Angelo Esposito [00:00:02]:

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 Wisking It All. We're here today with the CEO of Cuboh, Juan Orrego. Juan, thank you for being here today.

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Juan Orrego [00:00:29]:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Angelo. Thanks for having me.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:31]:

Of course. So I guess maybe to kick things off for people who don't know what Cuboh is, can you maybe give a quick description?

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Juan Orrego [00:00:39]:

Yeah. So Cuboh is sort of like an ordering stack for restaurants. We help restaurants with direct ordering so people can order directly from their website. We also aggregate all their third party orders from platforms like DoorDash and ubereats and Grubhub, skip the dishes, et cetera, all in one place. Make sure those orders get sent to the POS automatically. We just released a new product actually called Kivo Kiosks, which is pretty self explanatory by helping restaurants with self ordering and, you know, with the many issues that are happening in the industry with labor, just making sure they have a little bit more support and can support that autonomous ordering. So super exciting times.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:20]:

Awesome. So we'll definitely dive more into Cuboh. I'd love to see, you know, where you guys are at today, where you're heading. Learn more about, you know, what types of restaurants you serve and what type of benefits they can gain, but maybe to just take a few steps back. And I'm also a big fan of understanding the entrepreneurial journey behind things. So, you know, tell me a bit about you. Tell me a bit about Juan. Where did you start? Or, you know, a couple years back, how did you get to Cuboh?

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Juan Orrego [00:01:45]:

Yeah, so, you know, so we were talking about before the, before, you know, press record. So born in Colombia and you're married to a Colombian. So, you know, we're very entrepreneurial. And I think the stats, something like 50% of Colombians are entrepreneurs. Something like that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:59]:

Oh, wow.

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Juan Orrego [00:02:00]:

A lot of it is due to poverty, of course. Like, people just kind of have to create their own opportunities. But both my parents are entrepreneurs, and I always knew that I was going to end up working for myself. I was born and raised in the Caribbean, Colombia, but I moved to Canada when I was 17. And I always had a small business as a, on the site, you know, like had like an online jewelry business even when I was a kid, like, selling ice cream door to door to my neighbors and whatnot. Eventually, I ended up getting into restaurants. So I started working for this food truck, and that's what helped me pay for school in Canada, and after a few years, really understood the industry. But I ended up getting another job at a tech startup, and that's kind of how I started in the tech world as well.

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Juan Orrego [00:02:47]:

After a few months, I wasn't a very good employee. I ended up getting fired. I was a sales rep. I didn't meet the quota. And it's like, really, like three months in or something. And so I was like, you know what? I am actually gonna just try and create my own company. Like, maybe the world is just trying to tell me that this is my time. So I'm gonna go all in and try to combine both the experiences that I have had.

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Juan Orrego [00:03:12]:

For the longest period of time in my career, I was fairly young. I was 21 or 22. So it's not like I had been working for a decade or anything like that, but, you know, I had worked. We worked for a few years in the Russian industry, and then just a few months in tech. And so I was like, I'm gonna teach myself how to code, and I'm gonna create something for restaurants. And Cuboh was born. We were actually an analytics company at first with the main premise that restaurant tours make a lot of decisions based on gut feeling. But in the startup world, I saw that most of the decisions were made through data, and so I wanted to apply that same thought process to the restaurant industry, but it didn't really work.

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Juan Orrego [00:03:49]:

I couldn't really sell it. And after a lot of conversations, I heard from a restaurant that they had a lot of trouble with delivery orders. And this was back in 2018. 2019, where DoorDash was starting to grow really quick. Rob Hub was growing real quick. They're the biggest at the time. Uber Eats was starting to venture into their food delivery business, and people just wanted a way to send those orders directly to the POS so they don't have to pay someone to manually enter those orders and make mistakes. And so I said, that sounds great.

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Juan Orrego [00:04:22]:

It's kind of crazy that this is how. That this doesn't exist. It's a no brainer. And so I developed it, learned how to code, you know, eventually hired a couple developers, recruited our co founder, CTO, and we went to market in 2019, and, you know, a year before COVID So, you know, as soon as COVID hit, everything went from zero to not 100. Honestly, went to, like, a million. Like, we went, like, 80 employees. And, like, a year and a half ago, it was something I never imagined could happen in my first, like, real venture. So it was kind of crazy, but really cool to help restaurants through that tough time.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:59]:

Yeah, yeah, no, it's. Yeah, there's certain industries where things really kind of took off and, and obviously, like, restaurants got hit hard. But, I mean, the. The flip side of what happened was exactly that. It was a lot. A spike in online ordering and the revival of the QR code that came back and it was like, yes. I don't know, it must have been, like ten years ago. I can't remember.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:17]:

But, like, it kind of.

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Juan Orrego [00:05:18]:

Yes.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:19]:

Yeah, yeah. Then it was, like, a bit nerdy. So, like, it kind of went away, and then, like, all of a sudden, it just kind of came back. And now it's, like, back, now it's cool again. It's funny. You got a second shot at, and it's cool again. It's on the menu. You could pay your tab.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:31]:

You can see the menus, you know, so it's funny how it made a comeback, but, yeah, so I'd love to hear, like, what was the big pain point you saw at the time? So, you know, for a lot of restaurants listening for them, it's obvious. They're like, I, you know, the pain. But for people who are maybe not as well versed, speak a bit about the pain of what they typically do before using something like Cuboh.

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Juan Orrego [00:05:50]:

Yeah. So, you know, you're a restaurant. You understand that you want to be on delivery apps, right? Your food travels well. You have a little bit of bandwidth in the kitchen, so you end up signing up for DoorDash and Uber Eats and Grubhub. You want to be on all of them is kind of what we see normally works the best. Because if you're not on DoorDash, people that are on DoorDash are never going to order from you. It's kind of the thought process in the consumer market for this delivery apps. And so you sign up for all those delivery apps, but then what ends up happening is all of them send you their own tablets because they need to communicate to you when an order comes in.

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Juan Orrego [00:06:25]:

Actually, when we started, a lot of people even used fax, which was super crazy. Yeah. So they would get the orders to fax, print, and then they would, whether you got it on the tablet or fax, you would have to enter that into the POS so that the order gets recorded. You know, your inventory gets accounted for, the order prints in the kitchen. And restaurants started to see that not only was it super slow, but their employees normally are really young. They're so overwhelmed with the volume, they start making mistakes. They, instead of entering a burger, they enter a hot dog. And then customer gets the wrong order, they have to remake it.

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Juan Orrego [00:06:59]:

Their reputation gets tarnished. So that's when they start looking for something like Cuboh. And we've evolved the product into more than just that. More than just integrating that order. You know, we help restaurants with making sure that the orders get auto accepted in, like, less than a second. So the delivery apps are seeing, wow, this restaurant is really quick. Every time we send them an order, the customer receives a notification that they're preparing the order right away. So let's start ranking them higher and higher because less cancellations are happening.

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Juan Orrego [00:07:27]:

And so it kind of snowballs into, like, more volume, less mistakes, easier to handle. You can be on all the delivery apps at the same time. And then there's, like, the menu management.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:35]:

Right.

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Juan Orrego [00:07:36]:

Inventory. When you run out of something, like making sure it's 86, etcetera, etcetera.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:42]:

Wow. Okay. And I can imagine, you know, you alluded to, obviously, the time side of things, so just being super time consuming and inefficient to just have to literally copy paste an order. But in addition, even if in a perfect world, it, you know, it's taken time, there's the mistake side, and so you're making mistakes, and that has effects. Do you have an idea of, like, what that mistake rate was? Like, how many orders were average? Yeah. You know what I mean?

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Juan Orrego [00:08:07]:

Yeah. So when we measure that super early on and what we saw was out of ten orders, between one to three would normally have a mistake, which was, because a lot of them, it's not just the item, it's, like, small modifications.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:18]:

Right. If you want your fries on the.

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Juan Orrego [00:08:19]:

Side or if you want your sauce on the side or something like that. And it's just so overwhelming for the staff to have to handle all those small details, notes. A lot of people would ask for. Hey, can I actually, you know, I didn't see fries on the apps. Can I have an order of fries? So, hey, how do we charge for that? They didn't pay for that. It's a note. So, you know, a lot of errors would start to come up, and it was actually one to three out of ten. That's super significant.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:40]:

Yeah.

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Juan Orrego [00:08:42]:

And again, in the peak of COVID like, you know, we had such overwhelming demand for something like Cuboh because everybody just needed to get on the apps, ensure that they could handle. Handle it as quickly as possible. Like I said, early on, it was awesome to help them out through all that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:58]:

That's awesome. And so when you guys started, if I'm not mistaken, you guys were or are based in Victoria, BC, is that. Yeah. Cool. So you guys started there. I love to hear the journey because, you know, half of this is, you know, talking to restaurateurs, but also half of this is really understanding that entrepreneurial side. So, you know, you kind of, your path led you to being that entrepreneur from your DNA, that family, you know, it's in your blood kind of thing. And then you started in Victoria.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:23]:

What is that? Getting that first, you know, restaurant or two look like. And then what, what happens after that?

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Juan Orrego [00:09:29]:

It's really funny because, you know, first entrepreneurs kind of have a hard time, like, pricing their product and they, like, really underprice it and stuff. So we, I started selling to restaurants in Victoria. I think they just kind of saw this, like, skinny, like, immigrant kid. Like, you know, there's no way this kid's gonna build this product. So, like, they would just, they just didn't pay anything. So then I was like, yeah, I'm not selling anything in Victoria. Let me try Vancouver, which is just like an hour and a half away. Quite a big city.

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Juan Orrego [00:09:57]:

And we got our first two customers, like, pretty much instantly paying, like, $20 a month, and. But I was honestly scrambling, like, just making a lot of cold calls and cold emails and stuff. So I just kinda looked at San Francisco and pulled the Google maps and started cold calling them. And, you know, eventually someone wanted to buy it. They were like, what's the price? And I was charging 20 Canadian dollars a month. I was just, like, 60 us just to try and gauge. They were like, done. I was like, holy wow.

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Juan Orrego [00:10:31]:

Like, I could probably charge a lot more for this. So eventually we started testing with our pricing and stuff. But, yeah, the first sale, honestly, was just, like, all hustle, like, just trying to get someone to listen to me.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:40]:

Yeah. And it's funny. I mean, I'm sure you could relate to this, but I find most entrepreneurs, including myself, when you get that first sale, the feeling is amazing. Even though, like, you could be in so much dead. Yeah.

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Juan Orrego [00:10:52]:

Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:52]:

You spent, like, a year developing something in death weapon. You get, like, $20, but, like, there's something about someone paying for something that you thought of and built that is so gratifying. Right.

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Juan Orrego [00:11:02]:

For me, it was just, like, so much rejection. Like, you, I was trying to fundraise because I, you know, like, I didn't have, like, a friends and family that could raise. So, like, fundraising, I was just hearing no after no, after no, and then trying to sell Cuboh to restaurants. Like, no, after no, after no. And before that, we were analytics. So, like a million nos before. Before we became, like, what we are today.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:23]:

Right?

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Juan Orrego [00:11:23]:

So hearing that, like, hearing someone say yes, you're like, cool once the payment goes through, it was actually super. I still vividly remember when I got the email that someone had paid, and it was just like I was a crack.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:36]:

Like, it was. Yeah, it's such a good feeling. And so just to paint the picture, so people have, you know, three tablets, and, you know, for people that maybe don't, most people, most restaurants are experienced this, but for those who. Who don't are listening. And just as, you know, regular kind of audience members. So you can imagine, you know, one tablet for uber eats, one for doordash, one for whatever other system, and skip the dishes, and you end up getting these. Or. So now you have three tablets on top of your POS.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:00]:

So when you guys come in, just to paint the picture, is it that it's connected directly to the POS, or is it that now it's on your kind of tablet and you can consolidate all those on. On your tablet. Like, tell me a bit about, like, the logistics of how that works.

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Juan Orrego [00:12:13]:

Yeah, so both we send the order to the POS, but then we also provide the restaurant with one tablet so that they can get rid of the other three. This is something that we debated a lot early on. Do we just send everything to the POS? And we tried, but what we ended up discovering was, in a utopian world, you can get rid of your tablets, have everything, go to the POS, it prints. Awesome. But a lot of, you know, like, customers can write notes. That's normally things that they want to add to the items that they're not paying for, or say that the restaurant ran out of an item that was ordered, they need to refund it, make sure that the inventory updates POS is when really built with that use case in mind. And so what we started to see was that restaurants started using the tablets again. And it was really important for me that we were the universal remote control, or the restaurant, so that the pain of tablet, what we call tablet hell, could actually be solved by the service that we're providing.

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Juan Orrego [00:13:16]:

And so that's why we ended up developing this one tablet, which, again, acts sort of like a universal remote control, so that the restaurants don't have to use the other three tablets and they don't have to touch it. You know, everything runs on autopilot but when something arises, they can still go to that tablet and interact with the order, their menu, the customer, whatever they want.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:35]:

Got it. Got it. And so, and so what does your typical customers see? Like pre-Cuboh and post-Cuboh. So, you know, talking a bit about the pain. Three tablets down to one time savings. Are there any metrics that you guys have that you say, hey, we're able to help with this in terms of, you know, bottom line or even.

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Juan Orrego [00:13:54]:

Absolutely. So not only the errors that we were talking about earlier, the ten to 30% error rate, which is pretty high. Yeah, we completely eliminate that because there's truly no human involved. But. But we also start to see that restaurants very quickly get more sales on the delivery apps. And that's where that auto accept delivery apps are really interesting because they have this. A lot of people don't know this, but they have this algorithm very similar to Google, because they want to make sure that whoever they're ranking high is going to make the money. If they're sending volume to the wrong restaurant and they have to refund that order, then they probably tarnish that relationship with the customer forever.

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Juan Orrego [00:14:35]:

And it's so competitive now. There's uber eats, Grubhub, Doordash, Chownow, and a million others. But between the big three, people are going to switch back and forth if the experience in one isn't ideal. And so that's why we started to develop this sort of like auto accept. Let's make sure that the delivery apps are liking the restaurant. So when orders from whatever restaurant, we accept the order, and literally 0.1 second is what we have tracked, which is much faster than a human. So the restaurant starts to rank high. Now there's also less errors.

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Juan Orrego [00:15:04]:

So the delivery app is starting to see. Huh, look, the refund rate on this restaurant is actually a lot smaller than it is for other people around the delivery radius. So let's rank them even higher. Every time that the customer orders something, they do end up delivering it. They don't have issues with inventory, and that's because now, instead of them managing three menus, they only have to manage everything in one platform, which is keyword. So it's a really comprehensive set of small features that when you aggregate them all, it not only helps you save the relationships, which is obviously something you can't really measure, but then there's the food cost and eventually the increase in sales. And hopefully restaurants can also start to add more delivery apps as well. Hopefully they can see this is really easy.

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Juan Orrego [00:15:51]:

Actually, there's no extra work in me adding maybe an own direct ordering solution, commission free that I can have on my own website.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:00]:

Wow.

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Juan Orrego [00:16:00]:

I don't have another tablet to manage. I can just manage it all through Cuboh anyways, so really isn't any extra work.

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Angelo Esposito [00:16:05]:

Right. That makes a ton of sense. And so who would you say is like your typical audience? Right? Like, obviously restaurant industry is massive. Who do you guys know? Like, for sure, if you're x, y, z, this is like kind of a perfect fit for you.

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Juan Orrego [00:16:20]:

Yeah. So normally we working with, you know, quick service restaurants, technically anyone that delivers could be a fit. But normally, you know, you don't have steakhouses on the delivery apps because they, the steak just doesn't travel as well. It happens. We do have customers like that and we can help them. But where we find that a restaurant is the most successful is they have a really quick service. They can make food in five to 15 minutes. The food is going to travel well.

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Juan Orrego [00:16:49]:

So whether it's burgers or sandwiches or pizza, that's sort of like fast food. And then in terms of size, we don't like to work with big, big corporations like McDonald's and Burger King. They have the resources to develop their own solutions. Obviously, if they came knocking on the door, we'd love to work with them. That'd be awesome for our business. But they have the resources to build themselves. So we try to focus on those smaller players. We do work with franchises, but normally, like 500 locations would probably be where we max out.

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Juan Orrego [00:17:23]:

But on anything in that, like one to 100 locations, that's really where we thrive. We do really, really well.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:29]:

Awesome. And then I can imagine because you're dealing with QSRs, one to 100 locations, there's probably a handful of poss on one side, you're integrating with, obviously the delivery apps. On the flip side, you got to put that in the POS. So what do you guys find so far? The main, you know, whisk integrates with a ton of pos as well because of our solution. But I'm curious, on your side, what do you see as the main Pos in that space, or at least for your target market?

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Juan Orrego [00:17:55]:

Yeah, so I love working with square. They're one of our, like, really close partners. Their team is awesome. Clover is another great POS that we love to work with. Revel. You know, if a restaurant is looking for POS, I think those are, you know, we work with so many, but the ones that I see normally do really well with this, like, QSR market, revel, Clover, square, there's a few others, depending on where you are, that might have a better solution. For example, in Canada, we work with this POS often. They're just really familiar with the Canadian market and they might be a better fit.

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Juan Orrego [00:18:37]:

I think all these pos. The POS market is so competitive, they all need to have really robust solutions to be able to stay in business. There's just small differences that might work better for whatever the use case is. So I can look at, you know, your audience in the eyes and tell them, hey, go talk to this one. But, yeah, yeah, I know. Based on market share, based on what I see, you know, customer happiness. If I were to open a restaurant today, I think, you know, square clover rebel will probably be the main POS that I would. That I would like to look at.

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Juan Orrego [00:19:08]:

Ignoring any. Any specific use cases, of course.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:10]:

Right, right. Yeah. And we see it too. Like, our clients ask us all the time, like, what POS do you recommend? And the truth is, like, we integrate with, I think, 60-ish now. Yeah. And it's funny because you hear good and bad things about the exact same POS. People will say, like, POS is the best, and then someone else is like, POS is the worst. So what I realize is, like, it's a really, like, it depends on what you need.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:32]:

The type of restaurant you're at, QSR versus maybe fast casual versus full service. Are you a group and you need group functionality? Are you a single venue? There's so many cases, and then you can at least narrow it down. And even within that, there'll be differences where people will swear by one or swear by the other. So I got to the point where I'm like, hey, look, these are the ones we integrate really well with. Cause we have a direct API. You choose, you know, like, you choose. Don't let. I don't want to be, you know, I don't want you calling me, telling me that you.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:56]:

You're not happy with your POS. Yeah.

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Juan Orrego [00:19:58]:

Just like anything, it just truly, truly depends. Even with our own solutions, like, it just truly depends.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:03]:

Right, right. That makes sense. Cool. So just to get a sense, I know you said maybe about, correct me if I'm wrong, about 80 employees. Is that about right?

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Juan Orrego [00:20:10]:

Yes. That was during the peak of COVID market.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:13]:

Yeah. Right.

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Juan Orrego [00:20:13]:

Market change over the past couple years.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:15]:

Okay, okay, okay. But so that growth, I mean, nonetheless, even if you tell me, you know, for still a lot of employees. Right. So, um, I'd love to, like, learn a bit about that growth. Right. Those first two locations, like, you said, then you realize, you start realizing, okay, what can we charge? What was like, the go to market? How do you start? You know, COVID helped, I'm assuming, but how do you start kind of going to market? And what markets are you serving today?

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Juan Orrego [00:20:37]:

Yeah, so we're primarily in the states and Canada. We have a handful of restaurants in, like, Europe and Australia and stuff like that. But North America is really where we're focused right now. During COVID our go to market motion has changed a little bit after COVID, but during COVID we were such a young company that we didn't really have any, like, we didn't have a marketing engine. Everything was outbound. We kind of have to source our own opportunities. So it was cold calling, but cold emailing worked really well for us early on. And restaurants loved it because they didn't know there was a solution out there.

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Juan Orrego [00:21:09]:

And they knew that. They knew the delivery apps, a lot of them were starting to use them. And then we would reach out and say, hey, we have the solution that integrates, you know, with your delivery apps. And almost everyone would say, yeah, absolutely. I would love to hear a little bit more about what you have post COVID. Then the intent definitely dropped because restaurants were already on the delivery apps. I think almost everybody signed up for delivery apps in the peak of COVID in order to be able to survive.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:34]:

Right.

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Juan Orrego [00:21:36]:

And so we started to have, we started to develop our own marketing engine. So putting a lot of resources and content out there. So if you go to our blog or you subscribe to our newsletter, we have a lot of great stuff. We also have ebooks and stuff that we write, so restaurants just find us through that. Or if you look up for integrations, we're normally number one on Google as well, so it switched a little bit more to inbound. Nowadays, people mostly search for us.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:01]:

That's awesome. That's a great place to be. And so I guess for you guys, there's not really a geographical boundary minus just maybe in different geographies outside of us, Canada. Maybe it just means different delivery apps or different poss, but like.

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Juan Orrego [00:22:14]:

Exactly.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:15]:

Okay. But ultimately, it doesn't really matter. It's just more from a development and marketing standpoint, I guess.

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Juan Orrego [00:22:21]:

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Like, we technically, we can just develop, say, you know, global or delivery, like those european delivery apps, we can just build them tomorrow. But the problem is that we also would need a support team to support them.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:35]:

Right. Time zones.

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Juan Orrego [00:22:39]:

The time zones that go to market is also a little bit different. There's the GDPR. There's a few things that, and honestly, at the end of the day, our market share in North America compared to what's out there, very, very small. We still have a lot of room to cover. So we don't want to go to Europe knowing that we're still nowhere where we want to be in North America.

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:58]:

That makes sense. If you're still scratching the surface because of how big the market is, it's like, keep scratching before spreading yourself. So that makes sense. I'd love for you, if you can share, I'm sure there's a ton of success stories. Any success stories that kind of stand out to you? Like, in terms of, like, a client using Cubo that you're just, you know, you maybe share with your staff or it's, you know, known company wide.

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Juan Orrego [00:23:20]:

Yeah. So there's a couple, a couple things. So, like, in 2019, when we had just launched, we got accepted into Y combinator, which was a dream for me because you know how hard it is to get in.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:32]:

Yeah.

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Juan Orrego [00:23:33]:

You know, I was a terrible student, so I was, like, prepared to be rejected because I got rejected from all the schools. But getting to YC is harder than getting into Harvard. And so I was just so proud of, I would tell my mom I didn't get into Harvard, but I got into Y combinator. And it was just an unbelievable experience. So that's probably one of the proudest moments of my life, was building something and then having them believe in me. We moved down to Silicon Valley for three months. There's this one spot that we absolutely loved, which was snake the Greek in San Jose. If you're ever there, you should check it out because their food is unbelievable.

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Juan Orrego [00:24:07]:

And we would order from them pretty much every week. They had, I think, two or three locations at the time, and we started pestering them, being like, hey, we're down in the valley. Like, we love your food. We would love to work with you. Eventually, the program ended. We couldn't actually. They never responded. And after a year or so, we ended up engaging with them.

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Juan Orrego [00:24:28]:

And now they're one of our largest customers, actually. Like, they have intense, intensive locations. They signed franchisee agreements as of recently. I think they're on, on track to be 100 plus by the end of next year. And that's just awesome, you know, seeing them not only grow, but also, like, how it just reminds me of the, of the time when we were down there, which was so special for me personally, but also seeing them grow and then be a part of that growth is really cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:54]:

That is really cool. And, yeah, for. For people listening that might not know, there's. There's a few, you know, accelerate. I mean, there's many accelerators, but there's a few really, like, high level ones. YC is probably the top. You know, I'd say another big one is Techstars. Yeah, we were part of Techstars, which is fun.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:10]:

And textures was, I think when we went there was like 600 something applicants chose ten companies, so. And it was cool because it was that.

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Juan Orrego [00:25:18]:

So competitive.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:18]:

Yeah, it's super competitive. And that one was, I think, at the time was the first tech stars in Canada because tech starts worldwide, whereas YC's, I think, is just one. Right. It's.

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Juan Orrego [00:25:26]:

They only have one in valley. Yeah. Although they went remote during COVID but I think they went back to doing it all in person.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:32]:

Yeah, techstars.

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Juan Orrego [00:25:33]:

I also, like, really looked up to techstars. Like, if we. The reason why we didn't apply to Techstars is because they had invested in a competitor and we knew they weren't gonna invest in us.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:44]:

Yeah, that makes sense.

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Juan Orrego [00:25:45]:

But then we got into y combinator.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:46]:

Which is huge, which was.

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Juan Orrego [00:25:48]:

That was my dream.

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Angelo Esposito [00:25:48]:

Yeah, yeah, that's huge. Yeah. I mean, if you get into these things that like. I mean, they are what exactly. They sound like they're accelerated. For an entrepreneur, it's an entrepreneur's dream. You get a bit of capital, you get a lot of guidance and direction, and it just accelerates the progress. Typically you get good introductions to VC's as well, which can help with the fundraising.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:08]:

So it's, you know, for startups, listening out there, trying to get into an accelerator could be a good move. A lot of the times, not always, but a lot of the times, it could be.

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Juan Orrego [00:26:16]:

You meet a lot of cool people. Like I met. Yeah, the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky. Like, how else would I be able to meet him if it's. If, you know, if it wasn't for YC, stuff like, that was unbelievable.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:27]:

That's awesome. I love to hear just a bit about, like, your journey kind of as a leader. Right. So you go from, like you said, like, not having that sales job. Right, which is not representative, but, you know, it takes a shot to be like, ah, whatever. And then you kind of go into, boom, I'm into YC. I'm a CEO for the first time, which is hard because it's like you're learning as you're growing. Like, what does that journey look like from the CEO? What are some, I always, like, kind of sharing lessons that people learn.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:51]:

Like, what are some lessons you learned as kind of a leader in the last few years?

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Juan Orrego [00:26:55]:

Yeah. Yeah. You know, like. Like with. With anything that is new. You suck at the beginning, as a matter of fact. I mean, there's levels, right, to everything you do, and so you're always trying to get better. I think when I started, I was just so young, I was so hungry.

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Juan Orrego [00:27:13]:

Like, I, you know, I just wanted to make this a success because I had no other option. So it was all me just doing anything and everything myself. Eventually, as we started to grow, then I started to read a little bit and experience, you know, managing a team leadership, you know, motivating people, firing people, which actually never gets easier. Performance, it's. It's, I think, really hard. The thing for me is I am really, really competitive, and I think that defines my leadership style of, I want us to be the best that we can be. And I love hiring athletes, you know, people that thrive under high pressure, you know, fast moving environments, never settling, you know, outwork everyone else. That's sort of, like, as cliche as it sounds, like David Goggins sort of like, yeah, hey, like, let's, like, we, you know, with your mind, you can control anything and everything.

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Juan Orrego [00:28:16]:

And that's kind of what I try to tell my team, that we can. If we want to be a billion dollar company, we can be a billion dollar company, but it's going to be hard, and we need to put in the work. And with that, you know, it's. I think the biggest thing for me was getting used to the fact that it's about, as a leader is about, how do you get people to respect you? Whereas early on, I was more. It was more like, how do I get people to like me? And I, when I talk to a lot of new leaders, there's that really, you know, hard transition of them being like, but I don't want to give them that feedback because, like, what if that they take it the wrong way? And I think that was something that eventually clicked again, as with everything you start to learn. And it's, you know, they actually don't have to like me. They just have to respect me. And if they.

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Juan Orrego [00:29:04]:

They want to be the best version of themselves, then they have to hear this feedback. And people actually, unlike what I would have guessed back in the day, people like it. People want to hear if they're doing good or bad. People want to know how they can get better. And a good leader has that sort of radically candid, what do they call it? Radical candor of being able to be respectful, give feedback, but be direct enough for people to understand exactly where they're at.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:31]:

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. It's funny. It's something I learned too because I, you know, similar to you, I didn't have like career jobs. I just kind of was always in startup and then three, four years, yeah, failed and a new startup and failed and you started now. Now it's whisk and it's doing well, but like took kind of a lot of failures. But in doing that there's a lot of things that I just didn't know that like later you start to kind of appreciate like, oh, I get why, like people document everything and why there's sops. And I get like, you start and one of those things that, what you alluded to is that feedback. And I realized like, I'm not the type of guy that likes too, too much.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:04]:

Like, not that I don't like feedback, I like feedback, but I don't like too, too much constraints, but a lot of people, or too many constraints I should say. But a lot of people actually thrive on that. If you're like, hey, this is the plan. This is where you can be in six months, is where you can be in a year. This is kind of a layout. This is how you can climb the ladder. Most people thrive. And for me it was something I had to learn because I was like, that was new to me.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:24]:

Right. So it's super interesting. So I love to hear maybe just to kind of, you know, for people listening, how can they sign up for Cuboh? I know you said obviously, you know, you got do a lot more inbound but like let's say there's a restaurant here listing or a franchise listing, a QSR. Like man, I want to give this a shot. So what do they got to do to sign up and what does the process look like?

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Juan Orrego [00:30:46]:

Yeah, so you can email us at sales calm. Cuboh is spelled C U B as in boy. Oh, kind of like as in Cube. Or you can go to cuboh.com and then just click on get a demo or get started right at the top and it will take you to a forum. The process is super easy. It takes about a couple of weeks to get set up which is mostly the delivery apps have scheduled where a schedule where they migrate people over from their own tablet over to our integration and they do that every Wednesday. So we just kind of have to line up the timeline stuff. But on average it takes about a couple of weeks, mostly because of that, and we honestly do most of the work.

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Juan Orrego [00:31:24]:

We hand hold all the restaurants throughout the process. They go live in a couple weeks, and it's as easy as that. Restaurants start seeing their orders in the new tablet, which we ship over to them. And orders flow into the POS as well. They print in the kitchen and whatnot. Customer support is super important to me. Like I said, I'm all about excellence and making sure that people have a really good experience. So we replied with everyone in under five minutes.

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Juan Orrego [00:31:50]:

I did support for years and years and years, until, like, a year and a half ago, where I eventually delegated it over to a leader. But I'm still very involved. I want to ensure that everybody, from the moment that they buy, they understand. Okay. Like, it's technology. Obviously, there might be issues, but if they do arise, there's a team right here that's willing to help me. And we're the friendly Canadians, right? When someone calls us, we just want help.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:16]:

That's awesome. And I guess, like, for people who maybe. I don't know, I'm not too familiar, but I'm sure there's a handful of competitors. Like any industry. Can you maybe highlight why someone would want to pick you over some of the other people in the industry?

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Juan Orrego [00:32:33]:

Yeah. So I don't know if you like, from what we're talking about earlier about the tablet and stuff, that's our main difference. Most of our competitors take an order and they put it into the POS, and that's great. If you have an exclusivity deal, you're only working with one delivery app. That's probably all you need, because you only have one tablet anyways. But when volume is increasing and you have multiple delivery apps, then that remote control becomes really handy, and that's our main difference. Kubo actually not only sends those orders to pos, but we also give you some more day to day tools that you can actually interact with those orders and get rid of the delivery apps or the delivery app tablets. And the way that translates into more money and more money saved for the restaurant is the delivery apps will like your restaurant a lot more.

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Juan Orrego [00:33:19]:

So they all rank you higher that auto accept. Our competitors normally accept orders in 7 seconds. Ours is 0.1. So much, much better than our competition. And because there's less errors, more communication with the customer, inventory is more up to date. You know, orders are refunded right away, or you obturate something right away, the customer is always in the loop. Then the reputation overall for the delivery for the restaurant, the delivery apps is much better, and hence your, the ranking is a lot, a lot better. But again, if you're only using one delivery app, probably don't have a lot of kitchen capacity.

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Juan Orrego [00:33:51]:

All this might be an overkill. That's why that's where our competitors thrive.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:55]:

Got it. That makes a ton of sense. And then I guess, to wrap things up, I would love to just hear your kind of vision for the future. You know, I know you alluded to kiosks and stuff you're working on now, but, yeah, what's, what's on the roadmap now and what's coming up? And what's, what's your vision?

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Juan Orrego [00:34:09]:

Yeah, so when we started, it was all about, you know, third party deliveries, but we have started to just from the feedback that we hear, you know, delivery apps are expensive. Restaurants want to use more than just that. And so we have a lot of tools. We kind of have the sort of like, the heart of the overall system, which is, you know, this platform that receives orders, can communicate them over to a POS. The restaurant can manage everything from Cuboh. And so our long term vision is we want to build this sort of like, ordering operating system for restaurants where they can handle everything except for when someone walks out to a cashier. But if a restaurant, sorry, if a customer walks into a restaurant, they don't want to talk to a cashier, whether that's QR ordering or our kiosk or the third party delivery app or through their website. All of that is powered by Cuboh.

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Juan Orrego [00:35:01]:

And we want to start building marketing solutions. Since we have all the customer data in one place, then restaurants can be really effective with it, send really valuable journeys to ensure that restaurants are coming back. And the data is going to be super powerful. That's the goal at least, because restaurants can now see, oh, wow. You know, we had Angelo who ordered through a third party app, but he eventually came through directly and then also then ordered QR code and then came through a kiosk. So he came from DoorDash. But now he's ordered four times in person. And you can continue doing some remarketing because their customer information is now in one place, as opposed to having to use multiple systems to operate all of these different channels.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:47]:

Right. I love it. For everyone listening, check out cuboh.com and its C-U-B-O-H.com. If it makes sense for you, book a demo, see if it fits, and if it'll save you time and money. Once again, I'm here with Juan, the CEO of Cuboh helping restauranters. So Juan, thank you for being on Wisking It All today.

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Juan Orrego [00:36:10]:

No thanks to everyone listening. And thanks to you, Angelo.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:12]:

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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