume of the restaurant entity, they may have to be at different levels of PCI security.

And so there's different devices they have to use and different platforms and then they've got auditors involved and then that all trickles down into the decision making that needs to be made.

If you think about level of service and so somebody's going to walk up to your table with a tablet and it's got a credit card reader on it and then they hand it to you, you have this whole awkward thing where you've got to tell them how much you're tipping them while they're standing there.

Certain devices are certified in that way and then other devices may be for a drive through and other devices may be at a counter stand.

And so the way that the restaurant operates drives and dictates the devices that are certified, which dictates which platforms, whether or not that's iOS, Web, Windows, Android, that you can run on those tablets or those devices.

And so suddenly this like, "hey, I'm going to pick one device, I'm going to pick one processor," that's all out the window.

So you have, n-complexity here to try and figure out how you're going to tie all this together, to try and go after your customer base. And then the market's fragmented on top of that.

So you have enterprise folks who might have a five year contract with their credit card provider and you have SMB folks who maybe only have a 12 month contract, but if they choose to get out of the contract, they may owe $50,000 for that hardware that they've been using that the credit card processor gave them for free.

And so the tech stack gets really complicated and cumbersome really fast. A nd then you layer in these gateways, which are not that dissimilar from an API gateway.

And the gateways then might allow you to get some more flexibility, but now they want a percentage of every transaction.

And so you can charge more and you get, but you get more flexibility, it becomes a pretty significant hassle, needless to say.

And I would tell you that other countries, not in the US maybe Canada and parts of Europe where the credit cards are regulated, a lot of these problems go away and you get standardization. It's kind of interesting.

Isaac: So there's a lot you just covered there. But I remember when I was younger, before I learned to program, I worked at a Italian restaurant and we were using Aloha and at that time everyone used Aloha.

And I think even at that point it already felt a little bit dated just from a user experience perspective and what you expected to see.

And I think everyone kind of independently came to this idea of like, "oh, like eventually we'll just use an iPad or whatever and eventually we could just hand people the devices and let them do that stuff."

What do you think actually drove the market adoption there? Was it maybe you guys, or was it just market readiness? What do you think drove that?

Anthony: It's a good history lesson because NCR and Aloha, Aloha was acquired by NCR, owned a lot of the market.

I mean at one point in time they had the largest penetration of the POS anywhere. At CBS, our founder actually about 15 years ago was like, " nobody's calling me about a old DOS based platform anymore, so we should probably figure this out."

So before iPad1 we started building for Macromedia. Actually we were building for a Macromedia experience, Flash.

And ultimately the iPad one came out. Apple actually fronted us some money to put a POS onto an iPad and we were the first POS on an iPad.

The market though, I think if you look at it, not that long ago, eight years ago or a little less, finally got over all of the things that go into hardening a system.

You asked me earlier about, hardening a system. And so, you know, you walk in with an iPad one into a restaurant and drop it, it's not going to be a very pretty thing.

But now they've been hardened quite a bit and you can get them so they're drop resistant and liquid resistant and they still work and wi-fi and all the environment.

I mean you put them under a heat lamp. I mean restaurants are crazy places to try and put equipment in. I mean just crazy.

So yeah, so the market's matured, the hardware's matured and then people's willingness to operate. I mean right now, I'm sure you've all walked around or eaten at a restaurant that has a Toast tab, right?

Toast is the largest POS provider in North America right now from a number of stores. And they got that little Android device.

And when that first came out, people did not want to have you hand them a computer to swipe or tap or dip a credit card.

And they certainly don't, even now, it's kind of an awkward thing of like, "hey, I'm going to tip you and then fill out your survey," while the server standing right there.

And then the whole thing is a little awkward and still not quite where I think most people wanted them.

Isaac: Yeah, where the server's pretending to look away as they hold the device in front of you, but it's still in their hand.

You seem to be pretty ahead of the market in terms of knowing what's coming, whether or not you realize it.

My question is what do you think the future dining experience looks like in 10 years based off of all of this?

Anthony: That's a great question. Right now there is a ton of work going into and around how you get guests back into the restaurant.

And so I would say that CDPs and one on one marketing, we talked a little bit about LLMs and AI and how to get the right promotions in front of the right people.

And I would say if all the brands that are working on that get what they want, then RIP our inboxes because it's going to be non stop.

Luckily most of those brands probably won't be able to execute or they'll get stuck somewhere along the way.

But the dining experience continues to drive more and more towards the: "how do I get Anthony to come into my restaurant, one more time a week or one more time a month? And how do we make sure that we're giving him the right offers."

And that really starts that dining experience. And then once you're there, there's a lot of stuff going on.

We just actually released a new product that we've patented and put a lot of time and effort into around AI and knowing when your food's going to be ready because something happened during COVID that hadn't really taken place beforehand, which is that you now have all this online ordering and third party delivery and doordash and Uber eats and all of that coming in.

At the same time, I'm trying to sit down and have dinner with my wife while these third party orders and first party orders are coming into the kitchen.

And so now I have a worse dining experience or a slower dining experience. And right now that's not all managed.

There are separate channels. They come into the kitchen differently. If you guys have ever seen, the Bear, the show.

Isaac: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Anthony: So it's real. Like, it's real.

I mean, it's pretty close to as real as it gets there. and you know, all the different dining channels, there was an episode where the printer just kept going and going and going all their orders and he just kind of threw the printer, turned it off and was like, "enough of this." But that's a real problem.

And so I think as systems get smarter, AI gets implemented. Basic machine learning in some places will just be fine. It doesn't need to be fancy AI, being able to keep track of what's going on in the kitchen. So I think you'll end up with a smoother dining experience where the restaurant operators know what's going on. And right n ow they, by and large, don't know what's going on.

Christine: How are you kind of thinking about just all the data that you have aggregated on the platform and how to use it to essentially make the platform better over time?

It sounds like one piece is making predictions about when food will be ready, but what other opportunities are there for you as a restaurant platform to drive value with the data that you have?

Anthony: What exists in general technology is you generally have software that has APIs, and APIs are available and open and anybody can build and away you go.

I would tell you that in restaurant technology, that doesn't exist. It's a really strange thing, but they're all closed.

Any restaurant brand you could rattle off, it's a closed ecosystem and it might cost money to use the APIs, which is fine to some degree, but you wouldn't even be able to get the specs for it.

And there are also pretty much no data standards. And so, we talked about APIs and around email. That doesn't exist.

And so when you think about all the data that we have as a POS company or as a tech company in the restaurant tech space, being able to get that to work with someone else, they likely don't have the same data or probably have very different data, which makes importing and exporting and migrations and all those things really, really, really complicated.

But we manufacture a point of sale system. It's essentially an ERP for a restaurant.

And it's interesting because the restaurant industry generally hasn't treated it that way, but it is the piece that generates all the stuff, customer interactions and all of the items on the ticket and the credit card tokens so that you can repurchase or reorder.

I mean, there's tons and tons of data there. And so the first thing we do which makes us a little unique is, we have an open API.

It's your data, you take it and do with it what you want.

And so we actually have customers that have built all kinds of things on top of our platform and continue to do so.

And we want to encourage that as much as possible because right now we're the only ones in the market that have an open API that she can go build around.

Christine: Wow, that's fucking amazing. You're basically creating the de facto RFC for restaurant data.

Anthony: We are unintentionally. Like, again, coming from a tech background, like, this shouldn't be that hard, but it is.

Christine: I mean, there's two ways things get standardized, right?

There's, one, a bunch of standards nerds get in a room and figure out what the best possible standard is.

And the other is just somebody goes out and does it. And if everybody adopts that standard, then it becomes the de facto standard.

And I just love the idea of being able to build on top of your own restaurant data. Sounds really fun.

Anthony: Yeah, yeah, we've got customers that do all kinds of fun stuff with it and you know, the basic stuff, shuttling data around from point A to point B.

And then we've got others that are doing some more innovative things with kitchen timing and drive thru timers and all the things you could possibly imagine needing in restaurant tech.

Christine: You mentioned that a lot of your users are non technical before.

What have you seen in terms of how the current trend of AI empowering non-technical people is changing how people can build things with your platform?

Anthony: Yeah, so we've been playing around a lot with, we'll call it the "no code, low code," talking to our API endpoints, and that continues to be a thing that we're pursuing.

We recently started playing around with Lovable. That's a super fun tool. And so we've got some customers that are working with that and having that interact back and forth with our APIs.

Of course, in that case, they're fairly technical users that are playing with an AI code generation tool that talks to our APIs on the back end.

But we find that most users of our point of sale back to, "hey, I used to work in an Italian restaurant, "most of our users are, we'll call them in the age range of 18 to 30.

And they're not highly technical. They want to be able to press a button and have it pop up, "Hey, this is Anthony's favorite dish. And this is when his birthday is. And the last time he was here, he ordered these three things" and make their life easier rather than having to build cool stuff, I guess.

Isaac: I think that that touches on something really interesting because you mentioned all the way back at the beginning that you talk to these restaurant owners about, "hey, we've got this system that'll help you build schedules."

And they say, "we already pay someone to do that" and if you remove that from their job, it's not like they're going to be more effective.

There's just fewer things they have to do. And at the end of the day, pretty much anyone, the only reason that they'll buy a piece of software is if it increases the enterprise value.

If it makes more customers come in the door, makesthose customers happier or makes them return more or order more.

Even the example you just gave is a really positive outlook on it of kind of having this intimacy with the customer just by having that data ready to go.

The same way that a sales rep at a traditional company would pull up the CRM right before they talk to a prospect or an existing customer and pull up all of that information that they have on them and bring it into the conversation.

So I think that's really cool. That's all I wanted to say there. It's just a really bright future for it, I think.

Anthony: Yeah, it's the hospitality industry. It's all about being hospitable. And how do we do that?

Well, we bring some of this data, this big data back and we make it so that the average user, which, I mean--

There's millions and millions of people in the restaurant and hospitality industry, and on average they have a GED. It's not a highly technical industry. There are certainly very technical people in the industry, but by and large the average worker is not. So you've got to really make sure that the technology meets them there and allows them, to your point, to bring some enterprise value back to the business. And that generally means going and making an upsell.

Go sell them an extra margarita or an extra dessert and get the add on for the big fries or whatever the case is. And you got to have some data to do that.

Isaac: Yeah, I have another potential direction for this stuff that I want to mine out real quick.

By the way, anytime you're in something that touches consumers, every consumer has an opinion. Every consumer is excited about it.

When you're in the world of email APIs or something, only once someone's actually had contact with it do they have these strong opinions.

I am curious, do you think that some of the future of the restaurants will become less personal?

And my example there is hotels. You see a lot of hotels. If they start to target millennials who are starting to accrue some capital and whatnot and starting to travel more, they're having the touchless check in experience.

We don't even go to the front desk. You just touch your phone to the door.

Some of that's due to interesting social anxiety that the generation has and continues to get higher as those generations progress.

Do you think that there's a world where people walk into restaurants and order without talking to someone somehow at their table one way or another?

Anthony: Yeah. I think you, I think you touched on it. I think it goes back a little bit to that one on one piece.

Like your preference versus my preference. Right. Like I might want a high touch environment and you might not.

I think there's room for both of those. I think there's a lot of studies out right now. They're showing that us is at a kind of a saturation point from a number of restaurants anyway.

There's a lot of restaurants and not as many people eating out. And so that's a problem.

But, yeah, I mean one of our customers put in a pizza making robot, put it into a Walmart, last year or year before last.

And so you walk up to a kiosk and you enter in your order and you say go. And it sends electronically the order over and then the robot makes your pizza.

And if you don't desire to talk to a single person, you don't have to. And so the very opposite of that.

You guys are California, you've got In-N-Out burger, which is very hospitality-centric, but you know, you get in that drive thru line and you get your burger and you're out the door and it's quick, right?

And that's kind of their whole deal is serving it quick and getting you gone. So you don't want to have a long conversation about your birthday with them.

Isaac: fair enough.

Anthony: Yeah.

Christine: It's funny, I was just thinking that yesterday I totally ordered lunch on an iPad somewhere and there was a person right behind the glass and I just wanted to talk to them.

So maybe I'm not ready for the kiosk future.

Anthony: Yeah.

Christine: So you mentioned a while back in the conversation that you, in a first attempt at creating software for the restaurant industry, tried to sell them some scheduling software for kind of the back of house.

How has the attitude or the desires from those folks in the restaurants themselves changed in terms of what they want from technology?

Like , if you sold that today, would people be buying it or is it something that hasn't changed and then what has evolved over time? Thirty years is a long time.

Anthony: Overall, the number of software products in the retail industry, and I think in general in any industry, has gone through the roof.

And so all the stuff you read from Okta or anybody that puts up these studies, you know--

The average enterprise is using 70 or 80 pieces of software when you total it all up and some have more. The last thing I saw was anybody with more than 20,000 employees, they have closer to 200 pieces of software.

And so we've seen exactly that in restaurant and retail tech, HR tech is the exact same space, is that there are all in one solutions.

And you know, if that's all you can afford, you've got a sledgehammer, then you're getting an all in one solution.

But you start going, well, I really need this marketing piece or I really need this feature that does this thing with scheduling on calendars or I want to track applicants this way.

Then you start going and getting and collecting these laser focused vertical pieces of software.

And then suddenly you have 70 or 80 software packages and your managers are responsible for managing and running 30, 40, 50 pieces of software.

And that creates a new level of complication. But we found, scheduling, for example, in restaurants and retail, it's hard to find employees these days and once you get them, it's hard to, you know, there's that phrasing of "you couldn't keep employees if they had handles on them." It's very hard to keep them.

And then you've got to, you know, deal with the scheduling and the preferences and the overtime and all the labor laws and all of that.

So 20 plus years ago we had a hard time selling people scheduling software. We don't have that problem anymore.

People go, "hey, we need scheduling software and we need compliance software and we need HR software and we need." And so suddenly they need tons of software anyway.

So I'm curious, is that what you're seeing in other verticals as well?

Christine: Yeah. I have two comments. One is I would say that in general the amount of competition in the software ecosystem has exploded over the last few years.

The barrier to entry is going down. There's lots more people just launching new things.

If 10 years ago you had like two options for fulfilling some sort of software need, you now have 10 and I don't see that really changing in the next few years.

I think if anything it's going to get even wilder as just there's so much idea, experimentation because people have such powerful tools these days, everything from APIs to integrate payments, communication, SMS, all those types of things to AI code building allows people to spin up a POC and just experiment with ideas in a day rather than a month.

And I think that the best ideas will win. But there's a ton of idea experimentation and that's going to continue.

Other thing that we're seeing is some trends around just how platforms evolve. Like new, best-in-class features tend to come to be as a product that's an idea, that's just that thing.

But then we've seen over time people tend to consolidate within a vertical and bring in those best in class features and make sure that the data is connected between all of the pieces because that makes the sum of all the parts better than each individual piece where the customer has to essentially glue them together themselves.

So I'm sure Isaac has some deep product thoughts about this, but that would be my summary.

Isaac: I wouldn't call them deep thoughts, but I got a lot of thoughts. Who knows if they're all right.

I would say that just as with dining, there's an elasticity as far as what you'll end up buying. Right?

Those people who are eating out less, they're still eating, but they're being a little bit more mindful about their eating.

As the economy changes and whatnot and as there is a bit more saturation, as the novelty wears off, all that kind of stuff.

And I think you probably see the same thing in the SaaS world. Most companies are trying to consolidate one way or another and reduce that vendor list from 100 or hundreds down to maybe dozens.

And maybe the wish list will be single digits, maybe because of budget also because they're just overwhelmed with all this stuff.

You have to do all this just to manage these relationships and these renewals and whatnot. And all the vendors are all trying to change things up every year.

Christine: Compliance and security.

Isaac: Yeah, there's a huge load. So what we're seeing for example in our world is, for example CRMs are a lot of our sweet spot customers.

A lot of our customers are CRMs or ATSs, things like that, things that are kind of hubs. And we see a lot of companies that played along with those hubs or were part of that ecosystem that are trying to become the hub.

And my hypothesis there is because they're trying to become uncuttable from the budgets and you can't cut the hub.

You can cut everything around the hub, but at the end of the day you can't cut your hub.

So they're all trying to play in that world. So we see a lot of task management platforms trying to become CRMs.

We see call recording platforms trying to become CRMs as well, all kinds of stuff like that.

So I would actually even imagine the analog to that would be that in the restaurant world you'd see some of these restaurants trying to open grocery store chains.

I'm not saying that's going to happen, but that's basically what I'm seeing in the software world is the equivalent of that. Which is interesting.

Anthony: It's happening. It's happening for sure. I mean, I think your analogy is correct.

I mean Rudy's Barbecue is a small grocery store with barbecue and a fuel station. I mean I don't know what that is. It's a C store and all of those things. Right.

I don't know if you guys have been in a Buc-ee's, but it's 100 fuel stations and a grocery and a Walmart and a Kmart.

The blending of that stuff is absolutely happening. Is to try and figure out how to, how to tackle all the problems you're, you're talking about.

Isaac: Yeah, now that you mention it, I really loved Wawa when I lived on the east coast.

Anthony: There you go. Yeah.

Isaac: And you know, you couldn't get me to not go there even if I was not going to the hot bar or whatever. You'd still get your fuel there.

Anthony: Yep.

Christine: Costco also has the hot dog and the pizza.

Anthony: Yeah.

Christine: Gas station.

Anthony: Yep. The prepared foods and trying to figure out where people are going to go and yeah, it's an evolution for sure.

But I think you're right. I think the platforms are by and large trying to be the hubs and make sure they don't get cut, I guess.

Isaac: Well, we wish everyone the best of luck in competing to be the 1 hub in everyone's lives. I don't think there could be a lot of winners there.

So we're nearly at time and I want us to jump over to Picks, where we just bring something that we're excited about and just can't stop talking about in our daily lives. It doesn't have to be a piece of software or anything like that.

My pick actually is a little unusual. I don't wear that much jewelry very much. I'm not really a jewelry guy.

But occasionally I like to wear a bracelet. And putting on those clasps is hard. And as a guy I don't really have fingernails.

We cut them pretty close so it's hard to put on those clasps. And I got this little thing, it's like a stick with an alligator clip on the end and it was five bucks and it made it really easy.

It definitely cut a good five minutes of struggling out of the getting dressed up routine. So my pick is a stick with an alligator clip on the end.

Anthony: Love it. Love that.

Isaac: Spang, what have you got?

Christine: So in honor of summer, my pick this week is a pizza -shaped floaty.

So I have a friend who is obsessed with pizza and for his birthday I decided to get him a pizza shaped floaty for a pool or whatever.

But while I was researching this, I found that you can get eight slice shaped floaties that can be connected together in the shape of a pizza.

Isaac: Oh my God.

Christine: With these little ties. I bought the whole pizza and I gave one floaty to eight friends.

And I'm really excited to to have a pizza party on a lake this summer.

Anthony: That's pretty awesome.

Isaac: First of all, I'm very proud of you. You have four times the national average amount of friends, if you have eight friends you can hand pizza slices to.

That sounds really fun.

Christine: Yeah.

Anthony: Wow.

Christine: I went for a test run the other day with three and things were learned.

Anthony: They clip together?

Christine: Yeah.

Isaac: Like in an alligator clip kind of format?

Christine: Like a bungee cord. With the little circle and then they twist together.

Anthony: Okay.

Christine: Okay.

Isaac: Anthony, do you have a pick?

Anthony: My pick is way more nerdy. I've been spending as much time in Lovable.dev as I can these days.

It's been super fun and very frustrating at times. But being able to chat with essentially a product designer that can build what I want it to has been pretty awesome.

And it produces reasonable code. So, yeah, I've been doing a lot with that lately. That's my pick.

Isaac: I think that's awesome.

Christine: All of us busy execs, I think, are very grateful for AI coding tools.

Anthony: Yeah.

Christine: Allows you to actually ship something in the time that you have.

Isaac: What I really like about it is that you think you're good at delegation until you deal with one of these AI coding tools and you're like, "No, no, no, no. Come on, just please."

And, you know you can't go in and just edit the code yourself. It would be kind of breaking the rules.

Anthony: No, that's totally right. You think that you give good direction on the products that you want to build, and you don't.

So my trick there is to keep a ChatGPT somewhere and have it write your product specs and then dump that into lovable.

Isaac: Oh, my God, you've automated the whole stack.

Anthony: Yeah, a little bit.

Isaac: All right, well, that puts us at time. Thank you so much, Anthony, for joining us and telling us about the past, present, and future of the restaurant world.

Anthony: Thanks for having me. This has been fun.