00:00Talk to us a little bit about how this works, because you aren't necessarily helping the
00:05customers get those reservations. You're more on the restaurant operator side.
00:10Thanks for having me. And I'd say we're doing both. So for restaurants, we're making their
00:16life easier to be able to take bookings in. And then for consumers, we're making their life
00:21easier to book. To give an example for the audience, if you take the hotel industry,
00:27this model exists already today. So for instance, a consumer can book on an online travel agency.
00:33They can go directly to the hotel's website. They could book through their credit card. They could
00:37book through Google. Regardless of how you book your hotel room, we're all checking in at the same
00:42front desk through the same system. For restaurants, however, that model does not exist. So Katie, if
00:49you book on one reservation app and Romaine, you book on another reservation app for the same
00:52restaurant, you're walking in and that restaurant is using multiple iPads to manage those reservations.
00:58So for the restaurant, it's challenging because they now need to look in different places just to
01:03run their night. And often for the consumer, it's challenging because you don't exactly know which
01:07reservation app to use, where you're going to find that restaurant. So Channel Connect solves this
01:12problem the same way that this problem has been solved for many other industries like hotels and
01:16airlines as an example. Yeah, absolutely. It certainly sounds like a headache. And seven rooms,
01:22it was founded in 2011. And you think about the past 15 years, I have to imagine that this
01:28problem has only become exacerbated as the number of channels has multiplied in that time.
01:35Yeah, that's absolutely right. So we started the company in 2011. We started with the central
01:40question, which is still the question today, what can we build to help the industry and help the
01:45operator grow up the restaurant grow? In 2011, many of the platforms that we use today were just in their
01:51nascency didn't exist. So since then, Google has become front and center for food and
01:58restaurants. When you open up any social app, if you use Instagram or TikTok, a lot of the content is
02:04restaurant and food focused. So you've seen this explosion of food everywhere on the internet.
02:10And you've seen places now where consumers are going to all over the internet. But you haven't seen
02:15the technology that restaurants are using today meet what's happened all around them. So Channel
02:21Connect is really in response to that, which is helping the restaurant meet the consumer wherever
02:26the consumer is online. I'm curious to, as you sort of build this out and more importantly, try to sell
02:31it to more of these restaurants here. I mean, what is sort of the competitive advantage you have
02:37to prevent or at least to sort of fend off one of your other competitors trying to do something like
02:42this? I would say that the reason for doing it, just to start with, is really about how do we
02:50help the
02:50operator and how do we help the industry? Less about what competitors are thinking or what
02:55competitors are doing. And we hope that this is finally able to provide infrastructure to help
03:01restaurants meet consumers online. Not sure how competitors will think about this. Can't really
03:08comment on what their strategy is. My only hope is that the players that are helping support the
03:14restaurants are starting first with the question of what will help the restaurant do business in this
03:19new world. And we think if you start with that question, you will end up with the same answer
03:23that we ultimately came to, which is something like Channel Connect needs to exist for the entirety of the
03:27industry.
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