My guest today is
, a fellow Substack writer who publishes Expedite, a newsletter about restaurant technology. If you follow Boss Barista closely, you may remember that Kristen had a guest post on the newsletter a few weeks ago, and that we were both Substack Food Fellows in 2022.Kristen has been writing about the intersection of restaurants and technology for over a decade, and in this episode we talk about the unearthed potential—and sometimes looming danger—of technology in the food sector. We discuss how many of the high-profile examples we’ve seen of tech “disrupting” established industries are instigated by outside aggravators: people who think they can “fix” nonexistent problems or who fail to understand the industry they seek to improve. But we also talk about how technology can work with and within the restaurant—as long as it’s put in the hands of people who understand their industry best. Here’s Kristen:
Ashley: Kristen, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.
Kristen: Sure. I am Kristen Hawley. I'm a freelance journalist and the founder of Expedite, which is a newsletter about restaurant technology and the future of hospitality.
Ashley: Did you grow up with coffee in your life?
Kristen: Nope.
Ashley: Not at all?
Kristen: No, my parents did not drink coffee. And I grew up in the ‘90s, like right when coffee house culture was sort of finally making its way to my tiny Pennsylvania suburb.
So I would go listen to live music and drink steamed milk with vanilla syrup.
Ashley: That's so wholesome.
Kristen: I know, I know I didn't have coffee until I went to college in New York City and then it all changed.
Ashley: You're not a coffee professional, and I know a lot of coffee professionals have these “aha moments” that convince them that this is the thing that they wanna do, but because you're kind of outside that industry, I wonder, do you have a moment where coffee really made an impact in your life?
Kristen: I think it was more that I was a young journalist living in New York and I had a tiny apartment with four roommates and coffee shops became my third place. And restaurants became my third place, but I lived in Brooklyn and they were popping up and I was like, “Oh, these are great places to hang out.”
So the space came first and then the coffee came second.
Ashley: That makes sense.
Kristen: We grew together. I moved to San Francisco in 2009 and that's sort of when it really took off for me because it was everywhere here and the culture had changed again. But it still was about places and time, not necessarily the ritual of coffee.
Ashley: How did you become interested in restaurant technology?
Kristen: So I started working in magazines in New York, on the food desk and doing recipes and food culture and restaurant culture and restaurant news, and I loved it and it was amazing. I got laid off during the recession in 2009 with most of the magazine industry.
When I moved to California, I started working in technology and covering the tech industry, and I realized how much I missed food and restaurants, so I decided to sort of smash them together and create my own beat as a freelancer going very, very deep on the then-emerging business of restaurant technology 10 years ago. And it has since obviously matured very quickly and changed very quickly.
But the big thing for me was that I noticed culturally a big difference in the hospitality business in tech-centric San Francisco versus New York City, which is more of a hospitality town. There was a ton of friction between, I would say, diner expectations in San Francisco around technology, around what people wanted, around what they expected, because they work in this forward-looking industry versus how the restaurants viewed how they should be serving clients.
In 2010 in San Francisco, there was a real sense that people that worked in technology were changing the world, for good and for bad. And I think that, sociologically, that was so fascinating to me because I came from an industry where you're like, browbeaten into submission as an assistant and you're working in magazines and editorial—and suddenly I was in this place where my peers had power and control.
They were doing interesting things and they had all these ideas about how things should work and some of that was really, really great and some of that was really terrible. And so that's sort of where I landed: in this interesting spot where I was chronicling what people expected in the tech industry from the restaurant industry and what they were getting and sort of how that that played out.
Ashley: That's a really interesting tension: what people expected versus what people were getting. And I wonder in those early kind of nascent, like 2009, 2010 years, where I would agree—technology just seemed really, really hopeful. I moved to San Francisco in 2015 and I feel like I just saw like the very end of the rose-tinted glasses on the potential of technology.
Not to say that there's not a lot of potential there specifically, but I think people were starting to question more [things] like Google Bus or free meals at work—
Kristen: Ugh.
Ashley: …kind of like rhetoric, right? I started to see kind of that era of technology in San Francisco.
But I wonder from what you were observing, where did those expectations misalign?
Kristen: Well, I think there's a negative here, and that is that a lot of—I don't wanna generalize, but I'm going to—a lot of people that worked in the tech industry at the time felt they knew better. I think that that's true in some industries, certainly in the technology industry. There was a lot of like, “This is better, this is better, this is better.”
You keep pushing forward and innovating and changing and it's accepted. But where that did not work here was when you had people who enjoyed restaurants and had the resources to really enjoy restaurants, and therefore they believed that they knew better than hospitality professionals who have been doing this their whole life.
And that's when things started to get a little spicy, probably around the time that you mentioned, because there was a lot of like, “You're doing it wrong and I can fix it. And I'm gonna fix it for you. I'm gonna optimize it. I'm gonna make it better, faster, stronger, whatever. And I'm gonna make money doing it.”
Ashley: It seems like that's probably when—I can't say this for certain because I haven't followed it as closely as you have, but I have to imagine that's the time of like, “We're gonna disrupt X, Y, Z, industry” rhetoric started to really come in and it's like, but how and why and what do you really know about this?
Kristen: To what end, right? Yeah. It's Uber—and there's no better example than this. And there's so many ways that it's parallel to what we've seen in hospitality because it is like a little bit of a hospitality company, right? So they, the company, was disrupting the established taxi industry. And whether you believe that the way the taxi establishment is good or bad, they decided they saw a weakness.
They saw an opportunity to improve and they saw an opportunity to make money, and that was disruption for the sake of disruption. Like, yes, we can all get to the airport easier now, right? That's great, but it flipped this entire industry on its head because they could. And then they asked for forgiveness, not permission when they were breaking laws.
And then suddenly it was so well-funded and grew so quickly and was so big that it just became this monster, elephant, huge presence that suddenly couldn't go away, right? And so things had to change around Uber, especially in this town where the taxi industry was terrible. You could never get a cab—I understand why it started here [in San Francisco], but it was that, “We can completely shake this up and change this business and make it different. We can make a ton of money. I don't care who we're gonna step on on the way up. My way's better, get out the way.”
Ashley: Right. And now we're at this moment with Uber where ridesharing apps are now the same, if not more money, than they were when they were quote unquote “disrupting” the taxi industry. It seems like Uber tried to disrupt an industry and then seemingly broke it irreparably—we can't go backwards now.
Kristen: You cannot go backwards. And there's a lot of parallels in my world. Like you cover restaurant technology, of which the delivery business is a big part, and the way that it has changed the labor model, the way that it has changed diner and consumer expectations about speed and service and what you are owed and what you have to deal with versus don't have to deal with.
No, you can't go back. You can't erase it. It's done. And now there's legislation. Now there are rules and regulations that are baking this contractor model of service into the future of work in America. It's hard stop.
Ashley: So with these kind of caveats in mind, I understand why people are generally resistant to technological advances, and especially in the coffee industry. We pride ourselves almost on being lo-fi. Things are handmade. Things are artisanal. Things require a really specific skillset. And I see this really interesting tension between automation and what the role of somebody behind the bar is.
And I imagine that tension also exists in the hospitality industry. So I was wondering if we can maybe talk a little bit about—this is maybe a big question we'll have to break down a little bit, but how do we kind of start to think about technology as a way of helping us versus hindering us, if that makes sense.
So again, maybe we have to break this down a little bit, but like I imagine that tension exists in the restaurant industry too.
Kristen: 100%. And I think the thing that's important to remember is that this is a spectrum. It's not a switch. So it's not like you're gonna flip a switch and suddenly become a tech conglomerate that's evil and roboticized. There's a lot of nuance and there's a lot of room to sort of incrementally improve or change or help the hospitality experience.
For all of the bad stuff I just said, I'm extremely pro-technology and very excited about its promise. And the thing about it is like, in an artisanal industry, if you're cooking, if you're making coffee, you don't have to replace that with tech because it's more efficient.
Like, is it? Yeah, there's a robot coffee place in the airport because you're in the airport. It is fine, great. I don't want that at the corner of my neighborhood. They're two extremely different use cases.
So I think that, by writing off tech as something evil, as something that's coming for jobs, as something that's coming to hurt the business, the hospitality industry is shooting itself in the foot because there is a lot of small, incremental processes that can be automated. Back office stuff—there's a lot that can be improved using tech tools.
Unlike what we've been told to believe by the people that build these things, you don't have to optimize every single thing to make it profitable and better. That's not the goal. I don't know if I wanna get into funding and money and scale, but those businesses do make more money. So if that's the end goal, sure. But I don't think that technology will erase the art of and the craft of hospitality.
Ashley: How do you think technology has changed the way consumers expect to get food items?
We're maybe two steps behind, when I think about coffee, because I think it's understandable that people maybe want that convenience of being able to order a meal and have it delivered to their house, but I still think there's one step behind in coffee where people are like, “Oh, okay, I understand that the best-quality coffee I might need to go to.”
I wonder if that's gonna change because we've seen dining expectations change so swiftly.
Kristen: Well, if it follows what's happened in restaurants, I think you're just gonna see that behavior become more extreme. So going [to a restaurant] will become more of an experience, more of an event. There's a great place around the corner from me in San Francisco that I go to and I get my latte super fast and I come home and I feel like maybe that will go away.
Maybe it becomes more experiential versus convenience? I was just in Japan and everything is savored and very slow and rigorous and intentional. And I don't see that here in San Francisco, and I'm sure that's the cultural thing, but that was a real eye-opener for me in terms of what coffee could offer on the not-convenience side.
Ashley: Right. That's a good point. Now that I think about it too—that experience doesn't really exist in the United States except for maybe a handful of very small coffee shops. But even then, I have to imagine that almost can't exist here unless you have a ton of money…
Kristen: Yeah.
Ashley: …because coffee shops live and die by, I would argue, maybe even smaller margins than restaurants.
The cost of goods is super high. Inflation has obviously affected coffee like it has any other industry. But I've never worked at a coffee shop where we didn't live and die by like a morning rush. If the hours between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. were not busy, you were screwed.
I agree, I think that there's something to be said about people are starting to go into these extremes. Either you're ordering something on your phone and it gets delivered to you, or you're going to a restaurant for a full-fledged experience and there's not a lot of middle ground.
I used to work at a restaurant that was very much like an all-day, casual, neighborhood joint, and then within months of COVID it was gone. And I have to imagine even if it stayed open during COVID, it would still be in jeopardy because it didn't exist on that one spectrum or the other. Not to say that those are good or bad, like you said, getting to these extremes is actually kind of scary, but I wonder what that spectrum looks like in coffee. It seems ridiculous to me that I would go on my phone and order a coffee and have it delivered to me, but maybe I'm just being silly thinking that's ridiculous.
Kristen: I mean, it sounds ridiculous to me too, but I can't really pinpoint why because I order groceries on my phone and I order a solo dinner on my phone.
Ashley: Right, and I would order coffee maybe on my phone to go pick up, but the idea that someone would like go to a coffee shop, get my order, go to my house and deliver—it seems bonkers to me.
Maybe it's because—this is another thing I've noticed in working in a restaurant versus working in a coffee shop, and maybe this serves us better than I think it does, because it's kind of annoying sometimes, but people are so particular about their coffee.
Kristen: Mhmm.
Ashley: And as a barista, I'd be like, “Oh my God. Get over it. Just drink it.” Not to say that people don't deserve to get exactly what they want—they do—but it's like, you're working behind the bar, and you're like, “I promise this is good. Please don't put milk and sugar in it.”
Maybe that's the thing that will help save coffee shops. Not save, they're not in danger right now, but maybe that's part of the experience and maybe that's why this idea of coffee will always have some sort of lo-fi kind of current running through it is because we really want to have coffee the way that we want it.
Kristen: That's an interesting point. I was talking about being a magazine assistant. There was an art director famous for giving her assistant a Pantone chip to take to the coffee shop to make sure that she got the right amount of milk in it.
Ashley: That's wild.
Kristen: Yeah, true story. 100% true.
Ashley: I've had multiple bizarre experiences with customers. I had one customer—I worked at this coffee shop in New York in Times Square, super busy. We were always slammed. She would only order coffee if either myself or another barista were pouring drinks. That's a level that does not make sense—there's no difference between all the other [baristas], there were like nine or 10 of us behind the bar. But it was really a big differentiator for her.
We would see her walk in, and if I was on register or the other barista wasn't there, she'd just leave.
Kristen: Wow, that's—
Ashley: I wonder, and like I said, I think for a long time in coffee, we've been hindered by this idea that people really want coffee their way, and maybe this can help transition us into how we can learn more about what our consumers want with technology.
But in coffee, we have, I think, for so long been like, “Please try this without milk or sugar because it's really good,” or, “Please try this espresso without adding three tablespoons of sugar.” But in a way, because people feel so closely personally tied to their coffee, that tie might never be severed and it actually keeps us closer to the experiences and shops that we love.
Kristen: I think that that is extremely possible and also best-case scenario.
Ashley: Right. That is best-case. You're absolutely right. But then again, it also speaks to this idea that maybe we really don't know that much about our customers. So I wonder, as a person who's written about restaurant technology, how have you seen technology inform restaurant and hospitality businesses about what their consumers actually want?
Kristen: Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest changes I've seen, hard stop, is the evolution of loyalty—and that has happened because instead of “Buy 10, Get One Free” cards, there's so much more information available to restaurants and hospitality businesses about what their customers are ordering, just by virtue of the fact that we pay more with credit cards.
It is because we use computers and because we use our phones to pay and because we order on an app or we order online to pick up or just we pay with the same card every day. You can learn so much more about somebody and what they like and what they expect, and then you can use technological tools to apply that in smart ways.
That's the evolution of the loyalty business. So it's all about giving people what they want, not necessarily like a spray-and-pray, one-size-fits-all discount offer that will just get people in the door. So there's been huge, huge steps in that arena, even in like the last three years, I would say—big, big changes.
Ashley: What are some of those changes? Because I think, again, going back to the idea that coffee is lo-fi, I just went to a coffee shop and they gave me a punch card and I was like, “Please don't give me this. I don't want it.”
Kristen: Yeah. Oh my gosh, that's so funny. I can't believe this. I'm shocked.
Ashley: That they gave me a punch card or that I didn't want it?
Kristen: That they gave you one, that people are still handing them out.
Ashley: Oh yeah, 100%. I haven't seen a coffee shop utilizing—and this is maybe just because I go to three coffee shops in my neighborhood—but I haven't seen a coffee shop utilizing a loyalty program that involves technology at all.
Kristen: It might run in the background.
Ashley: Say that again?
Kristen: It might run in the background. It might be something. I would say, one of the big changes—so you don't necessarily have to be an active, like, “Sign up here, log in here,” participant in order to participate in what would be considered a loyalty program, because it could just be targeted marketing campaigns.
You know, they know who you are because of how you pay and how you order. Therefore, they can send you an email that they know that you'll respond to. Respond to, be interested in, not respond to the email, but they can send an offer that they know that you might like because of your order history or what time you come in, or how many days of the week, or what days of the week.
How, if you come in three days a week, how can we make you come in four? How can we bring you back twice in one day? There are things like that that happen without the customer necessarily knowing, which sounds really creepy…
Ashley: It does.
Kristen: There's a real creep factor. There's a real creep factor that I would say the loyalty industry at large is very cognizant of.
Because if you creep someone out too much, the relationship is over. But I would say another huge change is that you don't have to be an active participant. You don't necessarily have to sign up to earn points, and no one wants to do that.
Like no one's doing that—well that's not true. Every Starbucks customer is doing that, but otherwise you're probably not gonna sign up for some one-off program to earn points or whatever for buying something.
Ashley: I like this idea that we can learn about ways to give people what they want through their consuming habits. Like you said, it is a little bit creepy. But like, when I was a barista, I would look at Square and be like, “How many lattes did we sell? What time of day do we sell lattes?”
Not specifically at the people that were buying them, but I would 100% analyze what are our consumer habits? Or I would do this a lot—this is really nerdy: I would track the temperature versus like the tipping point of hot and cold [drinks]…
Kristen: Oh no, that's—so technology can do that for you. I mean, that's baked right in.
Ashley: Can you talk about that?
Kristen: Those kinds of tools, companies will call it AI—sometimes it's AI, sometimes it's not—can take all of those things into consideration. The traffic, traffic patterns, is traffic backed up? Are people running late? Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is school closed? All of those things can be taken into account when you're analyzing patterns of behavior.
If it's gonna be a snow day, you can set up a marketing campaign ahead of time, that speaks to people at home, they're not going to work.
Maybe the roads are closed, maybe everybody's running late. Everybody was delayed by three hours. Whatever it is, all of those things, anything that you have on your phone or a computer, that information can be pulled right in a good loyalty program, a good point of sale, a good any sort of restaurant management system—and you can optimize based on it.
Ashley: I think as you were saying this, one of the things I wrote down was these programs can help increase foot traffic, and I think one of the reasons that I have seen arguments against automation or technology in coffee is that there's this idea that technology replaces people.
And that can happen. I fundamentally believe that there are people who view technology as a replacement for labor. Those people exist. We've seen them in other industries. That being said, that's not about the technology, that's about the person who's thinking that way. So then when I think about technology as a way to do something more, to expand, I think of like, okay, if I operate a small little coffee shop and I'm thinking about robot baristas to replace labor, that's the wrong question.
What I should be asking is, I have people working, how do I increase foot traffic? How do I get people in the door? How can technology help me do that?
So not only are the people that I'm employing making more money, but I can hire more people, I can expand, and I'm always interested in that. That tension of people who view technology as a one-to-one replacement for people, which again, I think is a very warranted fear because we see people do it, versus technology as a way to expand, to do more.
And not necessarily that expansion is growth because I think growth is also kind of a funny topic too, but just to be better at their business.
Kristen: Yeah. So think about the amount of time that you personally spent digging through Square, nerding out on stuff like that—you don't have to spend that time anymore. You're a manager, you're an owner—you can automate that just by using the tools that you have because you're using a point-of-sale system, and that means that you're not in the back office.
You're upfront, you're talking to people, you're engaging, you're doing all the things that make an in-person business so hospitable. And that's the big pitch from tech companies. They can automate the stuff that takes the most time and takes the time away from doing the actual thing that you're supposed to do and that you wanna do, and that builds a good business.
Whether that's growth or just engagement. That's the best application. And I'm not talking about robots, I'm straight up just talking about payroll, all of the stuff that takes the time.
I was just talking to someone this morning who her company builds text message-based training for employees at restaurants, big restaurant concepts, and she was saying that the kind of automation that [her platform] involves gets a manager out of the back office because they're not translating manuals into Spanish and they're not having to do so much one-on-one coaching and it just, there's so many tiny pieces of automation that are not necessarily robotics that takes so much time away from hospitality. That tech—it works and it's available.
Going back to the beginning of the conversation, if people are resistant to use it just for the sake of like, that it's automation or AI or whatever it is, then really you're just wasting time on stuff that you don't need to be wasting time on unless you really, really enjoy paperwork. In which case, great.
Ashley: So we talked a little bit about how automation can be used on the consumer end and thinking more about people who are decision makers, not necessarily looking at technology as a replacement for labor, but using it as an actual powerful tool to expand and do more.
And you were even saying that technology businesses often sell themselves as that, that you can interact with customers more, you can offer more of this, you can offer more of that. I wonder on the product development side or the technology side, do you think technology companies always understand that?
Because I think there's something to be said for technology companies trying to innovate on something that maybe didn't need innovating, or they try to innovate in a way where they're like, “Wow, look at this. This is better.” But it reflects a deep misunderstanding of the industry that they're trying to be part of.
Kristen: Yeah. And this goes back to what I was talking about in the very beginning and what the genesis of my work was, which was this massive friction and the, “I know better than you attitude,” so there is nothing that gets me going more than somebody who starts a restaurant technology company because they want something—and we see this all the time.
It’s, “I'm gonna do a reservation spot. I'm gonna do like a members-only club to sell bookings to Carbone in New York City. I'm gonna build something so I don't have to sit and wait for the check.” That is always the wrong idea. It never works. It never works.
Maybe it works out short-term. Maybe you get a small acquisition, but you probably are gonna look like a douchebag and you're gonna piss off the industry that you are alleging to help. That's one extreme. I see less of that now. I see a lot more of people like yourself with backgrounds in hospitality that have seen problems and because of their other life experience, understand that there are gaps that can be plugged by tech.
It is very clear to me as someone who watches the industry very closely, the difference between a company that was founded by people who know what they're talking about, or people who at least listened to the people that know what they're talking about before they built, before they iterated, versus people who see or perceive a problem from the outside that's potentially not an actual problem.
Restaurants get pitched on new tech, and I don't know how coffee is, but restaurants get probably like five or six pitches a week. I worked closely with a restaurant in San Francisco on something not tech-related, and I would go there during my lunch hour occasionally—they were not set for service, and reps for tech companies would knock on the door and try to sell them on something that would help their bottom line. And it was wild.
I said, does this happen every day? And they said, every day in this town. From the outside, I see the bad actors not surviving, but that doesn't mean that they're not getting some kind of traction and that doesn't mean that they're not inconveniencing hospitality business owners along the way.
Ashley: Right. And then there's this idea too of technology coming in and trying to almost buy our trust and failing at it because we don't get the whole picture. I mentioned a company to you before we started recording—I'm not gonna name them on this—but that was essentially what happened with this company.
If you're in coffee, you can probably guess who I'm talking about. But I think there was this idea that this technology company was gonna come in, revolutionized the way that we drink coffee through this subscription service. They hired a bunch of very qualified folks in the industry with a lot of clout and then laid off a bunch of them, and now it's like, “Wait, what were you doing this for?”
Kristen: One of the most controversial posts I've ever written on Expedite was titled “Venture Capital is Killing the Restaurant Industry.”
Ashley: Yes. Talk about that more.
Kristen: What I'm talking about is not the individual VCs and LPs and all of the people with the money. What I'm talking about is the attitude. And what I'm talking about is the massive funding that goes into lifting up a new idea at the beginning and then what happens when that funding goes away.
And in the environment that we're in economically at this moment, we're seeing this happen a lot. And what's unfortunately also happening is that when these businesses are losing their funding, when these unprofitable businesses are losing their funding and they can no longer go on, many of them don't seem to have much loyalty to the hospitality businesses that they claim to serve. It's almost like when things got hard, they just bailed and that is the exact opposite of what we saw happen in the restaurant industry during COVID. When things got bad, these people [restaurants] stepped up in a big way.
And when the tech industry got bad, and I'm sitting in the center of it right now, people are jumping out of the boat. I was not surprised, but still like gobsmacked with the reaction—and his is so inside baseball—but when Silicon Valley Bank failed. It was like all of these people that were telling us that we had to make big bets and take huge risks and this is the future—suddenly the second that the ground got shaky beneath them, they bailed.
Those are the forces that are behind some of these startups, especially the ones that are built to scale, which is what you need to do to find product market fit, because that's what people wanna fund.
They want a unicorn, they want a billion-dollar return, or at least a good return. And unfortunately that kind of scale and that kind of disruption is—I don't know what to say about it. It's fickle, it's delicate. It doesn't always happen. And again, the forces, so tech that's trying to scale and make a ton of money and turn huge profits versus restaurants that are inherently not necessarily scalable, because they're experienced businesses or maybe they don't wanna scale, or maybe they're happy and they're turning a small profit and they don't wanna optimize to go to 50% or whatever it is. The expectations on the hospitality side and the expectations on the tech side are different.
And when you smash them together, it can create a lot of problems. I don't know if that explained it well.
Ashley: It totally made sense, because I go back to this idea of what makes coffee shops really special is often that there's the one that you love, or the one around the corner from you, or the one where the baristas know your order and that's something you cannot scale. That's not how that works in coffee.
And I'm always interested in businesses who think they have to grow to be successful. I think this even goes back to this idea of how to utilize technology more appropriately. But growth doesn't always have to look like expansion. Growth does not have to look like, “I own 19 coffee shops, and now I am in a years-long contract negotiation with my unionizing baristas,” which is what's happening at Colectivo Coffee here in the Midwest—19 locations. Their baristas unionized, and they fought that union every step of the way. And it's like, is this the value that we really want to have in coffee?
Maybe this is a deeper question than I maybe really intended to go with, but we're getting towards the end so might as well go with it: It seems like we think of technology and we think of automation as these like big, lofty ideas because of tech. Because tech is designed to scale, tech is designed to make money.
Tech is designed to be this VC, money-making, ridiculous cycle. But really where the power of automation and technology could be is just like making your one little small thing better.
Where do we go from here? Because again, it's like every time I hear about tech and a new technology, it's painted in this way because it has to be.
Kristen: I think what might change—we're in a big reset, so I'm speculating. But I think that we have our expectations, our industry, the world, whatever, our expectations of success have come back down to earth a bit. And that's been a hard pill for a lot of people who have gone big in tech to swallow in the early days.
It's normalizing. And along with that normalization comes the normalization of expectations around growth and success and what that looks like. Like the DoorDash and the Ubers were a fantasy. They were a really, really well-funded fantasy that pushed through on hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars of investment.
I think that's sort of going away. And I think that's because the appetite for that level of disruption is going away because people see what's happening—people, the public at large. And the other thing that's happening is that as the hospitality technology industry becomes more mature, there are far more specialists.
So there are investment firms that invest only in restaurant technology or primarily in restaurant tech. There are billionaires who made their money in DoorDash or Toast or Square that understand the hospitality business, that want to fund new hospitality businesses. So there's a broader audience for that funding with expectations of what success looks like that are different than expectations of big tech, what big tech looks like, what success in big tech looks like.
So I see a lot of promise for the future of hospitality tech for those reasons and because of the climate that we're in. I think that the hospitality business obviously has proven itself time and time and time again, especially during COVID, that it is resilient and that it is open to change, and it is open to some level of some level of—my brain, just the word flew outta my brain—optimization.
The restaurant industry has proven that it is up for some level of optimization. Because we're in a hiring crunch. The labor market, everything is changing, and there are people that are interested. I feel hopeful about the future given this big crash and given that everybody, many people—hopefully the right people who are humbled by what has happened over the last six months to a year. I guess we'll see what happens.
I'm glad that restaurants aren't going away.
Ashley: Yeah, I like that. I like that hopefulness, because I didn't really understand how pivotal these last six months to a year have been for redefining our expectations of what technology can do and what we should expect from technology in return.
Kristen: Oh, absolutely. I live in a tech household and I see it happening. My partner works in technology and it's very different now. It's hopeful in the way that 2009 was hopeful. It feels real again, it feels like we're not all just like raising a bunch of money because we can, or flying high because we can, or because we have to.
It's like, “Does this business work? Can this business make money? Is this business helpful?” All of those things have to be answered. Even now, when investors are looking, it's not just enough to have a good idea that might be something someday. You have to prove that it already is something, and that's big progress in my opinion.
Ashley: Kristen, thank you so much for taking time to join the show. I appreciate it.
Kristen: Thank you for having me. This was fun.
Kristen Hawley is Glad Restaurants Aren't Going Away