Vishal Agarwal [00:00:00]:

Every single day, hard work needs consistency and resilience is, "Don't give up." Every failure is followed by success is followed by a failure. Keep your head in a stable place and show up to work with the same energy every single day. That's the value that has been inculcated in me, and I think that's held me in good stead in running and working in this company.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:29]:

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 Vishal Agarwal, founder and CEO of Checkmate. Vishal, thank you for being here with me today.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:00:58]:

Thank you, angelo. Thank you for inviting me.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:01]:

Of course. I mean, as always, we like to start the episode with just telling our viewers that might not know our listeners, that might not know what the company actually does. So can you start by just telling us what is. Checkmate.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:01:13]:

Sure. What we do for a living is, again, we've evolved as a company. The core product that we started out with was integrating third party orders into the POS systems of restaurants. So you have Grubhub, ubereats, DoorDash. And when we started, there was postmates and caviar and multiple other solutions, integrating all of those solutions into the core POS systems of the restaurants. Today we integrate with over 50 different POS systems and over 40 different online ordering platforms. So we've obviously evolved from just the big three delivery platforms, and now we integrate all of the digital channels for a restaurant. Our goal and focus is to help restaurants become digitally omnipresent, and to ensure that they're able to push out the menu, and receive orders from multiple digital channels, and be present where their customers are present.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:13]:

That's awesome. Well, and I'm always curious to understand the story behind it. So what inspired you to kind of create a company that focuses on, you know, digital ordering four restaurants?

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Vishal Agarwal [00:02:24]:

Yeah, I would love to have some inspirational story, but the honest fact is I stumbled upon it. And, Angelo, I don't know. Can I share my screen?

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:35]:

Yeah, you should be able to.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:02:39]:

I have an image that I always keep open because that's how I got my start.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:46]:

I love it.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:02:47]:

This is Angelo. I'm sorry, where are you based out of?

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:52]:

I'm personally Miami, but the company is quite distributed. But we were officially in Toronto, but now the whole team is quite distributed.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:03:00]:

Understood. The reason for asking is I wanted to see how aware you're about New York. So this is taken. This picture is taken in Brooklyn in 2017. The genesis of the company was I wanted to start a company where you could use Vishal.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:17]:

I'm just going to jump in because this goes on YouTube, but it also goes on audio platform, so people who are listening on Spotify or Apple Music. Vishal is currently showing me a picture of a restaurant in Brooklyn with 123-456-7899 tablets opened next to the poS. So sorry, I just wanted to interject to paint the image, but please go on.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:03:37]:

Thank you. Thank you for that context. I started off with the idea of developing a mobile app that you could use to pay and split your check using your phone when you're dining in restaurants, so you don't have to wait for the check or splitting a check. That's where the name checkmate comes from. Obviously, I couldn't afford the domain name checkmate.com dot. I was trying to sell that. It had been about a year, year and a half, you know, and a guy told me, like, listen, you seem like a nice guy. You're selling something that's nice to have.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:04:07]:

But this is the real problem we have. Can you help me solve this? Right. So just being in the restaurant industry, visiting restaurants every day, speaking from speaking with operators, that's literally what got us the start. When you see a problem like this, and, you know, again, for the audio viewers, this is a restaurant where you walk up to the counter and you order your food, and you literally have to tower over these nine tablets to order food. Like, that's a bad experience. I defeated the entire purpose of the structure of that restaurant.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:42]:

Right, right.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:04:44]:

So that's how we got started. Started with SMBs. And even today, we serve the entire spectrum, all the way from a one location mom and pop shop, all the way up to a national brand like Wendy's and Arby's and five guys.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:57]:

So, yeah, I saw that on LinkedIn. You guys work with five guys, among other other national brands. That's pretty impressive, right? From idea to landing those types of.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:05:07]:

Clients, that it is a very, very humbling experience. We were at the five guys headquarters last week doing our business review, and I told them, I don't take this for granted. And I think it's that service oriented approach that we take really resonates well with the larger brands that we work with.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:28]:

That's really cool. And then just to paint the picture, you're there, you're working on your problem. And it's funny, because this is something I hear often with entrepreneurs, including myself. You're trying to solve one problem, and in solving that problem, you realize there's something else that's not a vitamin, but a real pain. And you're like, okay, I want to build this painkiller, not this vitamin. So when you started, let's say, with that client, I'd love to just. And we'll go deeper, but just to understand the backstory. So you see this newer, bigger problem.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:55]:

What does that actually look like? Cause we have a lot of entrepreneurial listeners. I love to hear, like, how did the pivot happen and how did you go about developing and starting and testing to then fast forward now work with Wendy's and RB's, et cetera?

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Vishal Agarwal [00:06:09]:

Yeah, absolutely. And I can promise you my journey is not unique. I'm sure there are millions and millions of founders who have gone through this process. So even if it's not new, when I learned about this problem, I went back, I had a list of 30 or 50 operators, and I emailed them with this picture saying, hey, is this a problem you have? And would you like to have a solution? I think 50% of them responded within 24 hours. Yes. Yes. So then I go back to my ctO, and I said, I'm not an engineer, but I've hired engineers and managed engineering team. I know the problem it solves and how it solves it.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:06:54]:

So I go back to my CTO like, hey, I just sold a solution. Can you help me build it now? That's right. That's how all startups get their chance. But it was, you know, we still remember the very first days, Angelo. It was very, very unnerving because we were processing real customer orders. Like, I live in New York. I order delivery three to five times a week. If I don't get my food, I am pissed.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:07:17]:

Right? So it was very unnerving because, a, we were handling real order transactions, and b, we were affecting the revenue of a real restaurant. So this is not sandbox anymore. This is out into the real world. You're touching live electric wire. I know what I had done at that point is I spent a lot of time physically sitting in that first restaurant, making sure that this works. There is no substitute being hands on, being physically present, understanding the pain points, talking to the operators. Don't talk to the managers who sit in corporate office. This is not their problem.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:07:58]:

This is a problem. This is not their problem. The problem is with this store manager who's actually there, the staff, the person who's hearing. Like, imagine if you. If, like, right now my phone was ringing, right? If I don't either answer or disconnect within 5 seconds, my mind starts to get irritated.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:18]:

Yeah.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:08:19]:

Now multiply that by night while you're also taking a food order, preparing food, and all of these tablets are going off. They are the people that we really wanted to solve this problem for. So spending time in the restaurant, you know, sitting in the dining table, going behind the counter, understanding how the receipts print, understanding like, hey, this order took 10 seconds to inject, versus this took 15 seconds. Do you have a problem? And they're like, no. It takes us two minutes to physically punch it in. So if you can do it faster than two minutes, we're good. So understanding what really matters to them, right. And optimizing for that.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:08:58]:

It was a tremendously fruitful journey. And, you know, it's been seven years now, six plus years doing this. But I still remember that experience. It was so valuable, because even today I can understand Ops. We have a team now that manages this. And I'm not involved, obviously, as much in the day to day, but I feel comfortable and confident that I don't sound like an idiot when I'm talking to my VP of Ops or VP of customer support. They're like, okay, his question is, okay. You know, he's not talking about, no.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:33]:

There'S a lot of value in that. It's funny because I WISK. I was the same way, similar to you in the early days, like boots on the ground going in. We got larger clients that were doing inventory. And I'm like, oh, man, that's a massive wine cellar. Okay, I want to be there. And you start uncovering things that you don't really think of until you're there. And one of the ones that always comes to mind was, we were at this hotel, five star hotel.

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:54]:

We were getting the restaurant of that hotel. Everything's amazing. Okay, let's go count the wine cellar. And I wanted to be there to help them set it up because it was probably early days, so we probably didn't have a. A lot of the wines in our database. So I'm there, and then all of a sudden, we go in the elevator, and we keep going down, and I'm like, oh, no, where is this wine room? And it was like, level eight basement. So the minute we're down there, I'm like, there's no chance there's a router down here, there's no chance there's Internet. So we get in there, and I'm just like, shit.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:21]:

Like, our app doesn't work without Wifi. Like, I didn't. We didn't think of that. It was early days, and even if we did not, like, we would have developed it day one anyways. But anyways, long story short, I just kind of manually started taking pictures and writing it in, like, my notes app. Like, okay, they have six of these and five of these. And, you know, weeks later, we eventually developed it. And so many of, like, the good ideas that our clients now appreciate.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:43]:

I always say, it's not. Not this, like, genius behind the scene. It's really just being on the ground and be like, okay, this is clearly a problem. Let's see if we can solve it. And so I totally resonate with being there.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:10:55]:

Yeah, that's what we always talk about, even with our vp of product. And, like, listen, let's talk to customers. Let's not be nerds sitting behind computers solving problems that don't exist.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:08]:

Exactly.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:11:09]:

Talk to customers, because what you think is a cool idea may be very different from what is a relevant idea. Is it really solving problems? Right. And that's where a lot of our efforts and resources go, is it doesn't have to be cool. It has to solve a problem, because this is a restaurant industry. They're literally playing with fire every single day. So, you know.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:33]:

Yeah, no, I love that. And I know. And correct me wrong, but I believe you're currently working with over 23,000 restaurant locations. So I love to know. Yeah, yeah, sorry. That's correct.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:11:48]:

We are now up to 27,000. We have to update.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:51]:

Oh, wow.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:11:51]:

Yes.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:52]:

Okay. So update that stat, and I'll update that here. 27,000 locations? That's insane. So, first of all, congrats, because that's from one location at 27,000. That's no easy feat. But one of the things I love to share is maybe any kind of success stories. I'm sure there's a ton, because you have 27,000 customers. But any of that kind of stand out the same way? You know, I remember that client with the wine inventory.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:12]:

Is there any clients that you can share, maybe a success story that might resonate with the audience?

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Vishal Agarwal [00:12:17]:

Yeah, you know, the first largest client we had was five guys. Then the next one was Arby's. Right. Then obviously, within these five grants, we had others, which we really value. And onto Wendy's. And we've recently won another large account that we'll be talking about shortly. I think the one consistent theme that I've always gone back to is put your money where your mouth is. If you're really saying yours is the best solution, do you have it built into your business model to provide a free trial, a risk free trial to the client? Don't spend that time in doing sales decks and massive marketing campaigns and flying your salespeople out, sending bottles of wine to get their attention.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:13:09]:

Once you have their attention, what is it that you can really, really deploy on the ground level in the stores? Does it work? Can you back it up with the right service and be bold enough to tell whether it's a single location client or a 6000 location client? I will do this for you for free for 510 20 location for a couple of months. You tell me if it works for you or not. So I think that's the one most important. And, you know, I guess we've been guilty of that as well in the past. But we, as generically SaaS providers, we are so quick to cater to our investors or to cater to, I don't know, a balance sheet, like cater to your customers first, right? The rest will follow. So don't try and jump into like, hey, we need, we need to sign a three year contract because, well, that's what the Wall street wants. Can you really support a month to month contract with these customers? Right, because you'd have to win them over every single month. And that means that's the message that you have to resonate across the board in your organization saying every single one of you is responsible for customer retention.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:14:20]:

So I think that's my biggest. That's been the pillar of every single large client we want. With every one of those that I mentioned, we've gone in with like, hey, you know, thank you for connecting with us. Either we got referred through a partner or they heard about us or we were persistent enough they gave us a shot in that trial period, in that ops. You know, don't tell them to sign a 20 page contract because then the legal fee is more than your bill. And don't go in straight with like, hey, you need to give me $10,000 first and then you need to sign a three year. Can you deploy at your locations first? Can you give them the service? Can you back up what you're saying like, hey, you're the best solution? Sure. Can you show it to me? Yeah, I mean, it's easy for us to say because we are SaaS and we have no hardware yet.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:15:12]:

We will be launching our first hardware solution in Q two in the form of a kiosk. So we'll see how far this theory goes. But up until now, that's been our number one source of how we've been able to win big accounts.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:25]:

That's amazing. And I think there's great advice in that of, like, you know, actions speak louder than words, right? So getting your product in their hands, them seeing it for themselves, there's no bigger testimonial than just the raw, the raw data and what's actually happening. So just. Just imagine, like, I know you have countless pilots that you did like this, but in general, what would the process look like? You know, chitchat with the client. Eventually you'd convince them or encourage them, hey, no risk. Let's try this in a subset of, you know, all your restaurants. And then what would a typical output look like? They would try it. And what type of results would they see before saying, oh, this is awesome, I want to now roll out? So, you know, across the nation, I.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:16:08]:

Mean, that's exactly right. They would give us a subset of locations, and they will say, hey, we'll connect you to our lab. First, let's pull the lab menu. Let's inject some test orders, build out the menu. Again, this goes back to a lot with, we've been working very hard with this mindset that we are not a technology company. We are a technology enabled company. We don't provide technology. We provide solutions, and technology is a big part of that solution.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:16:37]:

But technology by itself is not the entire solution. It's technology backed by service that gives you the superlative solution that solves your problem. So when we are connecting, you know, the third party menus or the digital menus of the brands with their Pos systems, we are not just saying, let's see what you have and connect that we're saying, can we also look at your menu? Maybe your menu is not set up right. Can we help optimize it? That's the level that we started. Even during free pilots? Even during free pilots. We say, can we start with looking at a menu very honestly, it's quite rubbish. You know, we have some best practices. Let's optimize.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:17:16]:

That's the level we start at. We connect with their pos. We do trial runs. We set up the menu on Uber eats, doordash, or their choice of their digital platform.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:27]:

Yeah.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:17:27]:

And, you know, it may seem like, okay, once you've done the connection, then what is there to it? But I can promise you, like, two thirds of the problem with the large brand is solved by technology. One third is super customized to what they need. So really honing in on their requirements. When do you want the orders to fire? How do you want the kitchen receipts to look? Hey, can we trial this location here with this kind of test market? Or can we shuffle the menu for this particular set of locations? Because we're doing an extra promo? The extent of service, like, to me, it's two thirds, one third, two thirds technology, one third service based, because that's what the enterprise clients need. You know, that's what your rbs and your five guys in, you know, your white castles like. They require that level of customized solution because this is an ever growing part of their business.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:15]:

That makes a ton of sense.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:18:17]:

Digital is not a stepchild anymore. It's a core part of. That's the level we start at, and then we go into their real locations, launch with 1510 locations, prove it out, and then scale. But just last week, we rolled out, like, 1800 locations for a client. It may seem like, oh, we did 1800 in three weeks, but it took three months of solid prep work before that. Or even more.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:41]:

Actually, even more. Yeah, that's amazing. It's amazing to hear, and I know that it's a check made. And again, maybe these numbers are slightly higher now, but from what I read, integrates with over 50 PoS systems and 100 ordering platforms. So how do you manage to keep everything running smoothly, you know, at risk? We integrate with about the same, I think, 55, 60 ish POS system. So I know it's not easy. I can't even imagine adding 100 ordering platforms on top of the POS system systems we already integrate with. So how do you do it, and how do you keep everything running smoothly?

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Vishal Agarwal [00:19:12]:

It's a business, right. We follow the same fundamental principles. One thing that I really like about us and as a top management team is we're always looking to learn, we're always looking to grow. We're always saying, hey, what can we do better? So we try to follow good business, good, solid, fundamental business practices. Right? I know it sounds a lot like 50 PoS systems, 100 auditing platforms, but that's what we do for a living, right? So you have to do it well. It's not like you have other options. I think the two pillars of what. What I would say we've built, number one, is people.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:19:52]:

Nothing happens without the right team. So the team is absolutely fantastic. They understand what they're signing up for, and then they commit, and they do a great job with it. The second pillar I would say is documentation, again, massive focus throughout the organization. Like, we built an entire team around documentation now to say, hey, I don't even want to do the permutation in combination of the number of settings you could have with 50 PoS systems and 100 auditing platforms. Right, right. The only way to manage backed by technology, again, is solid documentation. Again, because we are so heavily service oriented, this documentation is easily public facing as well.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:20:31]:

But when customers who are literally like, it's a five location client dealing with a massive meltdown in their restaurant, we're not going to go tell them to read documentation to figure out how to turn platform changes, prep time. They can simply shoot us a text, shoot us an email, we'll take care of it for them. Documentation and training and obviously just building a right team.

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:53]:

I love that. And then I know one of the things that you mentioned, or you guys mentioned on your website at least, is that you help restaurants manage and protect the revenue. So I'd love to know, like, in practice, can you give some examples? Like, obviously we're talking about the chaos and simplifying from nine getting everything into one, but I'd love to get a bit deeper. How do you help them manage and protect the revenue?

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Vishal Agarwal [00:21:14]:

Yes, absolutely. The three key, you know, tenants, and this is more of an internal speak, is, you know, power manageable. So we have.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:23]:

Say that again, power.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:21:24]:

Power. Manage and evolve. Right? Power is we help you be present in all of these digital platforms. We help integrate those directly to POS system. But, you know, let's say you own a buffalo wild wing store, right? And one day you wake up in the morning and you forget to open that store. Right. You just forget to open that store. What happens? Zero revenue.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:21:47]:

Right. But you won't forget to open that store because. Why? It's a physical store. You can see it. It's part of a routine. You will, you will know. Yeah, but if you forget to switch on your online ordering platform, your first party, your uber and your doordash and your grubhub and your waiters and the others you want to know, you will just forget because you will get on with your day. So this is, again, a very specific example how we are taking like, real world examples and trying to devise solutions to operators who manage locations at like 50 locations, 100, 500 locations.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:22:25]:

We are developing alerting systems, dashboards, high-level dashboards for truly enterprise clients to help manage their operations better. We've just rolled out and it's still in beta, but they rolled out a real-time dashboard to show across your entire ecosystem. Let's say you are a Buffalo Wild Wings franchisee or a sonic franchisee that manages 100 locations. How do you know that your digital operations are going well?

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Angelo Esposito [00:22:51]:

Good question.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:22:52]:

You've rolled out a real time dashboard that shows what's the injection rate, what's the uptime, downtime by POS, by location. And now we're evolving this to say, how is your cancellation rate, how is your driver wait time, how is your refund percentage? What is your customer approval rating look like across platforms? So, giving you a single unified place, collating information from various sources. So you look at it and you say, these three stores are out of whack. I need to go fix it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:23]:

Yeah, that's massive.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:23:25]:

But also, we'll be thinking about, okay, this is a UI based solution, right? There's a user interface. There's a web based solution. We are working on a mobile app for restaurant operators. But how do you make it UI less so you don't need a user interface. Right? Like, hey, if I'm the manager of 30 stores and my biggest selling item is this particular cheeseburger, so anytime a store manager who manages one store marks this cheeseburger as out of stock, and if it's out of stock for more than 3 hours, I want to know, can you send me a text alert on this? That's my highest selling item. I know. We never run out of stock. How the hell is this out of stock for 3 hours or three days, depending on your level, you know.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:13]:

Right.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:24:14]:

Trying to give very specific examples on how we are helping them manage their digital operations. Right. Similarly, you can extrapolate it to say, if any of my stores are marked as offline, on Doordash, and Uber eats for more than a day, I want to know, and I want to know about this every single day until the cows come home. Right. So you can set up alerts and reportings and email alerts and text alerts so that you are constantly notified, so you're managing what we call management by exception. I have set up a monitoring system. Just tell me what's not working well. And this is resulted.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:24:51]:

This has resulted in operators recuperating a lot of revenue that would otherwise have been lost.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:57]:

Wow, that's huge. And it's funny because we talk about that internally as well. Like, the idea of how do we surface the data they need, right? Because, like, restaurants have so much going on, they got a million and one things, and it's just, yeah, you can give them a ton of data, but how do you give them what they need versus just like, here's a million KPI's versus, hey, here's something you should probably know. You're running out of this or, you know, this store is not doing well or sales of dip to you. Like, how do you surface that? So that's, that's super interesting and definitely answers my question of how you're, you're concretely helping restaurants, you know, save, save that revenue. And I know one of the things is also customer satisfaction. It's a big deal for any business, obviously, but I know it's something that you guys touch upon too. So maybe just to quickly get a sense for our listeners, how does Checkmate help improve maybe that side of things that the customer satisfaction side.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:25:55]:

The end user, the actual dinos, how do we improve their satisfaction? The thing about us. So we have recently launched our own first party solution. We acquired a company exactly a year ago.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:08]:

Oh, wow.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:26:08]:

And you know, that's where we've become now. A b, two b, two c company.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:14]:

Right.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:26:14]:

Earlier we were just b, two b. Right. So the end diners never even really knew that their orders were hitting our system. Right. But again, I think One of the fundamental ways in which we help the experience of the end user, as well as of that of the restaurant, is by optimizing the menu. We have a specialist team that looks at the menu, whip up various versions, and we are releasing a new product called DSOT - Digital Source of Truth that is a truly enterprise menu management solution.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:26:52]:

We are releasing it in Q two.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:55]:

Wow.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:26:55]:

Wow. I'm telling you, I'm just realizing what a heavy product release quarter Q two is becoming. It will help you in an automated way, a b test your menus. So I come from an e commerce retail background, and if you go to any good e commerce retail website, they will customize the website as per your preferences. The entire layout will look different. Right. For a restaurant, we've been stuck in this age where everybody gets the same menu in that same order with the same details.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:25]:

Right?

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Vishal Agarwal [00:27:26]:

Why, like, if you have a new NPU that you've launched, everyone sees the same picture and the same description. Why can't we? A b test, right? Right. Spread it across. Let it. Let three versions run. Let the best man or woman win.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:41]:

Yeah.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:27:42]:

And let that run across the larger spectrum.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:45]:

So speaking of the digital source of truth, what's super interesting is it's. And you kind of alluded to it, but it's so common in like, the regular digital world. Like e commerce or just websites. Right? Like it's, let's a b test these titles or let's try two different call to actions and see which one performs. But the idea that you guys will be bringing that to the restaurant world into menus, I think is massive because it's, who knows, right? How much can a description help, right? How much can a picture help? And like, the answer is probably a lot. That's why there's teams that, you know, there's companies that all they do is data science around menu engineering and, you know, there's science behind the cheesecake factories, you know, 20 page menu and pictures and whatnot. So there's a lot of complexity that I don't think the average person thinks about. But it's really cool that you're going to be able to offer this way of giving people that same experience they would with a website.

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:35]:

But down to the menu level.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:28:38]:

Down to the menu level. Should you have 20 modifiers or three modifiers? Which one converts better? Simple things like this. We absolutely have to be able to test it out and not just rely on someone person's gut there. Right?

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Angelo Esposito [00:28:52]:

That's huge. That's huge. And look, obviously you guys have built an impressive global presence, so kudos. 27,000 customers and growing. What's one piece of advice you'd give to entrepreneurs looking to grow their business?

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Vishal Agarwal [00:29:06]:

I don't think so. I'm as wise enough to be able to give advice. I mean, it's not related to being an entrepreneur or founder or having a company or not having a company first. Huge kudos to everyone who tries to start their company. It doesn't matter if it works or not. It takes a huge amount of effort and guts to do that. I think it's just a personal value is just hard work and resilience, like every single day. Hard work means consistency, and resilience is don't give up.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:29:40]:

Every failure is followed by success is followed by a failure. And keep your head in a stable place and show up to work with the same energy every single day. That's the values that have been inculcated in me and I think that's held me in good stead and running and working in this company.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:00]:

Yeah, no, it makes sense. People see the overnight success. They don't see the six, seven, eight years before that. So I totally relate to that. So, so, well said. And then last but not least, just I always like to kind of just talk about the future of hospitality and restaurant tech in general. Where do you see restaurant tech evolving? In the next few years, for us.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:30:24]:

The focus is to become the center of a restaurant's digital ordering business. So something that we touched upon earlier is we want to help power all of your digital channels, but not just that, we help you manage them. In addition to managing, you want to help you evolve. So now that you have three and you can manage them well, why don't you add another three and see how that goes? Interesting, because then you'll not be flying blind. You'll have complete dashboard control over what you're doing. Where I see this space going, you know, everybody talks in very generic terms, like, oh, there's going to be consolidation, right. It's really funny to me. It's like saying, you know, the sun will rise.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:31:07]:

I'm like, I'm sorry, you're not a genius for saying, but if you can tell me exactly when the sun will rise down to the last minute, then you're a genius, right. Without using your gadgets. Where I think the restaurant space is evolving is there is going to be consolidation and there is this talk about, you know, enterprise customers are tired of having multiple solution providers and they want just one tech stack and they want one place to control it all or one throw to choke. I'm a big believer in the space between zero and one, which is a million possibilities. Zero means everything is provided by one big company. One means you have 20. You have to stitch together 20 different solution providers to get one answer. I think the answer will stabilize somewhere in between where you won't have 20.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:32:00]:

But could you have two or three different solution providers combined to provide you one solution so that now think about it like from a service solution provider. I would love to be that company, right. One solution provider, the Omnigod and everything. But if you think about it from an operator's perspective, like a CTO or CIO, why would they put their, all of their eggs in one basket? Then they would have no leverage over pricing, over feature sets, over product roadmap. So they want to keep it distributed, but they don't want to keep it too distributed.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:37]:

Right.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:32:37]:

So I think it's going to shake out somewhere in between in terms of the value an operator expects visa vis the value distribution providers can provide.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:49]:

That makes a ton of sense. And I got one last question for you, and then I'd love for you to, you know, plug. I was like, ending off with where people can finance the checkmate, you know, any, any, anywhere you guys are on social, et cetera, et cetera. But the last question I want to ask and it comes to mind just because you deal so much with, you know, online orders and that type of stuff. I'm just curious to get your opinion. Doesn't have to be the company's opinion, but what's your opinion with downtown cores getting back to where they were, you know, pre COVID? So it was something I was talking about recently with a buddy of mine and we're just talking about how a lot of restaurants that are in downtown Coors, you know, during relied a lot on office culture and whatnot. But with a lot of these offices not going back, a lot of the deliveries is happening more in the suburbs and stuff. And obviously the downtown core that live there maybe will use the deliveries.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:39]:

But I'm curious to get your perspective. Do you ever think these downtown cores are going to go back to where they were? I'm just curious to get your perspective on that.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:33:47]:

We've always been a remote company. We started off as remote back in 2016, so we didn't go remote because of COVID I think it was my personal belief that let's hire the best talent wherever they are. Why be restricted to a single city?

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:02]:

Yeah, I love that.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:34:04]:

I'm not a fan of getting an office space in Manhattan.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:08]:

A lot of overhead. Yeah.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:34:09]:

Again, because I'm a big believer in remote and have been since day one. Before the COVID hit, before the pandemic hit. I truly think remote work is here to stay. Right. But I also recognize that there are some companies where they're like, no, remote work won't work because employees are frankly skipping work. They're not being as productive. So we're going to call them back. Calling employees back to work is basically a form of better monitoring.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:34:39]:

Right. Like, so I can have a better oversight on you. So I do think it's going to come back some. Like if it went from 100 to zero, it will come back. I don't think so. It will come back to the same hundred level because now employees recognize the value of remote. And very frankly, we get some amazing resumes and people reaching out to us saying, hey, we'd love to work because our companies are asking us to come back full time and we like remote and we've gotten to the rhythm and we now have a good balance in life and this is what we know better now.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:10]:

Yeah.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:35:10]:

So I don't think so it will go back to where it was, but I do think it will not be at the crashed level that it was during COVID or where people thought, oh, the office culture is dead. I don't think so. That's happening.

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Angelo Esposito [00:35:24]:

Yeah, that makes sense.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:35:26]:

Having said that, again, restaurants, they will continue, especially in the downtown core. They will continue to serve their core constituents. If you talk about the financial restriction in Manhattan, there is never a dearth of tourists, COVID or no COVID. And then again, a lot of volume being picked up by delivery. A lot of volumes, because people still love these restaurants. And you cannot deliver, like, a mile, two months. I don't even know how big an island Manhattan is. But, you know, you can get.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:36:01]:

I can get food delivered from downtown now. Right? So I don't. Again, it's about the overall business of the restaurants, which I think is going to be pretty consistent.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:11]:

That makes sense. It's funny what you said about being remote first. Like, we're big believers in that, too. And the analogy I always joke around about is, like, it's like finding, you know, it's like dating, you know, if you didn't have to be in person. But what are the chances you'll find a perfect match in a radius of, you know, 1 mile versus the whole world? And the bigger the pool, like, you'll find. You'll find that match. But what the negative part was, like, post COVID, when everyone started working remotely, it was one of our, like, competitive advantages. So we were able to get, like, really good talent that maybe didn't want to go to a more corporate job because we offered that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:44]:

And then it was like, damn it. Now everyone. Now everyone's offering this. So I'm happy to see some people are for, like you said, forcing back to office culture, because it'll give us that competitive edge.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:36:54]:

I did not know even WISK did remote first.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:00]:

Yeah, yeah. We're big believers. At one point, we had, like, a small office in Toronto, but since the beginning, like, a lot of the team, especially the product side, was. Was fully remote, like, talking from South America to Europe, to us, Canada. So really kind of just, if there's good talent, we're hiring. Doesn't matter where you live, you know, that's awesome. Well, just to wrap things off, Vishal, this is great. Like, congrats on all the success for people listening.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:29]:

We have a lot of restaurant listeners, a lot of entrepreneur listeners. Where can they find you? Where can they find. Checkmate. And, like, any plugs you want to make, this is your chance. We'll be sharing this. We'll also publish this in our newsletter as well, on our website, on YouTube, on Spotify, you name it. So anything you want to plug. I'm happy to, like, have our team add in the description as well.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:37:49]:

Oh, thank you. I mean, if you want to reach out, explore our solution, you know, itsacheckmate.com is a great starting place. I'm always accessible at Vishal, at the checkmate, my LinkedIn profile. Feel free to reach out, connect DM. Always happy to have a conversation. Yeah, that's it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:09]:

That's awesome. Well, you heard it here first with Vishal Agarwal from Checkmate, so you guys can check them out. It was a pleasure having you on the show today, Vishal. Thank you for being here.

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Vishal Agarwal [00:38:20]:

Absolutely. Really appreciate it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:22]:

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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