Ashish Tulsian: Hey, welcome to the Restrocast. Today, I have an exciting guest, Benson Tsai, a rocket engineer, a rocket scientist who is literally fixing the pizzas, the stellar way. Benson is all what passion looks like. It’s, you know what he’s doing at Stellar pizza is clearly an example of when a lot of smart people come together and try to fix something they’re passionate about. He’s not only fixing pizzas. I think the secret sauce is in how he’s trying to fix it. And he’s not even trying, they’re quite succeeding. I love this story because it is inspiring at so many levels. It is inspiring because smart people are not trying to reinvent the wheel, but they have the courage to also say that they are just improving what the world has already done. This and much more in this conversation. I’m sure you will come out of this conversation inspired as well. 

Benson, welcome to this August. Thanks for agreeing to do this. 

Benson Tsai: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m so excited to just talk and tell you my story. 

Ashish Tulsian: So you just entered the restaurant space and before you entered, you have done, you know, some interesting stuff. And I you know, before I get to a point where. How did you land the restaurant. Let’s talk about your your journey where it all started. 

Benson Tsai: Yeah. Well, so once upon a time, long time ago, my parents actually, they immigrated from Taiwan to America, and the first thing they did was open a fish and chips restaurant. So. So sort of grew up in that like, environment. My parents quickly learned how terrible or difficult or challenging it is to run a restaurant. 

Ashish Tulsian: Where was this?  

Benson Tsai: This was in Alhambra, California, Los Angeles, California. And then they they stopped that. They sold it and started independently running their own businesses. So I grew up in a very, very entrepreneurial family. The expectation of of me and my older sister was to go and start a business that was like default. It was not go work.  

Ashish Tulsian: That’s not that’s not that Asian, right? 

Benson Tsai: Yeah, it’s not that Asian, I would say. And when I was working a steady job, I was the first person in my family to ever work for someone else. And they would question, you know, they’d be like, What are you doing? Like, you should go work.  

Ashish Tulsian: Wow. That’s that’s very cool.  

Benson Tsai: Start your own company. But grew up in Los Angeles in an immigrant household. The only foods allowed in our you know, Asian household that were not like Chinese food or Asian food. It was pizza and in and out, nothing else. We never ate in any other American restaurants.  

Ashish Tulsian: Why? Wow.  

Benson Tsai: Just because they just were not used to it. And so that’s sort of kind of the seed for what I’m building now. But I remember falling in love with chemistry and science and ended up watching The Good Eats by Alton Brown was amazing show about cooking and baking or just cooking and science. And then there was another show called Unwrapped where they took you through food factories and they would they would show people or machine people and machines working in concert to make food, you know, by the millions they would make. I remember slicing cookies, flying through the air, like just watching for me that was watching toy kind of be produced and manufactured and spread throughout the world. Happiness and joy in that little in those in those videos. And I really wanted to do that. So I went to college in Los Angeles, too, at a school called Harvey Mudd College, a very small engineering school in Claremont, got a degree in engineering, wanted to pursue sort of large scale chemical process manufacturing. So I got a degree. Yeah. So I ended up going to grad school for chemical engineering where I was. I thought I wanted to be a professor for a little bit, but got distracted and ended up moving to Silicon Valley, got my masters, moved to Silicon Valley and started my first company.  

Ashish Tulsian: Yeah, And what is that about?  

Benson Tsai: Yeah. That was so this is 2008, right after the sort of the recession had just started and thought that we could build an electric vehicle company from scratch because Tesla had just gotten off the ground.  

Ashish Tulsian: And so that was 2008  

Benson Tsai: 2008. Trying to raise money, lots of fun times, very difficult, challenging times. But for some reason we thought it was possible. And we started a company called Motor Power Systems Building electric school busses, electric garbage trucks. That was the that was the mission to tackle fleets of electric cars, because at the time everyone was concerned with how far you could drive in an electric car and where would you charge it. And if you look at delivery vehicles, they drive the same route every day and they go home to a depot. And so that was that was the mission. And the company is still around today. Yeah. My my, my friend ran the company for ten years. Jim Castle has ran it for ten years. And we found a new CEO recently. Oh, wow. Nicole Motive. Motive, motive. Power Systems provides power transfer for electric. So you if I’m wrong,bootstrapped in funding as well. A large part of the fundraising or the funding came from the California government as well to stimulate this kind of sector. A clean tech. Auditor. 

Ashish Tulsian: So what about you? You started that and then you.  

Benson Tsai: Yeah, a few years in, ended up moving over to a very, very small company that is now called today, Lucid Motors, which is a big company. But I joined in the early, early days when they were a company called Ativa, and at the time they were building battery packs and electric power trains for busses and trucks in China where the government had just announced, like all trucks need to be electric next year or something like that. Yeah, but I was like. Yeah, in, in that environment, you know, I thought I could make a bigger impact. Given that I speak Mandarin, I speak Taiwanese, I speak English, I speak engineering, right? And all of those things. How do you speak Mandarin. Oh, or is it is it too close to Taiwanese? No, no, no, it’s not. It’s not close at all. It’s actually like almost English and Spanish of a difference. Oh, wow. So as I was saying, when my parents both started their own businesses, my dad started a petroleum company, import export picture frame company, and my mom started a Chinese school to teach kids English, reading, writing, as well as Chinese. And so for me, my my parents were too busy running their own businesses. I remember, though, like kind of thinking, if I don’t learn Chinese, well, who’s going to pay my mom to teach their kids Chinese? And I if I don’t do it well, I’m going to be out on the street homeless for some reason. As a kid, I thought that at that weird thought in my head. So I did well in my Chinese classes. I took Chinese in high school and I would say I’m pretty fluent.  

Ashish Tulsian: Wow. Okay. And Taiwanese was of course. 

Benson Tsai: I totally spoke at home in dialect. Yeah. No, no, no written language. Yeah. So, So. And then I learned engineering as a language because I think if you speak English, you know that engineering is its own language itself. And so, so I thought I could have a big impact working at Lucid in the early days, which I think I did. I was one of the few employees who spoke all the languages and a lot of the information got like funneled through me and my. There were there was a time when there was a meeting and there were three side conversations, each in a different language, and they were fine because they didn’t understand each other. But like my head was like going to explode because I could understand everything.  

Ashish Tulsian: Wow. And in all, the three were Taiwanese, Mandarin and English. Yeah. Wow. Well, of course, Taiwan is is a very important business. 

Benson Tsai: Yeah. Yeah. And Taiwan also is a very, very food centric culture. When you see your friend or a stranger on the street in America, you would ask, Hey, how are you? Right? For me or for Taiwanese people and Chinese people as well. We ask the question, Have you eaten yet? And that is how well you are doing. So. So I do make that mistake. I remember one time I was talking to a coworker from America and I was walking away from the lunch area and I was like, Have you eaten yet in English? And then he got excited and like his eyes lit up and I realized that he thought I was going to go with him to eat lunch, but I was just looking for lunch.  

Ashish Tulsian: Ouch. Yeah. Yeah. I’m just not being nice. This is my. Yeah, Yeah. I think the way. I say it is, I don’t even mean it like.  

Benson Tsai: So. So food is a very important part of Taiwanese culture. They invented Boba, right? It’s just like a very innovative country to that mishmash of foods to, to, to, to go. And there’s like, All right.  

Ashish Tulsian: And then you said, you know, how many years you do that?  

Benson Tsai: Two and a half years. Yeah, yeah, that’s been a while. So that two and a half years designed some of the early battery packs that are now looking at the technology, looking at the battery packs in the current Lucid motors. You know, had a pretty good impact on what I think was pretty was advanced battery technology better? Hmm Yeah. 

Ashish Tulsian: And then?  

Benson Tsai: And and then Space X wanted to move back to Los Angeles and one of the coolest companies in L.A. in 2014 was, was Space X, and they were not a success at that time. They had launched maybe three or four. My numbers might be off, but just a few rockets, you know, once a year.  

Ashish Tulsian: I think two of them failed.  

Benson Tsai: Oh, yeah, three of them failed. The first three failed. And so so for me, I was just like, Well, do you want to design batteries for spaceships? And I was like, I’ll try it. Like, I was very uncertain whether I could do it, but in general in my life, whenever I. Was over there. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whenever, whenever I felt, whenever I’m trying to make a decision, I try to make the slightly more uncomfortable decision because like there’s a saying, discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. And that’s sort of the way I try to make my own personal life decisions. Just be uncomfortable. Yeah.  

Ashish Tulsian: And how is Space X?  

Benson Tsai: Amazing. I was there from 2014 to 2019, and in that time frame, in that five year span, I was a part of 76 rocket launches. Well, that’s right. Wow. I was standing on the floor. So Space X, very innovative company. They’ve lowered the cost of launch services by a third to a third of what other people can charge because they reuse the rockets. But I remember watching a cartoon my first week there of like, we’re going to do this thing where we’re going to shoot a rocket into space and bring it back down. And I laughed because I was like, okay, we’ll do that in like ten, 20 years. Within the next year, we were smashing rockets, like into boats on the ocean, just like failing in front of everyone. Learning, though, learning that is the key thing.  

Ashish Tulsian: You know what? You know, one, one, one, one. Stupid, funny thing. But yeah, you know, all this, all this Elon Musk Twitter saga, you know, across the world, Right. And so many entrepreneurs, you know, my circle is I’ll start a lot of people around. And there are times on entrepreneurs would say, Oh, Elon Musk has lost it. I’m like, wait, hold. His rocket lands backwards. Yeah, yours is barely going through. You are not going to put an opinion on Elon Musk. Call me when your rocket starts landing backwards.  

Benson Tsai: He definitely has the ability to push people to accomplish incredible things. And I was there for a large portion. You know, there was a whole new satellite program that I was a part of. I designed the battery systems for that and also worked from scratch.  We designed the battery pack for the spaceship that is now taking humans to space. But in 2014, the US had already lost the ability to send humans to space. Yeah, we were relying on the Russians and had space X not been there. This war, you know, like we would have just been cut off from the space station. 

Ashish Tulsian: Well, absolutely. Yeah. No, actually. And I’m just I’m still like, in my head. I’m still there like 2014 to 2019. Those are like the, like the most important years in SpaceX.  

Benson Tsai: Yeah. I mean, this is like years. I hope there’s more exciting years ahead, but I had so much fun that we launched the, the car into space on Falcon Heavy, which was the triple beam rocket that we thought. And my name was etched on that car that we sent to SpaceX. Oh, and it’s just there were so many things that I remember standing on the floor when we landed our first rocket without blowing it up. And someone came from behind me, hugged me and lifted me what it felt like 15 feet in the air because it was just such an exciting moment. And and I realized, like National Geographic, like all these people were there filming. And so I watch these things and I’m like, Oh, yeah, wow. Okay. So that’s captured that moment in history is captured. Yeah, yeah. I’m totally taking that. You’re I lived an entire aerospace engineers career in five years and it was amazing. And more actually because you know also like challenged Yeah you know so many notions and so much that. Is quote. Yeah absolutely. Disrupted an entire industry. I think if you look at Elon’s history you know he is where he is today. But Tesla, everyone told them like what are you doing trying to to to take on the GM, take on Toyota and look where they are today. And the same exact thing with SpaceX, everybody was like a private company. Cannot you know. Correct. Do this. 

Ashish Tulsian: No I actually think and this is of course fun going on, Elon. But but I think I actually believe when I look at the companies, you know, that that are. Spinning out that that’s. Yeah that those are happening none of them have actually bloomed yet and it’s already at a trillion Yeah, like none of them have bloomed like each of them have their best years in front of them. Some of them have never even bloomed yet fully. So I was like, you know what, what this guy is doing, I don’t think you can put a dollar value to this. I don’t know. Will it end up 10 trillion or 20 deliver 100 trillion? You can’t put a dollar value because most of these companies are like they’re about to bloom.  

Benson Tsai: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s it’s it’s it’s so I, you know, it it felt so good to be a part of history. And now when I go to a science museum and I sit in their little rocket launch simulator and I hear the countdown ten, nine, you know, all the way down, I, I like I transport myself. I get transported back to the moments where my hardware was on, you know, a rocket flying to space. And those nerves just come back every time I hear that sound. And so, so it was really, really great. Five years of my. 

Ashish Tulsian: Wow that that’s amazing. So now what is this Rocket Man doing? Selling pizzas? 

Benson Tsai: Was I. Yeah. Why am I selling pizza? Well, I mean, I told you a bit of my story, wanting to really spread joy in the world through food. And I think it was time. It was sort of time for me to figure out what I wanted to do next. I remember watching the prototypes of the StarLink batteries come off the production line, and I stared at them and I was bored. And that was like a weird, weird feeling to have because like, here I am standing on the ground floor of probably one of the most exciting aerospace or engineering companies on this planet. And I was bored. And that’s sort of when I knew I needed to move on. I wasn’t learning anymore. And and for me, you know, again, trying to be uncomfortable, I was comfortable building space, space batteries and it was time for me to change it up. And that’s that’s ultimately what I did. And so, so me and two other of my space battery friends at SpaceX decided to. Oh, wow. Yeah. All three of you are from. Yeah, I spent five years with my co-founders working on space batteries. They were the team that worked on the Falcon awesome battery system and it was actually my my co-founder James Wahawisan who really wanted to start a company. And the entire time I was like, You’re on your own. Like starting a company. It’s terrible. It’s hard. And he was he started he I think he quit his job and he was like very serious about it. And then and then my other co-founder, Brian Langone, also was like, let’s go. And once they sort of showed me, you know, that they were serious, I was ready to to get involved.

Ashish Tulsian: Yeah. What’s happening now?

Benson Tsai: So we today, you know, ignore the fact that we built all of this crazy technology. Today we are selling pizzas to students and college campuses in Los Angeles and they can order on their app while they’re in class, while they’re in their dorm room order and then come carry out, take the pizza away. We have a fully automated food truck that can make a pizza in about four and a half minutes, and it can make a pizza every minute. So we can do about four pizzas at the same time. Uh, and with that, we think that, you know, our pizza is good. I am confident that our pizza taste good. 

Ashish Tulsian: So you’re doing a pizza in four and a half minutes? Yes, that’s right. So that’s like four, four pizzas out and four, four. Okay. That’s right. Yeah. And when you say there’s a fully automated truck, you mean the pizza? The pizza making. Process? 

Benson Tsai: Yeah. Yeah, I’ll talk through. Yeah. Have you made a pizza before? Yeah. No, I’ve seen people doing it. Yeah. Yeah, I can. I can imagine. Fairly simple. You know, your proof, your dough for, you know, two days, three days and then and then you get it. You’re going to make your pizza. So you get all your ingredients, you open the dough so our machine will take a proofed dough ball, pick it up, move it over to the dough press, which will press out the dough. So. So instead of using hands, we’re designing a robot with hands that does this. We have just a press that comes down and it presses out the dough, and there’s a shape of pizza there that’s left behind, right? So and then the dough gets moved into a topping line where it’s sauce, cheese, pepperoni. We can we can handle up to ten different toppings that get added. So whatever you order, whatever you customize however you like, it gets added onto the pizza and then it goes into one of four ovens that we have in our vehicle, which where we cook for about 2 minutes and 15 seconds and hot pizza rolls to the to the back of the vehicle.  And then slicer cuts it up and then we box it in and hand it off to the customer.  

Ashish Tulsian: And why in the food truck?  I mean, this is I’m assuming that this is like you can actually place it another.  I can imagine this as well. 

Benson Tsai: Yeah. Our goal, Oh yeah, Right. We have so my, my team is actually a team of 30 SpaceX engineers, Uh, lots of space X alumni alumni at Stellar Pizza. Our head chef is from SpaceX. He used to teach. Chef Ted says I used to run food services for all. He built all the food services at SpaceX, feeding 10,000 people three meals a day. So we have a lot of that’s why we’re called stellar people. We have a lot of SpaceX experience. And so your question was with regards to. Know why a food truck like you get, you know, what, what do you build? You can place it in a brick and mortar store as well. So yeah, so this amazing team has built a magic box that makes pizza and how we make money from this magic pizza printing box. It can be used in various, it can go in stadiums, it can go into retail locations, it can cook other kinds of pizza. It can. It can. But I think the reason that I was really excited to make it mobile beyond the fact that it adds this constraint of space and size, I think it was really there was a moment where I ordered DoorDash and a ten year old kid handed me my food when I opened the door and I was like, What is happening right now? And his mom was driving and to me I realized that something was a little bit broken, like she could maybe not afford childcare or it’s just more efficient to have kids help with DoorDash even though they don’t get paid. It just felt wrong to me. And so, so I was excited to sort of provide a different solution. I’m not saying that that DoorDash is necessarily bad. I think it’s really good for the restaurants that can survive on the platform. But for us, we were like, Let’s cook and move and deliver pizzas fresh, you know, make it on the way to their houses. So we have the most affordable delivered pizza on this planet. And that was.  

Ashish Tulsian: Oh, so you mean that, you know, when somebody orders truck is going in then or you have like the.  

Benson Tsai: Idea would be to have like a fleet of trucks roaming a particular area, a neighborhood or a larger neighborhood with like maybe one two mile radius. And as you order on the app, it starts, oh, it’s, it gets, it gets the order. And so it starts driving to your house in 4 minutes, 5 minutes, 6 minutes. The pizza’s getting made while it’s driving your house. So you’re going to get your pizzas better, but, you know, fresher, faster and definitely more affordably because. Wow. Yes. That that was the reason is. 

Ashish Tulsian: Is a truck self driving as well. 

Benson Tsai: That’s not that’s not a joke that I’m a pioneer in the self cooking car industry and not the self-driving car industry will eventually not. Yet yeah. Someone else billions of dollars have been poured into that and it will get solved eventually. It’d be really cool one day to have drones flying off self-driving pizza trucks and delivering pizzas to people’s backyards and that’s like the sci fi cool version of the future that I want.  

Ashish Tulsian: Oh, that’s that. I just got a visual. Yeah, a truck is a speeding truck has drones coming out. And there’s driving pizzas. All of our neighborhood. That’s that’s amazing. So how, how, how long did it take for you guys to build this? And what like, what did it take to build this? Because you know, and I’m really curious because, you know, there are a ton of, you know, companies that have come all over the world.  Yeah. You know, when it’s an automated pizza making, you know, all all kinds of types, some kind. So, you know, what was your process and yeah, special.  

Benson Tsai: So a lot of other you know any new industry is going to have a million different angles or approaches to solving the same problem. And so when I built my electric car company back in the day, I saw 10 million different companies that were all trying different electric powertrains. There was electric skateboards, there was electric motorcycles. Right. And I see the same thing happening in the food industry, in the food automation industry. Everybody is trying their own thing. We took a very like SpaceX approach to it. We it needed to be cheap. It needed to be very, very, very small, very compact, and it needed to solve the problem from a we call it the first principles method, where what did we actually want to do? We just want delicious pizza come out of a box, right?  A freshly made, delicious pizza. And with that approach, we started researching like, there’s robot arms, there’s all these other strategies. And what I realized the key unlock for me was realizing that we’ve been eating pizzas made by machines for decades in the frozen pizza industry. All of those, if you look at those factory videos on YouTube, you can see it’s just like they mass manufacture pizzas. And so we decided to take that technology, use modern engineering methods, use modern engineering, engineering materials, modern electronics, everything. Just everything is cheaper now. So we shrunk it all. We redesigned everything. So it would fit in a very, very tight package. And that’s the key, isn’t necessarily the specific mechanisms for making the pizza. It’s about the system integration that that that requires a team of space ship engineers to design. That was the real, real challenge. 

And when you say that packing packaging in a small space. Yeah the small space is the truck is the size. Yes. So that means what you’re talking about, the industrial machines that are making pizza. Huge factories. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. So. So it took three years. Plus you had a little COVID in there. It’s challenging. Three years. But we got to the point where the machine got its certification from the National Sanitation Foundation and, you know, getting the permits and everything to operate. It’s really exciting to see all of it now. And the end product is actually just a happy college kid, like biting into.  

Ashish Tulsian: Brilliant how long back did you go live?  

Benson Tsai: Uh, maybe six weeks ago. So very, very recent. Just now? Yeah. Nice. And how’s houseless? Good. Good. Very good. We have a lot of, uh, in terms of social media buzz, kids are sharing our our boxes. I think I saw one student, he put our pizza box in in the fire and took this really, really cool photo. So seeing the brand resonate with the college kids is really good. Our price point is incredibly affordable right today, where 7.95 for a 12 inch pizza, cheese pizza. And in large part of that is because of the robotics, the robotics.  

Ashish Tulsian: Are you are you saying that you are still unit economics positive at 7.95? That’s efficient. 

Benson Tsai: Yeah. And the robotics allow us to spend more money on higher quality ingredients. Our pizzas are delicious.We can spend more money on the one or two employees that need to be at the truck.We can pay them a living wage and provide them benefits. And then we share the cost of the food,the cost savings with the customer.And I think that at the end of the day, the mission that I’m on is to spread a little joy in the world. Pizza’s like the happiest. There’s no such thing as a burger party, right? She’s the happiest food on earth next to ice cream. And the other aspects to what I get really excited about is,is making the cost of living like reasonable, keeping it low.  And with automation and robotics, if you if you go home and open your pantry today, all of that is in your pantry and at reasonable prices because of automation.  Yeah. And so I’m just bringing that technology into the restaurant, you know, closer to the customer. And it gets me really excited to think that, like we could also be solving food desert problems in cities, in urban areas, that there’s just so much with a mobile magic pizza box that that’s.  

Ashish Tulsian: That’s that really exciting means. And I think a lot of things stand out for me in this and this is probably one of the coolest, you know, stories on automation and in the, you know, in the restaurants that I appreciate, not that I’m like, I’m not for automation. Yeah, but it’s like, you know, whenever we talk about robotics and automation at the restaurants, right in the in the food service or food, you know, cooking generally the debate is exciting at all. Whether it’s going to come out the same thing or not, but it’s going to be delicious and not I you, you know, compromising with the staff or the quality or, you know, I think none of that we discussed. So, yeah. So I’m just, you know, I’m really happy to hear how you’re looking at it.  

Benson Tsai: Yeah. I was less focused on like if I was going to build a restaurant, it needed to be good food. It didn’t need to be like gourmet, like Italian fresh, you know, handmade artisanal food. But it needed to be good food because I’m a foodie. I love food. And for us, my co-founders, we actually became friends at SpaceX because we would go off campus and look for new foods to eat all the time. And that was sort of the genesis of our friendships.  

Ashish Tulsian: Great. And, you know, how do you how do you look at like, what what’s what’s the business model going to be now? Are you are you planning to earlier on fleet of trucks, is it going to be franchising what’s what’s happening out there?  

Benson Tsai: As a venture backed startup? Nothing is off the table. Uh, but for now we are operating our own vehicles and under our own brand because that is necessary for us to really mature the technology to the point where we may feel comfortable franchising, we may feel comfortable licensing. I don’t know where where that my path will, you know, the stellar story will go. But all I can say is that I think it’ll be a really, really fun ride. 

Ashish Tulsian: And yeah. And when you are talking to the restaurateurs. I mean, this is not a MURTEC question yet because this is just happening. You know, we are using, you know, the same time. But when you’re looking at all the chatter around robotics or automation in the restaurant industry, what’s you know, what are the things that are exciting you that other people are doing? 

Benson Tsai: Yeah, well, I’m just excited that I see a lot of automation in restaurants already. I peek into McDonald’s and I see the the auto cup dispenser that fills the drink based on the orders that come in. I think this is the natural progression of of quick service when it’s not when you’re not looking for a restaurant experience, when you’re looking for something quick and easy and fast and affordable, it’s already it’s already happening. And I and I see a lot of restaurateurs, people who operate, get really excited about the automation because they see what it can do for their business. It allows them to focus on training employees to interact with humans versus interacting with machines. 

Ashish Tulsian: But then on the other side, we are having voice AI. Yeah. So even the interaction, even the interaction is going on, right?  

Benson Tsai: So yeah. The Voice AI Well, I also think that a lot more of this next generation doesn’t necessarily want to even talk to anyone to order. I think they want to use their app and once they become a regular customer, they don’t even need to really use the app. You want their like favorites, like all of Starbucks has it and and Chick-Fil-A, you know. It’s all yeah, basic stuff. Once you once you on everything’s super smooth and that’s what we want to do We want to make the entire experience feel seamless. Like if someone opens the app and we’re in their neighborhood or they’re near the truck, I want the pizza to start being made before they even hit checkout. Right? So it feels like our four and a half minutes could feel like 2 minutes. And that’s that’s like I think there’s just a lot of exciting technologies coming into the restaurant world. And obviously with more tech happening now and I’m I’m excited to be a part of the conference and and hear what people are trying what people are doing. We took the crazy approach of building entirely vertically, build the hardware to cook the food, build the software to control the machine, build the software to control the machine like at large, like the entire restaurant, the entire software platform. So we have our own point of sale system as well. 

Ashish Tulsian: That know we I mean, that’s the only thing that I don’t like about your store. You wired you guys writing software as well. Let us do something. You’ll make good code, you’ll make the beans, you’ll make the software. Yeah, but two questions. One, are you planning to, do you think, or do you even believe that you want to take it outside of the U.S.? Because, you know, this can actually find appeal in a lot of other countries. Yeah, but, you know, do you think about it? And is it is it are the regulations that can stop you? Is that something that you know, that is dead or is this something that can be scaled across the globe? 

Benson Tsai: Yeah. So regulations are always there. I think America, maybe Europe are the strictest. So if we can comply with those those regulations in general, we can probably make the modifications necessary to cook. In other. It would make me so happy to take these machines to Taiwan. My only concern there is actually pizza’s pretty expensive there and not a lot of people eat pizza. I think they do. But it’s not just it’s not as frequent as your average American.  going internationally would be and. Is big on pizzas. Yeah. And we don’t mind cheap though so you have you’re. Actually pretty good I’ve gotten I’ve gotten requests from people in India like can you do Roti or like I was like, yeah, probably. Yeah. So they’re the use cases for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s definitely the case here. But as I said earlier, that nothing is off the table. Like, it’d be amazing if it’s stellar pizza, you know, expanding across the globe or if it’s our technology expanding across the globe and other on with other brands. Like I’m just excited to be able to lower the cost of living for everyone.  

Ashish Tulsian: As a founder apart from the excitement and the rush. Yeah. What’s keeping you awake?  

Benson Tsai: Oh, building a restaurant is very, very hard. I, I think I deal a lot with, like, maybe not. Maybe in part, maybe it is imposter syndrome of, like, what am I doing in this restaurant space when I just should just design cool things for cars or space spaceships? Um, but then I realize that most people Enter the restaurant industry quitting their finance job or like, right. They find joy in serving people food and that that’s what powers me through all the troubles that I face. Building a venture backed startup. Um, I’m here to try to make an impact on the world. But we live on the ragged edge of, of, of like, survivability, the growth and failure border. Like, I’m just, like, dancing along that, that, that edge right on the cliff every day and it’s it’s it’s challenging it’s it’s mentally you know exhausting.  

Ashish Tulsian: Who’s your competition. 

Benson Tsai: In my view my competition as basically all other companies right now. Uh, it’s not.  About name three. Name three, Domino’s, Pizza Hut and a Little Caesars and Papa John’s the big four. All right. Okay. But but the funny thing about the pizza industry is it’s so fragmented. You’re technically have competition in every corner at every corner. And and not only competition, but also, uh, friends. Like, everybody needs to eat. Everybody loves pizza. You’re not going to go to the same pizza restaurant every day. Everybody has slightly different pizza. So I’m just excited to be playing in this in this area where it, where new new comers are welcome all the time and we get to try our own thing and have our own brand. I often joke that, you know, we’re not artisan like crafted pizzas, but our robots are artisanal. Crafted by engineers.  

Ashish Tulsian: Yeah. Okay. That’s that’s like, that’s actually going to be a cool tagline. Artist newly designed robot. Yes robotic. Robotic pizza. Be the. Yeah. Handmade robots. 

Benson Tsai: Um, yeah. The restaurant world is a very, very fascinating place. And there’s a common saying of, you know, you say it’s not rocket science when something’s so simple, right? Or it’s just rocket science is this like, nebulous thing that’s really, really difficult. But in reality, building a restaurant is way harder than rocket science.  

Ashish Tulsian: I don’t believe you. 

Benson Tsai: Here’s here’s my take on this. Okay? For rocket science, there’s physics, like there’s laws of physics. And you just basically everything obeys, behaves exactly as intended. You have a customer come in and you try to do one thing. It might work on this customer, but this customer, there’s no laws, there’s guidelines. So so I genuinely think being being a restaurateur, being an entrepreneur is way harder than being a rocket scientist.  

Ashish Tulsian: I totally agree. I you know, I had my restaurant 12 years back, and I can tell you that, you know, I was running a tech company, you know, While, you know, I invested in this restaurant. And I actually used to think that running I mean, how hard running a restaurant can be. I’m running a tech company and I built telecom systems. And yes, my first few months in the restaurant, I was like, dude, this is like, this is unpredictable. Yeah. Every minute I hear you on there. My last question now that this machine is dead already, of coming out, you’re perfecting nebulous all the systems. But what are these 30 you know, SpaceX’s engineers doing now? What are they working on?  

Benson Tsai: Yeah, designing the next generation of vehicles. And I want to be the place where the best engineers who are also foodies want to work. And we’ll be working on the next generation of automation for other food categories.  

Ashish Tulsian: And so it’s not going to stop a pizza. 

Benson Tsai: It’s not stopping at pizzas. 

Ashish Tulsian: On that note, Benson, I you know this is all the best. I think this is this is just starting. You’re just starting. I’m super happy to do this conversation. Yeah. Now, right. We’re we all going to, you know, look at how this goes and I’m sure it’s going to go. It’s going to go really great. So thank you for being on the podcast. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. 

Benson Tsai: Yeah, Thank you so much for having me.