Ashish Tulsian:   Hey, welcome to Restrocast. Today my guest is Karl Goodhew. He is a CTO at BurgerFi. Karl has had a great, rich experience between retail, hospitality and now restaurants, starting with Home Depot, Macy’s, JCPenney, working with hotel groups to now restaurants. I found Karl having that streak of self-taught engineer something that I can relate to because the problem solving skills that I saw and the perspective on restaurant tech was quite refreshing. I’m sure you’ll enjoy. So welcome to Restrocast. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for agreeing to do this.

Karl Goodhew: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Ashish Tulsian: I would like to dive in straight into the journey much before restaurant tech. I can see that your career has been technology, technology, technology all along. And a lot of industries and a lot of, you know, product, services. It’s quite a wide range to cover. But I would like to start with where it all started. How did you. Tell me about your early years. Where it all started?  

Karl Goodhew:   Yeah. So I went to the University of Georgia and I was actually a chemistry major for a few years. And I had a really bad semester where I actually made C’s and that was not good for Karl. Karl doesn’t get C’s And so I changed my major to management information systems which is not a it’s not a computer science, it’s a business major. And I started to teach myself how to code and ended up graduating right with the end of 2001, right after 9/11. And all of my cohort basically had their jobs revoked, there they all their jobs with Accenture and or Andersen at the time. You know, they all got rescinded. And I was fortunate enough to already have a job, landed with a niche consulting firm in Atlanta that made accounting software for utilities. That’s very sexy.

Ashish Tulsian:  Oh, my God.

Karl Goodhew:  So I was coding and implementing against big ERP systems, very niche accounting software that calculates depreciation for utility poles, pipes and other equipment in the ground. And I started there traveling the country four days a week. A company called Power Plan, actually, they’re still around Power Plan, Power Plan, Power Plan and it was a lot of fun. And I learned the importance of understanding the problem before jumping right in. And also the client relationship.

Ashish Tulsian:  You were traveling the country as an engineer or as a product person?

Karl Goodhew:   As an engineer. So I was, you know, it’s a small. At the time there was I think I was employee number 25, and we would go out in groups of two or three and there would be a senior. And then myself.

Ashish Tulsian:  And it didn’t matter who you were, there were only a handful of people.

Karl Goodhew:  There was only. A handful of people. And everyone was working.

Ashish Tulsian:  And that’s why I love startups. I think, you know, at startups you get exposed to the entire spectrum of the problem and the solution and what happened just because you are there, because you know there’s nobody else.

Karl Goodhew:  Exactly. And the problem is yours to solve. There is no one else to solve the problem. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. But I did realize that this was not what I wanted to do. Traveling three or four days a week and working on utility accounting software was not thrilling. And I ended up getting really lucky. The timing was perfect. I started to really get into iPhone development and Android development right as the app stores started.

Ashish Tulsian: It was started in what year?

Karl Goodhew:  2007 or 2008. And on the side as a side gig, I was building apps and got the attention of some folks and ended up at Home Depot building their their apps. It was actually their second version

of their app. I like to say that I built the original. That’s not true. It’s. It was the second version, but this was the better one. And oh, no, I got I got the I got the thrill of building out some features that still exist today. And I love that gut job. And, you know, hindsight’s 20/20 when I left there, the stock was 27 bucks and it’s 300. But other than that, I mean, it was it was really a great job. And I still… 

Ashish Tulsian:  You did that as a side or… 

Karl Goodhew:   No, No, that was full time. 

Ashish Tulsian:  So the side gig landed you….

Karl Goodhew:  The side gig  landed me to do that job because the person I was supposed to present my work wasn’t able to go and they asked me to go and present it. And then, you know, you make, you make connections. And so I, I was fortunate enough to end up being an architect at Home Depot and introduced a lot of the tech that they use today, like find find the product in the store and my favorite one was the was the augmented reality feature, which was in the commercials for quite a while actually. So you could hold up your phone and see a picture of the door or patio furniture or whatever it is. Yeah. And made a lot of good connections and those played out later that I eventually, you know, got phone calls from some folks who work there and moved around, ended up at J.C Penney, working for a gentleman named…

Ashish Tulsian:  That’s always great. You know, I must say, you know, I’m a big believer of compounding. I mean, life is compounding anyway. 

Karl Goodhew:  Yeah  you’re right.

Ashish Tulsian:  Well, everything is compounding and both are compounding good as well as bad. Right. So so one of the best things that happens when you’re when you really do good work wherever you are, at whatever level you are, is that you know, that reputation and that work compounds and people call you back. 

Karl Goodhew:  No, they do. And, you know, you get to know good people. You understand who’s good people and who’s maybe avoid over time. And you just that’s not something you can teach. That’s something you learn. And I, I think Home Depot at that time, lots of good people probably still are lots of good people. But yeah.

Ashish Tulsian:  So how long were you there?

Karl Goodhew:  Was there for Almost three years. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I got a phone call and a lot of this is macroeconomics, you know, I got a phone call. Do you want to move to Miami and be in a startup? They should have just asked, Do you want to be on a beach? And, you know, and we bought our house in Atlanta in 2006, right before the bust. And so, yeah, it was about time that we could actually put up for rent. We would be okay. So my wife and I packed up and we moved to Miami. We went to I went to go to work for a startup. Yeah. Which was a big change. 

Ashish Tulsian:  And what was the startup about?

Karl Goodhew:  Yeah, the startup was called Yellow Pepper. And Yellow Pepper existed as a SMS banking service in Latin America, and they wanted to pivot, right? They’ve been very successful with some SMS banking, but they knew that that wasn’t going to last forever. And we need something app based. We need something to sell the banks that’s more than SMS, otherwise they’re going to go build it themselves or someone else will come and eat our lunch. So we ended up building a platform that uses the payment rails for Visa, MasterCard in Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and you can walk in and use a four digit rotating code on your on your app to pay right there four or five digits. And so it’s time based. So basically you open up the app, you say, I want to make a payment. You punch that code in the payment device and your payments are taken. Right. This is fantastic for Latin America because of the banking rules, right. Where the risk shifts and people aren’t willing to take the risk of using debit cards and you know credit card because the…. 

Ashish Tulsian:  Even today.

Karl Goodhew:  Yeah yeah yeah.

Ashish Tulsian: It’s not it’s not that great even in 2023.

Karl Goodhew: Right right, So great team there. They ended up being acquired by Visa but I had left a few years prior.

Ashish Tulsian: Okay.

Karl Goodhew:  Yeah. Still so yellow Pepper is now part of Visa. They still sell their solutions very solid.

Ashish Tulsian: There they go like a payment POS.

Karl Goodhew:  They’re they’re a payment service And they sell to banks. So they’re, they’re on the back end. Right.

But they also help the consumers facing apps with the with the banking software. Yeah. Yeah. 

Ashish Tulsian: All right. Got it. Okay. So that was that was the that was the closest you came to the P.O.S. or….

Karl Goodhew: Well, no, I ended up. I ended up working for Macy’s eventually. I’m working on POS software, but we’ll get there. There’s there’s a couple of steps between startup my my LinkedIn is pretty couple of years couple of years couple of years. I ended up being called by Mike Amend who was who’s now the one of the CTOs at Ford Motor Company. He asked me if I would come to Dallas and work for JCPenney, and this was under Marvin Ellison. So after the whole disaster of Johnson, right. It was it was hey let’s go in, let’s try to save JCPenney. And we completely rebuilt the digital side of JC Penney, 100% rebuilt. And I was fortunate enough to work on the mobile apps and loyalty side. And I mean, JCPenney threw everything at that to try and save themselves. It was it was a lot of fun. And I would say that’s probably the one time in my career where, you know, there was a mission and it was very clear mission and it was all about we got to save, we got to we got to do whatever we can to save this company. Well, it didn’t work out. Spoiler alert.

Ashish Tulsian:  At least we had the mission.

Karl Goodhew:  Mm hmm. Yeah, but I take Mike Amend, good friend, and I see his passion and his motivation and his willingness to work is probably the best. I’ve ever seen in my career. Yeah, it’s a great guy. Try to get an interview with him. If you can. It’s uh Ford motor, but he’s been in retail. But why not. Yeah, so JCPenney didn’t quite. Didn’t quite make the cut and I ended up working for Macy’s. Another gentleman from Home Depot Naveen Krishna, who is now CTO at Napa Genuine Auto and he called me and asked me if I wanted to come to Macy’s. And I went over there and I, I basically said, I’m not doing what I used to. I don’t want to do another mobile app gig. I’ve built mobile apps. I know I know how to do that upside down.

Ashish Tulsian:  No more retail.

Karl Goodhew:  No,no,no. I want to be in retail, but I don’t want to build mobile apps. And so he said, Well, we’re doing this interesting project where we’re building a new format store ended up getting being called Market by Macy’s. So your average Macy’s store is 200,000 square feet. And so we’re built out this model. That’s 20,000 square feet. So 10%. And I worked with a very creative lady named Rachel Shipman out of New York. She had created Story which had been acquired by Macy’s. And the goal here was Rachel lead a team to go build a new concept and let’s go do it. And we did. And I got to do that this part time job. And then run four different teams of development teams.

Ashish Tulsian: Okay,

Karl Goodhew:  So I had POS and Mobile. Mobile.

Ashish Tulsian: For this format.

Karl Goodhew: No, no. For Macy’s. For Macy’s. For Macy’s Total, which includes Bloomingdales, the Mobile POS. So I got to play with POS software, which includes curbside pickup and all that inventory systems for in-store, which includes RFID and asset protection, which is a very interesting topic and upon itself, self-checkout. So we built self-checkout at Macy’s. Not many folks know that that exists, but it’s it’s there. And then we just had general development. So for four different teams there. 

Ashish Tulsian: Why were you building all this in-house I mean? 

Karl Goodhew: Well, that’s a great question. And Naveen left to go be a CTO elsewhere and I understand their direction changed and, you know the build versus buy is very secular and the pendulum shifted. So I believe they’re now buying more off the shelf than building it. But for me it was great because as a software engineer developer at heart, you know, building stuff is a is fun..It’s different than my role now.

Ashish Tulsian: But I think I think for me why I ask you that question specifically is because, you know, I, I’m biased, of course, but but then, you know, even back in the day, I do wonder for an outfit like Macy’s or or for for larger, you know, outfits. I think the process is a standard. Things are like scale is the problem. Speed accuracy is the problem, security is the problem. You’re not really too dynamic or you know agile when it comes to your processes or your structure. Built for for such structures, sounds like too much reinventing the wheel. I mean, for nothing.

Karl Goodhew: Oh, I mean, we had agile teams, we had really good software development, a great, great leadership in the software development space.I think there is a fundamental question there. Can you move quicker if you buy something off the shelf? But unless you’ve been in Macy’s or or home depot.

Ashish Tulsian: Is it only about moving quicker? But it’s I mean, it’s it’s may it’s may not be only about moving quicker. That’s true but then I believe that when you take a product off the shelf, the product is also growing. So so, you know, market movements, you’re running your own business, your business is retail, restaurant, hospitality or something, Right? That is going to be there are going to be trends and the shifts and the modules and the workflows and the features which you will lose sight of and one day you will need it and somebody helps us build it.

Karl Goodhew: Yeah, I think that’s one view. I I think the other view is that the business believes that their way of operating is unique and they have to do it their way. Otherwise it’s not what we want and we’re not going to be successful.

Ashish Tulsian: Yeah, but that’s a problem. No? 

Karl Goodhew: That’s a problem with everywhere. That’s a problem everywhere. But we always had that conversation that Macy’s is is no more unique than Home Depot or JCPenney in that you’re selling things off a shelf in a retail setting. There are definitely intricacies and there are definitely examples where you know that you are unique, but I would say that with the scale of Macy’s, with the scale of Home Depot, there are very few products that you can buy off the shelf and just plug in and go. However, I will say with cloud development and the ability to scale technically in terms of the number of servers and databases that has that has changed the game.

Ashish Tulsian:  Sure, right.

Karl Goodhew:  But in the old days, you would as a startup say, I have this new product for Home Depot and…That’s, you know, yeah, no, it’s never going work.

Ashish Tulsian:  I think I think yeah I think and startups. I hear that absolutely I think I think startups also need a majority curve, because, you know, I can tell you at Restroworks back in 2012 when we started and you’re into it, you know, somebody asked me how so you can you can power Taco Bell, right? So, yeah, sure. So, so why are they not using you?I said we don’t have time to sell to them. So you mean you can your product is going to solve them tomorrow? Absolutely. And, you know, cut to 2019. We signed our first Taco Bell. Yeah. And it took us six months to actually go live and I was like, oh, damn. Like after seven years, that is six months of work to be done before we go live in 2012. I legit believed that it’s Taco Bell’s mistake, that they’re not buying us. I am ready. Yeah, I think it’s startups. It’s also the scale pieces. You don’t know what you don’t know

Karl Goodhew:    Right? It’s right. And you have to you have to have been in those enterprises to understand how they work, how the sales process is, how the sales process is built in a way to not to really gate those startups from coming in the door, even though there’s procurement teams, there’s analysis done on cost of cost of software. The CTOs already said, no I don’t want any more Vendors, everything is built as a mountain. Yeah, that is very hard to scale as a as a, as a startup trying to get a product into a major Fortune 500 company. It’s very hard 

Ashish Tulsian:     No, absolutely. And I and I, you know, I can only appreciate over my own journey that it’s hard for a reason. There are stakes. And this is something that I normally, you know, have been telling ourselves as a company, but I’ve been preaching to a lot of fellow entrepreneurs who are at different stages, right. Where, you know, like, you know what? Don’t curse that CIO or CTO and the guy, you know, there are stakes and you know, he is looking at you with suspicion. Have you looked at yourself? I look at you with suspicion. I look at myself with suspicion. It’s Okay. Right. Instead of, you know, pushing that back, embrace it. All right You know, hear the person out there are stakes. Stakes are real. Nobody got fired to buy an IBM. It’s a real thing. It’s fair. It’s it’s it’s not unfair. You want your your just shot, right. But you need to embrace the fact that there are stakes and you need to answer those questions where before if somebody is asking those questions too late. 

Karl Goodhew:    Yeah. No, absolutely. And the other thing too, is you’ve got to make sure you’re priced correctly if you come in too cheap. No one believes that you’re…..

Ashish Tulsian:    Oh, yeah. Of course, hundred percent.

Karl Goodhew:     If you’re too expensive, you’re not getting in the door. You have to be at that sweet spot and leave room for knowing that procurement is going to beat you up

Ashish Tulsian:    .I think it’s funny you said that, right? Because. Because with startups, you know,the oversimplification of this problem being cheap. Yes. It’s like, oh you know, you’re paying Oracle, X, Y, Z. I’ll do that at 1/10 the cost, like, why and how will you do it at 1/10 the cost why will somebody buy you at 1/10 of the cost. 

Karl Goodhew:     Yeah. And also to rip out Oracle and put in a startup,there’s costs associated with that part of it. So maybe don’t go after Oracle or maybe do.

Ashish Tulsian:  Maybe do. But I think I think taking care of these nuances is one of them.I think I think that there are those startups that are disrupting, you know, Oracles in the Cisco’s all of the time, but definitely every time. But they do it and you see a lot of, you know, maturity in the system. You know, they’re maybe new age, but they’re not new, 

Karl Goodhew:     Correct. Yes. Yes. And invariably they grow and then they become another oracle or Salesforce or.

Ashish Tulsian: Oh, that’s a that’s a rite of passage. That’s exactly what they want to be.

Karl Goodhew:  I know, I know they want to be that guerilla who can’t be displaced.

Ashish Tulsian:  They’re like, absolutely. They’re like, please make me something that people curse.

These guys don’t move. Yeah. But you know what? What? After Macy’s.

Karl Goodhew:   Yeah. So we opened that store in Southlake, Texas. I think it was like March 7th on March 10th, 2020. And then all hell broke loose….

Ashish Tulsian:  2 Minutes of silence. 

Karl Goodhew:  Yes. Yes. So I ended up staying there for a little while longer, working on those other systems. And it was it was a lot of fun, but I had already done a lot of that work and I wanted to do something different. And the one of the gentleman from Yellow Pepper on the on the really the the SPAC side. So of Burger Fi, Burger Fi  was a SPAC that acquired a private company, BurgerFi. And he called me and asked me if I wanted to do more high level CTO work.  And so I was like, Yeah, this sounds good. So I’m I live in Atlanta. The company’s based out of Fort Lauderdale and I’m CTO of Burger Fi and Anthony’s Co Fire Pizza, who we acquired on November 21.

Ashish Tulsian:   Oh, okay. Yeah.

Karl Goodhew:    So we have 120 BurgerFi and 60 pizza pizza joints casual.

Ashish Tulsian:   Yeah. Great. Before I jump into the, you know, the darker side of the restaurant business in your research, I saw that, you know, you ran a tech services company for a while.Was that like something that you ran separately or over

Karl Goodhew:    My own thing? Yeah. No, that was I was on the side gig. It was really building software, whatever I could find. I built some software for managing dental x-rays. I built software for measuring the distance between I don’t even remember what it was, but in a lab bacteria or something on a slide.

Ashish Tulsian:  Why were you doing all this?

Karl Goodhew:  I Because it was opportunistic and I, it was something to do and, you know, broaden my scope of, of work and, you know, pay some bills.

Ashish Tulsian: That was happening on the side while you were going. Ahead. 

Karl Goodhew:  Yeah,I haven’t done that in a while. Yeah. So I was, you know, it was very opportunistic as it came across.

Ashish Tulsian:  And you. You code I’m assuming. 

Karl Goodhew:    I code self-taught. So a lot of people look at my code and laugh, but it generally works. I’ve run coding teams, which has helped me a lot in understanding what good code looks like and then me understanding that I’m better at helping project manage and making sure we hit schedules. Then then me coding, that’s it’s not good for anyone anymore. But no, Java is probably my number one language that I code in now. But I, I do a lot of, you know, what I call hacky scrappy stuff. Oh, we need to know. We need to know competitive pricing. Right. Okay. I’ll build a quick scraping tool and put it in the cloud and away we go.

Ashish Tulsian:   That’s interesting. So, you know, I saw hospitality in between as well.

Karl Goodhew:    I was very briefly at a hotel company called Omni Hotels about six months. Yeah, we did a little bit of work on building new website for them and but I didn’t stay long. Not that there’s anything wrong with Omni. It was just, you know, it wasn’t for me.

Ashish Tulsian:   Too slow or? I find hotels too slow I have to say. Well I manage the hotel, my family had a hotel.

Karl Goodhew:  Okay. So I think the problem with Omni Hotels and I, I think it’s a great company, but you’ve got to look at the ownership. He made all of his money in oil and real estate. Digital wasn’t really top of mind so it was an uphill battle from the beginning.

Ashish Tulsian:  Um, tech was just a utility or.

Karl Goodhew:   Well, if someone wants to stay at an Omni hotel, they’ll just come to the website and book it. Got it. Why do you need to? Why do you need anything else?

Ashish Tulsian:  Yeah, no, I think, I think hotels are slow because I think one of the biggest reasons why hotel are slow is because that like their opportunity or the problems lie in this one building. Yeah right. So you like not a lot can go wrong with it you know they’re you’re always contained. I mean, of course there is a there’s a scope of innovation everywhere. Right. But I find hotels as a problem So contained in that you know building in that in that one property one at a time that hotels moves slow that’s that’s been my.

Karl Goodhew:   I do draw a lot of similarities between hotels and restaurants though the inventory expires at the end of the day.

Ashish Tulsian:   I’m not much in hotels I mean even even in hotels, inventory expires in the restaurant.

Karl Goodhew:  That’s what I mean.  Right So, yeah, it’s very similar in that you’ve got to manage that inventory. You’ve got to work out the right pricing to get the right number of people in the door and there’s a lot of the same problems.

Ashish Tulsian:   Yeah, I mean, I still believe that, you know, hotel is like the for the restaurant as well audience as captive you have a you have a certain percentage of people you know that if you know 100 people have checked in 30 are going to eat here anyway anyway you know so hotels are like I find them like much more chill. Restaurants are always on fire. They’re they’re like every day is a new day, literally.

Karl Goodhew:   I think that’s fair. I think that’s very fair. Yeah. Although I still come back to hotels, at least when I was there, the pricing mechanisms were very outdated.

Ashish Tulsian: I think. Yeah. I mean, for the hotel rooms. Yes. Hotel industry also uses competitive intelligence on pricing a lot. I don’t know how you know how tech forward that is, but they you know, industry has figured

Karl Goodhew:   It’s yeah. It’s self-fulfilling, right? It’s right. Oh, they’re at 200. We got to be at 200. Oh, they’re at 200. We got to be at 200.

Ashish Tulsian:  That’s a that’s a very guesswork.

Karl Goodhew:   Right. Right, exactly. Exactly.

Ashish Tulsian:  Yeah so BurgerFi. But what’s been what’s how’s the restaurant industry treating you?

Karl Goodhew:   Well, personally, they’ve welcomed me, which is nice because I didn’t get I haven’t been stepped in the back yet, so I actually like it. I think it’s a…I don’t have to wear a bulletproof vest anywhere or anything like that. So, no, I think that the restaurant industry is very welcoming to outsiders. I thought it might be a little bit like, Oh, you didn’t come up from the operations side like, Oh, we don’t trust you. And it hasn’t been like that at all. They’re very receptive to new ideas. And I’m speaking generally but I found that everyone  that I’ve worked with or spoken with, they they are welcoming of new ideas and maybe we should look at it a little different way.

Ashish Tulsian:   That’s also the timing. No, you came in post COVID, I think. Technology was already at the forefront.

Karl Goodhew:    Yes, that’s correct. In that off premise, all online ordering had already happened. But yeah, so there is a dynamic shift that I wasn’t there for. I completely agree. But I, I think in my mind I had ooh a chef’s going to want to do it this way or you know, an operator is going to say it’s I’ve always I’ve done it this way for 30 years because that’s how retail is a lot of the time. Yeah. And you know it that that didn’t happen. So I guess everyone became more used to technology and receptive and understanding that we’ve got to we’ve got to change.

Ashish Tulsian:  So how the how the how did the BurgerFi started like you know what did you? What did you see there or was it all perfect when you entered?

Karl Goodhew:    Yeah, everything was perfect. Nothing, No changes needed at all. So that was fantastic.

Ashish Tulsian:   I thought so, Yeah. 

Karl Goodhew:   No, absolutely So. BurgerFi was a family run company for about 11 years. And I mean, no disrespect to the folk who were there prior, I think that they were making the best decision for them at that time. And I can’t put on their glasses and understand what they were seeing. But a lot of the decisions made were just that. What do we need to do right now? Which means that, you know, when I came in, we had four different POS We. We didn’t really have a.

Ashish Tulsian:   How large was the estate? How many stores?

Karl Goodhew:    See? So we’re now at 120 stores.

Ashish Tulsian:   When you entered.

Karl Goodhew:   When we entered, it was about the same size, a little bit smaller. Not. Yeah, but we’ve opened a lot of corporate since I joined. I think we’ve opened a lot of corporate stores around 12 corporate stores and then the franchised side is where we’re focused on growth right now.

Ashish Tulsian: So four different POS systems.

Karl Goodhew:   Four different POS systems, which makes data collection a challenge, we were able to get rid of one completely and then we used an aggregation tool Miros for BI tool, which then feeds through to our GL ERP, everything else. So a lot of the systems were built for a mom, not mom and pop, but a family run company, right? So we now have a ERP that finance can use, automated invoice, scanning a lot of things that really help the business run. It took a while to get there. A lot of the menus have been redone. You know, I was there during the massive supply chain issues, right where everything went through the roof. So that was a lot of, I wouldn’t say, fun. From a from a technology perspective, it meant that we had to understand what our what our competitors are doing, what is, what are our costs. We we didn’t have visibility to that. And that meant we had to move quickly and make those changes in pricing which which we’ve seen, you know, big, big increases in pricing over the last two years, as I think.

Ashish Tulsian:  Still going on?

Karl Goodhew:   We revisit it very frequently. I think we’re moving towards more dynamic pricing, more store level pricing based off of competitors nearby, not broad sweeping increases.

Ashish Tulsian:  Mm hmm. When you say dynamic pricing, you mean dynamic through the day or both?

Karl Goodhew:   Oh. Both that and dynamically for that store. Fairly frequently, right? Not necessarily during the day. We don’t have a breakfast, but at our airport locations and lunch and dinner is same venue. So we, we drive lunch through promotions, loyalty versus different pricing structure.

Ashish Tulsian:  Mm hmm. Yeah. So I’m assuming that now it’s one POS system, too, are you?

Karl Goodhew:   We’re not quite there. We’re not quite there. It is still a journey. It’s very, you know, it’s capital intensive to rip out a POS. And then when we acquired Anthony’s there on a completely different POS. So, you know, that’s, that’s something that we evaluate, I think with my background being in payments payments, some POS are now, you know, often people get confused because they’re so intertwined. And I think that’s the opportunity that we’re looking for. How do we maximize our commodity, which is the payment space to make sure that our POS is the right POS.

Ashish Tulsian:  Can you give them that?

Karl Goodhew:  Yeah. So to me, payments are commodities, right? As long, you have to be up, you have to take payment, you have to take Apple Pay, you have to take EMV, you check those boxes. Okay, what’s your value add? You can pay a table, you can scan QR and pay. All right. Most everyone’s got that now. So payments to me, as long as you’re up and you’ve got a track record of being up, the cost is the cost. The cost is the driving factor at that point. So then the question is, can you get your payments to pay for your POS hardware?  And can you do it in such a way that you’re not locked in? And if you can solve both of those things now you’ve got the flexibility and the cost.

Ashish Tulsian:  And you know, I, you know, that’s, that’s a, that’s a brilliant point because I believe that for whatever good reasons or past couple decades, POS software companies that I’m talking about, like the restaurant POS that is supposed to solve so much in the workflow and menu and whatnot, they are aligning with the payment system, locking, you know, companies payments has actually their incentive to go in the deeper, darker corners of that workflow. Right? Because your cash till is operating, they are continuously bringing in It doesn’t matter whether they got that one workflow in or not. It doesn’t matter whether that menu was feasible or was versatile or rich. You know, for a marketplace. So I think the payments and the software POS systems are supposed to be two different problems. They cannot be one,they need to work together.

Karl Goodhew:   I completely agree. Unfortunately, the industry is consolidated around this verticalization of the POS and payments space, which then results. Like you said, you’ve got to look at the feature set of a particular POS and you better bet on it because you’re locked in for some amount of time that you can’t make changes.

Ashish Tulsian: I mean, you’re locked in even without a contract. I personally feel that, you know, especially like, you know, any, any restaurant chain of a certain minimum size is locked in anyway.

Karl Goodhew: Yeah, there’s capital expenditure.There’s I mean, there’s effort, there’s interfaces, there’s integrations. So you’re already locked in.

Ashish Tulsian:  I don’t need a contract for that. I mean, I can tell you that, you know, some of my customers cannot go out even if I screw twice just because, you know, they’re locked in, because there’s so much there. The stakes are high. There’s so much that has gone in. So I think payments is probably the lowest, you know, denominator.

Karl Goodhew:   Yep. In that I agree 100%. And what it does is if you’re locked in on the payments side Now, it makes it difficult to pick a third party kiosk, drive through menu boards. Right now you’re really limited in your ability to innovate in this space. So I don’t like being vertically locked in. I know, I know. Some folks are probably listening to this who are vendors today going, Uh Oh, but I think that it’s in the best it’s in the best interest of the restaurant company to to maintain separate.

Ashish Tulsian:  I think I can tell you that, you know, I am, you know, we are a POS. We started as a POS company actually. But all my biases aside, the fact is that I was a restaurateur 12 years back. Mm. This product was earlier built for my restaurant. Yep. We currently operate in 55 countries. Right From that vantage point we see the impact of where payments are aligned with the POS and geographies where payments are not aligned with the POS. Right. We for me, I think I’m really vocal about it, but with our competitors as well, that guys, you know, you can compete on 20,000 other things like the payment fees. My, my point in the payment is that your incentive is misplaced. You locking somebody down on the hardware on the payment on the contract, you’re making money on that transaction in a percentage, you know, it’s a no go because that takes away the incentive from a software company to really solve what deep dark problem. You don’t need that. And that is exactly why I feel that restaurant tech in general is super fragmented. It’s broken not because products are bad or individual products, which solve the problems nicely. Beautiful products, multiple of them, but they’re broken. Like the entire spectrum is so fragmented that you are trying to, you know, buy like 12 or 13 products and then try to make them talk to each other seamlessly. And then you’re complaining that they don’t talk to each other. Of course they don’t. Right. What’s what’s been your experience with that?

Karl Goodhew:   I completely agree. And I also I have to take a step back and say I only had a US centric view of technology. I understand there’s issues like fiscal in foreign countries where for those who don’t know, you have to, by government rule, maintain a log of every transaction in a.

Ashish Tulsian: And every country has a different one.

Karl Goodhew:  Everyone has a different one. And it has to be immutable or not immutable, and it has to abide by all these different rules and regulations. And you’ve got 55 countries, you probably got 54 different rules.

Ashish Tulsian:  Oh. Don’t ask. I mean, we have seen we have seen such bizarre fiscal integrations. Yep. Where we you know, we asked the guy that. All right, so, you know, how does that work? And when he explained we were like, what, why? And and it wasn’t even about how how how are we going to do that? We were like, who designed the system? Like, what is your government?

Karl Goodhew:   A bunch of legislators.

Ashish Tulsian:  I mean, you see Mexico, right? They have a stamping. Every time you hit print check, an API call hits a government server. There is an invoice ID generated on the fly. It comes back. It needs to be stamped on that bill. And that’s when you print the bill. They were like, What? That stuff.

Karl Goodhew:  There’s no latency there.

Ashish Tulsian:  Yeah, I mean, problems are umpteen, you know, turkey, they have locked the payment terminals. So if you are, if you are using a verifone machine or ingenico machine or, you know, that needs to be integrated with the government. So because of taxation, they need to get the, you know, the number of the tax. Thailand government has issued every business a certain series of invoice numbers. Oh, right. And your invoices have to be with that suffix, that prefix and that series. And I can.

Karl Goodhew:   Yeah. That’s, yeah, I think that Yeah, that’s not my worldview. I’m very US centric, which is great from that. I don’t have to worry about that. But I do agree with you. It’s very fragmented. There’s a million solutions out there, but I don’t think that’s necessarily unique to the restaurant space. There’s a million solutions in retail. There’s a million solutions in any industry. It’s just that here it seems that there are some big players that are consolidating and becoming a little monopolistic. I hate to say that out loud. In some areas, and that drowns out a lot of the innovation and the smaller players.

Ashish Tulsian:    I think if I if I take like take a step back from when I said fragmented, I, you know, even in the US, I actually mean that it’s a single problem statement and it has been chopped into 12 hyper specialized pieces. And some of those problems are in fact most of those problems are so intertwined. Right. That while the specialized solution in isolation looks brilliant. Right. But it’s not operating in isolation. 

Karl Goodhew:   Well, yes, But then you look at companies like Uber, Amazon, Google, they can’t solve for every iteration or every scenario inside the restaurant space. Like Uber doesn’t have a great pizza builder. Right? Yeah. And they’ve got cash to throw at it all day. Right? Amazon is trying to understand the restaurant space and they don’t don’t you know it’s Yeah.

Ashish Tulsian:  They won’t get it. I hate to say that right. I don’t think I don’t think they’ll get it. I’m

Karl Goodhew:   There’s a lot of smart people at Amazon. 

Ashish Tulsian:   It doesn’t matter. I think I think if I truly think that Google is a great company and if a great company like Google can do Google Plus, I don’t think the problem is smartness. You know, they suck at social. Google’s APIs suck like like, for example, Google. All Google understands is the collect data process and give it back to you. If you if if Google had to accept data from you like a two way their APIs suck like all over.

Karl Goodhew:   I think that’s a little shortsighted. I’m sorry. So I know a lot of I know a lot of Google engineers, too. They’re they’re very smart. To your point, being smart doesn’t mean making good decisions.

Ashish Tulsian:   No, I’m talking about the systems.

Karl Goodhew:  The system capabilities that they have, though, are pretty significant. They’re building out a retailer. 

Ashish Tulsian:   Don’t get me wrong. I think, I think that the probably might have come across as wrong. I mean, that companies have dominated and Apple doesn’t fall far away from the tree. Yeah so so I’m talking about the organizational DNA and I’m not not ownership smartness of the people. Inside right. So what I’m saying is that super smart people at Amazon are going to make crazy strides and they will work in retail in that area, in e-commerce and marketplaces, and they do that all the time. They did AWS I mean, that’s that’s an adjacent. You know, in a world I mean that’s a tangential word, not even not adjacent and what I mean is that that organizations who have a certain DNA, they you know, Uber, uber eats failed at so many places in the world while they actually disrupted logistics for real, they actually disrupted, you know, cabs.

Karl Goodhew:  I agree. I just look at it this way. So Amazon has a very customer centric view of the world. How do we solve a customer problem? And that customer might be the business right? Whereas I think that Google takes more of a business centric view of the world and how do we solve a business problem that may not always be in the best interest of the customer? This is my view of the world. For what it’s worth.

Ashish Tulsian:   Interesting. No, but I think I think for me the fragmentation is also about that. You know, when a company is not so, for example, a lot of POS companies suck a lot of back of the house companies. You know, we’re not able to do, you know, a lot of other things in that equation. Right You know be be labor management are not hard to find the acquired and I meant the DNA from that.

Karl Goodhew:  And I completely agree with that. And I think you have to decide upfront are you going to do a best in breed, which means you have to have a fragmented tech stack of best inventory system, best labor scheduling system, best POS. Or are you going to accept that it’s not going to be fantastic? across the board and pick one of those solutions. that claims to be able to do everything, understanding it’s not going to quite be able to do everything in every area. That’s the decision you got to make and how complicated it is, the cost, the budget that you have. Do you want to focus on operations and selling food or do you want to focus on systems? I think that there’s a lot of questions in there that are very complex and it’s more about the business structure. And do you have the time and money, resources, effort, willingness to go down that path? Yeah, but I do agree it is fragmented in the in the systems world and we choose to do best in class where possible or if we’re budget constrained, what’s the best that we can get for that budget. Hmm. Right. And yes, it results in a very fragmented tech stack, but we consolidate across brands wherever possible.

Ashish Tulsian:   On the new age tech. We are also talking about start-up Alley at MURTEC. And the new edge tech, there’s a lot of AI that is flying around. Yeah. VoiceAI You know, one of my favorites also because I like my biases. I believe that visual interfaces will go lesser than lesser in the world in general, not only in restaurants. Yeah, sure, Sure. You know Voice is easier, right? You. I read that you guys are, you know, doing something on voice ordering, Voice AI.

Karl Goodhew:   So all, all 60 of our pizza restaurants Anthony’s that you’re greeted by a voice A.I. when you place your order and the majority of phone orders do get placed through that A.I. System.

Ashish Tulsian:   So. So, you know, what’s what’s been, what’s your current experience with voice? The AI and I’m talking about challenges and opportunity, accuracy.

Karl Goodhew:   Yep. So we partner with Converse now and they’re fantastic partners in that we work with them on challenges. and there have been plenty. Usually around the way that people say things or different terms for what we call one thing. So pepperoni, right? I call it pepperoni. Someone else may call them pepperoni cups or, you know, salami or like it’s not quite what what you expect. And you don’t know that until you listen to thousands of calls. So they go through that training procedure and they train the model. And that solves a lot of that. That the issue then is accents, Spanish speaking is a bit of a problem. And so we we backup, which is a human right. Human ends up taking the call if someone we have keywords we listen to for frustration and we immediately transfer the call.

Ashish Tulsian:  So so what’s happening? What’s the accuracy?

Karl Goodhew:  It’s the accuracy is great. When when the system is able to understand and understand you, there’s no accent issues or anything like that. I would say that, you know, there there are a good percentage of the population that still struggle with it and we’re working through that and that’ll that’ll come over time.

Ashish Tulsian:  But is it is it when you said accents and you’re talking about like people characterizing a certain thing or naming it differently.

Karl Goodhew:   There’s another segment of the population and that’s those that don’t want to talk to a robot. They just. Okay, human representative

Ashish Tulsian:  What what are those calls like? 

Karl Goodhew:   Oh, no. The problem with those calls is that they’ve worked out the customer has worked out how to get through to a human right away. Okay. So they bypass the system. And that’s something that we have to make a business decision on, Right. Because, yeah, the benefit for us is I don’t I don’t want to beat up customers. Right. But if the customer uses the phone A.I. to order or better yet, through our website, they are placing an order that we know will be made. We know we receive the order correctly so right. If they get through to a person, that person is now not able to offer customer service and hospitality to someone that is in the store. So that’s taking away from another customer customer’s experience. And I want to divert those hours of hospitality to real interaction at the table or at pickup so that you come back a second or third time, not during an order taking process. There’s not much business value out there.

Ashish Tulsian:   But is the is the accent problem or the of the data and training model, etc. is a geography based. For example, you know, let’s just southern you know, if you if your stores are concentrated over that and I’m assuming that because it’s 120 stores. 

Karl Goodhew:    We’re majority Florida, half Florida and then scattered East Coast all the way, Denver, Alaska. Right.

Ashish Tulsian:   Okay. So you’re yeah, dealing with quite a Spread,

Karl Goodhew:   quite a spread. But I would say that South Florida in particular is a little bit of a challenge with Hispanic population. Right. But you’re. Well. We’re going to work through that, right? If we had unlimited resources, we would do a Spanish model instead.

Ashish Tulsian:   Isn’t it there yet? 

Karl Goodhew:   No. We for Spanish, we take them through to a Spanish speaking colleague. Yeah, yeah,

Ashish Tulsian:   I, I think that voice AI, you know, is something that I sincerely hope that it’s going to improve for everyone over time. It’s not only really about like, one player, I think. Yeah. The kind of collective. 

Karl Goodhew:   Yeah. And as a customer I, I feel like there’s some companies that abuse abuse it so I’m going to call it AT&T. They you know they will make it impossible to get through to someone. Mm. I think that in the restaurant space in particular hospitality that shouldn’t be the goal.The goal should be if we can help you right now, we will help you if you need assistance, will gladly get you that. It shouldn’t be a, it shouldn’t be a maze, it shouldn’t be a challenge to get through to someone. But at the same time we would like you to try it and see if you can get through the process. It’s really a great process. We just want you to try it just once.

Ashish Tulsian:    What are the fads in technology? What are the things that you, the like the CTO cringes when you when you hear that, it’s like, oh, come on, don’t don’t talk this. I’m tired.

Karl Goodhew:    So we tested robots on in one of our stores and there were three robots in the on the floor yesterday and all I heard were people complaining why is it why is it here? Why is it keep moving into my booth? Well, why is it here? I think that robots. They’ve got a long way to come. I think that back at house, robots make perfect sense. I think front of house robots need to come down significantly in price and add more features.

Ashish Tulsian:  You mean back on the house robots. Like cooking, cooking. Automated fryers.

Karl Goodhew:     Automatic fryers, automatic for burger flippers, pizza makers, things like that. We’re not there yet. And the reason for that is a lot of these automated processes require frozen foods because it’s consistent and we don’t have that. Yeah. Mm hmm. All of our food is fresh in the pizza side. And then on the burger side, all of our meat is, you know, it’s not frozen meat.

Ashish Tulsian:    What do you what did you use robots for?

Karl Goodhew:    We use robots in the front of the house for delivering food. To table. To the table.

Ashish Tulsian: And how did it go? 

Karl Goodhew:   It was fine. I mean, it worked. But when you do the math and play it out, math doesn’t make sense. You know, it’s pretty expensive. And then the ROI, you can’t remove labor from the store.

Ashish Tulsian:   Correct.

Karl Goodhew:   So it’s not it’s diverting labor a little bit, but it’s not resulting in enough to offset the significant cost. And then also there are some technical challenges, especially in Florida, a lot of sunlight, and that messed with the camera system and oh, shadows and things like that. It it started to detect, Oh, there’s something there. No, it’s just sunny. Right. So that I think those kind of challenges.

Ashish Tulsian:   Yeah I think it’s just an evolution problem.

Karl Goodhew:   Yeah. Yeah. And they’ll get through that. They’ll get through that. But you know, the staff liked, it was the kids who loved it. I think it’s a good it’s a good thing to play with, see if it works for you. But, you know, I don’t think it’s a I don’t think it’s there. Yep. Yeah.

Ashish Tulsian:   No I think, you know, you’ve crushed It fully by saying that it’s just kids love it and.

Karl Goodhew:    Yeah. Oops. I don’t know. So I said QR codes. Do I think the QR codes are going to be around in five years? What’s that?

Ashish Tulsian:   That’s awesome. Please go on, tell me.

Karl Goodhew:     So QR codes have gone through this iteration of they were really big maybe five, ten years ago. Then they disappeared altogether. And it was all to do with the legality, like someone owned the patent on QR codes and sued everyone about it. Right. So I know. Macy’s Got sued. JCPenney got sued because if you printed a QR code in a on paper, there was this company that had the patent and they would go after you. Wow. And so everyone backed off of it. And then I guess something happened. I guess you know, legally something happened with that patent and they kind of flourished again.

Ashish Tulsian:   That’s that’s actually quite surprising because do you know who had that patent? A person in which country?

Karl Goodhew:   It was in the US, but.

Ashish Tulsian:   Wow. Because because China is probably pretty COVID. China probably was the largest user of QR codes. WeChat. Oh, China was like, I went to China, like in 2016 and 2017. The country had QR codes plastered all over the country for 20 reasons. Right, right, right. And I was like, Wow, these guys really love QR. Yeah, I mean, fast forward COVID, the world got plastered with it.

Karl Goodhew:    Yeah, I, I struggle with it because I see them used in stupid ways, like on the back of a bus or something. She’s going to scan a QR code as the bus is driving by. I don’t know. But in the restaurant space I feel like to your point voice, I, I won’t need to scan a QR code Contextually, the phone knows where I am. They know that I’m in a restaurant. They know that I’m in your restaurant and I should be able to just open up safari or whatever, and it should just show me the menu contextually, it makes sense.

Ashish Tulsian:   Maybe an auto wi fi. loader.

Karl Goodhew:   Yeah, something like that. There shouldn’t necessarily be that human interaction of, Oh, I got to go to the camera app, I got to scan something and I got to click a button. I think we can get better than that. I don’t know what that replacement technology is, by the way, but I agree that it’s going to get there. What I am happy to see is that all these different flavors of QR have kind of gone away. But Microsoft had a version and, you know, it was it was almost like, Oh, what app do I need to download now? Yeah, that’s all gone away, which I’m glad.

Ashish Tulsian:    I think mobile cameras have bridged that gap.

Karl Goodhew:    Yes, definitely 

Ashish Tulsian:   No, but I think I again, you know, as a tech company though, we do those solutions. I, I hate digital menus. I mean.

Karl Goodhew:   They’re hard to read, but they do help with pricing, dynamic.

Ashish Tulsian:  I mean, the utility is real, but the customer experience is bad. Right? Right. Sometimes it’s not even optimized for your phone. Correct. And you’re struggling with, you know, scrolling too much even to find things. Even if you know that menu, it’s still a struggle. If I don’t know the menu, it’s struggle of a different order.

Karl Goodhew:   Right. Right. I think the funniest one I saw was where I was at a bar and it was to scan them, scan the QR code to order your drink.

Ashish Tulsian:  It threw a PDF? 

Karl Goodhew:  Yeah, well, no it threw actually a system where for ordering. But it, it was just like pre-made cocktails and it’s like, well I know you got a full bar like how do I, how do I get my particular cocktail. Oh I got to talk to someone. What’s the point?

Ashish Tulsian:  I think the best is that and I think a lot of five star hotels across the world got it. I and I probably COVID and they didn’t have time. Right. And they continue to do that. I’ll scan it in like some random part of the world and it’s going to open a Google Drive PDF link. And I’m talking about I guess I’m talking about I don’t talk about like I’m talking about Starwood in the Marriott, right? And I’m like, Whoa, guys, you really need to like, buck up like, this is this is bad. Like you at least give me a marriott link or something. You know, I don’t even remember what hotel was that. But multiple hotels.

Karl Goodhew: Yeah.No, that’s terrible. You shouldn’t link to a PDF. Never to Google Drive.

Ashish Tulsian:  It was a Google Drive.

Karl Goodhew:   Oh, Google drive. Even better. Yeah. Yeah.

Ashish Tulsian:   Karl, this was this is this is a great conversation. Thank you. Yeah you know on the on the ending remarks would love to know you’re at MURTEC this is your first time at a restaurant tech conference. You told me this. Yeah. You’re right at the start. Where do you see restaurant tech is going? What would you like to see at conferences like MURTEC? You know what? What? What did you what were you looking forward to?

Karl Goodhew:   Well, I think that MURTEC has just from my you know, I landed yesterday at 03:30 and I got to walk the floor and see what was there. I think that from a vendor perspective, it covers the gamut in terms of technology. I think there’s a gap in the partners not being there. So the DoorDash, GrubHub, Uber eats apps of the world, which which is interesting because they account for such a large portion of revenue.

Ashish Tulsian:  It is interesting,

Karl Goodhew:   And I don’t get to beat them up on how crappy their APIs are. I think that there’s probably more real time data exchange that needs to happen. I think that I understand there’s a new data format that’s being proposed that’s being, you know. From RTM. And RTM. And I think that that’s a huge step forward. I want to see those DSPs. I want to see the big online players adopt that. Otherwise it’s we need it adopted right. But I need I need real time information. I need to know where drivers are. I need to know where, where, when food’s got to be ready, I need to know about refunds. I need to know about guest complaints. I, I think as an industry, we need to push for the walled garden to be taken down. But it’s it’s something that you’ve got to be careful about because they they use those DSPs they own the relationship right now. And you can’t you can’t do it all at once.

Ashish Tulsian:   Yeah. Yeah. And also I think this is something that I see around the world not only not only here, I think all the DSPs, all the marketplaces, they were so focused on, you know, getting the end consumer and holding the end consumer right. And look, and their worldview became so much that, hey, I am the guy who owns or has the customer. So you listen to me, right? You know, the negative side of that is that across the board, DSPs ended up ignoring what restaurants may need from them. Right. Be it APIs be it data, you know, be it consistency. You know, for example, you know like why is there no standard in APIs for DSPs around the world? Like handful. They’re like, we are integrated with 15 of them, you know, in multiple geographies. And I can tell you the struggle is is is almost similar everywhere because everybody is different. Right? And the problem at the core is not that they’re in I mean, I actually call it it’s not bad intent. It’s a lack of intent. I don’t even find that they’re like most of the times  you had these conversations with them where they’re like, you know what? Why do I need to do that? Because that restaurant is your customer and that end consumer, that restaurant customer. And the restaurant is my customer. And if we don’t work together,this guy gets screwed and that guy gets screwed and you get screwed. Like, what? What part of this equation is not is not clear to you, right? Like, Oh, I didn’t think like that. I’m like, What? What is the way to think generally?

Karl Goodhew:  Yeah, I completely agree. And it’s a delicate balance because they do on so much of the marketplace and so much revenue flowing through their systems that you don’t want to be on their bad side either.

Ashish Tulsian:   I don’t think you can be as well. You shouldn’t be. I mean, I personally am not a believer of, you know, debate on, you know, whether a brand should get all the orders directly or versus marketplace. I think I think it’s the reality is going to the marketplace. To be like right yeah. Because because consumer needs that comfort. Right. I don’t want to learn your app. I mean, I may love you as a brand now, but that’s not good. It’s not going to be my first port of call.

Karl Goodhew:   No, absolutely. I completely agree. So I don’t know if I answered your question there, but I think that MURTEC seems like a lot of a lot of good sessions.

Ashish Tulsian:   I mean, this question is actually, you know, it has nothing to do with MURTEC. It’s really this question is really, you know, for me, just because we are here.

Karl Goodhew:   Right. Right. No, I think that technology as a whole, it’s going to be extremely interesting over the next 24 months. What happens with the A.I. models? I envision a future where it’s not going to be for everyone, but the systems are going to know. Karl always gets pizza on Fridays, and he usually rotates through these three different restaurants. Hey, Carl, it’s Friday. It’s 3:00. Do you want me to order that Pizza Hut with the cheese sticks? And. Oh, by the way, your loyalty program is going to throw in a free medium. Do you want to use that coupon? I think we’ll eventually get there. The question is, who’s going to lead that charge? Who’s going to take advantage of it, and will customers be receptive to them?

Ashish Tulsian:    Damn, That’s scary. I’ll tell you. Why? Not Because it’s intrusive. I’ll tell you, it’s it’s scary because the last release of dope that you had by saying, hey, I’m feeling hedonistic today, I’m going to order pizza. And now that dope is taken away from you, so you’re going to find that dope in social media and probably you’re doing more reels and TikTok. So God bless the world. I think that with AI dope is going to get depleted and people will actually spend that time on social media.

Karl Goodhew:   Let’s hope their product I’m going to take a different worldview and say maybe they’re going to be productive. Instead, write a book instead of ordering pizza.

Ashish Tulsian:   Oh, come on. Oh, come on. That that was the most optimistic painting somebody have ever said to me. On that note, Karl, this is this is great. Thank you, sir. Enjoyed this enjoyed this conversation.

Karl Goodhew:  All right.  Appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Right