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SPEAKER_01: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody.

SPEAKER_02: It's your boy, J. Cal here. And it is June in 2020 when we're recording this. And it seems like everybody stopped sheltering in place.

SPEAKER_04: And lo and behold, the numbers of people with coronavirus is spiking. The number of deaths is still low and going down or flat. So it's going to be a little confusing and we're going to have to figure it out in two or three weeks. A lot of speculation. Maybe we're testing more. Maybe young people are getting it and not dying. But it is a very trying and confusing time for everybody.

SPEAKER_06: And on top of that, we had the social unrest and we have the election coming in the fall. For those of you watching this a year, 10 or 100 years from now, I'm just giving you that context

SPEAKER_07: because our conversation today is going to be with somebody who has decided to not only do a startup

SPEAKER_04: and startups have 70, 80% mortality rate. Basically, if you start a company, the default case is you're going to fail.

SPEAKER_08: But this maniac, who I have on the show today, decided he would do a startup for restaurants and hospitality. And as anybody who's ever been in the restaurant business knows, that also has amongst the highest mortality rate. Now, as if that was not enough, I told you the time at which we're recording this.

SPEAKER_04: A time in which there is a direct correlation between states that opened up restaurants and the increase in coronavirus spread. In other words, restaurants are a vector, at least on the inside. The industry, hospitality, travel, restaurants has been decimated.

SPEAKER_06: However, the founder who is on the program today is going to tell us all about how he thinks we get out of this and what the future holds.

SPEAKER_09: And he's been at it for nine years working on a very interesting company called Seven Rooms. And you can go check them out at Seven Rooms. That's seven is spelled out, S-E-V-E-N, obviously. And his name is Joe Montaniel, like Daniel, but with a T.

SPEAKER_07: And he is the CEO and co-founder. Welcome to the program, Joel. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_11: Doing well. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_07: And you are in the former epicenter of this outbreak, New York City, my hometown.

SPEAKER_04: And in fact, you're in Brooklyn. How are you doing personally? Have you, aside from the business case, on a personal level, did you get coronavirus? Did you get tested? And how are you doing? Because in New York, the infection rate hit 25.

SPEAKER_08: So I got a one in four chance of you actually having had it. And I didn't ask you this during the pre-show. So have you had it? Have you been tested?

SPEAKER_15: I don't think I've had it. I haven't been tested. You haven't been tested? I have not been tested yet.

SPEAKER_19: I would like to get tested.

David Friedberg: And I do have friends that I know, friends of friends that have gotten it. So that... But no direct friends, just friends of friends? No, no direct friends.

SPEAKER_06: And hopefully the answer to this is no. But do you know anybody who has had anybody who's passed away from it and is dealing with that? Because New York City was pretty scary there with 2,000 deaths a day. I think you guys peaked at 1,500 or 2,000. Now it's down. I saw Cuomo said yesterday 15. And he's been very clear that it could be people who were dying already, and they might have died with coronavirus as opposed to died from coronavirus, which is an important

SPEAKER_25: distinction.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. So I don't know anyone personally.

SPEAKER_19: However, probably two degrees of separation away, one of our main investors, lawyer's father passed away from it. And then I have a lot of friends that are doctors and some of the frontline workers.

SPEAKER_27: And I hear some of the stories, and it's pretty heartbreaking.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah. They said it was one friend of mine who works in an ICU said, Jason, it's medieval.

SPEAKER_06: It's like a medieval plague, just people lined up all over this ICU. And that was during the peak, I think, when people didn't even know how to deal with a

SPEAKER_04: person who had coronavirus and they maybe were ventilating people too soon. Now we seem to have some sort of treatment. What's it like in New York City right now? I have a lot of friends there who say it looks like New York City in the second week of August,

SPEAKER_06: which is when there's nobody there on a weekend.

SPEAKER_25: He said, literally, this is like a weekend in August every day. What's it like in Brooklyn? What's it like in Manhattan? What's it like for you?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, that's a good description. It's very post-apocalyptic. No one's walking on the streets.

SPEAKER_19: The crowded areas, you would imagine, are empty. The storefronts are boarded up. It feels like we've been in this zombie apocalypse, if you will. So more recently, people are starting to come out a little bit more, I think, because of the weather. We're in phase 1, 1.5 of the reopening. So there's starting to be some signs of life. That said, I think, if you imagine the August summer weekend in the city, take half of that.

SPEAKER_38: And it's probably the max that it's looking like right now.

SPEAKER_30: Wow. And I assume Brooklyn is the same. People have just left. A lot of people have left the city.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. About one out of two people I know have left the city. They're somewhere on the West Coast because they got out early enough. Or if they're lucky enough to have a second home, they're all camping out there. So a lot of people have gotten out.

SPEAKER_30: And you have 100 plus employees at Seven Rooms. I'm assuming you had an office in Manhattan or Brooklyn?

SPEAKER_46: We did. Yep. Right in Chelsea.

SPEAKER_40: So in Chelsea, my first office, 19th Street between 5th and 6th. Where's your office?

SPEAKER_48: 27th between 7th and 8th.

SPEAKER_04: Oh, wow. You're really over there. I lived in the Starrett Lehigh building on 26th and the West Side Highway. Back when in New York, you could live in a commercial space illegally and hook up your own water and put a hot water heater and do everything. That was old New York, which, by the way, you're basically heading into now. Because when a market collapses like big cities are going to, things get really funky and interesting. Nobody would ever rent a commercial space for people to live in unless the commercial landlord had nobody else to rent it.

SPEAKER_06: And then they would basically, in the 90s, they would just turn a blind eye. Isn't that crazy?

SPEAKER_27: So crazy. I'm very curious to see what happens to the commercial real estate market in the major cities.

SPEAKER_44: It's a lot of things to figure out there.

SPEAKER_04: How are you thinking about your office space and going back? Are you just basically saying, hey, we're just not going back this year or we'll decide in the fourth quarter?

SPEAKER_08: Because if you've got 100 people, I'm not sure how many people are in that office, but I'm guessing you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, if not a million, on an office space.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. So majority of our company is in New York. About 90 employees are in the New York office. Oh, boy. And, you know, we're, firstly, we're really big on people being together. Right. That's one of the things, it's one of the reasons why, at least in the early parts of the company, we decided to invest heavily in New York. Yep. So that's been core. One of the things we've looked at is really taking survey data. So we do pulse surveys.

SPEAKER_27: And what we found, actually, is only 15% of our workforce would want to come back into the office and would only do so if it's safe to come in.

SPEAKER_19: And so it's got us really rethinking. You know, luckily for us, we have taken an approach to sign sublet agreements. We always try to, we got some good advice early on not to spend a lot of money in office space. Good advice. And so we've tried to lock ourselves into very short term.

SPEAKER_27: And our lease is actually up in four days. So we have a lot of flexibility.

SPEAKER_61: Oh my God, praise Jesus. So what do you do with all that, all those chairs and desks and everything? You just throw them on the street?

David Friedberg: No market for those. Right now we're trying to sell it back to the landlord of, don't you want to keep this because you can show the space off easier?

SPEAKER_64: For sure. That way we don't have to deal with it.

SPEAKER_04: Or maybe I can leave them here and then when you get a tenant, I'll take it out. So you get to, you don't have to stage the space. That's another good one. Other people are just telling their employees to come and take their desks or take their monitors and take their chairs home. In one place to build the company, how are you adjusting as a CEO of Seven Rooms to now deal with the reality that your chosen culture technique for building your company is now out the window and 85% of your employees are not coming back or don't want to?

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, one thing that I feel like we've lost by not being in the same space together is the hallway conversations, the water cooler conversations, the quick whiteboard sessions you can do to map things out. For sure. And for the first couple of weeks, we increased our cadence of all hands to be once a week. And what we're now starting to try to do more of is actually document. You know, I don't think we were a documentation culture. I think we were, let's meet, talk it through, decide, and then run. Right.

David Friedberg: Now you're like, put it on Notion. What are you using? We're using just Google Docs. A lot of Google Docs.

SPEAKER_04: How do you, when you do Google Docs, is there a way to have like a top level Notion-like experience or not? They used to have something called Google Sites or something where you did that. But the problem I have with Google Docs or any of these is because there's no hyperlinking between documents, you don't get this like top-down organization unless you tell somebody, hey, can you make all these documents?

SPEAKER_73: And then you have to open the doc.

SPEAKER_04: Whereas when you're in a web browser and you're clicking and hyperlinking, man, Notion has been such a game changer for our organization. I'm not an investor in the company, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_30: I'm hoping to weasel my way into some advisors or something.

SPEAKER_12: Hopefully the Notion people are listening. They are. Yeah, we should. We should.

SPEAKER_19: I think they're very early in their, like the search experience on Google Docs isn't great at all. Just do Notion.

SPEAKER_79: I'm telling you, it's crazy. Just take one department and tell them, I want all your Google documents, cut and paste them, put them over here and just tell them, like, I want you all trained up. We're going to do a webinar and just have one crush it and then it affects the entire organization. And then when I tell people when they send me their end of day reports, we do EODs. We do start a day EOD since we went. So I tell everybody in the general channel of Slack, tell us what you're going to do today.

SPEAKER_04: Like, what's on your agenda? Just bullet points. And it's not for micromanaging. It's just so people are aware. So they do it in front of each other. Then they reply to their own message at the end of the day in the thread and then post it back to the main room of what they actually got done. So you can kind of see the delta.

SPEAKER_07: And then, yeah, it's just really lonely for people. Are you lonely? You seem like an extrovert to me. Are you lonely like me?

SPEAKER_27: I am definitely an extrovert. I think I get, you know, as all experts do, get your energy from being around people.

SPEAKER_19: And so I think definitely there's been time periods because I can't see my friends as often as I normally would. I do live with my girlfriend, so that, of course, obviously helps.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah, you got a quarantine partner. That's good. Quarantine buddy. Critical.

SPEAKER_19: We got a puppy recently, so that also helps. So we're definitely hitting all those stats that you see. But, yeah, it's been a little lonelier because, you know, I like to be in front of people and whether that's clients, friends, friends of friends, all of that.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I get that sense. Okay, when we get back from this quick break, I want to ask you the question that's in everybody's mind since you will talk about what Seven Rooms does, which is very cool.

SPEAKER_06: I want you to tell me what you're seeing in your data from restaurants and get your opinion on what the future of hospitality is if this pandemic goes on for another year when we get back on this week's service.

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SPEAKER_09: Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Joel Montanio is with us. He is the co-founder and CEO of Seven Rooms. So my understanding of Seven Rooms is you make profiles of customers so that if you're a baller,

SPEAKER_06: you get treated like a baller. There was a company called Clout that used to have clout ratings where they would look at your social media.

SPEAKER_04: I had a really high clout rating because I connected all my social media to it. And one of the hotels in Vegas used to know your clout rating. And they knew I had, you know, at the time, 10,000 Twitter followers or whatever it was 10 years ago. And they would do all kinds of nice extra things for you, right? And, you know, there's some other hotel chains like Starwood used to do this pretty well. So explain to me what Seven Rooms does.

SPEAKER_93: And then the big question, what are you seeing from your customers?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, sure. So I'll give you the simple and then we can unpack it a bit more.

SPEAKER_19: You know, at its heart, we help hospitality operators better understand their guests through data. And it's really the problem we saw when we started the company was when we looked at the systems, for instance, a restaurant was using to manage their business. We saw one big thing missing. And that one big thing missing was guest data.

SPEAKER_27: And we really scratched our heads because we said, well, isn't this the hospitality industry? Isn't this all about understanding the little things? And if the system you're using to run your business doesn't have that data in it, how are you doing it? And how are you doing it well? You're basically not doing it. That's right. And, you know, it turned out we thought that you should, wouldn't you start there if you're going to build technology for this industry?

SPEAKER_19: And so, you know, if you, one analogy we'd like to give is, you know, imagine you went to the doctor's office and they didn't have doctor notes or patient notes. And you have to start from scratch every single time.

SPEAKER_101: Yeah. How old do you? Do you have asthma?

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, exactly. Not fun. Right. And that was what was happening in hospitality. And it's the reason why if you're a regular at a restaurant, you go to that restaurant. And if the people are there that know you, it's an awesome experience.

SPEAKER_103: It's why you fry calamari just comes out. They just drop it.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, that's right. And if you go back to that same restaurant, those people are not there. The experience is very different. So we really wanted to solve that. And so at our core, we're CRM. And then we really make it come to life through different operational touch points. So it's before a guest walks in, it's reservation, waitlist management. It's also online ordering, delivery, and pickup. When Jason walks into the restaurant, I understand that you've been ordering delivery for the past three weeks.

SPEAKER_04: How do you know that? That's always the one I was wondering because, you know, you walk in, they're not doing facial recognition or anything like that.

SPEAKER_06: It's up to the maitre d' or the host to recognize you.

SPEAKER_04: How do you connect my profile to me walking in?

SPEAKER_27: So in most of the cases where we started, we started with reservation taking restaurants. And in that segment, the common thing, and it doesn't matter if they're using a book, piece of paper, is what's your phone number? Right. So we can write this down. Yeah. So a phone number more or less might as well be a social security number. So it's phone number or email addresses or unique identifiers that will establish your profile. And then we track preference data. So if you have allergies, if you like a certain table, and then we have purchase data. And that was the key. We connected the point of sale system, which is where the server's ringing stuff up, to your profile.

SPEAKER_19: So for the first time now, the restaurant knows what you like to order. Also, they know how valuable you are. So if you ask the restaurant before Seven Rooms, who are your top 10, your top 25, your top 50 customers, they would be guessing. If you took it down a level, how are you getting them back? How are you speaking to them? You know, they couldn't tell you. And, you know, we thought that we could take some of the things other industries were doing really well and bring them into the hospitality industry.

SPEAKER_02: It's really interesting because, you know, like I have this ramen place. I love Ty Shokin and San Mateo here. And they just started opening up again. I saw on their Instagram outside seating. But I never – and they have my phone number because they use – or I think they do. They have the Yelp waitlist product.

SPEAKER_07: Is the Yelp waitlist product getting really popular in New York or other places? You see that in a lot of restaurants? Or are they using OpenTable?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, OpenTable more so. There's some other services. So I'd say Yelp is a lot more popular in the West Coast and SF in particular than in New York.

SPEAKER_04: And they have this great waitlisting app. But you also work with OpenTable. Does OpenTable let you API in or are they like closed and they don't want you touching the data in there?

SPEAKER_27: It's been an interesting relationship with them to say the least.

SPEAKER_33: Well, they're known as a cantangreous, sharp-elbowed company. Like the restaurants hate them, right? That's right. It's one of those things where – Why do the restaurants hate them?

SPEAKER_27: So at its simplest level, restaurants have been using OpenTable. And OpenTable, to its credit, they started off as a restaurant technology platform back in the mid to late 90s.

SPEAKER_19: And as things started moving more online, they opened up an online booking component.

SPEAKER_27: And as it turned out, they first started charging – they charged for both. And their model was 80% subscription fees for the restaurant technology, 20% of the revenue was coming from bookings.

SPEAKER_43: And what would they charge for that restaurant technology if it was a 50, 100-seat place? What would they charge per month?

SPEAKER_124: So like $200 a month, we'll call it. Okay, so super cheap. Super cheap.

SPEAKER_04: Right. Yeah. And that's the one that gives you like the touchscreen with the visual of all the tables mapped out. And then the host can then click, okay, Jason and Joel are going to sit here. We'll put them on this two top.

SPEAKER_43: They click it and they take you off the reservation list.

SPEAKER_80: Exactly right. Exactly right.

SPEAKER_19: And then as online was coming up, the online booking component became more part of their business.

SPEAKER_27: And so it became the other way, the other 80-20. And they started pouring more of their dollars into the consumer portal, not into the restaurant technology. And so it built this attitude in the restaurant community of we're your customers, we're the ones paying your bill, but we're getting no innovation on our side.

SPEAKER_19: And that's really what we set out to solve was instead of trying to create our own consumer portal, let's just focus on the operator. Let's give them the guest data. Let's give them the tools that they need to be successful.

SPEAKER_27: And let's think about OpenTable as a great marketing channel, which it is, and give operators the choice and control to use both.

SPEAKER_123: Don't they also charge like a dollar per cover?

SPEAKER_111: So every seat is a dollar. So like if your average ticket size is $100, it's 1%, but that's the highest end restaurant.

SPEAKER_08: For a $30 per, you know, $20 to $30 per restaurant, you're talking about a 3% to 5% VIG, right?

SPEAKER_04: So if we're going to the ramen place, the ramen place, you'll probably spend $25 a person. A dollar actually, you know, it starts to look like 4% on top of your 3% credit card fee. Now you're at 7%. And the margin at a restaurant is typically what, 20%?

SPEAKER_128: 10%, 20% for the big chains.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so 10% or 20%, that $1 actually is 40% of their profit. Correct. And that's why people were freaking out about this thing. Do people, have people left OpenTable over that?

SPEAKER_27: They've tried other players. There's been a lot of folks that have come out over the years. I'm sure you've seen a lot of them. It's been...

SPEAKER_131: Who's their big competitor, OpenTable?

SPEAKER_27: Resi? In the US, Resi is one of the bigger ones that has popped up before this Food Network put out a product called City Eats. Yelp has a little bit of competition. And then overseas, there's the Fork, which is owned by TripAdvisor. And then there's some other folks elsewhere.

SPEAKER_04: So you API'd into OpenTable to get this information and then OpenTable's pissed about that?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, we did a little workaround because they didn't have APIs available.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, for good reason. They want to be a blocked box, right?

SPEAKER_19: Exactly. That's right. And our point of view was, we don't want to own the consumer. We just want to plug the operator into all of the consumer channels that matter and focus.

SPEAKER_27: So when we started really focusing on restaurants three or four years ago, we kept knocking on their doors saying, Hey, we want a partner. We want a partner.

SPEAKER_19: We're not trying to do what you do. We were too small at that point in time. And then fast forward a few years later, 2019, we had enough customers where the customers really, in some ways, really encouraged, we'll say, OpenTable to give us an API to allow the restaurant to use seven rooms at their host stand to manage all of the bookings, but use OpenTable as a marketing channel.

SPEAKER_04: And did that work or no? Or OpenTable suing you or something? They don't like you?

SPEAKER_19: No, work in progress. They're not suing us. I think we, where we can help them.

SPEAKER_47: Oh, writing legal letters back and forth. You guys are dueling letters. Is that what's going on here?

SPEAKER_12: No dueling letters. No dueling letters. You know, we like, I like to try to find women.

SPEAKER_04: Well, what's the workaround? Because the data should belong to the restaurant. It's the restaurant's data.

SPEAKER_79: So do they have an export feature? Or do you have to put a dongle? Because I saw somebody had a, this is a really interesting idea. They put a dongle on a point of sale system between the POS and the printer. Did you see that company that does that? I haven't seen it. Yeah. It's a pretty cool idea. They put a dongle. And then when you go to print your ticket or your receipt, it will put a marketing message on or a QR code. So they kind of intercepted on the way to the printer.

SPEAKER_43: So did you figure out something like that? Because I know that was like people's solution previously.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, we had a, before we had the API, we had a simple export and it was more automated, we'll call it. Got it. And then once we did the API, they said, you can't, you know, without going to too much detail. So, you know, it's been a, because most of their business is driven by consumers, you know, to anyone's best guess, they want to control as much of that as possible. We just say, look, we want to find balance. Right. And we think if OpenTable, if you're driving the best, most profitable guests, then the restaurant should pay for that. However, if a guest is looking for the restaurant on Google, if they're literally on the restaurant's website, we don't think it's fair that the restaurant pay for that. And we think they should have the data. Oh, right.

David Friedberg: So the booking of a table, is that default to OpenTable on people's profiles? On their website, on their restaurant website, literally you go to a restaurant's website, so the OpenTable pop up.

SPEAKER_19: Restaurants are paying for that, and they're not getting as much guest information as they could.

SPEAKER_04: And if they send, if they put the, if they put the customers there and they send them through that, they're basically charging themselves that whatever it winds up being, two, three, four, five percent.

SPEAKER_147: That's right.

SPEAKER_02: So they're working against their own interests. Does your product allow people to book, and do you compete, like, in terms of the, like, overview of the floor and what tables you go to?

SPEAKER_07: You have that product?

SPEAKER_27: We do. Yeah. So we are the system of record on the host stand, and then we enable restaurants for the first time ever to take direct bookings and not pay for them through their website, through Google, through social channels, and then use paid channels. So we think about it very similar to what happened in the airline and the hotel world, where there is a role for these OTAs, but you should also have access to your direct and your organic channels.

SPEAKER_19: Like, you know, Starwood, they would, if, if Starwood, if, let's imagine that Expedia was the only player, and imagine Expedia also owned the booking website for W Hotel, and W had to pay every single time you book through there. It's ridiculous, it's criminal.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, there were a lot of, there was a big movement to ban OpenTable. Is OpenTable still growing, or are they losing market share? What's the, what's the story? Because I know they were the 800-pound gorilla. Where, how are they doing?

SPEAKER_15: It's, it's harder to tell. They're still the industry standard.

SPEAKER_27: But once they got acquired by bookings, I think it's harder to see what their numbers are at. So if I had to guess, they're probably flat.

SPEAKER_02: All right, when we get back from this quick break, I want to know, how do you charge and how to, you know, in relation to competing with them, because I'm always interested in like, what the advantage is in terms of the business model.

SPEAKER_40: And then let's talk, because we didn't get to it in this segment, what's going to go on with, what's going on with coronavirus and what you see going forward with the pandemic when we get back on This Week in Startup.

SPEAKER_88: Hey, everybody, I'm going to start with a call to action here. Zendesk is giving startups six months of Zendesk for free. You heard that right. If you've got under 50 employees, you can go right now to Zendesk.com slash twist, and they will give you six months free because they know it's crazy out there right now. Everybody is dealing with a lot of issues in their startup, in the world with the pandemic, etc. And they want to help support startups. And I've known Zendesk for a decade. They are amazing human beings. They make a terrific product, as you know, and they are tremendously supportive of startups. So again, six months free for your startup. And they qualify startup as under 50, which they probably could have said under 25. But I think they're being super generous right now. And they want to be supportive. Zendesk is a service first CRM company with support, sales and customer engagement products designed to improve customer relationships. You know all this. The Zendesk for startups program is offering qualified companies, again, six months free, and you can utilize their support and sales solutions and gain access to exclusive startup community resources to help you scale out your customer support. And customer support, you know, went from an afterthought now to being one of the most important things you do in your startup. Yeah, sure. Everybody thinks you got to build a product. Everybody thinks you got to have a great sales team out there, getting people into the top of the funnel. You know what you really need to do? You need to not have a leaky bucket and have people churn and leave your startup because nobody picked up the phone. Nobody solved their problem. Nobody did proper training, right? If you're the CEO, you need to hang with the customer support team, with the customer success team. And you need to be looking at the Zendesk tickets because that's when you're going to get great inspiration for new features and products or things you need to fix that you didn't even know about. So, if you're an early stage startup, defined as under 50 employees, get started today with six months free.

SPEAKER_04: That's worth thousands of dollars. Go ahead and get to Zendesk.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_02: All right. Welcome back. Joel Montaniel is here.

SPEAKER_40: And he is the CEO and co-founder of Seven Rooms, which builds customer profiles so they get better service.

SPEAKER_02: So, how did you price your offering versus OpenTable? Do you charge a dollar for every person who comes in or is it just a flat rate or is it – how do you charge?

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. So, fixed monthly license fee depending on the platform capabilities that you have. And our model is all ROI driven. So, we need to be able to prove to an operator that we can save them more money or make them more money. And as one example, one unique part of our platform is we capture data on their behalf and guest opt-ins. And then we have a marketing automation product that says, hey, Jason, you haven't been in the restaurant in two months. We know you're a VIP and we know you like the fish. Right. We're going to give you an offer automatically that looks personalized to bring you in directly to them.

SPEAKER_161: Got it. And that could happen by SMS. It could happen by email, et cetera.

SPEAKER_30: And then you charge just a flat rate. What would it be for a restaurant, a 50-seat restaurant, a 100-seat restaurant? That would be $500 a month, $200 a month?

SPEAKER_24: It's anywhere from $249 a month all the way to $1,500 a month per location. And again, we're always proving ROI.

SPEAKER_06: Got it.

SPEAKER_04: And so, if a restaurant were to get one extra customer per day, pay for itself if that customer had a $10, $20 profit, right? Is that kind of how you sell it?

SPEAKER_156: That's exactly right.

SPEAKER_06: What are you seeing in the data from mid-March till now in terms of, in aggregate, obviously

SPEAKER_43: not any individuals, but just in aggregate in your data? I saw a story today that there's like almost a perfect correlation between the states that are letting people into restaurants and the coronavirus outbreak.

SPEAKER_163: You can look that up on CNBC. And I don't have the details of it. But that does seem to be logical.

SPEAKER_04: What are you seeing? Are restaurants now coming back online in June? And then what was the shutdown like?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. So, the shutdown, everything stopped overnight, as you would imagine.

SPEAKER_19: So, we saw the booking percentages and capacity and everything go to zero. So, overnight. And we have restaurants in 26 countries. So, we see across the world what's happening with the biggest ones outside the U.S. being London, Dubai, and Hong Kong. So, we saw those markets, especially Hong Kong, close earlier and have now come back up. What we're seeing in particular, we also launched the delivery pickup product. We saw, of course, delivery, as you would imagine, spike. And in particular, what was interesting is pickup really, really spiked.

SPEAKER_30: What would you have a thesis on that? I do. People don't like to pay the fees?

SPEAKER_19: I think two things.

SPEAKER_27: One, it's a way to justify getting out of the house. Right. And two, actually, what you're finding is this brand association.

SPEAKER_19: And what I mean by that is this. There was a Wall Street Journal article maybe about a month ago that actually, I don't know where they could pull this stat, but it said, 30% of delivery drivers taste the food, which is gross. Oh. Right? Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_167: Gross.

SPEAKER_166: Thanks, dude. Thanks, dude.

SPEAKER_70: You just ruined it for everybody. There's no way that's true. And if it is true, I am not. I don't know where they got that stat. Oh, my Lord. Don't they seal them and put a sticker on them and tie it really tight?

David Friedberg: They need to. They should.

SPEAKER_19: So, where I think people are doing pickup and delivering, this is actually great for the brands is going straight to the brand and going and pick up. You don't, you, you're going to pick it up yourself. I don't, I know the person who probably made it. They already know what their spaghetti tastes like. They don't need to try it. Yeah. And so I think it's partly.

SPEAKER_08: So people are pinching French fries. This is what's going on. People are taking a little pinch of French fries, thinking we're not going to notice. We probably won't. Oh, so gross.

SPEAKER_02: Well, the other thing is pickup is amazing. We have cloud kitchens by our office here, Travis's new company and Diego's company.

SPEAKER_04: And it is so fast and cheap to just walk across the street or walk a block and pick it up that I think that's going to be the future of all this is, you know, just like there's a Starbucks every three or four blocks, there'll be a cloud kitchen every three or four blocks. Absolutely. Why?

SPEAKER_08: It would be fast. It's faster to just pick it up and you get your food hot. That's the other thing is like, you know, I, I love Uber Eats. I love this stuff. But sometimes I'll order my ramen and I'm like, wait a second, they're going the opposite direction of my house. It's like, oh, fuck. They're, they're doing another route. They're dropping somebody else's ramen off. Right. This is a message for Uber Eats. There should be a button that says premium. I want, I'll pay an extra five bucks to have this delivered direct straight to my door.

SPEAKER_04: VIP service. Something like that. So the, what would you say on a percentage, what, what countries are back to a hundred percent, if any, and then what is the United States looking like?

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. So we don't have any, at least for our core markets, anyone back to fully a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_19: Okay. Hong Kong is still operating at 50% capacity. They've been in that mode probably for about six weeks now. Uh, us is starting to come back. Uh, we've worked with restaurants all over the country in particular, it's been interesting to see what's happening in Las Vegas. So we power, we power about 70% of the strip. Uh, so MGM, Cosmopolitan, the wind all use our platform across all of their food and beverage outlets. Uh, so what you're seeing there is people are back. Uh, of course it's not at the same levels because there's capacity restrictions, but people are there, you know, they're trying to enjoy themselves and you've seen those hotels start to really try to accommodate around safety. Uh, so some of them have, have rolled out contactless order and pay. Uh, some of them are even using our system to help manage the reservations at their blackjack table at their craps table. It's been super interesting to see how they can fly.

SPEAKER_181: So you'll make a reservation because you can only have half the number of people at the table.

SPEAKER_146: That's right. And so we're, we're powering that as well.

SPEAKER_04: Oh my Lord, that's hilarious. So they basically put the blackjack tables there. I wonder if with the poker tables, if they're just going to play six handed going forward, five handed instead of, you know, nine or 10 seats. Right. Yeah. It's crazy. Um, and what do you think?

SPEAKER_02: I mean, I didn't have you on, uh, for medical advice, et cetera, but what is your take on knowing what you know about Hong Kong and other places, what's your take on what the fallout will be from this in terms of number of restaurants that will fold? Because if you have a lot of penetration in these areas, I'm sure you gave people a month

SPEAKER_08: or two off for their bills. Yes. Yep.

David Friedberg: You had to do that proactively or. And for certain areas of the country or certain areas of the world, we have actually waived

SPEAKER_44: fees through the end of the year.

SPEAKER_61: Wow. So that's really difficult.

SPEAKER_02: So you've got to deal with this crazy crisis, managing people working from home, all this craziness, and then you have to turn off your revenue stream in some cases.

SPEAKER_189: Oh my Lord. That's brutal.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. It's been, what was that board meeting? Like, well, I think we, we talked about, you know, the brand we're trying to create. There's also market, there's market pressures where competition in the market has given away their product for free through the end of the year. So you have a decision to make about whether we try to match that or not.

SPEAKER_27: And also more so, how do we lead? I think the easy decision was to, to waive the fees.

SPEAKER_19: What we really are thinking about though, is our platform is going to help operators in the up and the down. And actually this is creating an opportunity for us because we create restaurant profitability.

SPEAKER_193: If they're only relying on third parties, they can't own the relationship. They can't drive LTV. They can't drive profitability.

SPEAKER_30: Right.

SPEAKER_04: So they're going to be more attuned to this. And also if they're only seating 50% of as many guests, they want those seats to go to the ones who are going to spend the most money. And there's going to be demand. How, what percentage of your restaurants do you think will not reopen? Do you have any insight into that where people just said, Hey, take the machines back. Take, we're done.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, it's so early for us to see. And a lot of our segment, 75% of our customer base is actually multi-unit enterprise. So we've been a little bit insulated.

SPEAKER_38: That said, across the US, my guess is 30% of their restaurants were close. Wow. One in three.

SPEAKER_02: And despite all this, um, and, uh, that's why you're on the program today is to announce that you did a $50 million series B led by Providence strategic growth. I'm assuming that that deal was in the works before the pandemic hit.

SPEAKER_08: Yes. And then the pandemic hits when you're, you hadn't closed it at that point in March.

SPEAKER_02: We had not closed this in April. When did you close? May, June? It's like right around now.

SPEAKER_196: It's all blurry. Yeah. May, June, end of April, beginning of May.

SPEAKER_08: So you're working on this $50 million deal.

SPEAKER_02: Uh, this is obviously a very big, uh, uh, investment firm to be able to write that check. Does all of a sudden everybody sit down at the table and retrade and say, Hey, it's a new reality. We got to cut the valuation. We want these extra terms. Or is it just, Hey, you know, we made the commitment.

SPEAKER_04: We're going to go straight forward. How do you negotiate a giant deal like this? And then having the pandemic blow up right in the middle of it.

SPEAKER_19: Um, yeah, that was, uh, you know, one for the, one for the books, for sure. You know, it was something that I got a lot of advice on and, and really, uh, you know, I'll answer definitely more directly, uh, starting with, uh, what's most important. We, we went after the round opportunistically. Uh, luckily we didn't have to raise the round. Um, and we had built relationships with many of the investors that we're talking to, as you know, as most companies do long before, uh, when the pandemic hit, we were still early in the term sheet, uh, more or less, it was done, but still early enough. And, uh, some of the terms did get retraded to reflect the market realities, you know, and it was, uh, give and take, you know, really tough conversations. Uh, ultimately it was a, still a win, still a significant up round from our last valuation. And luckily, you know, we have our current investors as well as, uh, PSG coming in that really believe in the company.

SPEAKER_80: So it wasn't what we started, um, but it was still great, a great outcome.

SPEAKER_30: That is, uh, pretty amazing. Uh, when we get back, I mean, just, wow, I can't imagine how anxiety producing that must have been for you in April, May, trying to close a deal while your employee, you got

SPEAKER_02: to take care of employees while you got to take care of everybody. Hey, when we get back, I want to talk about the customer experience. I know you have some ideas and some new products coming in terms of voice recognition. I know a lot of these hotels are putting Alexa's in their rooms and, uh, people's expectation is getting pretty high, um, in terms of service. And I suppose people are going to have those expectations get even higher when they realize that, um, the restaurants really need their money and the hotels really need their business.

SPEAKER_30: So hotels are going to really need to step it up. So I want to know what the future of that is in personalization and voice when we get

SPEAKER_205: back on this week in startups.

SPEAKER_52: All right, founders, you've probably had a really long day. Maybe you're on zoom calls for five hours. Like I was, did a little workout on my Peloton, did a little tonal, man. It was a long day. I've been on that zoom and you know what time it is. It's time for me to close my Dell laptop.

SPEAKER_210: And you know, I'm going to crack one of those course lights and I get a nice crisp sip. Hmm. Ah, love a crisp course light. That's right.

SPEAKER_52: Brewed at the ice cold course brewing company in golden Colorado, which is a big startup scene. You know, they are made to chill. There is no doubt that summer is going to look a little different this year. We're going to have no festivals, weddings, sporting events.

SPEAKER_90: So a lot of things are not on the board, but just because your plans have changed doesn't mean summer is canceled. Nope. Even though these last couple of months have been a bit crazy for all of us, Coors Light wants to make it easier to chill this summer. Born in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado in 1978, Coors Light is refreshing, crisp, and ah, only 102 calories. Hmm.

SPEAKER_217: Yum, yum.

SPEAKER_52: So starting this summer, I'd like you to chill out just like your boy J-Cow with a crisp Coors Light. Maybe you'll listen to the pod and crack one open when you're on the back porch, listen on your AirPods. When you want to reset this summer, reach for the beer that's made to chill. You can even have Coors Light delivered by going to get.coorslight.com and finding a local delivery option near you. As always, you got to celebrate responsibly. You know that. And Coors Light Mountain cold refreshment is made to chill. Welcome to the program, by the way, Coors Light. So delicious. I think you're having one in the booth, engineering. Okay, he's cracking one open. Take some time. Chill out.

SPEAKER_219: Crack open a cold Coors like I just did.

SPEAKER_02: All right, Joel is zooming in here to this week in startups to talk about Seven Rooms, his startup, which builds profiles on customers to delight them and personalize their service. Been really genuine and transparent about how difficult this has been for him. And I appreciate that on behalf of the audience. Let's talk positively about customer experience. Everybody loves, the maitre d' knows who they are and they drop the calamari and, you know, bring out sparkling and do all that kind of stuff. We love free stuff. We love getting a great table.

SPEAKER_04: But what's the sort of future of all of this? What are some really exciting experiences that you're working on for people? I know that I was addicted to the dub. I would only stay in W hotels for a long time because the Starwood program was so great. And I had gotten up to like platinum or something, which means I automatically got upgraded to a suite, which didn't happen that often because there's so many, I think, people who are on that level. But they always gave me like my newspapers or food or points. And I just loved it, right? You get your New York Times and your Wall Street Journal, et cetera. So I became super loyal to Starwood because of that.

SPEAKER_06: What are you doing? And what is the state of the art now for really, you know, delighting customers?

SPEAKER_27: Sure, sure. So one thing we think about is historically the innovation hospitality technology has been about the transaction, basically moving phone bookings to online bookings. Yeah, who cares? Yeah, who cares? And if you think about every transaction you do, it's pretty the same across all the third

SPEAKER_19: party deliveries, across all the booking sites. So where we really want to innovate when you have the guest data is around the experience. And it's how can we help the restaurant understand as much as possible about Jason? And how do we surface that data to the restaurant at the moments that matter? Because CRM for the sake of CRM that's sitting in a computer is no good, especially for small businesses and especially for restaurants. No one's going to, Jason doesn't walk in. I'm going to go run over to the computer upstairs, look up your profile and then figure out what to do for you. It's all in the instant. So we combine the operational with the CRM. So when Jason walks in, I immediately can recognize you because I have a picture. Even it's my first day working at the host then. I know you're friends with the owner. I know you're a regular from downtown. I know that you love the calamari. And I know you love table 12. So, you know, that is happening right now, today, where we see it going is how do we make that even more magical? And how do we make the technology disappear? So when we first started, every restaurant we talked to, they were so scared of technology. They were allergic. They thought it was actually going to be, it was going to get in the way. They thought if I have an iPad, I'm going to, you're going to walk in and the guest is going to be like that, right? So we've always been thinking about how do you remove the interface? Uh, and so we started playing around with Alexa, sort of thinking about voice, uh, and we were fortunate to build a partnership with them. And, and this is where we think it can go where, uh, Jason, let's say you're sitting at the corner table. I now have an Alexa earpiece. And instead of having to run over to an iPad, instead of even looking at my Apple watch, I can say, oh, that, that guy looks really familiar in my earpiece. I can say, Alexa, tell me who's on table seven. She's pinging our system and that's, oh, that's Jason. He's friends with the owner. He's a regular, he's celebrating his birthday tonight. And his favorite wine is this, I can then go over Jason, happy birthday. Thank you so much. I could have called over to through Alexa to tell the server to bring a free bottle of your favorite wine. I have your favorite wine coming and let me know if you need anything.

SPEAKER_111: So do a lot of places have earpieces like that where they're communicating or is that

SPEAKER_06: just for like, you know, when I stay at the wind tower suites or like whatever the

SPEAKER_189: VIP entrance is now that I I'm rocking, you know, as opposed to when I used to stay at the, the Rio for $99 a night.

SPEAKER_19: They, they, uh, they don't yet. A lot, large part of that is because of the cost of the earpiece. Yeah. There's glasses, hardware, but it's still pretty expensive.

SPEAKER_02: That's going to be amazing. Now, uh, are, are any of your customers, uh, querying you about facial recognition and, you know, I walk in and it says, oh, that's Jason. And it just pulls it up.

SPEAKER_04: Does that, is that on your roadmap? Does anybody offer that in the world? And how do you think about that?

SPEAKER_02: Cause I know it's, it's a bit controversial. I would love to have that, um, you know, but I'm not everybody. Some people are concerned about, you know, this privacy stuff. I think privacy is an illusion at this point, but. Right. Yeah. I agreed with that. Yeah. What do, how do you think about that facial recognition technology?

SPEAKER_04: Have you had customers ask for it and do, do places use that around the world? I would suspect casinos do that all the time, right? They have cameras everywhere.

SPEAKER_235: So are they doing facial recognition? You think?

SPEAKER_19: Not inside their food and beverage outlets that we work with yet. That said, we've seen different rollouts across the world of it. Uh, we, we ourselves are not planning on building it. We really look at it as we'll partner with whoever gets it right. And then the other thing is, you know, going back to what we think about if it will lead to a better experience and more so if the customer wants to opt into that experience, then we should be a bridge to help manage the opt-in and help manage the data. And so, you know, we really think about whatever new touch points get created will be a platform that those touch points can be plugged into.

SPEAKER_172: Does anybody ever complain about like people knowing about this stuff and how do you instruct people to not make it creepy? Because if I don't know the hostess, uh, or the maitre d' or the host and they come over

SPEAKER_02: and they're like, Oh, Jason, how are you doing? And, uh, happy birthday. And, uh, last time you were here, you ordered extra pork on your ramen. I, some people might think that's creepy.

SPEAKER_04: Do you ever have that happen? And how do you keep personalization from dipping over into creepy?

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, it's a, it's a really great question.

SPEAKER_19: Uh, so, you know, the first thing is, I think, uh, the hospitality world and more specifically restaurants, I always say, I think they invented personalization, right?

SPEAKER_27: For sure. And this industry has been doing this without any data for such a long time. And I think people working in the industry are naturally predisposed, uh, to remember things.

SPEAKER_19: So this, the person working in the hotel, you know, remembering that you like the room by. Uh, the front or that you like your pillows a certain way, or that you like, you have a coffee that you want to go get. So I think for years and years and years, the industry has already been doing it. Uh, you know, there's different hotels that will do a roll call. All right. This family's coming in. Their son was 12 years old. He's on the basketball team. Their daughter loves chocolate chip cookies. And so I think hospitality is in an interesting place where it's one of the few industries where people actually want you to know more because it will lead to a better experience. And so what hasn't been done yet is the bridge between the consumer and the, and the operator

SPEAKER_38: and a way to collect it naturally has not been created. That's what we're really focused on working on.

SPEAKER_08: How does the GDPR look at this? Like in Europe, are you allowed to collect all this stuff or do you have to get explicit

SPEAKER_02: permission? How do you navigate their really stringent rules?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. Good question too. So, uh, they look at it a lot more stringently than we do today.

SPEAKER_19: Uh, we have capabilities built in to be GDPR compliant. So if a person in London calls in and complains, there's a way the restaurant can delete their profile, show proof of that, all of that.

SPEAKER_112: And of course they have to be extra careful about marketing opt-ins as well there.

SPEAKER_06: Right. And then is there a way for me to go to your site and say, tell me everything, every customer you have knows about me?

SPEAKER_19: Not yet. However, we are thinking about, you know, how do you make it? Because a customer shouldn't have to tell 200 restaurants that they have a shrimp allergy. Exactly what I was just thinking.

SPEAKER_08: Like, why can't I build my profile and be like, Hey, listen, I'm baller. I want you to know I'm baller.

SPEAKER_34: I'm coming in hot and I want a great table.

SPEAKER_19: Exactly. And so, you know, that's where we think mediating the, what the guest wants the restaurant to know is part of our thinking. And not every single time that every single situation, do you want the restaurant to know it, but sometimes you do. Right.

SPEAKER_27: And you should be able to let them know it when you do, and your, your history should carry with you whenever you want it to, wherever you want it.

SPEAKER_06: I think if you said what, if you allowed me to come and type in my email and my phone

SPEAKER_52: number, confirm it's me. And the value proposition of knowing what restaurants know about me and being able to manage it would be enough to get me to go there and then consolidate it.

SPEAKER_02: So I think that's kind of interesting for top level folks as like bait, right? Like, Hey, you know, you can see your profile stuff, but I would love to be able to fill that form out and then share with all the restaurants proactively. Do you, do you track the percentage tip people give and then put them into buckets, high,

SPEAKER_16: low, medium?

SPEAKER_27: We do track the percentage tip and then we have rule automation where if the restaurant

SPEAKER_19: said, okay, anyone who leaves a 25% tip or more automatically tagged them as this. And then maybe that might, might mean you get invited to the friends and family opening of their next. So we have a way to wire up all the data points, great tag automation.

SPEAKER_04: What do you do with the guy? What do you do with the guy who tips like 40% consistently minimum?

SPEAKER_252: It's up to the restaurant.

SPEAKER_04: So what they did, they pay, they make the buckets. So you don't have to say like, we are saying you're a cheap tip or you're great. That's right. But there's also who are the bad tippers and telling the waiters who the bad tippers are. See, that's a little controversial maybe, but I think the servers need to know that information

SPEAKER_254: that this is a cheap, annoying customer.

SPEAKER_04: There are inappropriate a-hole customers and you should know that this person was rude. Do people get to, I know that they can do whatever they want with their own data, the restaurants, do restaurants mark rude customers, they mark low tippers and then how do they use that data in your experience?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, we've seen them mark customers like that. One of the tags you'll see is handle with care.

SPEAKER_257: Handle with care.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, HWC.

SPEAKER_257: Handle with care.

SPEAKER_52: Oh, so that means a toxic person. That could be a Karen. I don't know what a male Karen is. What do they call it? Steve? Are they Steve?

SPEAKER_258: Jason.

SPEAKER_260: They're not a Jason. Jason comes in hot with a big- Put a hundy.

SPEAKER_04: They put a hundy in there. Uh, so they do handle with care is the code word.

SPEAKER_88: What's another code word? Give me, give me an insight. Yeah. And NFU. And FU.

SPEAKER_211: No effing.

SPEAKER_27: No, you tell me. No fuck ups, which basically means whatever this person wants, they're, they're baller. They're so close to the owner, whatever they want. They can literally be a huge asshole. It's an N-F-U. And FU.

SPEAKER_52: But they're going to probably leave a big tip and they're going to order the most expensive one.

SPEAKER_236: That's right.

SPEAKER_19: And it's giving the, giving the team that data is so important because they haven't had the data before us and it was impossible, good or bad for them to really manage that experience. Now, when someone walks in that is friends with the owner, they're going to think a little bit differently. Now that someone walks in, we, we also auto tag negative reviewer, you know, they might put their best server or they might send something over that's nice for the guests because they know what the past experience was that they can now rectify.

SPEAKER_172: Well, and the handle with care people, you know, like if it doesn't come out medium rare, it's going to get sent back. So let's just be on top of our game.

SPEAKER_04: That's interesting. Do restaurants ban people and how do they handle that? Like if they have a, we have something we call the do not fly list here internally. And our do not fly list is you came to one of our events and you harass somebody or you

SPEAKER_06: were otherwise a jerk.

SPEAKER_79: Or you, you know, we had somebody tweet something like really offensive, you know, while they were at an event and we're just like, we ghost them and we put them on the do not fly

SPEAKER_04: list.

SPEAKER_73: So then when they sign up for anything, they don't actually get any updates. They just get ghosted. We have that ghost list. What do restaurants do and what do they call it?

SPEAKER_15: Uh, some of them call it 86, uh, 86, right.

SPEAKER_257: The eight by six grave, which is when you 86, when all the lobsters gone, you 86, the item,

SPEAKER_61: which the, what I heard when I was a waiter was an eight by six grave.

SPEAKER_272: Did you know that?

SPEAKER_61: I didn't know that. Yeah. That's what eight, that's what I was told eight by six meant.

David Friedberg: Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_274: A grave. Yeah.

David Friedberg: Got it. Interesting. Got it.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. So they'll 80, they'll eight by six or 86 you. And that actually, when you call in, uh, your profile will pop up and they'll see it. That's what one of the other benefits or, you know, they, they, or they'll see that you're a regular and this is your first time calling in or they see, you know, so it's all of that. How do we give them that bite size?

SPEAKER_111: And then how does a restaurant say your business is not welcome? They say, we just don't have reservations available for that night. So that's their version of ghosting.

SPEAKER_06: Sorry. We can't accommodate you.

SPEAKER_277: We'll put you on the wait list.

SPEAKER_06: We'll put you on the wait list and you'll never ever get back.

SPEAKER_277: The priority wait list.

SPEAKER_30: Well, you know, we, we have a bit of that ourselves. Um, yeah. And that's super interesting, uh, to me is avoiding those people.

SPEAKER_06: This is my, my dad had a rule because when I was young, I really was thinking about entrepreneurship and my dad's restaurant. I said, you know, we should do two for one. If people get here, come at five o'clock because people don't come in until seven, six 37. We got all these empty tables at five. Why don't we do two for one or something? And he was like, the people who come in for two for one, they're just cheap and they're

SPEAKER_189: going to go through four loaves of bread and they're going to be annoying and they're going to steal the salt shakers. It's just not worth it. We don't want them here.

SPEAKER_06: And I was like, oh, pop. That's interesting. My dad knew at that time what customers to turn away in addition to which ones, um, to

SPEAKER_04: go after. But I, you know, people don't understand this. This is a super easy way. If you want to get a reservation to any restaurant. And every time I have a new assistant, I train them on this. And I would say on a Friday or Saturday night, I can call in to the top four restaurants in any city and I can get a table in two, three or four.

SPEAKER_02: So when I go to a city, Joel, I just tell my assistant, tell me the top 10 restaurants, look at Eater, look at this, look at the local paper, give me the top three or four, book me

SPEAKER_52: a table both nights. I'm in Park City. I want the best restaurant Friday and the second best one Saturday, get me a table six.

SPEAKER_02: Then I figure out who I'm going to invite because I'm a foodie. And I'm going to give this to you now, Joel, because you will appreciate this. My assistant calls. And if you have an assistant, that is a signal, right?

SPEAKER_52: So say, Hey, I'm calling on behalf of my boss, Jason Calacanis. He's in town for a conference with some important, uh, clients. Now you're, that's another little tip. Okay. It's clients. They're important clients. And now if you say it's important clients, that means you're going to try to invest, impress them, you're going to order a nice wine.

SPEAKER_04: And we're very sorry. We, we know you're obviously booked if the, in any way there's a cancellation. So you are apologetic and you're giving them an out and you're telegraphing to them that I am going to be baller. And then I tell them, look at the wine list, pick two of the expensive bottles of wine,

SPEAKER_52: you know, $200 bottle of wine and say, uh, and you know, he's a big fan of this wine. Uh, if you had two of them, you could put on the side. If something opens up, he would love to have those two bottles just on the table, ready to go to impress these clients.

SPEAKER_06: Uh, and again, I'm, I apologize profusely and it's, I know it's ridiculous for this call, but you know, I'm, I'm sure you'll get a cancellation once in a while because somebody can't make it or something. Somebody flakes.

SPEAKER_52: And they're like, Oh, yes. So let me have your number. When I tell you this technique works three or four times, sometimes four or four at the

SPEAKER_04: best restaurants, because what I just telegraphed to them is $400 in alcohol, six people. They know we're going to get a third bottle.

SPEAKER_02: We know we're ordering dessert. We're going to get some, a pair of tea for something. And that's the other power move. If they got a dessert wine, you just pick the dessert wine, which is usually 200 bucks. And now.

SPEAKER_128: They tell them everything they need to know. Yep.

SPEAKER_103: Everything you need to know. That's so smart. It works every time. And I, that's my gift to everybody in the, this week in startups audience. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: You have to be able to order $400 to make this plan work, but boy, does it work?

SPEAKER_284: No wonder they don't give me the tables.

SPEAKER_52: What is your technique? How do you get tables when it's hard to get a table?

SPEAKER_135: Now that we're not going to, it used to be hard in New York, right? Just last year, it was brutal. I heard to get a table in New York. Yeah. What's your best techniques?

SPEAKER_236: So I would, I would recommend, uh, I usually go on the, the week, week, day nights, you

SPEAKER_27: know, I try, I try to sneak in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_19: Um, however, if you're trying to make an impression, uh, the first time you go, I recommend buying one or two, uh, but usually two nice bottles of wine and they'll mark you down actually as a wine spender. And actually, so the signaling that you gave actually tells them that already that's so, but that's, if, if you're not using Jason's technique, which, which, uh, is a really good one, then the other thing I would add is when you do go to the restaurant and they don't know you and they didn't mark those things down, or they're not using seven rooms for that matter, uh, you should buy one or two nice bottles of wine. And I guarantee you'll get a table pretty much 90% of the time you call next time.

SPEAKER_79: So, wow. What other techniques are good? What other techniques are good for being a great customer and getting treated really well? You have any other hacks?

SPEAKER_64: Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: I think just being obviously calling ahead of time, you know, the, there, there really is a certain number of tables and for the, the most popular restaurants, you know, the, especially

SPEAKER_19: the smaller ones. So three days or more in advance is great. Uh, and of course, being as friendly as you can, because these folks that are picking up the phone or emailing, they're getting yelled at all day long, right? They're the, don't, you know who I am.

SPEAKER_04: You got, see, that's the thing. What, and this is what I trained my, my people on. If you are a hotshot, you know what hotshots do?

SPEAKER_33: They call on their humble.

SPEAKER_298: That's exactly it.

SPEAKER_33: That's exactly it.

SPEAKER_04: And I tell my folks, you just, you just, if you're super apologetic and you're baller, it's like, ah, this person is, doesn't need to be handled with care and they're going to be delightful.

SPEAKER_11: And this is the problem that seven room solves in a nutshell is it's so hard for the person

SPEAKER_27: picking up the phone or answering emails to understand who the customer is. Cause the most humble people are actually probably the most successful people.

SPEAKER_19: And so when you call in, we can pull up your profile or when your assistant calls in, so they know without you even having to tell them.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I love the texting too. Is texting getting popular? Because getting texts to me from a restaurant I love or whatever, there was this really interesting product out here, um, where it's a little keypad. Uh, I forgot the name of it. You, you, you'll certainly know it.

SPEAKER_79: And it's only for promotions. You type in your phone number while you're leaving and the front desk has nothing to do with it. You just type it in. And then I did it at this archery place where I was taking my daughter to this archery place. And then they would just text me every two or three weeks. Hey, if you come in two for one today or this weekend, whatever, it was kind of great offers of seven, it wasn't seven rooms.

SPEAKER_04: It was something else. Do you know about these? Like the loyalty program things? Yeah. Which one am I describing?

SPEAKER_12: There's a few that do those. I'm not sure which one, but I'd be curious to find out.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. What's the best practice in texting people? Because people use it for reservations now, you have to give them your phone number to get a reservation. So what's the best practice? Should you ask them, would you like promotions or you just send it to them?

SPEAKER_236: So definitely opting in and then, you know, texting or email, you know, best practices you would imagine is just sending them something they actually care about.

SPEAKER_19: And I think that that's partly also what we're trying to solve is without the data, you can't possibly know what they would care about. With the data, you can then make those touch points much more meaningful to the guests to get them to come back in.

SPEAKER_52: So what's the hardest table in New York? Is it still Carbone? What is the hardest table? Carbone's up there?

SPEAKER_51: Carbone is up there. Yeah. Carbone is definitely up there still. So good. It is so good. The spicy rig and the...

SPEAKER_93: Oh, in Vegas, it is amazing. Because I roll in Vegas with Phil Hellmuth.

SPEAKER_06: And Phil Hellmuth is sponsored by the Aria in some way, like those logos.

SPEAKER_04: So when Phil Hellmuth walks into a place, they know him, you know, and Carbone is the hardest ticket in the world. I come in with Chamath and Phil Hellmuth. Chamath is like the king of the place as well. And I mean, it'll be a Saturday night. We walk into Carbone with no reservation and they give us the private room. Amazing. Bonkers.

SPEAKER_256: They use our system there.

SPEAKER_06: They do? That's why it's so bold. Because I go in, I try to get it. Don't work.

SPEAKER_52: But when I'm with my boys, it is crazy. All right. Well, listen, Joel, I kept you for a long time. Continued success. Great job holding it down. I will give you just one other tip.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You ever tip the hostess to get a table? You ever give cash? Joel, is that it?

SPEAKER_196: On the way out. I used to do it on the way in. Big mistake. If I needed it, yeah. If I was trying to get them to do something.

SPEAKER_52: All right, Joel. See, now this is where you can learn something from J-Cal.

SPEAKER_312: Okay? Because I know you're- I'm learning a lot still.

SPEAKER_52: All right. I'm just giving you the 80s, 70s, and 80s and how we rocked things in Brooklyn back in the day when Brooklyn wasn't cool. I know you're in Brooklyn. You're in the cool part. But I came from when it wasn't cool. We go to Manhattan. And this is how we got into China Club and the Palladium.

SPEAKER_257: Take a 50. 50. Not a hundy. Hundy too much. 10 too little. Fitty. Right in the middle. Right? Because you're going to dinner with four people, six people.

SPEAKER_52: It winds up being an incremental 10 bucks a person. No big deal. You take the- You got to keep fitties online. So you got to keep, you know, like 10 50s in your safe or wallet or whatever. You fold it twice. Now, when you got a 50 folded twice, it's going to look just about, for people who don't know,

SPEAKER_257: it's kind of the size of a matchbook. Right? So just go ahead and fold it twice. Looks like about that. Right? See what I got in my hand there? I'm doing the visual for those of you who go to the YouTube channel. You take it, put it right here in the palm, and then your thumb holds it. Okay? You see what I got?

SPEAKER_315: Yeah.

SPEAKER_257: Got the thumb holding it. Now, if my hands are down, you don't see it. Now you see it. Now you don't see it. Not in this hand, it's in this one. You walk up to the reservation desk, and you put your hand, one on the top, and then one maybe a little bit, you know, beneath, and you look the person in the eye, and you say, I am so sorry. I didn't make a reservation where my assistant might have. I don't know. Maybe you can check. But if there's anything you can do to help me, I would really appreciate it. And then very much on the side, you show the 50, and you turn over, and you say, what's your name?

SPEAKER_33: Oh, it's John. Great to meet you, Susan. And you put, and you shake their hand, and you put it right in their hand. Boom. I have done this a hundred, two hundred times in my life. Nice. One time it didn't work. Now, the fear you have, what's the fear you have in giving that 50? What's the fear you have?

SPEAKER_12: Yeah, that they can't help you. That you give it to them, and they take it, but they can't help you.

SPEAKER_33: Right. That will never happen.

SPEAKER_04: It's an irrational fear. They would never take the 50 and then not do it, because you could complain to the manager, and they could lose their job for taking the 50 to begin with. Now, they're allowed to take tips, but this is a big tip, and to take it and then not do it, it would be a disaster for that person if they got caught doing that. And one time in probably the two or 300 times I've done this in my life, the woman, it was at Asia to Cuba in New York, which was a hot restaurant in the 90s. She came back to me, and she said, oh my God, you're so sweet.

SPEAKER_52: I can't do it tonight. She gave me the 50 back, and she said, but I got you two seats at the bar. That's the one time it didn't happen.

SPEAKER_103: And she refused to take the 50 for giving me the seats at the bar. You have to tip on the way in, everybody. Hit the hostess.

SPEAKER_04: Hit the maitre d'. It's 20 bucks is okay. 50 if you're baller. 20 in a small joint. That's it.

SPEAKER_298: I got to get at least a couple of 50s.

SPEAKER_103: You're not even rocking 50s? Hold it up somewhere. Come on. You got to get back on the cash tip. This is killing the economy. And this is why you all can't get reservations, and you're not baller.

SPEAKER_52: It's because you don't got cash. The other thing I would do is when I would go to Vegas, and I would ask them when I was cashing out, hey, can you give me $300 in twos? Can you give me $500 in twos? They have $2 bills. They give you whatever you want in Vegas, because in Vegas, they know some people are superstitious, and they want $2 bills. I would keep $1,000 in $2 bills around. Usually in my office, in a lockbox. They're not in the office right now. But anyway, I would keep a lot of those around. Then whenever I went to a valet, I would give two or three $2 bills. And I'd say, hey, here's this for luck. Every time I pull up, they go, $2 bill, guy.

SPEAKER_323: There you go. Wow.

SPEAKER_04: $2 bill. So I gave you three techniques. It's memorable. That's the thing. It's memorable. So I gave you three techniques, Joel, and you shared a lot with the audience. You said it all.

SPEAKER_33: To recap, my God, get your deal closed before a pandemic if you can. If you're into building office, don't sign long-term leases. Sublet. Sublet. Great one. Don't get caught.

SPEAKER_79: And listen to your team send surveys, and you can't fight them. And if you get into a fight with a big incumbent, you got to stick it to them. Their margin.

SPEAKER_327: Use your customers.

SPEAKER_79: Yes. And their margin is your opportunity. That's right. And OpenTable's margin is that dollar, and you don't charge for it. That's right. If you're a restaurant or you know a restaurateur and they're paying OpenTable, the VIG, they can do it for free with Seven Rooms. Get in there. Check out Seven Rooms You're Hiring, I'm assuming.

SPEAKER_27: That's right. Can I add one more? Yeah. Just one more that I didn't mention I should have is in the deal process, having really supportive existing investors and board members and Dinesh Mourjani from Comcast Ventures, letter series A, and phenomenal advocate for the business and really helped get the deal done and work through all the complexities.

SPEAKER_257: Well, listen, I wish you the best, Joel.

SPEAKER_52: Thanks for coming on the podcast to announce and do the first podcast where you're announcing the $50 million series B by PSG Providence, strategic growth. And that's an important tip. A lot of people want to come on the pod now. Best time to come on the pod. We don't take pitches. But if you were closing a giant round and you were committed to announcing it here, that

SPEAKER_103: might, it might be like the fitty. Might be like the fitty. You might have, you might, you kind of did it, Joel. You called and you said, hey, put two bottles of, you know, of Opus One on the side here. Give me a magnum of Screaming Eagle. And look, here we are. All right. So grease the wheels is my best advice. Stay safe, Joel.

SPEAKER_208: And take care of my hometown, Brooklyn. And thanks for holding it down. Great job on the pod. We'll see you all next time on this week in Star Wars. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.