2025-04-04--t02-14-56pm--guest518507--deepti
===

Deepti: [00:00:00] it led me to a realization that we caught an elephant. Now how do we feed this particular elephant? How do we change our company strategy, our company mission to.

Align with what these big brands need, or should we stay true to ourselves and really focus on the company's mission and what its vision was it's very hard to say no to that kind of revenue. but it, ultimately led to a supercharge growth, 

Jeff: welcome to Launch Pod, the show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today we're talking with Deep De Manata, VP of Product at Hunger Rush, an all-in-one POS system for restaurants. In this episode, deep de talks about why Sometimes you just have to make the pizza, meaning experience the day-to-day problems of your users, not just your buyers, 

getting her biggest UX wins from fixing the paper cuts that users run into all the time, and how to say, not yet to the allure of going up market to enterprise too soon, because as she says, once you catch that elephant, you gotta feed that elephant.

So here's our episode with Deep de Manata. 

Deep, deep. How you [00:01:00] doing? It's great to have you on today. Thank you so much for coming on.

Deepti: Thank you, Jeff. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited to be here.

Jeff: Yeah, this would be, we have some cool stuff to talk about because I think you've had great experience in the QSR, quick serve restaurant kind of hospitality world, or just the hospitality world in general, right? , you started on consulting, but. Quickly went into product at Hyatt Groupon, which I think we all, recall that fastest end of that company and then spot on.

And now you're at Hunger Rush and those past two companies, you've been VP of product. Lots of cool stories to go through and we can really dig into some kind of tactical stuff that worked. So let's just dive in 'cause you're at Hunger Rush now. Do you wanna just give a super fast overview of what y'all do over at Hunger Rush there?

Deepti: At Hunger Rush, we provide technology for mid to large scale. Pizza slash other parts and domains of a restaurant. We do everything from point of sale, online ordering, marketing solutions. All in all we like to call ourselves the partner of [00:02:00] our restaurants that we serve because it's not just about technology, but other areas and aspects of restaurants that we help them with as well.

Jeff: So one thing I wanna just. Double click on is, we talked a little bit earlier and one of the big things you have gone through that kind of drove really strong understanding and enabled you and the team to build several things that have really helped improve the lives of not just, the people at the top of, your actual.

Buyers who are looking to, obviously make a return on their investment in technology, but also down to the bottom of the people actually working on the front lines is this idea of your team just has to make the pizza sometimes. So what does that mean actually? 'cause I think you can probably tell it better than me.

Yeah.

Deepti: I love telling the story because a lot of product people out there, understand what we are doing with our product and how we are doing that thing, right? Or that problem solving that particular problem. But not a lot of people understand why, and that why comes [00:03:00] from, not being in your customer's shoes.

So one thing that we've really done well here at Tunga Rush is we've ingrained it in every single product person, is to go live a life of your customer. That means we go on site at the customer. Sometimes we try to do double shifts at the customer. We try and learn how a pizza is made as a new employee run a drive through window just to understand, what challenges they face when interacting.

In with the technology and day-to-day basis because you have a lot more empathy and a much deeper level of understanding when you actually play that role. You don't really get that same sense when you're just sitting in your office and somebody just calls you from customer support and be like, this person is facing this challenge.

It just doesn't drive that level of emotion. When you are actually on site, you see it so clearly, you feel it so clearly that you'll react to that problem in a very different way. So I'm really proud of what [00:04:00] you know we've done from that. Aspect of things here within the hunger rush culture.

We make it a point that we are visiting many clients of every quarter and like I said, even make the pizza with them, which is a really fun activity. 

Jeff: I love that it's not just. Make the pizza, it's actually go in and like you said, work the double understand 'cause , I spent multiple summers when I was younger working at McDonald's. So it's not pizza, but, same, QSR kind of industry.

Until I worked there, I was really probably underestimated the complexity of. It is a haring environment like they are. Everything's metriced and you are looking at speed and you need to put the burgers down, maybe if you're on the grill and go cook other things.

Potentially run over the drive through and take orders and I was just shocked at, I. The capabilities of some of the people I worked with who held five orders that were all like, had customizations on them in their head at once while taking orders or people, I worked, people who had [00:05:00] three different conversations on the radio, like they would talk to the person at the window, they would talk to the person on the radio who was ordering and they would talk to internal people concurrently, like three conversations.

And , they would do it seamlessly. And I tried to do this. Just was completely lost. It is a way more wild environment than people think, I think, at times. So it's so cool to see that, your focus on understanding isn't just, oh, let's go make the pizza, or let's talk to users. It's let's go work the double.

Let's go see how this actually works. And I think there's, some cool deeper dive stuff here. But yeah, if we can go a little bit deeper than that, like what did that experience look like? You actually worked a drive through, right? And you went in and the team went in and did some of the stuff.

What are some of the situations, that kind of came up as you went through this that you realized could be addressed?

Deepti: it was, you know, fun, challenging. At the same time. I could tell you this, that, one of our clients was very kind enough to give us a platform to actually experience that double shift, I would say to

Jeff: That is a big deal to them. 'cause that if you throw someone there who doesn't know what they're doing, that could be [00:06:00] tough.

Deepti: Exactly. And my learning from it was multifold, including we should all buy really and invest in really good shoes because I couldn't on that after that double shift. But interesting enough, right? I was trying to run through a very high traffic period on the drive through window.

I was trying to hold the window at the same time, work on the point of sale, to place an order and also try to make edits to an order at the same time. And like you mentioned before it's not for everyone. It's like there's so many things that are happening. There are customers waiting impatiently at times.

There was a mom that came through the drive through window who had placed an order in advance, had. Three screaming children at the back coming off of a soccer game. And she's trying to tell me at the same time that she wanted to edit her order and add a couple of sodas in there on the order as well.

And, I panicked. I really did panic and it was like, [00:07:00] how am I gonna do that? And that's when I realized one of the things that we call as as paper cuts here at Tage, which are like smaller changes in efficiencies that we can build within the system is how to make that edit of an order into one simple click.

Instead of me trying to find that order and going through multi folds of it. The other interesting one was that I don't forget is , I was talking to a customer on a drive through and the phone rings on the side. I pick up the phone and , this person on the other hand had placed a large catering order, which was supposed to go out in an hour or so.

And so the team in the kitchen was already building that particular order, and this person wanted to make edits to that order and be like, can you add two more cheese pizza or can you change that pepperoni pizza to maybe a half and half pizza? , and again technology plays such a key role onto that because it can, you can make those edits with our platform now and it puts like real time changes into the kitchen without really [00:08:00] disrupting the entire flow of me telling the customer in the window to hold on and then walking to the kitchen and then doesn't realize which make line things are being made out of.

So those things, really made an impact because when I came and talked to the team about why something is important, I didn't just have the number of clicks as a metric. I also had the emotion that came with it to translate. Which is really important. When you are the voice of the customer is to able to translate that to everybody in your organization and see the.

As an operator, I felt frustrated. I felt overwhelmed. And by reducing these number of clicks to just a single step process, not only have you achieved that analytical metric, but you've now achieved what we call as a happy customer , and a happy operator, right? Which translates in so many different levels.

Jeff: It's an interesting problem, right? Because looking at it, [00:09:00] one, I love that you got down to the user level because at heart those aren't your customers. Those are the users, but they're not the ones buying the software, but. The value to your customer is reliant on them being efficient, right?

If you look at, in that industry, headcount, cost and personnel cost is a huge part of your cost of doing business. Making them more efficient is vital your actual economic buyer. That said that you can't just talk to, whoever the tech lead is for the franchise company you're working with, because hopefully they have done a little of this, but likelihood is they're not as emotionally tied to going in and seeing it day to day. What was the process or the thought behind like, let's actually push past just who our economic buyers and let's get down to the nitty gritty.

How did that kind of evolve into such an intrinsic part of hunger rush?

Deepti: Yeah that's such an interesting question. And you're right. , the kind of buyer that we talk to, there are three levels to it. There is corporate and then there's a franchisee owner, and then there's the actual operator, or a restaurant operator, or [00:10:00] restaurant manager, as you call it.

What we very early realized is the decision maker on. . Purchasing of the software generally shifts between the corporate themselves as well as the corporate and the franchisee owner. But the actual user of the software is it could be anywhere from a 20-year-old kid running the front, like the ride through window to somebody who had been in the industry for a very long time, and.

Started the business from pen and paper and now has evolved into using technology to really understand the pain point at the all three levels. You have to interact with all three levels and like I said it's just. Made massive changes for customer empathy and also act as a connection point between corporate and the operator, right?

This is what we are hearing from your operator. I think you should invest in it so we can come more from a consulting angle for these corporates as well.

Jeff: Yeah. And this [00:11:00] idea of fixing paper cuts I think is a really powerful one that people don't pay enough attention to. Everyone wants to look for, what's the big win? What's the big, 20% increase thing we can do. But oftentimes there's a lot of situations where. The best way to do, that kind of gain is not one big solve, but it's like you guys kinda discovered what are all these little paper cuts throughout this 12 hour double that, is annoying to this, end user operator, but adds up to massive inefficiencies when you cascaded across all the employees and all the time worked across all these, franchises and stores.

Was that something you went into it thinking was gonna be an approach, let's look for all these little things and compound solutions, or was that something that kind of came out of doing this and realizing on the ground, this is the problem? It's not one big, it's many littles.

Deepti: Yeah, so it, it was actually the latter. We went in trying to, like any other company out there trying to create relationship with our [00:12:00] customer, but we realized how these smaller inefficiencies can lead to so much pain point, right? Some of these shifts end at 2:00 AM in the morning and imagine you're doing going through a massive close day process at 2:00 AM and things don't work.

You are not in any shape or form in capacity to call customer support and be with them for one hour to figure out what the challenge there is, right? You want those things to seamlessly work for you. You're exhausted, you're tired, you wanna go home to your families, right? As, as a restaurant operator, and you don't realize all those things again by sitting in your office.

You really have to walk the walk to talk the talk, right?

Jeff: It's also important, right? 'cause having, obviously now I'm. I come from a bit of a more understanding of where some of the senior folks are coming from, but 20 some odd years ago when I was working the drive through and the grill and the cash register and everything like that, a lot of those cases, it's not even just, you'll sit there and troubleshoot it and you feel [00:13:00] tired.

If you're the, teenage kid who is working those things and you're doing closing, a lot of times there might not be a manager there, or there might be some like secondary manager on closing at 2:00 AM and the solution might just be. We're going home and morning can deal with this.

And that's terrible. 'cause then a the next day, operations are messed up. People are, your next shift is pissed. Or things are broken the next day. And just as an executive operator, someone you know who's responsible for running the business. You are starting to really see impact to a lot of things. 

It's a collection of all these little paper cuts that, you can come to and can have huge business outcomes, which is great because, probably no way you all would've seen that had you not dove in and understood.

Jeff: There's huge value just understanding you, your users are doing and how they're using a product on a day to day. That's actually a big part of, how we operate and the point of. What we do here at Log Rocket is also showing that granular, you can see every experience, you can understand.

What your user's doing. And the big move we've made, recently is not, [00:14:00] we can't go in and sit in the pizza restaurant with with the operators, but we can, we've used AI to understand a lot better visually how people are operating. You're on an e-commerce site and you're moving and you see your users.

How are they actually experiencing that? And giving you that insight into that is a huge part of that. So just generally more granularly, how can you understand users and then. that up in a smart way, 

so great to see, this kind of depth of understanding that really drove rush to be such a good product there. Let's take maybe a step. Back in time kinda look at a different concept, which you've brought up when we talked earlier, which is, company wants that suite, suite enterprise revenue, right?

You get the big customers and you get the massive, seven figure eight figure deals. But you put it so succinctly when we talked earlier, this idea of. you catch the elephant, you have to feed the elephant. And not every company is set up to do that. So maybe before we dive into the endo, could you just give [00:15:00] the kind of overview what do you mean by that?

Deepti: Yeah. Very interestingly in a previous organization that I worked . We were provided with this opportunity where we had the opportunity to acquire another organization, which was serving some really big brand names. It was very enticing for us, not just from brand perspective, but also what they were bringing to add to the technology that already existed within that organization.

Everything was great. We went through the acquisition and. Very shortly after that, we realized that, how demanding this big brands can become. We realized how much customization we would have to do to our platform in order to meet their needs both from scale perspective, but also they had these unique customer journeys which were not translatable to some of the other customers that smaller mom and pops that we were trying to serve at that point of time.

And the gap was huge. We were putting in a lot more resources than we had originally [00:16:00] anticipated to meet their demands. And it led me to a realization that it is, to your point, we caught an elephant. Now how do we feed this particular elephant? How do we change our company strategy, our company mission to.

Align with what these big brands need, or should we stay true to ourselves and really focus on the company's mission and what its vision was when we were working through this acquisition and in the end what we realized was, we were really passionate about the small to midsize businesses, which was driving the growth of the US economy at that particular time and still do.

And, we felt what we did at that time was we parted ways by actually selling part of that business to another organization which was more in line with those brands and still kept the technological aspect of it and built upon the technology to better serve our current segment, right?

Which was like I said, small to midsize businesses. And I think it was [00:17:00] very difficult choice in that particular moment. A lot of people it's very hard to say no to that kind of a revenue. And but it ultimately led to a supercharge growth, right? That we were looking right from the start for the organization.

People felt more connected to the mission, people working for that particular organization and, all in all, it was a really good turnaround story, but like I said, , it also talks a little bit about how in tune you need to be into what customer segment as a product. You are catering too, because if you move too much away from it, you are thinking resources that for a small to mid-size organization, that's a lot of resources, right?

And then you. Somewhat become a custom shop for these bigger brands. Rather than focusing on your own growth and focusing on what you know your mission was. As I said before.

Jeff: What is the risk of to all these demands for custom work? One side would say if one big [00:18:00] company like that's asking for their pride, demand for those kind of things elsewhere 

what are you losing by focusing on serving some of these big elephants? At this point Mm-hmm.

Deepti: Level brand, right? The gap between their needs is huge.

Just let's take reporting as an example. A reporting for a mom and pop could be, can you just tell me what sold today? Can you tell me? Where should this recipe that I am creating in my mom and pop store is gonna be successful based on the cost of goods versus what I'm selling it for at the enterprise level.

While those needs remain, they have a very different need in terms of. I want to know exactly which location is doing what in terms of [00:19:00] sales, where is it coming from where is it coming from? Direct sales versus indirect sales, which still could be to a very very simplified way, a need for.

For an SMB, but it's just not their first focus, right? So again some of those things can be built over a period of time at a scale that can work. Like when you work with an enterprise like that, you're working with large amount volumes of data. So a focus on scale itself is really huge.

And sometimes you don't have the resources to do that.

Jeff: So if the idea behind this is if you are spending time solving those problems for a few giant companies Sure. You'll bring on. really large deals and it will ensure that retain or maybe acquire one or two large deals. But because the needs are so different than the high volume of kind of much smaller operators, the risk is sure, you bring on one or two very large customers but the cost is you might not.

As quickly grow in the mid-market segment, which you guys [00:20:00] were focused on. And so you could be losing hundreds of customers there. And it's a very different, revenue concentration story and growth story and just maybe Tam story where if there is, tens of thousands of potential customers at that mid-market and a couple at the enterprise.

Sure. It's great. You juice your growth numbers for the year, but what is the cost of several years potentially, or what's the cost of serving your core constituency long term? Is that kinda the idea?

Deepti: That is exactly what it is. And in, in a lot of ways, this example actually taught me is when you focus solely on your enterprise clients, because of the resources and the constraint and resources, you start ignoring a large portion of your existing customer base because they're much smaller and as they say, a squeaky wheel gets the grease.

And the enterprises are definitely squeaker, right? Like it.

Jeff: And they know how to be squeaky.

Deepti: Yeah. And so the things that we talked about earlier, like the paper cuts, et cetera, those kind of initiatives would never float because they didn't [00:21:00] map to what the larger enterprises were looking for in terms of their roadmap, right? So it's almost a choice between a custom dev shop versus growth within the TAM that you have identified that you could be good at.

Jeff: Generally looking at this kind of situation, right? There's kind of two decisions to make. One is, you've acquired this company, it gives you inroads into these much larger enterprise companies potentially.

so one path is. were this thing that focused on mid-market. Now we are going to strategically change and go up market because we see that there. The other is we're going to continue to focus on this mid-market 'cause we think that's the longer term better thing. This is what we've built. This is what's got us here, and the thing that's going to get us to the future.

It comes down to guys focusing on core strengths and focusing on where the big wins could be. How do you think that through and assess like which is the, you know, we have a strategic pivot point potentially, . Which way are we choosing?

Deepti: . Yeah. Again, I think it. Is [00:22:00] not. An isolated discussion that one person can make. It requires an entire organization, leaders from everything from marketing, from sales, from customer success and support product and technology to sit together and really look through is. Given the resources that we have in terms of human resources and financial resources, are we at the pivot point to serve those kind of customers or should we stay on path?

A story, an example I had to tell you. I really, admire one of the other leaders of one of the starting founding CEOs of talk. And he talked about how when talk first came out as a reservation platform there were so many people that reached to him and said, we'd like to use your platform.

And he actively went and said, no, because this is not yet tailored to meet your needs the day it'll. I will call you back. And I think that is the skill that we overall need to learn. The [00:23:00] ability to say not, no, not today. Maybe in the future. So it's that mindset that embodies, the right kind of focus on your customer because it's not just about bringing the customer in, it's also about keeping that customer happy so that it is a great partnership rather than like almost a divorce, right?

Jeff: Where both parties are disgruntled because just couldn't meet each other at that middle point. 

That's such an important thing to understand is like what is at core, the value prop that's gotten you here, and if you don't need to deviate from that, like if there's nothing imminently causing the business to fail, you don't see something in the future. I. That's going to, basically mean your current direction is going to be wrong.

Jeff: You're probably better off continuing to do the thing that got you there, right? We had non you on the show a little while back and he's the head of product over at Linear, they're notorious for saying no to request for customer features like they are. Extremely evangelical that they're [00:24:00] not gonna put in, little features to serve middle management reporting.

Maybe one day they'll get there, but for now it's, they focused on that simplicity or we just had Varun bimbo on who spent time as a head of product segment over at Shopify. And that was really interesting because up until right around when he got to the company, their whole game was easy for small e-commerce businesses and D two C businesses to do this kind of like quickly, heavy way to do checkout and store management and all these things. But over that years of their success and growth, they'd hit this point where companies like Allbirds had grown into these near enterprise companies at this point, and they needed a lot more.

And that was when they started to see, okay. We either have a choice to make where we're gonna lose those companies, or we grow with them and help them solve those next level problems. And they chose to do that. And

recent success, that seems like the right choice. 

Deepti: Yeah, I think what you bring up is a really good point, which is can you organically [00:25:00] grow and scale as your customer grows? Which is what Shopify's example exemplifies. I think that's a different problem than what we were describing before, is can you serve two different segments of a customer, one which is one side of the spectrum, and the other one which is on the other side of the spectrum.

So I think natural organic growth is that we should all strive for, and I think it is a recipe for success in most cases. It's serving two very different customer segments. Is where I think a lot of it gets very muddy and , it doesn't really put you in the best place for success,

Jeff: Especially on that kind of like binary acquisition, triggering just this bifurcation of focus. So yeah, I like the thought process there about how you go through and ensure, and it seems like the outcome worked there and the company's doing very well, but it was the right choice was we're going to focus on what brought us to the game and is has put us in the position to do this in the first place and we're gonna keep the mission.

And we're going to jettison the things that don't align. And I love when people are confident [00:26:00] enough to do that because I think that's such a hard thing to always do, is this is the wrong thing. We're gonna get rid of the wrong things and we're gonna focus on the right thing. So one last thing I wanna make sure we cover while we still have you here, 'cause I know how busy it is at any startup especially, but you've been kind enough to join us and there's one thing earlier in your career where you spent time at Hyatt, at some level all these companies are looking at how do increase efficiency? How do you book more customers, how do you increase bookings on the website? And this was, at a time the idea of travel agents and all those kind of things were mostly out, 

and so you guys were looking at how to continue to increase direct bookings on the Hyatt site and really found a novel way to use. Kinda customer information to, to make this a lot smoother of our process. But can I guess we walk through this one real quick? 

Deepti: So you're right in saying it was like an interesting time for Hyatt, right? People were using third party platforms like Booking do orbit at. Expedia all of which were separate companies, by the way, at that time. And we were really [00:27:00] at an interesting curve where we, through our loyalty program through direct benefits we were.

Getting more of an attraction of people coming booking directly from hire.com. What we did realize at that time was the choices that we provide to our end CU customer, in this case, the traveler, whether business or personal traveler. There were like multifold choices, like I'm talking search results, which would go.

Multiple pages, and we were expecting people to sift through all of that and really make the choice for themselves without really handholding them through the process. Interestingly enough I'll tell you a background story. Hyatt has a call center which also enables you to book using the same site, right?

There's a customer interacting with a call center employee or who's acting as your own personal travel agent and like sifting through all the results and providing you options. And I was listening through these calls and it [00:28:00] was. Very interesting because what I realized was what they were able to do by talking to a person on the other hand, was they were able to provide what they exactly wanted in a room.

So for example, if I was looking to book a beach vacation for five people in my family, how many brooms do I want? How far do I wanna be away from the beach? Do I want it to be walkable? Do I want it to be on property? Am I coming with a car? Am I not coming with a car? Am I celebrating a specific occasion or not?

And they were actually interacting with this person. And , what this person on the other side was doing was narrowing down those thousands of results to maybe like the two options and giving it to you and making the process. Very simple. So less cognitive load, less choices was resulting into more bookings by the call center.

And very interestingly, I was like, we should do this on our digital experience as well and what [00:29:00] is stopping us from doing it? So we started \ collecting more information about our customer, right? Asking more upfront questions, using third parties to make sure that we have or know enough about our customer to narrow down those choices to the select few.

And we saw immense change in our conversion rate. It was, really exciting because this was a time before ai just based on the information, we were able to like model the results to what this person really needed. And with the onset of ai, I can't even imagine what this will expose or do, right?

Like, I might get this short shot, this is what you want, and I'd be very happy about it because who likes to spend? I'd rather spend more time on my vacation than planning it.

Jeff: Yeah. So we had a guy named Ericka on several months ago, and he did a stint at Cameo. And talked about one of the big problems they ran into. There was this idea that you give people just [00:30:00] too much optionality and there it manifested As you buy time for one of your celebrities to come and, record a message for your, someone you care about and you're getting this cameo gift for, but they just gave people a giant open box and said, what do you want them to say?

And they saw a huge drop off and some issues with customer. Kind of satisfaction as a result of that because people didn't know what to do with that much optionality or we talked to recently a guy named Sean McCleary who described, I think this word was the best way I put it, was empty box syndrome.

And it can be extrapolated to things like this where just too many choices or too much lack of direction just leads people to. This just giant amount of cognitive load. And in your case, it manifested as people, having to make a million choices. And like you said, I don't want to spend hour, I don't wanna spend longer planning my vacation than actually on my vacation.

The solve back then was at first you had this human, kind of agent who worked you through it. You said like they're on the [00:31:00] call center, but then you all figured out a way to do this pre ai. To narrow it down, but what was the thought process behind let's solve this problem or that we need to, or how this problem can be solved?

Deepti: Yeah. The thought process behind this was very clear, right? Like we were trying to really up the game with our digital platform. At that particular time, it was fairly new. Travel then even now is only increased in terms of families, in terms of business travel. And what we realized was like, if people were booking the same thing through a travel agent or through a third party, what is topping them from doing that?

Directly on our platform. And what we realized is this was the missing gap, right? Like not knowing about your customer enough, not providing too many choices really handholding them through the process. It really changed the game for direct conversions and direct bookings for our site. And also like really [00:32:00] happy customer at the end of the day, right?

Because like we said, they, we help them make quick choices quick bookings, and then they're actually to the fun part of the vacation, which is I am at the beach that I wanted to be at for the last six months.

Jeff: And it wasn't a pain in the butt to, to make the booking. I was able to do this easily and the whole experience was great. Not just the vacation experience, but planning is part of the vacation experience as well. And especially at something like Hyatt, people are gonna remember, it was a great experience at the vacation, but setting up was bad versus this whole thing was so easy.

That's a huge part. Ai, it seems and the joke is everyone has an AI plan now or how are you using ai? Looking at kind of your experiences across, quick serve restaurants and hospitality it seems like in all these cases there's a huge place where.

This can come in and help reduce cognitive load on the end operators, on the customers themselves who may be buying a stay at Hyatt or everything there. How do you look at this and like where do you see opportunities for AI to really manifest as real benefits [00:33:00] in these places?

Deepti: Yeah, I think AI is going to be a game changer. Especially in the services industry, whatever service you might provide, whether that is a restaurant or whether that's a travel or just airlines. Just think of any domain which provides direct service to a consumer. I think where I am really excited to see this go is very hyper personalized experiences that we can provide in very short.

Timeframe, right? This is what I want. I, or maybe even narrow down the choices like we were talking about before. Like sometimes as a consumer, I don't really know what I want and if there is an AI agent based on the cues from my past, based on my history, based on what they actually know about me.

Could narrow down those choices. It's gonna be a phenomenal change, especially for the services industry. So I'm really excited to see where this goes. I think it's gonna be really perfectly aligned with what an individual [00:34:00] preference could be in different ways.

And what else? I think there's no limitation to this as far as recommendations are concerned in different industries and domains.

Jeff: Well, This seems like such an interesting problem that could come up, right? Like, where does the value accrue in this? Is it, does it mean that data is being gathered by all these kinda disparate, companies that, customers are working with? And how do you aggregate that so that no matter where I go, I get , a great experience is tailored to me no matter where you go deep, deep, you get a great experience.

Or is there some kind of. New service that needs to operate on top where there's like a meta, agentic layer, which I can, generally aggregate my preferences in a place, in a profile that I own. And then as I go around, because there's all this, move with all the new kind of layers around understanding and these tools all talking to each other is there some new value layer that's gonna.

Come up where there's a centralized picture of me or of you or of anyone as a customer. And that [00:35:00] follows you as you do all these other things. It's something, Hyatt can interact with or the companies that work with hunger Rush and all those kind of things. , do you have any thoughts on that?

Deepti: I think that's exactly right. I think the data about us exists in the world today is just so bifurcated in not being utilized in the way that I feel like with onset of ai, we would be able to do. And. Obviously there's a security aspect to it as well, right? As a person, I may not be very comfortable sharing certain parts of data with other people, but I thi but think about it, like 90% of that data, I, if I'm getting that hyper personalized experience or service, I would be okay to share.

I'm assuming there's 10% of the data, which could be like, medical data or financial data that I wouldn't be okay to share with others as just an individual. And I think if there is a place where we could really have those checks and balances, I think this could grow into, I.

Into a whole different world. I almost [00:36:00] think of it as, onset of mobile phones from landline. It wasn't that the phone wasn't available before it was, it just changed or shifted that whole paradigm right in, in a very meaningful way that where they were like, more mobile.

, I don't think my kids know what landline is in today's world. And I almost think of that kind of a paradigm shift in terms of how data is being used today, whereas this, how it'll be in the future.

Jeff: It's also that mall, right? Is the phone mapped to the home and now it mapped to the person, and like, how does data do that? , we could have a whole episode on this alone, I feel like, and we'll have to have you back on and we can see how it's evolved in QSR industries and in the hospitality industry.

And how hunger Rush is looking at this down the road. And so we'll have to, we'll have to follow up and have you come back on. We can track like what's going on a and how's it move forward? Maybe in a year or so, but unfortunately, I think we gotta jump. I don't wanna steal your whole day here, even though I definitely could interest wise.

You gotta get back to running product over there at Hunger Rush. So thank you so much for coming on. This was a real [00:37:00] blast. I feel like I learned a lot. If people wanna reach out and have questions or feel like they can, help you in some way, what's the best way? Is it LinkedIn or is there another way to get in touch?

Deepti: I think LinkedIn is the best first form of contact. And again love meeting other industries. Leaders and of course, love meeting you, Jeff. This is such a blast. I had a lot of fun.

Jeff: Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. Have a great rest of your day and yeah, we'll be in touch and we'll talk soon. Thank you.

Deepti: All right, take care. Bye-bye.

Jeff: Thanks. Bye.