Ryan Perera [00:00:00]:

It might shift power back into the restaurant's hands where they could start doing more of their own deliveries at a much lower cost. And I actually think, yeah, I actually think the future could be restaurants could share their autonomous vehicles with other businesses or other companies, or there'll be more sharing of drivers. And that's a big vision of Captain.ai, is that we want to allow businesses to share their drivers even now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:27]:

Welcome to Wisking It All with your host, Angelo Esposito, co-founder of WISK.ai, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome to another episode of the Wisking It All podcast. We're joined here today with Ryan Perera, CEO and co-founder of Captain.ai. Ryan, thank you for joining us today.

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Ryan Perera [00:00:57]:

Angelo, it's great to see you again. I'm excited to catch up with you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:01]:

Yeah, it's been a while, so I'm excited to catch up and hear about all the things you're doing. As always, we love to start with the show with a nice quick background on what it is that you do. So for the people listening, can you explain in a few sentences what is Captain.ai?

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Ryan Perera [00:01:18]:

Sure. So Captain.ai is a suite of apps and software that is specifically made for restaurants with their own delivery drivers.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:28]:

Love it.

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Ryan Perera [00:01:29]:

And we really enable these restaurants to manage their drivers better, to get operational visibility into where their drivers are, how the drivers are performing and delivering, as well as really giving customers the ability to track the drivers in real time. So that kind of superpower of knowing exactly where your driver is when he's on his way to you, we build all of the different software and tooling around that. So it's a very specialized what we do. It's for those chains, especially, who've got their own drivers and want to add a layer of technology to really improve their operations.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:59]:

Love it. Yeah, I remember when we met a while back. So I'm excited to catch up today because I'm sure you've changed a lot and grown a lot. So I'm excited to hear about what you've been up to, what you've been up to at Captain.ai and just in life in general. But I remember the way I was, or we were chatting about it was it's, hey, Domino's does a really good job of managing their delivery and that's, you know, their main business model is they can open up in a very small space and majority of their sales could be, you know, takeout, and they manage that delivery portion, but that's, you know, proprietary to them. And then in a sense, as you're almost at this point, I'm sure you're doing even more, but you're almost giving that Domino's model, let's say, of tracking deliveries and drivers. And now I was checking your website so much more, which we'll get into, but for all the other chains or all the other groups. So, like, I think maybe for our listeners, that's a good way of thinking about it, is like, and the parallel I would give is we had ray ready from ritual and he was, he kind of explained how Starbucks was probably the first to really adopt, you know, a pickup kind of motion, right? Like being able to order ahead and pick up, but it was proprietary to them.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:04]:

And then what ritual did, at least at the time, was, okay, can we give that same type of logic and, and feature, but to everyone else? And so I kind of see that parallel with you guys where it's like, instead of Starbucks, it's Domino's, and instead of order ahead, it's delivery, but it's giving that technology and those resources to all these other chains. But I don't want to put words in your mouth. So does that make sense at a high level? Is that a fair parallel for our listeners to think of?

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Ryan Perera [00:03:32]:

Yeah, I think you articulated that really, really well. And I often describe it the same way as if Domino's really is so huge and so successful. They've pioneered a lot of the technology around delivery. And by using technology, I mean, they even described themselves as a technology company.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:49]:

Right.

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Ryan Perera [00:03:50]:

By using technology, they've actually been able to get really good driver efficiency and a great customer experience, which they're famous for in terms of the live tracking. But they've got a huge tech team and they've got a huge, huge developer team to build out this technology. And most chains out there, even the chains with hundreds of stores, simply don't have those resources. So we really created Captain.ai to bring this kind of cutting edge driver tracking, technology, analytics, operational visibility. We've really built that to kind of level the playing field, enable other midsize chains to have that same level of technology without spending years building it. We've put the hard work in for years so that we can give it to the other chain. So we're really there to empower restaurant chains to do this kind of thing. So I think you articulated it amazing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:40]:

And, you know, one of the things I always like to share is the origin story. I'm fascinated. I'm an entrepreneur myself. I love chatting with entrepreneurs, so I'd love to hear, you know, and I got a sense of it. But with our listeners, what got you into this? Like, what made you want to solve this problem? What were you doing before where you're like, hey, I'm passionate about this?

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Ryan Perera [00:05:00]:

Well, we, as co-founders, wanted to get anything delivered to us, and we actually started the company out in London, England, in the UK.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:09]:

Okay.

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Ryan Perera [00:05:10]:

And this is about nine years ago. Nine years ago when we started, and we actually started the delivery company to actually get anything you want delivered. Food, groceries, retail, you name it. And we had our own delivery team of drivers. We had our own fleet of drivers. We were doing all the deliveries ourselves. We were dispatching everything. So we really built this from the grassroots.

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Ryan Perera [00:05:33]:

This was nine years ago. We were one of the first companies to do this in the UK.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:37]:

Wow.

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Ryan Perera [00:05:38]:

And we grew the company. We had teams of drivers across London doing these same hour deliveries. And because we were a tech company, we really started looking at how can we use the software to optimize what we were doing? Because it was pretty tough to make a profit, to be honest with this delivery. And we started looking at using machine learning to predict how many orders are going to be coming in and how many drivers we should hire to try and get the maximum efficiency of deliveries per hour per driver. We started building this dispatch software and we were actually invited to a conference in Switzerland, and we presented alongside Will Hsu from Deliveroo, David Buttress from just Eat, and Andrew Rennie from Domino's. And we were talking about the future of delivery. And we presented what we'd been doing at the company at the time was called henchman, same hour delivery, henchmen, James Bond style delivery branding. So we were presenting this on stage and talking about how we use technology to get this efficiency.

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Ryan Perera [00:06:45]:

And at the end of the conference, we were approached by a restaurateur who said, listen, I need this and I want this from my restaurant. And we suddenly realized there's a huge opportunity there, not just for us as a delivery company, but for us to take this and help restaurants with this technology. And so we actually sold the henchman business and most of our team went on to form Captain.ai. And that customer who approached us in Switzerland became our first customer. And so since 2017, we've been building Captain.ai and really only focusing on restaurants. We don't do anything else. We don't focus on retail, really focus on the restaurant industry. And our vision is to be that hyper focused, best in the market solution for the restaurants.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:33]:

That's amazing. And typically, I assume you guys work with mostly chains. Is there a typical range where you find that's your sweet spot?

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Ryan Perera [00:07:42]:

Yeah, I think we really find the best product market fit for chain chains. And that could be any chain from, let's say, 50 to a thousand stores or.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:52]:

Okay, wow.

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Ryan Perera [00:07:53]:

Large chains. We work with actually one of the biggest chains in North America, in Canada, pizza. Pizza. They have over 700 stores, and over 400 of those are doing deliveries.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:03]:

Wow, okay. That's no easy feat. And I find your background interesting because, and maybe you can share a bit about this, but you were actually in the medical field, if I'm not mistaken, at least from what I've seen online. But I'd love to understand, kind of like what brought you from maybe that side of things to delivery, you know, even before Captain.ai. Right. Like what? How did that transition happen?

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Ryan Perera [00:08:30]:

Sure. It's a bit of a random transition, I guess, to go from medicine into this field. Yeah. Yeah, I was in medicine and I, you know, I still love medicine. I loved what I was doing at the time. I definitely miss lots of it. And however, what I wanted to do is take a year out of medicine and build a business. It was a burning for me to do that.

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Ryan Perera [00:08:52]:

And, you know, I wasn't realistic at the time. This is ten years ago. I thought, okay, you can build a business in a year. I was a doctor. I didn't really understand, so I took a year out and we hadn't made it successful. We hadn't grown the business significantly. And then I suddenly realized, okay, I need a bit more time. And I took another year out, and everything started taking off with traction.

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Ryan Perera [00:09:13]:

And then that's the start of the journey, and I want to see it through to the end of the mission.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:19]:

So that's awesome. From doctor to entrepreneur. Yeah, definitely rude awakening when you realize a year is not enough. It's like, all right, I get it now. This is probably going to take a couple of years at least. That's awesome, though. What a great transition. And so one of the things I like to talk about is also how the early days look, right? Because now you got some massive change, obviously growth, and we'll talk about all that good stuff.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:42]:

But in the early days, you know, going from that conference, realizing there's, you know, I guess, a pain point, how did you go to getting that first customer? Right, so that, that was that literally that the first customer, that person that approached you at that. Okay. And so what did that look like? What did it look like to say, okay, there's some need or pain. We got to adapt this thing. How do we adapt it without risking too much capital? I love to understand the journey behind getting that first customer to use your delivery solution.

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Ryan Perera [00:10:14]:

Sure. So the first customer, I'll tell you who he was. It was actually Enrico Sedano, who's the CEO of Appiano, Switzerland. So Vapiano's is an Italian chain in Europe. They have over 100 stores. And they. The CEO of the Switzerland franchise approached us and he became our first customer who really believed in us. And I really believe in listening to customers and making them happy, genuinely.

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Ryan Perera [00:10:40]:

I'm just saying that. So we actually literally took our team to Switzerland and we lived there for a couple of weeks to them. Yeah. So we actually went and we took most of our developer team. We were in the store. Enrico was so kind. He was feeding us food, and we were literally, the developers were coding in the store to get the launch. To get the launch right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:00]:

That's cool. I didn't know that. That's really cool.

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Ryan Perera [00:11:03]:

So we went there and we had a very close relationship with them for many years. And we really spent a lot of time building this up. And it's only through time I think we were able to learn the intricacies of different things. I'll share one of the challenges, building a good auto dispatch solution. So what does that mean in a restaurant? Typically, if you don't have technology, the drivers are just going to take any order they like, or there may be somebody coordinating and say, okay, you take this order or you take this order. A better approach is if you can look at all the possible ways a driver could take different deliveries and you mathematically calculate, okay, how can I get my delivery times as low as possible? By combining this driver with this job going in this direction? Also, how can I keep my food fresh? I don't want to do five deliveries in a row. I need to limit the number of deliveries so the food stays fresh. That problem is actually quite hard to build a solution for.

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Ryan Perera [00:12:04]:

And we tried different approaches to auto dispatching. So we tried a rule based system. We tried distance based systems. Eventually we had to use an AI, an actual AI algorithm, which we integrated with, that allowed us to really get the results that we needed. And that was a many year process. So what I would share is that some parts of this technology are really quite challenging to build and require a lot of work with the customer, very closely working with them to understand it. And so I think I'm excited that the product is so mature now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:40]:

That's amazing. And I can imagine, like, you know, you say it's an AI model. I'm imagining it's taking into account things like, I don't know, traffic conditions, time of day, weather. Is it taking some of these other, you know, maybe factors into play when thinking about delivery. Just, I don't know if you can share that stuff or that's, like, private at the moment.

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Ryan Perera [00:12:59]:

It would take into account perishability of the food, how long it would stay hot for. It would take into account your business rules, how many orders can go together. It would look at your promise time. So promise time means what have you promised the customer, whether it's an internal promise or an actual promise to the customer, you know, dominant. You have a 40 minutes, 45 minutes promise. Pizza. Pizza has one. So we look at those, so we make sure you hit your promise times, keeping the food fresh, and at the same time doing deliveries as possible, fast as possible.

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Ryan Perera [00:13:31]:

Traffic is real time. Traffic is much more challenging to actually incorporate, but that's actually in our roadmap and something that we're working on now to bring in that real time, tough data that's cool to the decision making process.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:43]:

That's really neat. And it's funny, I saw a random video. I forget if it was waze or Google Maps, but some guy was tricking waze or Google Maps, and so he had. It was like a kind of a funny prank. He bought, like, I don't know, hundreds of used phones and put Google Maps on it, and, like, was rolling a cart down the street. And then if you looked at waze, looked like heavy traffic, so everyone went, like, another road. But he was showing on his camera how there was, like, no one on the road. So it just made me think about how he kind of tricked the system to think there was heavy traffic, which I'm sure is a complicated problem to solve.

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Ryan Perera [00:14:18]:

Well, you know what's interesting about that? I think, you know, if once we get big enough and enough stores using us, we could probably use the live driver data to get started to actually calculate what the traffic is really like. Use the driver's speed to calculate what the traffic is.

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Angelo Esposito [00:14:33]:

That's interesting. That makes a ton of sense. I love that. So going back to, you know, Switzerland, your team's on the ground eating some pretty good italian food, I'm imagining, but working in there. So what does the MVP look like? What was the first kind of thing that you launch to be like, all right, this guy's happy. Was it the actual dispatching part, the delivery? Like, what was the first kind of. I guess. MVP.

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Ryan Perera [00:14:56]:

Yeah. So the very first MVP was really a dispatch application and a driver. Driver tracking and the driver. So the core system is you can see where your drivers are on the map. That's the first thing that we launched with them, so they can see where their drivers are. And that in itself is useful. The drivers could get the jobs on their phones so they know what to do and then the customer could actually track the order. I can't remember the sequence that we released that, but it was, I think it was the dispatch up and the driver first.

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Ryan Perera [00:15:27]:

So we're happy that everything was working. We launched the customer tracking.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:31]:

That's awesome. And so when people come to you, you know, like, what's their biggest pain points they're experiencing? Right? Like I'm a chain, I got 50 locations. Is it, you know, what I guess, what are the main pain points that they're like, I need something. Is it the customer complaints? Is it just that they're not hitting the revenue they want? Is it just, you know, the efficiency of the logistical side? I'm curious, like what are the big pain points that then they come to you and they're like, okay, I need something like captive.

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Ryan Perera [00:16:01]:

Sure. So I'll be honest with you. You know, you start out thinking it's going to be one thing, but you find out it's something else.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:07]:

And what did you guys think originally? Because, yeah, that's for entrepreneurs listening. That's super normal. We learned that. But it's, you're always thinking one thing and then you get a nice surprise. But I'm curious, what was the thing you thought and then what it ended up being?

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Ryan Perera [00:16:19]:

So I think this might be biased because our first customer wanted us to automate everything from the kitchen to the dispatching. He wanted everything to be automated. Labour costs are very high in Switzerland, so any way you can automate things can really help the business. And I was also obsessed about this idea of automation and using autopilot to make AI driven decisions. So I thought that's going to be the core of the business. We put a lot, many years into building that. But actually I'd say the biggest pain point is really chain is want to delight their customers. That's what it is.

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Ryan Perera [00:16:51]:

They want their customers to have a really good experience. And so, you know, the consequence of that is actually what people really are excited about is can I give my customers an amazing tracking experience? So we found the biggest thing that chains are excited about is actually giving an amazing tracking experience to their customers. Customers are engaged, customers are less likely to go to third party sites to get the tracking experience they're ordered directly from that customers are happy. Better tips for drivers, that's what we found is really the cracks off. And then there's all the other benefits of Captain.ai, that they get the operational visibility, analytics data to how long their drivers actually take in, and AI if they want to optimize the routes for the drivers. So we thought it was going to be the AI, but actually it really is. The trikey, I think is the most exciting thing for chains to have.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:43]:

That's interesting. And then how do you guys, like, look at it? What the landscape when it comes to maybe some of these third party delivery apps? I know it's a bit different, especially when it comes to chains, because maybe it's added revenue, but it's high commissions. But to your point, maybe people like that experience. So when looking at some of these chains that are maybe already using, call it the Uber eats the Doordash like grubhubs. Where do you guys fit into that? Are you coming in? I guess. Let me just end it there. Where do you guys fit in to that equation? I guess.

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Ryan Perera [00:18:15]:

I think in the last ten years, there has been an amazing transformation in the restaurant industry. You know, really because of the third parties. I'm talking about Uber Eats, Doordash, deliveroo, skip the dishes, many others around the world, and I think they changed the whole industry for sure. And I think the change that I see is that delivery is no longer nice to have, but it's an expectation. Customers expect delivery. They don't necessarily know how they're getting it delivered, or whether it's your own drivers, or whether it's going to be done by a third party. But they all want food delivered. When we started out, there weren't that many restaurants offering delivery, because there weren't.

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Ryan Perera [00:18:57]:

There wasn't a proliferation of the third parties. So it was really the pizza chains or the higher volume guys who were offering delivery. Now almost everybody's offering delivery. I think it's over 80 or 85% in America.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:08]:

Wow.

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Ryan Perera [00:19:09]:

And you're continuing to see evolution of that industry even now, because companies like DoorDash and Uber are offering something called DoorDash Drive or Uber Direct, which, if you haven't heard of it, is like a direct delivery service. So the customer can now order through their preferred channel. It could be the restaurant's website, and a restaurant could opt for DoorDash to still deliver that. Even though the order didn't come through a marketplace, it came through their own channel. But they don't have to hire a driver. They could. They could use a third party, or they could have their own drivers and augmented with Doordash driver. So it's really like a white label delivery service.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:54]:

Right. That's interesting.

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Ryan Perera [00:19:55]:

And it's super interesting because our product has had to evolve as well to include that. So Captain.ai used to be just for your own drivers, but now you could also, if you're short of drivers or if you want to deliver to a certain area where you don't want your drivers to go to, for example, you can ask Doordash to do that delivery for you or Uber to do that delivery for you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:17]:

That's interesting. That's an interesting one. It's funny because I've heard of it recently, but I didn't understand it too much. But that makes sense. Like, leveraging the driver workforce that's already exist. And I'm assuming the idea is that you're paying less percentage because not going through their platform, is that the general gist or. I'm just assuming here. I don't know.

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Ryan Perera [00:20:42]:

Yeah, I think the unit economics depend on each restaurant and how much commission they're paying. But it is, it's typically more of a flat fee versus a commission fee. It's a fixed cost that a restaurant's incurring by outsourcing it versus a commission that they typically pay across a border on a marketplace.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:00]:

That's awesome. So, yeah, so I mean, to give the listeners, like, an idea, what does the typical, I guess, customer experience, let's say, look like from their point of view? So they, if I'm a restaurant, I'm like, all right, I'm listening to this. I got 25 locations. I'm like, okay, this thing sounds interesting. I go to Captain.ai, I'm assuming, probably book a demo, understand how it works. What does the rollout kind of look like? Do you start with one location? Like, how do you kind of get a proof of concept going for, let's say, a new group? And what type of metrics do they or you or I guess both you combined look at to kind of measure? Like, yes, this is working well, sure.

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Ryan Perera [00:21:37]:

So we almost always start with a pilot. That's just been our experience that it isn't. You know, there are some softwares you can just switch on. You know, if you're using notion or something, everybody can pick it up very quickly. But this is a real operational software. So this becomes kind of like the heart of the delivery operations. So there is training that needs to happen with the staff. There is making sure the integration is working smoothly.

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Ryan Perera [00:22:02]:

So we usually start with a pilot with a couple of stores, make sure the integration, whatever integration is done is working well, make sure the staff are happy and are using it. And we actually built some of our own metrics for this. Actually, we did a pilot with Pizza hut in Europe at one point, and we built out of that. We started building some metrics to measure how well a store is using it. And it's our own metric. I don't know if anyone else is using this. We call it geo verified. That's just our name for it.

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Ryan Perera [00:22:33]:

What it means is we check, did the driver actually mark as picked up and dropped off? Getting drivers happy with the product and using is one of the big keys. And so we can measure how active are the drivers in actually using it before we launch the tracking page. So that's one of our key measures that we use in our pilots.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:52]:

That's pretty cool. And then I guess on the restaurant side, like, what do they need to see for it to be kind of successful for them? Is it just they're looking at an uplift in delivery, or is it just making more deliveries? Like, what are they looking at to then say, okay, this pilot was successful. Let's roll this out to all 50 locations.

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Ryan Perera [00:23:11]:

Yeah, I think it depends on the restaurant. So I think some restaurants, they want this for the tracking page. So if the drivers are using it and they can give the tracking experience, then they've improved their customer happiness. They're happy.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:23]:

Got it.

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Ryan Perera [00:23:24]:

Some other restaurants are looking for hybrid delivery, so they'll want to know that they could outsource some deliveries to Uber or doordash and use some deliveries internally. I mean, even some of the restaurants we work with, they have their own online ordering, and they outsource all of their deliveries. So they don't just. They don't have any drivers, but they have their own online ordering platform, and they save on commission by doing that, and then they outsource their deliveries. So as long as that's working, we're really adding that value to the restaurant, that we're lowering their delivery cost immediately.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:58]:

That's cool.

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Ryan Perera [00:23:58]:

So they don't need to measure. It's an immediate thing that happens.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:02]:

Yeah, that makes sense. And can you share maybe a specific instance where Captain.ai or drastically improved the client's operation? I'd love to. Maybe, like, quick little case study, anything, like recent that comes to mind? Like, I love sharing the business side of tech. Obviously, we're in tech, too, at WISK, but it's always fun to be like, these are some really cool things that happened recently with client X, client Y. You don't have to name the client, but anything you can share on that side in terms of quick stories would be super cool.

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Ryan Perera [00:24:32]:

Yeah, we're actually in the process of building out our case reports and data, so I might have to come back on the podcast.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:41]:

That's fair. That's fair.

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Ryan Perera [00:24:42]:

Well, I do want to say, like, I really, I get what you're saying. And I think a big focus of our company will be creating these ROI measurements and proof proof that the product is doing a shift in revenue or a shift in delivery times. And I want to get that into the product, actually. So I would love to come back one day and actually share how we've progressed and what we're doing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:04]:

I love that. I love that. We'll definitely have that conversation and, you know, obviously we're talking about all the good, but I think one thing that's always fun to chat about is some of the struggles. So I'd love to know, like, what are some challenges that you've faced in building cap, apart from knowing that it's going to take more than a year, what are some other challenges that you faced over the years?

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Ryan Perera [00:25:26]:

Sure. I think at the beginning the market was really shifting. Was really shifting and we were trying to figure out the product market fit. At that time, we were out in Europe and there weren't that many customers in the UK, especially, that have their own drivers. It changed. The market changed very, very quickly. So one of the challenges in the beginning was trying to find the customers who love the product. We had customers who loved it, but we wanted to find more.

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Ryan Perera [00:25:53]:

And I think that's really led us to North America where we're now based, where in Canada and the US, there are hundreds of chains that still have their own drivers that need to solve this problem. So I'd say if you have a product and you know, and you believe that it's good and you've got customers that love it, finding the right place for those, you have to find more of those customers and sometimes you could be looking in the wrong place. So one thing I'll share is for a few years we were looking in the wrong place. That's interesting. As soon as we came over to North America, we found so many customers that would benefit from what we're doing.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:29]:

That's crazy. Yeah. And it's funny. Sometimes it could be such little nuances in the sense of just cultural differences or whatever. When it comes to tech and product market fit. It could be you're trying something in one region or continent and it's, it's not working, and you try that exact same thing somewhere else, and it's. And it's working super well. So I think there's a, there's a nugget of wisdom in that, of, like, understanding who you're speaking to and who you're targeting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:53]:

Right. Like, that holds a lot of weight. That's cool, man. And then I guess, you know what, you know, everyone's talking about AI chat, GPT, OpenAI and everything and anything in between. But I'd love to hear from you, as you guys are kind of, you know, doing AI when it comes to logistics, where do you see kind of the future of AI when it comes to, I guess, logistics in general, where do you see that, that heading? Well, which, yeah, I know it's a heavy, it's a loaded question because it's, you know, you got the Amazons of the world and all kinds of crazy things happening. But I'd love to know, from your point of view, where do you see things heading?

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Ryan Perera [00:27:28]:

Yeah, well, I would take a step back and I'd say the bigger picture of AI is. This is just my personal opinion. Yeah, I think we're probably very close to human level or generalized artificial intelligence. I'm very passionate about AI in that field. I think we're very. The advances we've seen in just the last year have been incredible. And I think companies like OpenAI are probably going to pioneer something that's close to human level intelligence, or that is breakthrough in the next few years. Very hard to predict how that's going to impact the world, but I think that could lead to acceleration of other technologies, for example, self driving vehicles, drones.

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Ryan Perera [00:28:06]:

Maybe this will lead to an acceleration in robotics as well. And I think when I bring this back into delivery, I actually see the future of the world. I don't know how many years this is, ten or 20 is. There will be many self driving autonomous vehicles and drones doing deliveries. And the cost of delivery will, which is the biggest factor right now in deliveries, the cost, I think the cost will tend towards zero as the supply side of being able to get these autonomous vehicles, or drones, would be almost ubiquitous. If you've got a car and you're not using it, you could let it go and do pizza deliveries during the daytime. So I think the supply side of who can do a delivery is very restrained. Right now, it's human drivers.

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Ryan Perera [00:28:50]:

But as soon as autonomous driving becomes a thing, whoever has an autonomous vehicle would probably lend it out into the marketplace that it could do white label deliveries. Tesla or your Prius might be doing a pharmacy delivery or a grocery delivery or a pizza delivery. It's generating passive income for you. So I think the shift in the marketplace when that technology comes is that the cost of delivery will tend to tend down and to become a commodity and supply side will go up. Everything will get delivered. You won't think twice about getting anything delivered. And I think that will be another shift for the restaurant industry. How that will affect third parties, I don't know.

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Ryan Perera [00:29:31]:

They might have to own huge fleets that they lend out, or it might shift power back into the restaurant's hands where they could start doing more of their own deliveries at a much lower cost aunce could share their autonomous vehicles with other businesses or other companies, or there'll be more sharing of drivers. The big vision of Captain.ai is that we want to allow businesses to share their drivers even now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:00]:

That's interesting. And I want, just speaking futuristically, asking for prediction here, where do you think that would or how do you think that would affect restaurants? Let's say from more of an experience standpoint, because if delivery, and it makes sense what you're saying, I can see that too, getting closer to the cost of zero. More people are doing delivery. What do you think that means in terms of restaurant spaces and maybe sizes and maybe even location? Like if delivery becomes a larger percentage, let's say, of sales, how do you think that affects the way we think about, or the way restaurants think about their build and their location and things of that nature?

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Ryan Perera [00:30:44]:

Yeah, I think we've already seen a preview of it with COVID where everything became pickup and delivery for a time, restaurants, and you saw a shift in the industry and it hasn't fully normal. You know, it's not gone back to where it was. Pre COVID delivery is still much higher than it was before. So, I mean, I think it's going to depend on the different restaurants. I think there's always going to be restaurants. Me personally, I love to go and sit down in a restaurant.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:10]:

Right. Like nice full service experience.

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Ryan Perera [00:31:13]:

And I think the ones where they're more. Where delivery becomes an enabler, the lower cost of delivery becomes enabler. You're probably going to see smaller footprints, more delivery focus, stores like the dominoes. So I think we could shift towards that as well. But I think it could be many years from now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:32]:

Yeah, no, it's interesting because. Yeah, the way I think of it is I think it'll make full service restaurants more popular in a sense, because, like, quick service, you know, there'll be a shift in the way they think of the build and maybe less, you know, front of house niceness and more kind of like, you know, the whole kind of ghost kitchen idea, or just maybe more bare bones, smaller spaces. But on the flip side, it's funny, I think as there's more and more delivery, then the. The experience of dining out would. This is my guess, or my intuition is, like, maybe that dining out experience becomes more important on the overall experience, because it's like, now, yeah, I can eat at home anytime, deliver. I want that good thai meal, that good chinese, whatever. Cool. But if I'm going out, I want more than just the food.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:18]:

So it might become. I have a feeling it's like it might tend to those FSRs being more about the overall experience, the architecture, the view, the vibe, the, you know, so all these other kind of senses beyond just obviously making sure the food is good. So, I don't know. It'll be an interesting place to see. I had a robotics company on a couple episodes ago, and it's. They're mainly in Miami, mainly in the Brickell area, and they have robots. It's called Tiny Mile. And they got robots, about 100 robots that go out every day and just do that last mile delivery.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:51]:

So it's interesting to see, and I know there's probably competitors doing things in other cities or states, but it's interesting to see. It's still early, but this stuff is happening. And as you know, with tech, exponential. And so sometimes, you know, we think it's 20 years away, and some of these things might be, like, even a shorter time period away.

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Ryan Perera [00:33:10]:

Yeah, we were. We were promised self driving cars a long time ago, and obviously waiting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:14]:

Right, that's true. That's true.

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Ryan Perera [00:33:16]:

I was hoping it would be by now. I thought it would be by now. But ten years ago, when we started, we thought self driving cars would be a thing today. And I think we feel some way away from it. But, yeah, I think, who knows what's going to happen with the advent of artificial intelligence in general and how that's going to accelerate other technologies.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:36]:

Exactly. And so just to kind of wrap up, where do you see Captain.ai going? What's next for you guys? You're working with some awesome chains. You guys are growing. Obviously, there's never enough time to do what you want to do in terms of just tech and product development, but in terms of maybe sharing little pieces or exciting things on your roadmap, is there anything you can highlight or anything you want to highlight?

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Ryan Perera [00:33:58]:

Yeah, I think really, I feel like we're a bit of a secret. The chains who know us, know us, but we haven't really got our name out there or gone out to the market and shared our product with the world. And so I think that's really the next stage for us, is we really believe in partnerships and we want to work with restaurant chains to really help them improve their operations, get that visibility and make customers happy. So we're really going to get out and I think that's what's next for us in terms of as a company, in terms of what we're building, some cool things. We've got the hybrid delivery, which we've launched. We've got an intelligent kitchen system that we're building as well, which will take into account things like the driver's actual location. I think we're one of the first, maybe the first in the industry to do something like this, where you actually will, instead of just doing first in, first out in the kitchen. We'd actually time the orders based on who's coming to the restaurant to pick up the food or where the driver is and when the driver's coming.

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Ryan Perera [00:34:58]:

So that works because it integrates into the whole Captain.ai system. We know where the drivers are.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:03]:

That's smart.

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Ryan Perera [00:35:04]:

Even the third party drivers, we want to pull in that data eventually and say, okay, doordash driver is going to be here in 30 minutes. You can cook this order five minutes later.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:12]:

Right. That's great for freshness too, right? Like just optimizing and not having an order to save out for an hour. That's smart. That's a cool one.

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Ryan Perera [00:35:21]:

Yeah. So that's some of the cool stuff that we're building as part of the system and, yeah, those are some of the things on the roadmap.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:27]:

Love it. And then I always like to do a nice plug. So for people that want to find you, obviously, Captain.ai. What? Where else? If you want to share any, I don't know, social emails, anyone share, you.

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Ryan Perera [00:35:40]:

Can reach out to us at www.captain.ai, you can go in there and send us a message and we'd love to chat to you and, you know, support you on your journey with delivery.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:49]:

Love it. And lastly, any advice for entrepreneurs? You know, whether it's tech or not, but just entrepreneurs looking to start, you know, you've gone from maybe, you know, doctor to entrepreneur. So from your experience, any advice you want to share to aspiring entrepreneurs, probably.

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Ryan Perera [00:36:08]:

You know, the only advice I could share is just be persistent. Don't give up. Because I think, I think if you believe in what you built, that's when you don't give up. I think if you know that you've got something, you've got some customers who love it. There's a point where things can always get tough in business. Persistence, persistence is the key. Don't give up. And I definitely have that mentality, and that's the one thing I would say, is you keep going if you believe in what you've got.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:37]:

I love it. Well, you heard it here. So Ryan Perera, CEO of Captain.ai is the website for all the chains listening. We're going to also send this out on our newsletter. So for all the chains listening, if you want to take a look at what they do and how they could potentially help you guys with your delivery needs and operational needs, Captain.ai and reach out to Ryan. I'll put you in touch with the right person on his team to make sure you guys are well taken care of. So, Ryan, without further ado, just want to say thank you so much for taking time out of your day, sharing your story, your journey, the story behind Captain.ai. And, yeah, we'll be excited to kind of share this on our platforms as well.

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Ryan Perera [00:37:21]:

Angelo, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Really enjoying it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:24]:

Awesome. Take care.

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Ryan Perera [00:37:25]:

Thank you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:26]:

Feel free to check out WISK.ai for more resources and schedule a demo with one of our product specialists to see if it's a fit for.

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