Is Technology Killing Hospitality? - Tomer Molovinsky | BCL #294

Restaurants, at the end of the day, it's a hospitality service. The most powerful technology in a restaurant is the technology you don't see.

Everyone, thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Tomer Molovinski, CEO and co founder of Per Diem, a YC bag company that is revolutionizing the restaurant industry with their white label mobile app solutions. Tomar, I'm so excited to chat with you. Obviously not only because of your incredible experience coming from Israel, you were, you had some incredible kind of beginnings to your career, but also you work with two incredible companies within OpenTable and Resy. And I think maybe back then they weren't as synonymous as they are with dining experiences. But I can't imagine not looking into OpenTable or Resi or anything else to go identify where I want to go for dinner. So it's crazy thinking about how they kind of revolutionize the experience going and dining with people and friends and things like that, but also how a lot of companies are shifting and trying to uplevel their technology base and solutions and things like that. So really interested and excited to get into what you're working on now. But before we get into everything with Per Diem, describe what you're doing before you started the company and what ultimately it inspired you to move into Per Diem.

Awesome. Thanks for having me on the show, Julian. Yeah. So like you mentioned before, Per Diem, I was a product manager at both OpenTable and resident busy. So I joined those companies both as they were going through pretty formidable years pre acquisition for both companies. So it was fun being on the product team and being able to really build products that were, we didn't know at the time that the companies were getting acquired but were really a part of like the strategic growth of both those companies. So at OpenTable it was. OpenTable was already a public company. It was really rebuilding our entire tech stack to put it on a modern os, build it on an iPad, and no longer these like clunky old servers and what have you. And then with that we were really upping. OpenTable had already become the dominant player in reservation. So one of the projects that I worked on there was taking the next step and really like Uberizing the experience and adding payments to the end of the reservation. So that was a really interesting project that I worked on and then I was able to take all those kind of insights I learned at OpenTable four or five years really. And then as Resy was going through their, through their, through their boom, I was able to join and lead consumer product there and take a lot of the ideas we had at Open Table and really being more, I would say like in the driver's seat in terms of like a product role. I was kind of able to drive decision making and make some more things happen and. And really was able to along with a great team obviously, but build some amazing products at Resi, our loyalty product. Everything from wait list to like launching our website. So yeah, that gave me a lot of obviously like insight into the restaurant industry and the tech side of the restaurant industry. But the reality is beforehand I had. My brother's a restaurateur, so I'd spent most of my life either opening a restaurant for him or working for him at one of his restaurants. And that kind of gave me that insider's knowledge on the industry. And so that gave me a somewhat unique perspective that, you know, and so I've been able to really like mesh that real world kind of operational experience. Everything from opening to running a restaurant to then like taking that and like what. What's the product experience that should be wrapped around that.

Yeah.

And that led to what we're doing today at Per Diem.

Yeah. It's interesting thinking about technology and especially within restaurants and it seems like there's either disconnect from one or the other sides. Like technology isn't built for the restaurateur and making it super operationalized internally, or it's built from the inside and doesn't necessarily have the modern or cutting edge feel. When you're building both at Open Table products and working with restaurants, how did you kind of make that connection? Do you obviously pull back on your experience with your brother's restaurant and everything you've done there? Why do you think essentially technology isn't so widely adopted in restaurants?

I think one of the big reasons for that in my opinion is that restaurants at the end of the day, it's a hospitality service. It's like, it's hospitality. It's. You go, it's someone with a smile on their face and the second you're like head is either on a phone or in a computer screen, then that's like the anti definition of hospitality. Right. So I've always had this, not really a mantra, but just like wherewithal of the. The most powerful technology in a restaurant is the technology you don't see. So booking that reservation or like some seamless payment on the back end just to make everything more frictionless and what have you. But the reality is like tech is good and restaurants can really, they can obviously they, they've more and more been enabling tech within the restaurants, especially since the pandemic. But like the extent to which that can really be in the background, I think it makes it a lot more powerful because ultimately the guest experience goes up without having a bunch of wires in the way like you can elevate if you can know, if I can know what Julian likes and what you know, if you're a vegetarian or if you have any allergy restrictions before you walk in the door, obviously you're going to have a better experience. But if I have to do that without a smile on my face and without being able to make you feel like you're wanted and greeted then, then you kind of lose some of that magic. So I think that you always got to find that medium of like what's too much tech and you gotta balance that with like how much hospitality you want to give.

Yeah. I'm thinking back on your experience with OpenTable going from capturing the reservation to even completing the full cycle of the transaction. How do you stay like keeping your consumer kind of engaged with the experience of the restaurant but also keep that process that seemingly sophisticated so simple being like all right, we paid for X amount of individuals or meals transacting and done. So that doesn't say hinder the experience of being at the restaurant.

Well, I think OpenTable and Resy and I think to an extent now per diem one of the benefits that we have is you really like when you're an open table, you're there for one reason, you want to go to that restaurant.

Yeah.

So and for years OpenTable really tried to make that as, as easy as possible. For years OpenTable didn't even want to make you add a credit card to book your reservation which led to a lot of last minute cancellations which ultimately wasn't good. So there's like a whole back and forth behind that. Like how much friction do you enable? But ultimately like the restaurant has to run a profitable A table is worth a lot of money and if, if you're making last minute cancellation then that's no good. So, so I think, I think that's a big part of it in terms of just like you know how you think about those experiences.

Yeah. Well, also thinking about so you get people at the restaurant, you, you now, now you're trying to almost increase or enhan. How do you do that? Is it through the data you're collecting through the information that they're inputting once they're there the restaurant, how do you enhance the experience.

So really the experience is. I'd say the restaurant experience is usually already good before the tech gets there. Like most of the best operators, they didn't need the tech. The tech is kind of an enabler and that's like their hyper growth thing that really makes them. So I don't think the tech is ever going to be like, oh, we blew up because we adopted this thing that's like few and far between. And like, I just, I don't like, ultimately it's like it's your concept. Oh, it's like how, how, how people. If you have loving fans, which a lot of restaurants and cafes do you have a following. And then if you have that following, then people are willing to. I mean you'd be the things that we would see, especially at Resi, because Resi, we had some super high demand restaurants.

Yeah.

And the hoops people would jump through to get a booking at that, you would be shocked. People are waking up at 3am we had some restaurants where we had, we had a feature called Notify where in a given night there'd be 50,000 notifies. That's 50,000 people in New York City waiting for one table to open up. The second that table would go out, it'd be a push notification. It was like winning the lotto and trying to, trying to get it. So. So I think like inevitably, Resi didn't, Resi didn't make the demand for that restaurant. The Resi put the pieces in place to enable that demand so that the restaurant could really leverage that. But ultimately it was the restaurant that did everything to create that demand.

Yeah. Our restaurants are, from what you've seen and maybe it's evolved today, are they more equipped to kind of taking on that demand? So now that they have an X amount of increased customers, they've already had this proof of concept. They're really getting their name out here. How do they actually deliver on that demand? Also how do they like a lot for a lot of tech companies. Right. You hire because you're scaling and things are consistent. So you can keep track of everything. It's metrics, metrics, metrics. But I'm sure with restaurants it's a little, little more volatile.

Yeah. So I think restaurants today, especially with social media, are more able to capture their demand than ever. And it's not just social media. If you think about every system that a restaurant runs today, whether it is an open table or Resi or whether it's square or some other point of sale, any online ordering system, you're collect you're, you're collecting a giant email database of essentially users and at the end of the day restaurants. Like many tech companies, it's direct response marketing that works. Sending out an email with an offer and that's what's going to get someone to click on that email and to go through and book something. So the more you build that up in your own database as a restaurant and that was one of the key factors that we preached to restaurants at Open Table. Build up your own database. Build up your own database and so the more restaurants can do that and leverage their own brand. Now, especially during the pandemic, I think everybody realized like sort of the dire straits of the situation of like okay, nobody was really taking online ordering that seriously income. These delivery apps that did a great job and built an amazing business and created amazing logistics networks but they did kind of have a stranglehold on the market in the sense that like everybody went to those places during the pandemic. So you were really so dependent on those third party apps as a restaurateur. And I think people are starting to realize so first it was just online ordering and then obviously that all blew up. You have square online, you have doordash storefront, you have a million different web providers. Yeah. And what is wasn't there is really that at the end of the day the ultimate loyalty machine in terms of any type of tech product is an app. It's a mobile app. Like your most our best customers at Resi used our app religiously. Your best customers at any anywhere you'll be they'll have your app. They want to get notified first whether no matter what you do. And so really the unlock now for us is like now we've at per diem we've created the technology where it's like okay, all this online ordering that became available during the pandemic, people started advantage of that. Well now we're taking that next thing that really only until now like the big brands, the Starbucks, the Sweet Greens, the Blank Street Coffee, all those guys, they've had to spend like literally millions of dollars building out their own mobile apps. And now we're coming saying hey guys, you don't need to spend millions of dollars. We give you that for 40 bucks a month. And so what we're able to do now is leverage all those emails and all we have customers that have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. So if you can take all that and you can power through your first party ordering and now you take all those delivery apps that are doing amazing jobs marketing you. And you just treat that as your acquisition costs and you say, hey, bring all that traffic in and then let me convert that traffic to my own channel. I built this great website, now I have this great app. And that's where I think the economics of the restaurant industry that we've been seeing over the last few years, I think that's where they start balancing out. Because like you realize like, oh, delivery, I don't need to pay 30% for every delivery I do, I pay 30% for the first couple. Then that person becomes my customer and then I'm, they're, they're doing delivery through the app, which cost me significantly less. It cost me a dollar a delivery as opposed to who knows how many dollars you just paid for that. So I think, I think the technology that's coming to market is ultimately helping restaurateurs, it's helping everybody in hospitality to kind of level the playing field. And then what that's going to do is you're going to have these behemoths of companies, the Uber Eats and the doordashes of the world. And that's, that is like the best marketing in the world for you. Once you have like the foundation to be able to convert that traffic, just like a tech company, once they get Google AdWords and they get, they can convert that traffic, once that restaurant knows how to convert that into like a just a passing by customer to a regular, that's where the magic happens. That's where, that's where you see as a restaurateur, exponential growth. That's where you can start. And that's why you see Starbucks and sweetgreen investing so much in their app. Because that's where, that's where the loyalty is. That's where the person who is ordering once or twice a week is now going to be ordering two, three, four, five times a week. Yeah, that's so, so that's kind of been my insight so far and, and how I recommend kind of restaurants dealing with this whole new world.

What, what would you say? I mean it seems like a huge educational kind of shift though, right? In, in terms of the restaurateurs mind because rather than kind of a built in solution, they're having to kind of conceptualize taking in this kind of peripheral data but then identifying, materializing it into almost like a funnel and seeing how they can utilize it. How much of what you're building now kind of does that for them and how you're able to communicate that value quickly and efficiently. And Almost simplistically for a lot of the restaurateurs who have been just focused in our experts at delivering great experiences to customers, not necessarily enabling themselves the best technology.

Sure. And then that's a good point. I think, like, at the end of the day though, it's not a lot like, sure, the blueprint that's been put out there, again, it's been laid out by Starbucks and others. So it's really just like, just copy those guys. And at the end of the day it means like merchandising it on your website, merchandising it in your stores, doing like different fun incentives that are going to get people to download your app. These aren't things that are like rocket science, but like, McDonald's has a Szechuan sauce that people go crazy for and they only make it available during in their app. So like, anybody can do that with their own products and make it if. If it's some kind of cookie that people go crazy for, whatever it is, and that can be an app exclusive. So there's a whole playbook out there. What we've done is made it easy for restaurateurs and cafes just to come in, plug and play. At the end of the day, that playbook also comes down to, hey, every door dash order you get, every Uber Eats order you get, throw a flyer into that bag and put a little promo in there, say, hey, guys, download our app. First order you get an extra 10 points or you get a couple bucks off. And before you know it, you know that, well, it can be very sophisticated, but at the end of the day, it could just be putting a flyer. And that, like low tech sometimes can lead to good results. So, yeah, it's like a lot of.

Companies who during even the pandemic times, if you order, you'd see a doordash logo or decal in the window and all of a sudden you drive towards that like, oh, I can get this on that application, but I like where you're going with it. It's like, let's take all that technology and enable these companies to run independently and see what kind of ability that they can have scaling their business and not be so whether it's gridlocked to pricing with delivery fees, but also a competitive marketplace where there's just so many different restaurants and businesses on there. One thing I always think about is like, how does this change the localized impact of a business? So say I'm a restaurant or cafe, I don't need to think about delivering to the person in the next neighborhood over. Right. It's like the people here, my community, I can keep and attract and maintain. How does you know what you're doing really change what they can do to the real local proximity?

Yeah, exactly. And most of our, for what it's worth, most of our orders are pickup orders. So it's not like most people are putting in delivery orders. And so exactly that. It's, it's, it's, hey, hey, you're local. What's easier? Every time you come to my website, a, you have to remember whatever my URL is. So it's like X, whatever with your city name, dot com, dot, co, whatever it is. I gotta remember that if I want to on a phone, I have to enter that into my browser. Right. I then have to log in every time because, like, the web browser refreshes. And last time I ordered on my laptop and now I'm ordering on my phone, so I gotta log in every time. Half the times you forget your password or that's a whole nightmare kind of thing. And so, like, it's really simple. It's like, hey, if you order from here every day, don't you just want to hit a button on your phone? You don't need to log in. Your favorites are just right there. The same thing you ordered yesterday is right there. You tap once and boom, it's there and you pick it up like. And so at the end of the day, this is a local thing. It's a hundred percent local. The reason we're doing this, it was actually the inspiration for per Diem as it stands today, was during the pandemic, living in New York City. And I have a mortgage here in New York City, so I wasn't able to leave like everyone else. And I was sitting here in downtown Brooklyn, and literally there are restaurants that I was like, I don't know if these restaurants are going to be here next week. And I think everybody. This happened to them during the pandemic, where they start looking around their neighborhood and they're like, oh, my God, I really like that place. I want to support it. And I remember there's a Korean place that opened. I was like, no matter what it takes, I'll order from you guys every day. And I did for like a couple months. And. But. But I think that was kind of the thinking and then. And then obviously, like. And so like, oh, my God, like, on the one hand, all these restaurants now, they're so dependent on these third parties. Everyone knows that's not really the most profitable way to Build a restaurant. So how do we as per diem, when we're in this kind of YC stage and very early in the game, how do we help to solve this problem? How can we make first party ordering a thing so that these. So that these restaurants can depend on certain things in time of need? And, and that was really where the genesis came. We iter, we iterated through a few different product experiences. So we started as a subscription service for local businesses, working with farmer's markets and bakeries. Ultimately, that was a little too out of left field for a lot of restaurateurs. It was like, all right, subscriptions, I get it, but like, what do you want? And we weren't kind of like making up as we went along. But what we found out through that was there was this deep connection. The ones that did it, like, their customers, like, really cared about that and it created this loyalty. So we're, we were hungry to do that. And then we realized over time that, hey, the way to deliver that isn't a mobile app and it really is the medium. And then we looked around and it's like everything out there kind of looks like a bad website from the 90s. Like, every mobile app solution that you've ever used that isn't at Starbucks or like Sweet green just looks antiquated and it feels antiquated. And my thinking is you can't level up if your thing looks antiquated. Like, the whole benefit of the app is that it looks fresh and that it's slick and that it's easy and then. And that's what consumers expect these days.

Yeah.

And so like, what we're bringing to the table is like, hey, you don't have to pay millions now to have that super slick app experience and what have you. And that's, I think, kind of like the. For us, that's kind of what created this, this inspiration. We're seeing the results now. I mean, like, we're, we launched three months ago, we've added over a hundred stores and, and we see that their customers love it. Like, the stores that are doing really well are the stores. Like I said that within their four walls, they just crush it. They know how to. And it doesn't matter if you have 10 restaurants or one restaurant, if you know how to run a restaurant, you don't need to be Starbucks to have your own mobile app. People will download it and they'll order from you very frequently. So that's kind of been the learning.

It's incredible to also think about the advancements of technology that's enabled this. Right. Like I'm sure there's probably being a white label service or having white label services are so incredible in terms of how easy they are to implement and then scale on top of. And it's exciting to see where all this technology will kind of enable these, these producers of these restaurateurs who are delivering to their, their customers. I'm curious as a founder, from, from your standpoint, your perspective, whether it's external or internal, what do you view as some of the biggest risks as you start to scale and grow this business?

Yeah, so we're lucky that we've, we've started to see like, I think early signs of product market fit in terms of where we are. And so for us right now it's really all about execution. Like you look at the market, it's terrible. Right? Like nobody's raising money now. It's like, whatever, okay, you kind of put that aside. There's nothing you can really do about that. Like I can control interest rates. And then you look at the end, it's just, it's been kind of that blase environment. But the reality is this is a really good time to be in startup world because at the end of the day, it's not money that creates this idea. It's actually the lack of money that creates a lot of like the breakthrough ideas. And so for me, the, in the, the ability to execute especially now and even as we grow and scale and inevitably raise more money, not losing that focus because you can really lose that focus. We started Y Combinator and Airbnb. They were the first kind of like talk that, that was given to us.

Yeah.

And Those guys raised $450,000 as their like seed. And that was like, and that's amazing. But you think about this like earth shattering company that's worth 50, whatever billion dollars today and they raised nothing. And that, and I think that that lack of raising too much money also forced their seat to the fire to make sure that they were building. That's amazing. And then when they did raise money, well that, that money went to good use because you already have product market fit and you can, yeah, you can scale the business. And so I think for, for, for us we've been for the first few years like we didn't hit product market fit. So it's like we built a great team and we're, we're cycling through different product ideas and executions and what have you. And finally as we're getting there, it's like, okay, let's we can execute now. We've, we've figured out how to build product and ship it but now how do we maintain that level of execution as we do start growing and as, and to me that's the biggest risk moving forward. It's, it's grow. How do you maintain that focus so that you don't get caught up doing stupid things?

Yeah. If everything goes well, what do you view as the company's long term vision?

So I think we have a very like I already, I already. I, I think within five years we could be the biggest app developer in the world. Like my goal is to have literally a million apps in the App store. And so our goal, they're a little bit more modest in the, in the, in the coming year but we plan to be in a thousand stores by.

The end of the year.

So that would be like a good V1 and then to scale that. So like I said, Square has 2 million merchants on it. Like I don't know that everybody's gonna have a mobile app but I wanna make sure that a lot of them do.

Yeah.

And then obviously and then we're also able to bring new different types of app experiences. So today we're talking about restaurants and what have you but you know, today we're integrated with Square. Square has a ton of, whether it's salons and barber shops and then you go to other like just more ecommerce, vintage stores and, and all kinds of like. And so I think there is an ability for us to go a little bit more wide in terms of the types of apps we're building. I think especially along this E commerce and shipping and then there is like an enterprise app that I think we'll have, we started playing with it now. Yeah, it's probably, it's probably about a year away but I think that could be really interesting and, and really open up some different types of experiences that I don't think people have really expected from like a mobile app.

I would say yeah all around the.

Context of like ordering and stuff like that. But I think it's like I think up till now ordering has been somewhat, not vanilla. It doesn't need to be too exciting. But I think there are other use cases that we've thought of that that we're going to start going towards. But I think the goal at the end of the day would be we want to be the biggest app developer. We want to have literally like a million apps. I think there are 3 million apps in the store today.

Yeah.

So I think like in maybe in five years there'll be 10 million. So I think having like a solid chunk of that, that would be what I would call a success.

I love that. I love that. And I also love the strategy of taking. Not taking, I would say is helping or enlisting Square customers to kind of go in towards kind of a more mobile centric experience. Is that something by design? Is that something you stumbled upon? Because that's pretty exciting from a, from a funneling standpoint, from a developmental standpoint as well. Right. It's taking those preexisting almost people who know technology and up leveling them to modern technology.

Yeah. And I think, I think exactly, I would say what we noticed early on in the first product was that all our customers use Square. So when we decide so. And one of the learnings of the first product is nobody wanted a separate system.

Yeah.

So we had, we had built like a Shopify system on top with like whatever, building every feature possible. And what we realized is like nobody wanted our Shopify, they had their Shopify and it was working perfectly. So really at a certain point today the game is you gotta pick someone to integrate with. And all our customers already were using Square. So they, and Square has an open API and they've actually invested a lot in it, unlike other point of sale companies. So Square does have this kind of a giant head start on this.

Yeah.

And they already have all kind of the cool coffee shop concepts and a lot of the quick serve cool concepts. So that kind of, you know, you think who would do well with an app? It's, it's the Square type of venues that would probably do well that have that loyalty. And so they were just a natural kind of first fit. And then as we started really jumping into it, we realized that like Square has this amazing online ordering platform, but there isn't a mobile platform to go with it. They have a great mobile web interface and all that. So really what we started doing was just one to one building against that. Like our customers all use that for online ordering already. So we're just building that in the mobile app interface and throwing some of our own ideas in there, like here and there, like, but, but that's essentially it. It's like, hey, there's another channel. You're not taking advantage of it. We're going to help you take advantage of this channel.

Yeah. So exciting. And I, I like this next question or this section. I call my founder faq. So I'm gonna hit you with some rapid fire questions and we'll see where we get. I always like to open it up with what's particularly hard about your job day to day?

Well, maybe waking up early. I don't know. My team's in Israel, so. No, but you generally, you know, I think, I think that has been hard is we've, we were born out of the pandemic and I think. And our company is like 100% remote. I don't know that we're going to be. Eventually maybe we'll have a sales office here like in New York or something like that. But like the reality is we're 100% new remote. And I think that one of the toughest parts is like, how do you, how do you keep everyone on track and, and make sure everyone's when. When literally like a lot of our employees I've been working with for years that I've never met one on one, you know, like.

Yeah, so.

So I think that's one of the bigger challenges in today's world. And how do you keep. But, but I think for what it's worth, we've done a good job. Like we've pretty much retained all our employees. We're still small, but I think, I think we've done a good job. But that is like the day to day as we onboard new people and bring new people into the company. How do we kind of maintain that culture? And, and so that's going to be something that definitely. I have to have my finger on the pulse.

Yeah. And thinking about hiring and even just managing people, having an interesting view from a product standpoint and product manager standpoint is, is how do you, what are the things you do to keep your team engaged not only on the priorities of the business, but just having a remote working culture, being so distant from each other, obviously it comes with some, I don't want to say psychological effects, emotional effects, but it's a different experience when you're, when you're scaling a company. What have you put in place to help mitigate some of the, the distance that companies can have with remote employees?

I think it's, it's just in our nature. Both myself, my co founder, Doron, we're very like transparent, I think, like, just like it's not like we have some like company culture that we're like, be transparent. It's not really that. It's like we're just that way. Like if something's on our mind, good or bad, we're probably going to talk about it in some context or another. So I join our standups every day. I give Everybody, verbatim feedback. From what I'm getting, sometimes you got to kind of like, whittle down the feedback so it's not. But I give people that feedback so they know they have as close of an opportunity as possible to understand, like, what the pain that that restaurateur is feeling right now. And the same for, like, our sales team. I'm in there trying to educate them as much both on the product and on the customer pain points so that we can empathize for people as we're trying to sell them stuff.

Yeah.

And I think that's a part of it. Just like being open. Like, we don't like, also like what we're expecting. Hey, if you didn't deliver this in this time. And like, I think you gotta be kind of like, like, in this world, if you let things slide, and especially with remote, like, things are gonna slide and they'll be forgotten. So I think you kind of have to address things. There's no reason to, like, be an a hole about it. But like, you know, you do have to hold people to their word as well. And. And that's a big part of it.

Yeah.

What.

What do you think? What do you feel is something that you're better at as a founder now that you wish you were better at earlier on?

Probably. I think. I think some of it does have the similar, I would say, attributes of a PM in the sense that, like, know that once, like once you say, like, go on something, like, you kind of got to. You kind of got to shut up. Like once. Once you give in the green light and whatever. Like, you can't one weekend be like, hey, guys, but we got to do this too. And I know, like, and so I think that's a real challenge because especially you're trying to sell and you're trying to grow the business and then you have this hot prospect and then all in. So you're trying to cipher all that information. And so I think the best advice sometimes is just to shut up and not. But like, yeah, just keep it in once. You're gonna have like those sessions where you plan and you do all your, like, whatever and. And you can course correct along the way. That's what you have standups for and stuff like that. But like, once you set a pretty, like, direct direction, you just gotta let that thing kind of go and play it out a little bit. And then later you can figure out how to like, either pick up the pieces or. Or continue and continue along the way. But. But that's hard sometimes. Just because like again, you're, you're just out there, you're trying to grow the company and it's like you hear one thing from one person, one thing for another, and it's great to get that customer feedback, but it's also, you gotta put up your own radars and to see like what's really important. So.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's well put. Thinking about the company and even just kind of the overall experience with restaurants as we see it kind of change and evolve, obviously Covid kind of increased necessary boom and deliverable experiences, even from a distance, whether it's picking up or getting delivered. But how has it changed in terms of. Obviously you're pushing some initiatives in terms of kind of creating a more intimate experience. But overall, is it going to be all mobile centric? How do you kind of create this authentic experience when the mechanism of mobile kind of creates this tension or distance kind of already?

Yeah, and I think that's something that's going to be like the challenge of our times. In terms of restaurants, how do, how does like a hospitality business.

Yeah.

Adopt tech the way it is Starting to adopt tech, yet still maintain an essence of hospitality. Because at the end of the day, and I think Danny Meyer kind of lays this out the best people don't come back because you're, you're, you got the best burger in town. People come back because they love your people, they love the, the experience. Like the burger will bring a few people back. But like, it's that type of experience that really is the sticky part. Right.

Yeah.

And so, and so how does tech enable that? And, and that's be a challenge. And I think, like, to the extent possible, tech does have to be in the background, obviously when you're ordering from an app. Like, yeah, let the app do its thing, let it play its role. But great. And this goes back to local. If you can now skip the line and because you've ordered ahead and minimize that, that actually helps the, the person at the counter because that's one less person they have to talk to and like they don't necessarily want to talk. And that can be very like exhausting talking to like 20 different people in a row and getting that right. So it's like for them it's a lot easier and a lot smoother and what have you. So like you think of these things not because they're just like cool, but they actually solve problems. And I think it's similar to the AI conversation we're having today. But like, the more Things are automated. It makes individual contributors that much more able to contribute. So I think especially as with the labor shortages we've been having in restaurants like that, I think you're going to see more and more technology that really empowers employees to do more. Because let's face it, a lot of times like restaurants had employees employed that didn't do a lot like a host. For the most part they're busy like one hour and then the rest of the time they're like wiping down menus. No one's really wiping down a menu either. It's kind of like a fake wipe down too. So it's like at the end of the day restaurants had employed certain people over like, because they get a crunch at like two hours of the day. So it's like, I think now with this different tech, you're going to be able to make some of those things that you did. You're going to have to change. I mean, obviously because, because things are changing. But. So I'm not as pessimistic on it. I think like, I think again like everything restaurants are going to have to find that, right? Like what's too much automation and what's too less hospitality. And then they, they just have to find what that perfect medium is for them. And that's going to be different for every concept.

Yeah, yeah. No, it makes sense. I even think about the mobile experience being a good kind of easy entry into a new restaurant or a new cafe being like, oh, I'll order there and maybe check it out and, and kind of it's, it's kind of this pull into this experience, which is so, it's so exciting to think about the little things that I think have just been missing, which is like the casual experience that a lot of restaurants, I think even people just enjoy it. Right. Walking the streets, maybe find something. But now it's like you can almost preemptively do that through this mobile experience, which is so cool.

Yeah. And I, and moreover, I, I want to emphasize too, it's, it's the, the work that like doordash and Uber eats, like that whole capability now for a restaurant, especially if you don't have to pay the 30% if you can. Because like today you can, you can kind of cut that out. Like it's kind of. And you can just enable the delivery component.

Yeah.

And so like that's something you, that's something that when I opened a restaurant in 2008, that didn't exist. Like, like in order to do delivery you had to Hire your own people. You had to like. And then it's like, what hours are they? Like, it didn't really. And then like, person doesn't throw up, so those deliveries don't like. This type of network is brand new and it's really something that I think restaurateurs will be able to leverage. And I think the news coming out of the door dashes of the world will be a lot more positive in years to come because, like, at the end of the day, it is enabling, like independent owners to like, do stuff that they weren't able to do before.

Yeah. Yeah. Tomer, it's been such an exciting conversation. I always like to ask this one before we end. What's book or a piece of advice, Something that stuck to you or lasted with you had lasting impact, whether it's early in your career now, something that you want to share with other founders, books or people. What would you like to share?

Yeah, so there, there is a book, I think it's called the Art of Design, or it might be something else, but it's, but it's basically the, the basis of design and, and shoot. I'm, I'm forgetting the word the, the title now. And I, I, I'm feeling butt. But it's an amazing book. And one of the fundamentals there is like, whenever you've had like that, that doorknob or something that just feels off, like you pull instead of push and whatever. And like, what that book shows is like, that's not those things when they happen, it makes you feel like it's your fault, like the user, like, oh, I'm stupid. Of course it's pushed not. But like, the reality is, is like, that's bad design.

Yeah.

And I think that that has kind of guided me in a lot of ways since I read that. And then I was able to work with some great designers throughout my career. And I think that's been like, one of the bigger inspirations for me professionally is just, it's not about being like, pixel perfect, because that's kind of B.S. it's really just about, like, making sure that that fundamental flow works and is crisp and is like, boom. And that's good design. And I think, like, that's important obviously today more than ever for every product and every startup. And so, and I'm sorry I blanked on the. But it's something of design.

Yeah.

There's a few out there.

Like a design of everyday things.

Design of everyday things. Sorry, sorry. Oh, I feel okay. Yeah.

Yeah, it's so, it's it's interesting you bring that up because I was having a conversation with somebody else. We were going through almost like a product demo and how we would go to a few of them and one experience was so seamless and the other wasn't. And I'm coming to think about it as like, how do you do that from a design standpoint or a product standpoint? Do you do that by eating your own dog food, by testing it out, talking to your customers, doing something, doing a little bit of everything? How do you go through that process to know where the friction is and how to make it more easily accessible? When you're the one building the technology and you're like, oh, obviously this makes sense.

Well, thankfully we're not the first ones to have to do it, so we can get lots of ideas from others. And then, and so I think that's what we've, we've liberally taken from other ideas, as long as they're good. And then as long as you talk to your customers and like, at the end of the day, you also gotta build something that makes sense and is meaningful to them. So if you're building product without customer input, like, you're more than likely not going to build the right thing. So. So I think that ultimately it leads to just knowing what the pain point is and that that helps in that sense.

So, yeah, yeah, last little bit, Tomer, is always like to give my guests a chance to give us your plugs. Where can we be a fan of yours? Give us your LinkedIns, your Twitters. Where can we, as members of the BCL community, reach out and not only be a fan, but support what you're doing and even start.

So, yeah, I mean, please come follow our LinkedIn page. We're on Instagram, not super active, but definitely posting a lot of our content and thoughts on LinkedIn. And so, yeah, you can check us out there or at our website, tripredium.com yeah, and if there's that great coffee shop or restaurant in your neighborhood and you're like, you already order from there every day, then please hook us up with a referral. They deserve a better app if they don't have one already, and we'd be happy to deliver that one for them.

So. So, yeah, amazing. Tomer, it's been such a pleasure, not only chatting about your early experience at OpenTable and Resident, what that really kind of fundamentally taught you and your career, but also how you're taking that and those learnings and really helping impact these restaurateurs who have a localized audience who have a lot of brand loyalty but really need to up level and really scale that and giving them the technology to do that. It's been so exciting to hear your story. Big fan of what you're doing and I hope you enjoyed yourself today on Behind Company Lines. Amazing.

Thank you, Julian, of course.