Ashish Tulsian – Hi, welcome to Restrocast. Today, my guest is Geoff Alexander, somebody who I call a maverick and a master of restaurants. Geoff probably has done everything on all types of concepts, restaurants dream of, starting with a full service, you know, fine dining large restaurants to QSR to kiosks to today what he’s doing at Wow Bao, it’s almost restaurant-less.

In this conversation I saw that Geoff is somebody who is a risk taker by imagining the future and living it. The courage to, you know, take a shot at what the future might be.

Things like, back in 2009, Jeff was the one who started an online ordering, you know, self ordering kiosk to somebody who in 2023 is releasing NFT’s for Wow Bao.

I came out of this conversation inspired to take a shot at the future, to fail, to figure out what was going to be a couple of years from now while running the show as it is today. I hope you’re going to enjoy it as well. See you.

Ashish Tulsian – Thankyou, Welcome to the Restrocast. Thank you for doing this.

Geoff Alexander – My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Ashish Tulsian – Geoff, I’ve I’ve seen, I’ve read a lot on not only your entrepreneurial journey, but a lot of things that you talked about. And I have like, I have so many questions and so many topics to talk about.

Geoff Alexander – I hope I answer them..

Ashish Tulsian – Right from, you know, branding to bootstrapping to, you know, being that underdog brand to, you know, technology, NFT’s , you know, web3; it’s a lot of it’s a lot of spectrum to cover. But, you know, I’m interested in knowing when it all started because getting into the restaurant space, diving in headfirst is is not something that people really think about. That’s what I believe, they fall into it most of the times. How did you?

Geoff Alexander – How did I fall into it? I guess you’d say fall in and I haven’t gotten up yet. When I was growing up, I’ve been around food, I’ve worked in grocery stores, I’ve worked in a special high end food market. But when I went away to college, I ended up working at a restaurant bar on campus for three years. My sophomore, junior -senior years started as a fry cook. Became the grill cook.They had me bouncing at the door at night time, for whatever reason, and then I got to be a bartender and eventually a chef supervisor and a manager too, while I was in school. But I’ve always had a strong work ethic. I’ve always worked my whole life since I was about seven years old. I’ve always had some kind of a job at some point. So I was taking full classes and working around food and I was dating someone a year older than me who graduated and moved to Chicago. We were in school, Madison, Wisconsin, and I would visit her on weekends and every weekend we’d go out to eat and it was just a different restaurant. But the all had been under the same umbrella company called ‘Lettuce Entertain You’.

 And I applied for a position and they told me it would take a year of me being a host or server until they consider me for management. And on the first day of work they made me management and I didn’t question and I just never gotten off the the track.

Ashish Tulsian – Wow.

Geoff Alexander – And what’s been nice, sorry, is Lettuce Entertain You has about 60 different concepts. It’s a 51 year old privately held restaurant group created by Richard Mellman. Many different concepts they’ve created. But for me, I went through about ten different concepts or so or eight different concepts during a 20 something year span. So it’s almost like every two years or every three years was basically a new job because it was a whole new cuisine, a whole new look of a restaurant, whole new staff, new challenges.So it was just it was, while I was always in the business, I wasn’t doing the same job always. I might have had the same position, but it was always a new start every couple of years, which made it really exciting for me.

Ashish Tulsian – So like when you say that they turned you into management on the day one, what were you doing? You were managing the restaurant or this was..?

Geoff Alexander – I went through training for 13 weeks, but I went through management training. In the Lettuce Entertain You world you do every position in the house over the 13 weeks from dishwasher all the way up to floor manager. And at the end of the 13 weeks, I was on the floor as a manager, a nighttime manager working the dining room. The restaurant was called Shaw’s Crab House, which is a seafood restaurant, 18,000 square feet. It’s two different restaurants in one; the oyster bar and the main dining room, very successful, started back in about 1984. Still there today, many years later.

And it was a training ground for me because it was at the time the dining room had a busboy, a back waiter and front waiters was full high end dining, and the oyster bar there were more food runners and servers. So you got both ends of the spectrum at a high end price tag with a lot of alcohol and wine and high clientele. And, you know, once you get into the business, the bug bites you and you can’t get out, which is why I keep my kids away from it.

Ashish Tulsian – Oh, really?

Geoff Alexander – My daughter’s done it, my daughter’s 24 now. And she did.

She’s bartended. She’s managed a bar when she was in college. She’s served and she loves doing it. She loves the business, but I won’t let her do it full time. She’s got to find other things to do.

Ashish Tulsian – Why?

Geoff Alexander – Because it’s, it’s not a life. It’s a hard lifestyle. And, you know, when I look back on my life, I have no regrets. And I’ve met fantastic people. I’ve done tremendous things, but not everybody gets that growth pattern. And, you know, you’re working when everyone else is not working, and it’s 365. There are no holidays,

 Ashish Tulsian – Literally.

 Geoff Alexander – There are no holidays, long hours. And it’s hard to have work life balance in the restaurant industry until you get to a certain position to achieve it.

Now it’s different in today’s world. I hire enough people, that everybody wants work life balance in the employee.

 Ashish Tulsian – Do they get it?

Geoff Alexander – Well, the employment, the employee base is being a little bit more stringent about their demand and what their expectation is. So it’s our job as good leaders to find and help them achieve work life balance.

But the clientele, their work life balance is when they’re dining, is when our employees want the balance right. So it’s a hard time, it’s hard to do it. So I keep the children out of it. I want them to enjoy it and have fun with it and be interested in it and enjoy to eat and but, and it’s great teaching. My daughter has an unbelievable work ethic because of what she’s learned in the restaurant industry, and I do think everyone at some point should work in it to understand how to treat people the right way and work hard.

Ashish Tulsian – That’s a big one, that’s a big one, right? Because the work ethic piece in the restaurant space is really about doing the right thing when nobody’s watching because, you know, you’re handling something that people are going to eat. Yeah, but with a lot of trust in you, you know, cleanliness actually starts, hygiene starts at the back of the house where nobody is actually watching you. And you you know, if you’re wrong there then your work ethic goes down the drain from there.

Geoff Alexander – You’re 100% right. But I look at it differently. Hygiene is everywhere in the restaurant, right? When you walk in, if there’s crumbs on the floor, you’re immediately turned off. And, you know, I’ve got to go into the bathroom of the restaurant. It’s dirty. I mean, then what does the kitchen look like? If you show me the bathroom to be dirty, the kitchen must be God awful, right? And that’s how I was raised in the industry is everything matters. And everything you do is marketing. Every single thing you put in front of that guest is the way that you’re marketing your restaurant. You’re marketing who you are. You’re marketing the belief in the restaurant. And as the leader, it has to be important to you. If if it’s important to you to give good hospitality, your team will give good hospitality.It’s important to you to be clean and to do things sanitary, then it will happen that way. If it’s not important to the leader then it’s very hard for everyone else to attach themselves to it because they never get the praise.And what you’re saying, you know, we all want to catch people doing the right thing. The restaurant industry is so many moving parts and the clientele doesn’t see everything to thank and recognize that employee. And as good leaders, we need to be constantly walking around and saying thank you and taking notice and so on.

Ashish Tulsian – Going back to your Lettuce Entertain You days, so you started there and then you’re saying that almost every two years there was a new concept, you know, what was your journey like within that? Like, what do you what are you creating concepts or are you just managing, you know, when did you when did that become like a is was it the P&L management? Was it still, you know, the product? What what part of the business?

Geoff Alexander – It’s a good question. Thank you for asking it. So in 1993, when I joined the company, I was what would be called a number four manager, general manager, then a two or three and a four in the Let Us world. As the number four manager, you know, you order supplies or you order linen or you, you know, and you work the night shift and the number three manager, you order liquor and you might start doing schedules and be involved in interviewing. Number two is in charge of all the random repairs and maintenance, the contract maintenance, the P&L, the food cost, and then the general manager does all the hiring and into the P&L and oversees the business. So I was in number four in 1993, became a number three manager, and then in 95 I wanted to grow and I was given the opportunity just to go from Shaw’s , from an 18,000 square foot restaurant doing huge volume and business, big top number sales to a small 1800 square foot little Asian concept that was trying to find itself and I said no. So I stayed working nights at Shaw’s, and then later that year I said, I want to grow. And they said, well, we still had this opportunity. So I went there ,became a number two manager working underneath what was the GM, but he was really the partner of the restaurant. And the team was so impressed with my work ethic and what I was doing that they were opening another location of that Asian concept.

 It was called Big Bowl in 1996, and they offered me the position to go to that new restaurant as the general manager. So I became the general manager that we opened over the next five years, we opened eight more locations and I grew into what was an area director role where all the GM’s reported to me and I reported to the partners of the business and then like an hourglass to partners went to me and I went back to the GM’s.

And in that role, I really got involved in construction. I got involved in, well, construction is probably the big thing that I learned. My next restaurant, we sold Big Bowl to Brinker International. They owned Chili’s and Macaroni Grill Bistro, Macaroni Grill. And I went to what was called Vong, which Jean -Georges Vongerichten is a known chef out of New York. He had five Vongs around the country. We were running the Chicago location and my job was to close it and re concept it. And that was my first time really deciding a menu, deciding the entire look of the restaurant. Myself and Kevin Brown is now the CEO of Let Us, we work hand in hand and he gave me a lot of freedom in making the decisions. And then the next concept I worked on was in Minnesota. We opened up ten Quick Serve, Asian kiosks inside grocery stores. And I had built 14 of them in ten weeks. And I remember clearly I was standing in Ridge down Minnesota in this grocery store and I had a lot of freedom in the build. And I’m looking at this wall and this is a huge wall, I mean, massively long wall. And I’m standing there. I called Kevin and I said, I think we need to make this wall green. And he’s like, What do you mean? I was like, he’s like vegetable green, like what kind of green? I was like, Kermit the Frog green. And he said, It’s only paint. And when he said those words to me, it empowered me in such a way that it’s okay to make a mistake. It’s only paint. So it’s the wrong color, you repaint it right? And that’s really where I, I between big, bold letting me learn construction VTK – Vong’s Thai kitchens while we recounts at Vong and doing menu development, and then having this full empowerment in Minnesota to build these ten restaurants. Those three journeys really gave me the autonomy and the confidence to do more than I opened up a restaurant called Frankie’s Scaloppine created the entire menu for that one.

Ashish Tulsian – That is on the Let Us.

Geoff Alexander – That was under the Let Us. We chose to chip in, which was one of the Let Us’s original restaurants, it was 20 years old. I wanted to close it and create this new restaurant. I work hand in hand with Rich Melman, our founder. Did the whole design of the restaurant, created the menu for the restaurant, and then I took over Wow Bao. And in the last 13, 14 years that I’ve been doing Wow Bao, I had complete autonomy to do things. And that’s where we got technology involved. In 2010, we used self ordering kiosks.

Ashish Tulsian – And when we’ll come to that, I think I think for me the most amazing thing is that from Shaw’s to, you know, to kiosk, right? So it’s the journey is reverse. I don’t know.

Geoff Alexander – I went from very high end to very quick service.

Ashish Tulsian – Yeah, exactly. Super quick service actually. You’re talking about having like a kiosk in a grocery store, right?

Geoff Alexander – Yeah.

Ashish Tulsian – How did you look at that journey and what part of and I think and I think for Wow Bao, you’ve gone further down and you’re supplying right. It’s it’s almost restaurant-less in a certain way. What happened?

Geoff Alexander – So first of all I love full service. You know if I could do anything when I retire, I would love to own some kind of a sport, neighborhood sports bar, you know, with the TVs and the games on and everyone’s there and having a good time.But I don’t want to work nights anymore and I don’t want to work 365. And if you own your own little one place, you’re all the time. So my dream probably won’t come true. But my journey allowed me to try all of these different cuisines, styles of service, old school service to very modern technology ways. Because I was just given a lot of trust by a lot of really, really good people, you know, between Rich Melman and Kevin Brown, both of Let Us, John Shulkin, who is my partner in private equity from Valor Equity Partners. There’s just been a lot of trust. It’s been given to me whether I’ve earned it or not. It’s about evolution and innovation. And I always say that if you’re not evolving, if you’re not innovating, you’re not growing, and you have to look at your business. And it’s funny to me, everyone’s talking about self-serve in kiosks now, and McDonald’s is doing it, Shake Shack is doing it, and we’re here in Las Vegas. And everywhere you go, I checked in the hotel on a cell phone, just like I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years. This is not new technology, but it’s become mainstream. And what I really enjoy about the industry and when you talk about how we changed from higher end dining to this almost supplying to restaurants now, it’s just been a great time in the industry to see how things are changing at such a rapid pace and to be able to be part of that. And if I stayed in the same restaurant doing the same thing, restaurateurs don’t change. We don’t evolve with all the money, we don’t have the skill set, we don’t have the patience, we don’t want the headache. I’ve taken on headaches in every one of my roles because headaches are how you grow and how you move further.

Ashish Tulsian – But is that is that, you know the restaurant industry is also about compounding. So so a brand, somebody built a brand, somebody built a certain kind of product, a certain type of service, then compounded that over decades to be a brand which people relate to a service, you know, they relate to. When you’re continuously talking about, you know, disrupting that you’re challenging the status quo. Is that because Geoff is bored or is it is it because, you know, he’s just a disruptor or.

Geoff Alexander – You know, I haven’t really thought about why we keep doing this, but I think it’s I think it’s the world is moving faster now than it has ever moved. Right? I have I have a 12 year old son who, I remember some of your listeners may remember this and may not, but I like to I like to say now when I get stuck, that my VCRs blinking 12:00 Now, for those of you know, what a VCR is, video cassette recorder, it always had a clock in front of it. It used to go to your grandparents house and it was always blink at 12. It was like because they didn’t know how to change the time of day. Right?

Ashish Tulsian – Oh, wow. You know what? I don’t think, you know, my parent’s VCR, they ever changed the clock. It was always blinking at 12 o’clock.

Geoff Alexander –  .. no wonder the younger, the older generation didn’t know how to do this, but we would go in there and be like, this is silly. It would annoy us and we would change it. Well, now in the world it’s going on. I’m my grandparents because my son takes up a phone or picks up some kind of technology and pushes buttons faster than I can see. What it’s happening and does things that I can’t do. And if the world is going to move at that speed, we can’t sit still.

Now, the disruption part, you know, here we are at the MURTEC convention and you go downstairs and you walk through their pavilion and all the technology there. All the technology is wonderful. All the technology is enhancing our experience. The problem is none of the technology is made by restaurant people. So all of that technology, no matter how good it is, we as entrepreneurs, if we want to use the technology and worse, if we don’t want to use it, but we’re forced to use it by our clientele is we have to adapt our business to fit the technology. The technology in the restaurant business are the only two businesses that don’t work together to get to an end result. One of us has to change our business model. And generally it’s the restaurant.

Ashish Tulsian – I mean. No, it is. Earlier it wasn’t.

Geoff Alexander – I, I don’t know if I agree with that. I remember in 2000 when the KDS kitchen displays screens. Right. You put in your kitchen when you order the food, it would show up on a screen. So the cook knew how to make it. There were a lot of headaches with that because you can only have so many characters. So if you had Lobster Thermidor, which is a lot of characters, well, you’re only allowed ten characters. So now it’s like, okay, what am I going to call it? Oh, call it this. But the cook doesn’t relate to that. And then at one point you had whatever you wrote on the cards is what came out on the, the, the check to the customer. So if you wrote ‘C H I X’ for chicken because we call you CHX, the customer was like, I didn’t order this. So there’s always been this. We have to adapt. But what I enjoy about it is if you embrace the technology, there’s so much reward for it and acceptance and then you get invited to do such great podcasts like this.

Ashish Tulsian – But, but on that note, you know, what were you thinking when you did a self ordering kiosk 15 years back? Why did you do that? Today we have a lot of reasons. Everybody’s crying about, you know, 20,000 other things apart from the labor shortage to, you know, to Covid to, you know, people having the experience of ordering on DoorDash, etc., think they’re they’re more open, you know, to just walk into your store, learn your kiosk and, you know, but what what was happening 15 years back?

Geoff Alexander – So back in 2008, I went to Richmond and Kevin Brown and I said, I want to take over Wow Bao. Wow Bao started in 2003, it was between partners and it wasn’t growing. And they told me I could take it over in January 2009 . So in late 2008, we were voting for the president. And I remember waiting outside in line for 45 minutes to go and take my turn to vote. And when I finally got in the room, they handed they said to me, okay, you made it to the room. It’s going to be another 20 minutes or there’s a machine over there and you can use and vote right away. And I said, well, is my vote going to count if I use the machine? Like, of course it’s going to count. So I went to the machine and it was just who do you want to pick and choose? And I’m like, we need these in the restaurant. I mean, that was as simple as that. And at the time we were using machines for ATMs, movie tickets and airlines and I guess for voting, right. That’s the only place you saw these kind of machines. And I thought this could be the game changer for us. And we had it quickly. We we got this going and in May or March, I think it was March of 2010. Right? It took us a year. We started installing it.

Ashish Tulsian – And these were like Wow Bao stores.

Geoff Alexander – Maybe it was 2009. But yeah, we had three brick and mortar stores and I put in two machines because the salesman said, You can’t have one because if there’s one in someone’s on it, everyone’s going to walk away. Great sales technique.

Remember that if you’re ever doing it. So I bought two and I remember the installer was on the ground, you know, plugging in the machine, setting it up, and someone walked up and started trying to order on it. It was getting frustrated, wasn’t working. And I’m like, we picked the right , we picked the right thing. I mean, this this is going to work. And we watched it immediately. Check average went up by like $0.89 a person flow through basically tripled because we had a to registered basically we were able to lose a cashier. So we save payroll and our throughput.We were doing people through the line. You could order on the machine and get your food and get out of the restaurant in 54 seconds. It was unbelievable what we did so we could have put them in the other two restaurants fast enough. Fast forward 2017, after Valerie got involved with us from Private Equity got involved. We partner with a company at the time and we elevated our cell phone and keys at that time to include ordering from a tablet and a phone and an android and we had a animated cubbies, we had a wall of Cubbies that were animated cartoons on them, personalized to be a screen up on top that would say your name and what cubby to go to.And you go to the cubby and say, Hi, Geoff, and your food would be in there and you double tap the door would open your food to come out. It’s completely an autonomous automatic front of the house experience and the evolution just keeps coming.

Ashish Tulsian – That was 17, 2017? Okay. Yeah, that’s very interesting. I think, you know, you’re in it. You’re you’re picking that up from a you know, that still sounds unreal to me. I mean, not that I’m not believing you. I’m just saying that in the restaurant space, you know, I, we provide technology to the restaurants, but even now in a post-COVID as the things got normal, I’m the guy who’s actually going to the restaurant and asking for the physical menu. I’m I’m not interested in, you know.

Geoff Alexander – The QR code

Ashish Tulsian – We provide the technology, but I’m I’m really not industrial for many different reasons. One of them is that personal touch. One of them is really talking to a human. Yeah. You know, talking about the best of the day or chef’s special or what’s recommended or you know and I and the last thing I really want to do is, you know, just fiddle around with my phone. Is that aggressive or is that…

Geoff Alexander – No, I, I think the QR code has been a great thing during COVID for us to do, menu sure. But I would much rather read the menu because I think that’s more social when you’re at the table as someone else. I tried to coin this phrase and my PR team didn’t like it at the time, but I was trying to use hospitechtality, which is the combination of hospitality and technology, because what happens a lot is we are in the hospitality business, but the technology is disrupting that and our job as the leader is to find a way to incorporate the technology without giving away hospitality. And when we talk about this fully automated restaurants we were doing, we had three of them. There was zero human interaction. Now we paid someone to stand in the front and say hello and goodbye and thank you and can answer questions for you. But during COVID, when everybody was trying to stop having hospitality, right, and go to pick up and not have interaction, I actually ripped out all those machines and went back to counter service because what I what I felt was during COVID, we lost interaction. We were all locked up. We weren’t able to talk to one another and we were scared. And I thought that was the most important time to bring back hospitality because we needed human interaction. Right? Food. If you think about food, we’re surrounded by food at all times. We celebrate with food and we commiserate with food. You always have to have food available. And if you remove the hospitality factor that the connection that food brings, that’s a problem. So there is a place for technology in our business. Like, for instance, you can pay at the table now in a lot of restaurants. Have you done this? We’re sitting down in a restaurant.

They take your credit card and they doing this, turn around, hand it to you. It is the most uncomfortable moment about what are you going to tip right? Right? Like I love you’re not taking my credit card and stealing it in the back and going on Amazon with my credit card. Like this is great that it’s right there, but it’s uncomfortable. So there’s got to be an answer. Maybe you’ll leave the machine with me and walk away. But we haven’t found that out yet because we’re so into how fast we can do things.

Ashish Tulsian – But I think I’m personally we we provide all this technology to the restaurants all over the globe, but I personally feel that technology’s job is to bring efficiency to your to your service, to your operation, to your back end. I think there are too many things that technology can solve. I think the human interaction in the restaurant is still something that I personally feel, you know, in a very old school way, that it’s it’s it’s important and self ordering kiosks as a cue buster in fast food fast casual. I still understand you know, at a certain point at an airport, if you’re in a grocery store, if you are if you are in a high street and you quickly want to drive through, I understood that. But then in the in the food service restaurants, even in, you know, semi, you know, fine dining, I think having QR code, having kiosks or having any kind of self forward self pay end checkout is like I think I think it’s pushing the technology too far. I, I do see the reason when somebody says it’s because of the labor shortage. I don’t think that’s a boon.

 

Geoff Alexander –  I don’t I don’t think that’s the reason I’m sorry to interrupt you. I think that there’s a generation gap and the children of today and I’m going to start with children, the 24 year old cause of my daughter going down to my son is 12. They don’t know how to socialize.

They don’t know anything but pushing a button now, we didn’t grow up that way. So we want a wireless, not an iPad scroll through, right? We want someone to come and tell us about everything. We want that old state card or fish card to roll up to our table and show us what’s the special for today. But this younger generation doesn’t want to be involved. They don’t know how to have the conversation. They don’t want to have the conversation, and they’re distracted too quickly. So it’s not is one right or wrong. It’s I think it’s generational. I think another important thing is I could be wrong about this, but I didn’t grow up in the restaurant business. I grew up in the hospitality business and a lot in the last five years, ten years, everyone talks about the restaurant business. I think we need to get back to talking about the hospitality business, and that’s part of the disconnect, right? Because the business has always been about giving hospitality. Right. We serve food and the key to that is we serve food. Right?

Ashish Tulsian – But I think we’re already past that. Right.

Geoff Alexander –  But we need to get back to that. There’s a lot of restaurants right now that I go out and there’s no manager on the floor. Yeah, you know, and then an old school manager walked by, checked on you at the table, was always present to make sure service was good. Food came out right. Like even just walked out and said hello and thank you for coming in. Now you don’t have anybody anywhere. And the servers are, you know, to some degree, the inmates are running the asylum in some places. And that’s why I think the service has gone down. That’s why I think the labor has changed. And I think people are trying to use technology to solve for some of that. Right. You used to call a restaurant and get somebody on the phone to make a reservation. Well, now you do it on on your phone and online or you call a restaurant, you’re not talking to a person. It’s all AI. Some of the AI is very good and totally does what you need. But then you get to like the sixth question, like you have that special request. I want a certain table and the AI gets confused. And now you turned what was a really good experience into. I want to hang up and call back.

Ashish Tulsian – Yeah, yeah. My mechanical experience, and then you’re, like, defeated the purpose. But you know what I think? I think that’s why I also believe that the immediate future, or rather maybe the present as well of dining in restaurants or the pressure on the, on restaurant industry to give that superlative experience for anybody who’s walking your door is actually much higher than before. Because now when when when I’m only interacting with technology to get the same food, maybe in the delivery or even in the self-checkout or even just walking into the store,unless you give me an experience which was like way above, you know what, what I would have taken from interacting with technology, I’m not going to walk into your restaurant.

Geoff Alexander –  What the problem is. Yeah, I had a great dinner here in Las Vegas last night, but the service was terrible. But the experience is great and the reason why the service was terrible was we ordered drinks. It was like 7 of us and the drinks came literally with the first course. I mean, the timing is off now. There could be a number of reasons why the timing’s off. The technology didn’t send the information to the bar. They’re shorthanded and they can’t get the food, whatever it may be. But I think what’s happening is there’s such a reliance on technology that it is not allowing us to give the service that we are paying for the cost to the clientele. The cost to the consumer is going up dramatically. It has never been more expensive to dine out. It will only be more expensive tomorrow than it is today, but the service we’re giving isn’t matching. Now. The restaurant industry used to be used to be a place to get learn how to get a job right , part time. When you were in school, when you were finding your real career. Some people made it a career, but it was a starter job, right? A lot of us worked when we were X years old in a McDonald’s or Burger King or whatever. Somewhere 12 years ago,give or take, the restaurant industry became a place to support a family. Labor wages went up,unions, whatever it may be, and that really changed the dynamic of the restaurant. That’s why technology became so important, because we couldn’t afford to pay people. We couldn’t afford people to. We couldn’t afford to have as many people working because we had to pay these people these rates so they could take care of these families. None of the restaurant was built at the restaurant to go back to what it was built for, or I think the service will come back, but the service doesn’t come back now because we’re we rely on the technology so much because we can’t have the number of people that we need to run the business and the costs just keep going up.

Ashish Tulsian – Yeah, and I think we have a way past that. Mark for it to come back. I, I’m afraid, because what the point you’re making is very interesting .

Geoff Alexander – I had an eggs Benedict and a glass of grapefruit juice this morning was 59. It was $43 before tip. I mean and it will be the cheapest eggs benedict in great and classic great produce I’m ever going to have again in Las Vegas.

Ashish Tulsian – The truth. But I find this dissonance not because in my head, one thing that I was wondering is what about the NFT inventory on Wow Bao?And I’m yeah, jumping this this on the on this other side because.

Geoff Alexander – So I love full service. I love technology. I just want them to work harmoniously. And what we’re trying to do with the NFT platform is we at we installed installed a rewards program for our dark kitchen, our virtual restaurants, and we look at the Web3 opportunity and the NFT opportunities, as a way to enhance that rewards program. So we want to take the NFT.

Ashish Tulsian – What’s this about? Like, can you like let’s, let’s do some NFT for dummies. When a restaurant brand then food, right? Because I can tell you last two years and especially after COVID, right, how Web3 and crypto was going through the roof and you know, a lot of people were asking me as the technologist that, oh, what are you thinking about? And I’m like, you know what? I’m just glad that people are going to eat food not in the metaverse without eating in the real universe. Yeah, I’m just glad about that. Can you dumb it down for us? What does like, how does a restaurant or how do you look at, what’s NFT or web3 in food?

Geoff Alexander – So for me, for the NFT, it’s creating community, right? It’s Someone who is either interested in buying an NFT or having an NFT so that they have a direct relationship with us on a level that the common person does not. So if I want to buy an NFT for $99, I’m making an investment in this and I’m saying something. That restaurant that I’m not saying to the person who doesn’t want to spend $99, I’m making up the dollar figure, right? So our goal with the NFT is to sell. However, many of these we’re going to sell them at different tiers with different benefits to go along with it. But the purpose of it is to create a dialog and to have a conversation and community with owners of the NFT. Right now, if I just put out there,

“Hey, send me your thoughts”, which we all have on our website, we all have a contact us button. It’s really a complaint button, no one ever calls you up with you. No idea, right? They just reach out to you when something’s wrong. But the NFT idea for us is by by creating this community, we can exchange a free flow conversation with consumers, people who are invested into Wow Bao , that they care about Wow Bao enough that they want to say, I want to have a voice and I will pay a small stipend to be able to have access, to share ideas, to hear what’s going on. And we will give you benefits that most other people don’t have. You know, one of the talks we’re having about is allowing the people who have an NFT just even have my email, like you can actually email the CEO of the company with a thought or a question or a concern. Now, the other side of the coin is what if they give away the email writers password protections? All these things again, right? I don’t want to have a red light thing and let’s, let’s take that green light thinking and ideas to have that right. What if..

Ashish Tulsian – You’re basically selling the privilege that the feeling, the privilege?

Geoff Alexander – Well, it’s a privilege, but I don’t look it as a privilege. It’s a benefit. Right. But the idea of it is it’s it’s, it’s a dialog. What we’ve lost in the virtual kitchen space. With everyone using DoorDash and all this stuff we were just talking about with technologists, you’ve lost the human interaction. I just talked with you about how we don’t see managers of restaurants walking to the dining room, right? Used to walk out of the dining room or sitting down, dinner manager come by and you could give feedback, right? Positive or negative, right? Or just made to feel welcome and thanked that you were there. The purpose for us is to create this community where a set of people and anybody can buy the NFT and join the community, but to have a way to share back a dialog. We thought about having access to our chef once a quarter, whether it’s, you know, ask a chef how to make you know something or to be cooking demonstrations, whatever it may be. But that is a closed opportunity for people. We have a bunch of other ideas that were thrown away and maybe they don’t sound exciting and maybe they sound very exciting. But the purpose of it is to bring back connection. That’s how we’re using the NFT. Now in the metaverse, in the web3 there’s a lot of things that are going on in there that I can’t speak to, but our idea for that is if people are going to be submerged into this, into this universe, into the metaverse, and they’re going to be playing games and having encounters, whatever it is you’re doing, we think that we could start off slow by being there and being there might be the we’re a billboard on their journey and they’re just reinforcing the idea of, Wow Bao, but our goal to get to is we have hot food vending machines.We have about 30 of them across the country right now in Florida, Georgia, and here in Las Vegas. And our idea would be in the metaverse is to have a Wow Bao vending machine. And if you were to walk up to the machine to choose an item, it actually takes you to our online delivery platform where you could order your food and it would be then delivered to your house. So you never actually leave the metaverse, right? It’s not like, Hey, mom, time for dinner and you got to take your headset off and put it away and give me five more minutes. So you actually stay in that experience doing whatever it is you’re doing and the food would just be delivered to you. That’s where we want to get to. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but we believe that that there is going to be a clientele that is going to be there.

 Ashish Tulsian – That’s one that’s very interesting. But you know, all your community ideas, I’m just amazed by, you know,the axis that you’re talking about. Where are these right now? Are they in the build?Are you already?

Geoff Alexander – We’re going to be minting our NFT is in May, so we’re ready to go with it. Yeah, we’ll be minting in May.

Ashish Tulsian – I think it’ll be great to catch up again on that because I’m just intrigued by the ideas of, you know, community. Yeah, you know, But, but are you validating these ideas from anywhere other brands and who are doing this successfully, if not the restaurant space, in the adjacent space?

 Geoff Alexander – I don’t know any. I don’t know people who are doing this. You know, that’s the thing. You know, I think that a lot of what the NFT community wants is they want to community, right? So if you’re going to enter the NFT space, you have to be willing to create a community of a dialog and you have to really listen to the people who are communicating with you. If you’re not going to listen to them, they’re not going to stay in your community,okay. So I don’t personally own an NFT. I’m not in a community, but we see the value that this group of people, however large or small it may be, can help us be better and can help drive what works, help us drive to where we are trying to get to.

Ashish Tulsian – About Wow Bao going from full service restaurant and still loving full service restaurants to going to absolutely restaurant-less.

Geoff Alexander – Yes. Yes.

Ashish Tulsian – You know what’s happening there? What’s, where are you taking Wow Bao? Whats, is it never going to have a restaurant of its own? What’s this piece about supplying to the restaurant and still having the brand Wow Bao you know, as a recognizable brand is, you know what’s happening here? It is this about, what’s the brand about now for you? Is it about demand that consumers can still have in somebody else’s restaurant about your, about Wow Bao or is it really about you know, just just distribution, you know, and converting to any FMCG player? Where’s that, where’s the difference between, where do you blur the lines?

Geoff Alexander – So Wow Bao is to be everywhere that we are, the people want us to be. That is the answer. So we have brick and mortar stores. We have three in Chicago, we have five or six airport locations. We have college campuses. We’ve done sports stadiums currently where we have a frozen grocery line. We’re in about close to 400 grocery stores. We’re available e-commerce on Amazon and Walmart. We’re on, we partner with a sushi group where we do sushi counters inside grocery stores. We have about 1000 sushi counters which will be at about 1600 by the middle of this year that are selling the product. So it’s and when people say, well, what’s the next step? You know, I don’t know what the next step is. We have 700 dark kitchens or virtual restaurants around the country and Canada where other restaurants are selling the product. So it’s really about where can we go that we haven’t gone yet and our brand, what’s different about Wow Bao than just about any other restaurant? The only other restaurants or brands in food that I think can do what we do is Krispy Kreme and Cinnabon. They’re the only two brands I think can do what we’re doing. And the reason why I say that is are we have manufacturing of our product, all of our product is shipped frozen and all you have to do is steam boil water to make it. Cinnabon manufactured product can be shipped anywhere. Krispy Kreme, same thing. Nobody else that I can think of can do what we do. Ice cream can do it, but there’s only so many months out of the year really where you do a lot of ice cream business. So that opens up doors for us that doesn’t open up for other people, right? I remember when they were building the Freedom Tower in New York City, there was a story that on I think was the 35th to the 50th floor of the skeleton. Right. There wasn’t even a building of the skeleton, they had a subway or something that they were so they could feed all the construction workers. And I always thought that could be us, because all you need is some way to boil water. That’s it. Whether it’s a hot plate, you plug in or literally fire, I think our food could literally be on a space shuttle. We could put our food into Tesla, whatever they have on the highway where you stop to refill your car or whatever they call those things. There’s there’s, we’ve hot food vending machines. Nobody’s got that. The product is so versatile and appeals we didn’t create, Wow Bao has been around for thousands of years from China where there’s a billion people. Right. The opportunity that we have with this food is so gigantic.

And when everyone looks at us and sees how omnichannel we are and how we’re in so many different places, we’re doing so many things, we’re like on the beginning of where we could be. And when someone says, Well, where are we going next? I don’t know. I didn’t know we were going to do sushi counters, right? I didn’t know that we were going to be involved in doing the virtual restaurant thing until late 2019. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us.

Ashish Tulsian – So when you are so when you’re talking about such formlessness, you know, there’s no form here, right? You’re really you’re literally talking about being formless as a restaurant. I mean, I don’t even know whether I can call it a restaurant anymore or not. What’s your, what’s the structure and what does it look like being the custodian of the brands,Wow Bao? Because customers, I’m sure, are experiencing Wow Bao at different, you know, in a different form factors and different, you know, I don’t know if if you can control if it’s deemed right or not, if it’s hot enough or not, unless it’s your own restaurant.

Geoff Alexander – That is the most important thing in the entire business.

Ashish Tulsian – How are you, how are you receiving this customer feedback? What’s the, what’s the brand management and what does customer listening look like? If you can if we can, you know, break down both…

Geoff Alexander – The secret sauce of how we make sure we’re doing it right, the quality control. So that is what we have done is we have given other operators, whether it’s our airport partners, our college campus or our dark kitchen partners, right? All these other restaurants, we have given them our brand. That is the most dangerous thing you can do, is give somebody a brand, right? They’re never going to live and breathe it the way we live in it. And the cook at X Restaurant, who’s doing so many hamburgers or fried chicken sandwich tonight and has to make three orders of Wow Bao, we need that cook to care about making it right.

Ashish Tulsian –.. your customers going to look at Wow Bao as Wow Bao?

Geoff Alexander – Yeah. And sometimes they don’t know it didn’t come out of a Wow Bao. Sometimes they hate the restaurant that it actually came from and they’re offended that we would work with such a restaurant. I mean, there are many different scenarios and then you see it in the grocery store or you see it in the airport, whatever, wherever it may be. So this is the most dangerous thing a company can do. And all we can do is teach and share culture.

And if someone’s not doing right, we can turn them off and we have the right to turn them all at once.

Ashish Tulsian – So what’s the process of listening?

Geoff Alexander – But so we listen on social, we listen on that ‘contact us’ button on the website, we read the reviews and what we have to remember is we’re basically serving some around 4000 meals a day across the United States. It’s a round number. So what’s the number of complaints? That is a red flag, right? I do something that I, that I, I kick myself for doing every single day. I get all the complaints. I actually read all the complaints.

Ashish Tulsian – What do you mean/ know by that?

Geoff Alexander – So they all come to my email. I say to myself every time I should be taken off the distribution list. I don’t need to be reading these. No, good is going to come out of me reading this. But I still, I read every single note that comes in from guests. Now, I don’t respond to them. I have other people who are who need to be handling that, but I’m..

Ashish Tulsian – But are you talking about even today?

Geoff Alexander – At this moment, I probably have four or five on my email today that I haven’t looked at yet.It just that’s what happens. Right? But if you’re serving 4000 meals a day, how many complaints is too many? Arguably, one is too many, but we all know we’re going to get one.

Ashish Tulsian – Sure

Geoff Alexander – Right, what you have to look for is you have to look for patterns. If it’s a question of portion size or food quality or the particular location or missing items,and then you have to address that. You can’t just turn around and have a magic wand sweep that corrects all the problems you have to understand what the problem is. And sometimes the problem is in in with us, we might hear we’re not worth the value. We got to remember on third party delivery, there’s like $12 in fees that we can’t control, right? You walk into my restaurant, you can get a full meal for $12. You want that exact same meal on third party delivery, it could be 2 to 3 times the cost, depending on which operators are running it, which platform it’s on, and how much you tipped and was it surge pricing and all these other things that go on which are totally out of our hands. So now all of a sudden you’re hearing not worth the price? Is it really not worth the price if everything was done correctly or is it the fees? And if it’s the fees, how do you communicate that? Because that’s not even us. So what you need to do is you need to find brand ambassadors. You need to find people in communities who really like your product. And it means more coming from non -employee people than it does coming from me. And if you can get these brand ambassadors not necessarily to contact the person of the complaint, but to be out there in public cheering on your brand.

Ashish Tulsian – So you’re talking about making sure that you, you know, you encourage your brand promoters to also voice their praise?

Geoff Alexander – No, we don’t. We don’t. Yes and no. So what I mean by that is on social, you have to build a relationship with people. And if there are people out there who are singing your praises, whether it’s direct to you on a review site or on social, you need to interact with them as much or more than the ones who are complaining to you because you need that. You need voices to be louder than other voices. Right? And this goes back to the conversation we were having about technology and hospitality. Hospitality is all about answering the call when it comes to you. The difference is with technology right now is everybody has a voice, no matter what, you can say something. That is difficult, it’s difficult to keep up with. I mean, we have somebody on our team whose only job is customer service, who sit there all day long responding positively to positives and negatives and helping with whatever it may be. But the technology has made it so much easier for people to say negative things than it ever has been. And it will only be easier tomorrow for them to say negative things.

Ashish Tulsian – No, because Geoff , I think why I asked you this question also is because I was listening to, you know, your story of how you surprised the lady, you know, who tweeted about you know..

Geoff Alexander – When she was eating, when we first joined Twitter in 2009. Yes.

Ashish Tulsian – Correct, and right, and she tweeted about, you know, having going through a bad day or having a day and you surprised over the dessert immediately while she was there. You tweeted back. I think that was phenomenal. That that that speaks volumes of, you know, about how much of a brand consciousness you have you and you have had, you know what I but I think it’s not that simple today to be listening to, you know, every direction in social media. Social media has…

Geoff Alexander – I disagree. It is as simple. It’s just, are you dedicating resources to it? Because for every system that’s out there that they can that someone can communicate to me to, there’s a system out there that will listen, right? There are aggregators that will pull in all the reviews right there, automatic bots that can respond for you. You can have somebody on your team do it. I mean, it’s resources. Everything costs money. But you the resources exist. It’s again, when we first started this conversation, we talked about what’s important to the leader. If it’s important that every single thing gets an answer to which there’s a lot right , there’s Google reviews, there’s tons of information coming in to you. Well, do you want to put do you want to respond or do you not want to respond? Do you want to be a brand?

Ashish Tulsian – Have you, have you ever shut down locations or have you shut down operators, you know, from selling Wow Bao because the reviews are bad?

Geoff Alexander – We have worked with operators to make it better or we haven’t necessarily shut them down yet. We are, we are actually it’s the first time that we’re having such conversations right now because what happened was we, so we got involved, the dark kitchen space we called dark kitchens, which is because we believe there’s extra capacity inside restaurants and the area is dark and we can help turn the lights on. And what happens? We had this idea in 2019 and then COVID had it. We’ve had this hockey stick growth of accelerated growth that no one’s ever seen. 700 locations in the United States and Canada in under three years. And we did that speed because we wanted to help restaurant , tours, dining rooms were closed, was the only business they had, and we helped people stay afloat. Well, when you have that kind of growth, something’s going to be wrong. And we we talk internally that we were building the plane as we were flying it. Right. And so we cared more about helping restaurants make money so that they could pay employees, pay rent, that was our focus. Now we’re pausing and we’re saying, okay, if this person if our goal is for everyone to make $2,000 a week and this person’s making $1,000 a week and their ratings are over here, does that hurt us or help us to keep them? Now, what we, first of all, want to do is we don’t want to turn somebody off because they need the money. It’s a revenue stream. It’s putting food on the table. But if it’s damaging the brand, if I have one location in Fargo, North Dakota, is it damaging my brand if they do bad? I don’t know.Maybe because when they travel on a plane and see me at the Washington, DC airport, maybe they won’t buy it. On the other side of the coin,it’s helping that restaurant tour. So we’re trying to juggle the fine line about what’s important to us. Is it all about our brand being the best it could possibly be, or is it about our brand being really, really strong and good and helping people? And that’s where we’re trying to find our way through. And our first inclination is not to turn people. The number one word in our employee handbook and the first word of the employee handbook is caring. So, caring means we are going to work with you, we are going to teach you. We’re going to we’re going to show you. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure you’re set up for success. And then if you show us that you don’t care, that’s another conversation. But we assume that you want to be partners on this journey. And so our job is to make you successful, not to punish you.

Ashish Tulsian – Oh, that’s great. That’s actually that’s great, because I think the angle

the angle, I mean, when you look at it from the perspective that this is putting food on the table and this is a revenue stream for the restaurant, you know, I totally hear you. You know, difficult to, actually do, when it is hurting your brand directly because people can, you know, have you know, can have a bad, bad call when they are just cooking your food as like the third of the fourth list, Right.I mean..

Geoff Alexander – Like I said, that owner who needs the money cares about it. But that cook is just tired and overworked and underpaid and doesn’t care as much.

Ashish Tulsian – Okay, now, that’s great. In your journey, one intriguing thing that I found was you’re a spin instructor.

Geoff Alexander – I am a spinster.

Ashish Tulsian – How’s that going and why is that going? What’s what’s happening there?

Geoff Alexander – So I’ve been teaching spin for about seven years now. I used to take spin regularly, and I remember one day we were all in class and the instructor didn’t show up. And we’re all sitting there and able to sort of look each other, were just pedaling. You know, some people are having conversations and I thought, how hard could this be to do? And I ran back to my locker and I got music and I came back in and I plugged in and I got up on the bike and I did three songs. And then the class was over and everyone cheered. And I was like, I sort of liked it. So I went out and got, you know, certified. I took a class on how to teach.

Ashish Tulsian – Geoff you are a dangerous guy man, and you’re like, one step away from taking everybody’s job.

Geoff Alexander – I get paid to yell at people and I get paid to stay active. So it’s been good. But it’s really, it’s a release. You know, I swim three days a week about two miles. Each time I swim, some about six or seven miles a week, I’m swimming and I teach spin once a week. And these are the releases. You know, we all need a way to release it. When you become at the at the higher levels of an organization it’s, you know, the old adage it’s lonely at the top right. We have nobody that we can commiserate with. You can’t take the work home right? And you can’t rely on the people who work just underneath you because they’re looking at you to have the right answer. So we need to do two things as leaders, we need to surround ourselves with other leaders who we can feel safe to come for conversation allies with, if that’s a word. And then we need to be able to have a release. And my release is teaching spin, basically yelling at people for 45 minutes. I guess my third release is I have a really, really good therapist who, you know, has helped me get to where I am. And I’m very proud of the work that we’ve completed together. And he’s become more of a life coach to me in business coaching than a therapist now. But those three things together, you know, create success. And if you’re out there as an entrepreneur right now or as a leader and you’re not doing any of those three, you need to start doing at least one of them, if not two.

Ashish Tulsian – Absolutely. I think I am not sure about yelling at people or spin ,I would love that. But but I do agree with the business coach or having a coach, you know, maybe in the form of therapist or coach in general. I think one thing that somebody shared with me once, you know, some ten years back, somebody was saying, hey, one should always have a coach.

And I was like, for what? So, you know, you need direction and that’s for people who are directionless. Of course, not even arrogant of me. So, so this guy said, you know what, and he pointed out a famous cricketer back in India and said, you know, you know, that guy has a coach, right? So, yeah, of course. And I was like, Oh, shit. He said, so that guy needs a coach but you don’t, like oh, when you put it like that. And it actually percolated over the years I did not act on it immediately. It kept on percolating drop by drop over the years. I was like, All right, I’m wrong for sure, but I still don’t know how to look at, you know, in a coach.

Geoff Alexander –  What we, what we say is our job as leaders is to manage talent. Right? Look at Phil Jackson, coaching the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan that now is when he was at the Lakers with Kobe and with Shaq. These are the best players in the world. They don’t need a coach. But by managing talent, he’s bringing these people, these forces together to do better. At our line, at our, if our whole day is managing talent, who’s managing us? You know, that’s why we need this person. And to me, this person’s giving me such a sounding board to just clear my head.

Ashish Tulsian – Yeah.

Geoff Alexander – Which, you know, is one reason why I think we’re able as Wow Bao to do so many different things because my head is clear, right? If you get bogged down in this problem, you get so bogged down this problem that you miss all the solutions. So it we’ve we’ve been very fortunate.

Ashish Tulsian – So when you look at you know, if I just stay there, when you look at the coach or therapist, when you are talking about the problem, you’re not looking for a solution or you’re looking for the third voice to just clear the windscreen just to help you navigate. Or is it really about solutions as well?

Geoff Alexander – Well, I read this book. I forgot Alex, his last name escapes me, it’s called The Third Door.

Ashish Tulsian – And I haven’t read, but I know the book.

Geoff Alexander – You know the book. So is he, he’s a young kid who wanted to basically was tired with school and got life’s lessons by just interviewing the best person in each position. Interviewed Warren Buffett, interviewed Lady Gaga for entertainment, interviewed, you know, Larry King just to get experiences and what he, what that book did for me and what my therapist coach does for me is they show me the third door, Right? It’s the path to go through that you can’t normally find. So no, my coaches don’t tell me to do this and I do that, it’s just when I swim, my mind just goes away and just it’s sort of like my best ideas happen in the shower. I don’t know if that happens for you or not, but it’s because the hot water is on you, you’re not thinking about anything and like, Oh my God, like I need a pad of paper in the shower for the ideas on the same thing happen in the swimming pool. And it happens with the coach because the coach teaches you how to look at things differently. That’s all it is It’s managing your talent to bring out the best in you. And the only way you can do that is if you can open up your mind for more ideas. There’s more possibilities and solutions and answers than there are problems. The the issue is a lot of us get bogged down by the problems. You know, you can’t see the forest for the trees or whatever the saying is that’s the problem a lot of us have.

Ashish Tulsian – Lacking the perspective, just getting too narrow at times.

Geoff Alexander – Yeah. And the other thing is I have a fantastic team. Like I get to sit here and do this podcast and talk to people is, Oh, Geoff Alexander, Wow Bao.Wow Bao is a team of people and what I’ve learned over time is you, me, entrepreneurs, we have hired people to do jobs. You’ve hired one of two people, you hired a really smart person or you hired someone to do a job. Now, have you hired someone to do a job, that means you got to tell them what to do all day long. Well, that means if I’m just telling you what to do, I can’t go do anything else. I hired smart people. And the thing is, you have to let the smart people go do their job. They’ll come to you when they need help. They’ll come to you with a question. And if they don’t come to you, you check in with them. Just be like, Give me an update. And if you let them fly, your business will grow. And when you have an idea, you’re going to have people who want to take on the idea. They’ll be like, I can do that. I’ll raise the challenge, I’ll make that happen. I have a guy on my team who has created a business for us, a whole separate business that we didn’t even know existed and doing all this partnership with the sushi counters that we have going on that he owns, he takes care of, he manages it. And he couldn’t be happier. Wasn’t my idea. I didn’t do it. I get all the credit. My investors, you know, everyone’s like,good job, Geoff. And I bring him in over calls that it’s him. Let’s share that happy moment you know, give praise where it belongs.

Ashish Tulsian – Absolutely the team is nurturing the talent is is really really important I think I also believe that most of the people you hire a lot of smart people in your journey as an entrepreneur, most of the times it’s it’s not always that you’re hiring people for the job, but you make them, you know, do the job because you are not able to lose that control.

Geoff Alexander – I think you hire a lot of people as an entrepreneur, but you don’t hire smart for the beginning because you don’t know any better, right? A lot of us as entrepreneurs, we don’t know how to hire anyone. We don’t know what we’re looking for. We like, want to get this done, Hey, can you do it? You’re hired, right? And as you get to a point, you know, we hire so many wrong people to find the right people. And that’s okay. You guys have to acknowledge what was wrong and what it is you’re looking for. You know, when I interview people now, I’m like the fourth interview in the process and I don’t talk to you about your resume, I don’t even ask you questions about your resume. I assume all that’s been hashed out with the other three or four interviews. My interaction with you or during the interview is, do I like talking to you? Do I want to do I want to be in the trenches with you? Do I feel like you will make us better? You’ll fit my, my, my culture? Do I feel like you’ll be good in the bullpen with all the other players? And if that connection happens and everyone else who interviewed you signed off on your qualities, you’re in. If I don’t connect with you, if I don’t see that, that. That if I don’t get that emotional spark that you’re going to add value to the team, that’s the problem.

Ashish Tulsian – So, you know, if I can give this these this emotion, some words, me and my co-founder, Sakshi, she’s also my wife, you know, we have this rule that when we are hiring and we are, you know, hiring for mid to senior positions, who is going to be having, you know, a lot more face time with us? We’re looking at the person in that moment and just figuring out, can we hang out with him/her? And if the answer is no, that’s very difficult for us to make that call. Even at times when we are pressured and..

Geoff Alexander – You’re never going to want to bring them in the room.

Ashish Tulsian – Yeah, because here you need that person, you need that skill on the TL and you’re like, you’re going desperate, but then you’re contrastingly questioning that, can we hang out with this person? Is this is this conversation leading to like we can talk for like 3 hours and, you know, and we can talk about random shit and still make sense out of you what both of us are saying. So I hear you there.

Geoff Alexander – And a lot of people don’t try to get that connection anymore. But that’s again, what Covid taught us. We all want connection. We, the human species, need to interact. And that’s why I love the restaurant business. It’s about interaction.

Ashish Tulsian –  Absolutely. All throughout. Geoff, that was a great conversation.

Geoff Alexander – Thank you, I appreciate everything.

Ashish Tulsian – I you know, when we started this conversation, there were times in between I was you know, I was I was completely trying to poke you with, you know, technology not being the best thing and the greatest thing because I, you know, for me, this journey, you know, coming from the most traditional fine dining restaurants, you know, the group, you know, that you’re working with and coming to NFT and Web3, for me, this this entire thing is quite, quite amazing. I’m you know, I’ve always been a techie. I’ve run two companies did restaurant in between and you know my current company Restroworks is a result of that but I’m still a very web3 and NFT noob. I’m not dismissing it because I’m sure it will kill me if I dismiss it. I am actually more concerned than interested,but I think for me, starting this conversation then was was really about understanding where are you coming from, where is that? And you know, where is that? Is there some dissonance between the traditional old school, Geoff, you know, in those restaurants versus somebody who is believing in Metaverse and talking about a vending machine in Metaverse? I think for me, this was enriching because I find the, I find the both both the things are at the place and you are continuously trying to be a disruptor.

Geoff Alexander – I appreciate that. I think what’s important is technology moves very quickly and there’s always a period of adoption and, is NFT and Web3 going to make it? No one knows. It’s not going to make it tomorrow, right? It’s where are we going to be three years from now?

 Ashish Tulsian – And maybe it would make it in some other form.

Geoff Alexander – Right. It might evolve. But again, we did self-ordering kiosks in 2010, 2009 and no one did it. And now it’s everywhere. I think the NFT and the Metaverse, Web3 is going to have a place down the road, so we are investing to be there. I like, you know, I had I there’s a Will Ferrell movie called Ricky Bobby Talladega Nights and I always quote the one line from it. “If you’re not first, you’re last.” And I don’t want to be the follower. I want to be the leader. Now, while we’re on this journey to get there, there will be more.Right. But we’ll have a jump start on this before anyone else gets there. Some people will they will definitely pass us.They will definitely do better than us. But we got there. We did it right to a degree, and then it evolved and it changed. But I’ll be able to do this while everyone else is over here still. And that’s what I really like about adoption. Meeting people like yourself, having conversations about what’s next, what’s coming, you know, the big thing everyone’s doing right now is AI. I I’m not using A.I. for anything, I don’t know if I have a place for A.I, but A.I. is going to be pretty big.

Ashish Tulsian – I never said no. For example, you know, a couple of years back I somebody was asking me, you know, where is Restroworks going to use AI and are you thinking about AI? Are you thinking about AI being given to your customers and this and that? And I think, you know, my reaction three years back and I think it continues today is that I don’t know about A.I. or not AI. I mean, we are doing whatever we are doing, but I do believe that interfaces are going to change. Screen is not going to be the interface. It is a problem to learn, you know, a UI, no matter how easy it is. You know, I enter a McDonald’s, learn a great, you know, self ordering kiosk, and then I go to Wow Bao. No matter how great that design is, there is a little bit of a learning curve that’s that’s not great. I do believe that voice is going to be, you know, the first interface for most of the devices. And the voice is going to be that interface, AI is going to happen. So so I think I think that building, that evolutionary change we can see when we are when we are continuously involved, the business,when we are continuously looking at problems and the solution then and most of them start intersecting towards something for you. And I hear how NFT, this is actually a new like a fresh view, the community view, you know, for me, I’ve not dived into it, I am sure you can tell, but, but yeah, I think , I think AI for me is actually voice for me AI is less about the recommendations or less about the menu optimization for now I think for me AI is all about voice we can actually master that would be will be far ahead and will be used.

Geoff on that note, thank you, thank you for doing this.

Geoff Alexander – Thanks for having me.