Julian: Hey everyone. Thankyou so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have TimMclaughlin, founder and CEO at GoTab, a leading restaurant commerce platformthat helps more than 1000 large and mid-size restaurants, breweries, bars,hotels, and other venues run lean, profitable operations on making guests evenmore satisfied.

Tim, I'm so excited to chat with you andespecially because, within this industry we think, there's not much, I. Fromthe outsider's perspective or customer's perspective, not a lot that needs tochange in terms of the service or equality or anything like that, but I'm surethere's so much that we don't see that that can be improved and can makeexperiences better and, and that impact us as, as users, customers that makethat experience overall.

So, so either fluid or effortless or, orso satisfying in that regard. And so excited to chat with you to, to really getan insight on what makes that happen. But before we get into that, what wereyou doing before you started GoTab?  

Tim: I actually, well acouple things, but one of those things was I own or owned two restaurants thatI started with my wife.

Yeah. And another couple. So yeah, I didthat for, I don't know, four, three years. We got them open. It took two yearsto get the first one open. It's not a trivial to open a brewery, it turnsout.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. for theprocess, obviously. I think , when, as, as a, a simple consumer that doesn't,run these kind of businesses, we see an empty space and location.

We think, we've been to a bunch ofplaces. We, we know exactly what people would want, but what goes into not onlythe building process of a restaurant or, or brewery, but also you know, how tofunction, how to run it into operations that I think are so critical to, to thesuccess of a restaurant.

You, you could have like three items ona menu, but it could be the best experience and, and vibe and energy. Sure. Buthow do you go through that process in discovering what, what your consumerwants? Is it a guess? Is it calculated research experience? What is it?  

Tim: Well, I, it's, it'sfunny, I was talking to an investor yesterday and they said, well, I eat atrestaurants, so I think, I know restaurants , which is, I think, what mostpeople think.

Yeah. Cause obviously you see the, theoutside of the bar, if you will. Yeah. You never see the backside of the bar.And there's a lot more that goes into it. A restaurant in my mind is, is reallya factory. It doesn't sound sexy, it doesn't sound beautiful when you call it afactory. But real, it really is.

It's also an artist studio, so it'sboth. Yeah. But it is, it's an artist factory, studio. It's a craftsmanfactory, if you will. Yeah. My prior life was actually software, so I didsoftware and user experience design for 12 years of my career before owningthose restaurants and breweries.

And so much like most people went into arestaurant, I wanted a better customer experience. Yeah. A better guestexperience. And that's kind of what started. But then my own interest incuriosity in in building a better factory, if you will. Yeah. So that theguests weren't let down because I think as we've all started experiencingrecently, is that service is great when it's there.

Yeah. And it's not so great when it'snot, and, you kind of go out with hopes of being taken care of or at leasthaving ways to take care of yourself if nobody else can. And that's often whenwith all the labor challenges that have been occurring. Yeah. And the changesin the market and pricing and all kinds of stuff, it's gotten, prettyinteresting over the last, three years.

Julian: Yeah. I can see, I, Iguess, from my point of view, thinking about your experience and the designcomponent, I'm curious, like, how meticulously do you kind of think about thedifferent components of the factory model? In, in thinking about. Step anddescribe to the audience who doesn't know how integrals each step to theoverall output of, what the guest is going to experience.

Tim: I spent a lot of time,so even prior to my software engineering background, I was a mechanicalengineer and I did designs and improvements on factory designs for all kinds ofdifferent manufacturing facilities and. My wife's actually an industrialengineer, which in as industrial engineering, she's, she's an industrialengineer, turn nutritionist and math teacher.

Yeah. So she actually has a backgroundin food and in industrial processes. So I spend a ton of time thinking abouthow to shave off 15 seconds or 30 seconds or 10 seconds. Yeah. And because itseems like really small things, people are like, oh, why would you do that? Areally dumb example. , communicating on the floor of a restaurant to a managerthat a guest is unhappy.

Mm-hmm. , in a typical restaurantthat's, might take you 10, 15, 20, 30 seconds assuming people are available andthe manager's not getting yelled at at the moment. Yeah. Or isn't cleaning upglass or, or something. And then when that adds up over the course of the day,that might add up to 20, 30 minutes.

Yeah. Because things happen and stuffoccurs and, and every day, and you compound those numbers. And it really, itcreates a lot of losses. It creates a lot of dissatisfaction. Yeah. But it's,it's, it really is a sum of, sort of death by a thousand toothpicks typeproblem. Yeah. And that's, I, I spend probably, my wife would say, too muchtime thinking about these little nuances.

And sort of the time studies part of theworld. I don't know if you've ever seen time studies in a factory where theytalk. Don't move this thing from here to here. Yeah. This way. Move it, move itstraight, and you therefore save one second in that process. Yeah. So anyway,that, that's kind of what I get excited about and there's a lot of opportunityin restaurants to improve those things.

Julian: Yeah. I think, most ofus could think back on experiences that we didn't, that, that weren't as, assatisfying or, or were maybe just like, put off to a certain restaurant. But Iguess overall, what are some of the common experiences that guests or commonbad experience that guests have?

And are there reasons that continue to,to come up as, as the stories kind of sure. Compound on themselves? What aresome of those common reasons?

Tim: I mean GoTab startedin 2016. We've been working on our product for a long time. Really. So weweren't sort of a flash in the pan or a concept that just sort of QRSs poppedup in Covid and people thought, oh, GoTab been was, know, starting covid.

We were actually doing QR ordering to tablein 2018 before anybody even knew how to scan a QR in, in this country. For alarge part. Yeah, I am. You might have, cuz you're, you're younger, but I canassure you everybody over 25 at the time pretty much couldn't. Yeah. And so Ispent a lot of time thinking about that.

We originally started just trying tosolve the payment problem because it, it is the most thankless part of thedining experience. Right. You, the consumer never says, wow, I had a great timepaying. That, that just doesn't happen. Yeah. We all would rather that partjust disappeared. So that's where we originally started.

And then we realized, and, and that is amajor failing point of most dining experiences where Yeah, you go to a nicerestaurant and everything's good up until you can't leave cause you gotta getstupid check. Yeah. But it turns out like changing habits and that by itself in2016 wasn't really doable.

Mm-hmm. . And so at 2018 we rolled outQR ordering and much to our chagrin, we found out that restaurants thought wewere crazy consumer. kind of thought we were crazy and we had a hard time. Likewe had a really hard time convincing people that ordering on your phone was agood idea. Yeah. Because frankly people love being taken care of.

Yeah. And it's really great when someonecomes up and says, Hey, how can I help you? It's good to see you. Or, that'sfine. Well, the problem is when it's not like they don't come up or they'reunpleasant or they're unavailable. , and unfortunately that happens and we tendto forget those parts. We tend to like, yeah, remember the good experiences andget nostalgic and say, oh, that was such a great time.

But I can assure you, most people, ifthey think hard, they can imagine. Plenty of occasions. Not that I want them todwell on the bad, but Sure. There's plenty of occasions where you're like, boy,we spent 10 minutes just trying to flag down our server before we could evenplace our drink order.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. It's, it'sbizarre to think about, the, the differences or the subtle differences betweena good and in a, in a bad experience. And, it seems like they are binary inthat respect. You go through these processes, but I guess as a founder, that'sexciting to kind of see. There is a poor experience and there's maybe somethingto directly influence it.

And, as you were going through theprocess of, helping restaurants and breweries and, and all these other venuesimprove the processes what, what you said you started with the orderingprocess, and, and making that easy and. And then where did that expand upon?Cause I can see you having the ability to go in so many different directions,but as you build technology, you have to focus on.

So what was the next step from there andhow did things kind of cascade to what the product is now?  

Tim: Well, so we were doingQR ordering in 2018 at my restaurant. And it was actually doing very well inone, we didn't do it in the other one because it was candidly an olderdemographic. And we just didn't think it was gonna fly.

Mm-hmm. , we did do it on the patio.Patios are oftentimes hard to get service and yeah, in this particularrestaurant, you had to go into the bar to order if you're on the patio. Mm-hmm.. So a lot of people would, or some people would do it because they could avoidhiking to the bar and standing in line.

And then we were, trying to find theplaces we were really scratching an itch. Right. And so that wasn't every. AndI can tell you old school hospitality people who went to Cornell or, or theappropriate school for hospitality would say this is not hospitality. And, andvery few people would, would suggest that this was any form of hospitality.

And my argument was, look, this is, wewould all love great service. Sure. Unfortunately, pre covid it was maybe lessof an issue. , but unfortunately people can't be everywhere at one time.Mm-hmm. . And so inevitably something happens, server gets tied up for 20 minutesdealing with, a problem, and now your, your night is, you can't go to the play,you can't leave, you can't go to your friends, whatever it might be.

Sure. Unfortunately we just weren'tgetting traction, so like all good. pe CEOs or I guess tech people we werepivoting to add into the POS world because the problem is that we also need tosupport the old model, which is not QR based. And then Covid hit and then allof the stuff that we were being ridiculed for, which was, this stupid QR idea.

Yeah. And that wasn't hospitality. Itall kind of went instantly away. And all the people who told. In 2019 that,that we were crazy. Called us back and said, can I get that QR thing ? So itwas funny. It was good. I mean, and certainly we, it's not like we were rightin any sense of the way. Like there's definitely such thing as being too early.

Mm-hmm. , and were it not for Covid, we,we would've been too early. Mm-hmm. , I do think it would've happened, itprobably would've taken three or five years. But Covid accelerated QR adoptionin this country. like overnight. Pretty much.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Crazytiming. ,  

Tim: incredible timing.Who's, yeah, definitely dumb luck.

or, or, or whatnot. And there's alwaysan element of luck, I believe in all. There's, there's very few companies whosucceed without some element of like, yeah. But anyway, yeah. So that, thathappened and as we were starting our pos what we did was really weird. Is, wefound prior to Covid that QR ordering really broke down massively in thefactory, if you will.

Meaning in the kitchen and in the bar.Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . And the reason it broke down, and nobody really, frankly,nobody else has still figured this out, yeah. Was the, the operations for akitchen and a bar were not designed for super high volume. Ah. And what I meanby that is, let's say to my restaurant, my wife's restaurant rather, It's about10,000 square feet.

So it's three stories inside. It's gotfour, 4,000 square foot patio outside. It can hold a lot of people and youcould have, 200 people there, two or 300 people there in a line, right? Yeah.And beers are flying out and they'll sell thousands of beers on a, Friday orSaturday night. The problem is, is that if you have, 200 people or even ahundred people there, and they all order beers 17.

you've now gotta take, a hundred or morebeers to tables. And normally in a normal restaurant you might have fiveservers or three cashiers, so you don't ever really have that problem. Youbasically constrict the ability to take orders, so you never have a fulfillmentproblem, meaning like, I don't ever have to take a hundred beers to tablessimultaneously.

Yeah. So the, the good of GoTab is wecan create more sales. Yeah. The bad of GoTab. , we can create more sales. Andnow you have to deliver on that problem. Yeah. On that promise. Yeah. And sowhat we ended up doing, and again, it was fortunate during covid, was we werebuilding a whole new kitchen operational model.

So we, we, it's called a kds in therestaurant world kitchen display system. And it's kind of a dated model. Itoriginally came outta McDonald's, so like McDonald's and qsr, they were at someof the first places.  

The, so it came outta qsr? Yeah. Wherethey were trying to move very quickly. . Because of that, it wasn't necessarilyadopted by sort of the nicer restaurants, right? Yeah.

They didn't consider a good, good form.It was a QSR type thing. Yeah, it was a fast food thing. So they didn'tnecessarily adopt screens. And if you talked to many chefs three years ago,they didn't really want screens in the kitchen. They didn't feel like it wasvery artisan. They wanted paper. And paper was physical and old school.

Yeah. And it was sort of nostalgic forthe old way. So we. redoing all that, we ended up building screens that designwhen and where things go dynamically and handle the surge and set the guestexpectation about pacing. And all those systems came out during Covid and itwas really critical. Yeah.

Because there were no people to work ,so you had no employees or very limited employees and you would have thesemassive surges of, of ordering volume. Yeah. So we ended up building the wholekitchen. Building the whole bar. And when I say building, building the systemsthat drive what you make. Yeah. When you make it, how long it's gonna take,tell the guests how long things are gonna take.

Right. All from the kitchen based onreal-time feedback. Yeah. So yeah,  

Julian: it's, it's bizarre.It's funny, I, I just watched that movie, the Founder, which goes through thatwhole process of McDonald's and, and that whole system that they built, and itreally, It's beautifully orchestrated and how they do it in the movie.

I'm not sure how it happened in reallife, but it seems very much, if it's, if it's similar, it's very exciting tosee how the process can be so refined to be so sophisticated. But also you, Ican see it's interesting that, there was a pushback in the higher end, if youwill venues and things like that because really it's, it's a person to personexperience that makes you know that so successful.

I. As a consumer of it but theoperations component doesn't necessarily need to be there. As, as much as Ijust want someone to talk to and tell me about things not necessarily have togo through all this kind of robust or bulky. Materials that, that go with, withexperience.

Now with, with everything evolving, howhas that really improved those higher end experiences now with them being moreopen to actually adopting this technology and putting all those systems in? Iguess whether it's your feedback or that you're seeing or in your experience,how how have you seen that that improvement in, in the overall experience ofthese higher end restaurants once they've implemented your.

Tim: So there's a ton ofgains. I will say. There are still objections. Sure. If you get into the reallyfine dining world, they still like printed tickets. Yeah. And there arearguably some benefits to printed tickets. But I do think it is somewhat amisnomer and part of part of it is people like, let's put it this way, there'sno factory anymore that runs on paper.

Right. People aren't running around withclipboards anymore. They're using computers or. Digital devices to recordthroughput and efficiencies. Yeah. And it doesn't sound sexy or nostalgic to,talk about computer screens driving your shafts, cuz everybody wants to imaginethat these chefs are these artisans.

Yeah. They are artisans when they'recreating the, the recipe. Yeah. That actually when the cooks are making thesame recipe that the chefs put in place, you want it to be the exact same asthe chef when he designed it. You don't want to just kind of sloppilyapproximate what they think he or she made. . So there's, there's tons ofefficiency, there's tons of scalability that comes in by adopting these systemsand it becomes a lot more precision and there's a lot more feedback.

So we saw, for example, just a hardnumber just in running efficiency. So running is when you take the food from thekitchen to the table. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. , really dumb thing. No other systemeven thinks about if optimizing that. But it turns out if you're running athousand beers to table. . Yeah.

It's actually a lot of running . You'recovering a lot of square feet or a lot of linear feet of walking. And inrestaurant design, you do think about how long it takes to walk from this placeto that place. Yeah. Well, if you do it twice when you could have just done itonce, it's much more efficient.

And when we rolled out our kds, weactually cut the running labor requirements in half. Wow. So we went from sixrunners to three runners. Wow. . So that's a, that's a big savings, right?Yeah. And not only that, it's also more, it's a better experience because ifyou and I were sitting at the same table and our batching system were to takeeffect, it would make sure that yours and my beer show up at the same time,even though we ordered it slightly different times.

Yeah. So that way we can cheers ourbeer. Right? Yeah. So there's, there's experiential improvements, there'sefficiency improvements. Yeah. But you really have to think through that wholeprocess. And much like, the McDonald's founder who was, challenging in manyways he was very attentive to the details as they showed in that movie.

Right. Yeah. He was like looking at,okay, if we move this over six inches and we shift this thing that way, yeah.And we think about it, you can be very intentional and very you can have a lotof impact with a lot of.  

Julian: Yeah, it's reallyinteresting to, to think about the efficiency and, and not only increasingcost, but also that experience.

And I'm somebody that's like if a tablesits down half a second after me, but they get something sooner than I didordering at the same time, I'm thinking about that. I think most consumers dowith that experience. And that's really a critical piece that I think isexciting to hear. The ability to kind of batch and move things through and, andoffer that experience that you don't necessarily have to think through or breakthe conversation or, break the third wall.

Right. It's like we're in act and wedon't have to break to, to, think about anything else. But I guess one thing Ithink about, a founder and thinking about technology is how much data that youcan provide to these restaurant. The types of things people are ordering, howquickly they order, how how do they pay the bill?

What are the percentage tips and what's thatinvolved? How do you go about not only thinking, conceptualizing and capturingdata, but also enabling restaurants to actually look into it when,historically, like you said, they're running around pen and paper, they mighttake a glance at it.

There's not a lot of maybe introspectionunless there's a critical problem. But now it's like you can be proactive andmake things that much more. How do you think about that process and how do youadd the value there?  

Tim: I, I think about it alot personally. Sure. Because coming from a web and commerce design onlinesystem, they, there's a lot of analytics that go into that.

And so, yeah, if you're shopping, forexample, on Amazon and you look at something but you don't buy it, believe me,Amazon records that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they will, and they will dosomething with that later, and they're gonna suggest that to you or some othersimilar solution. So if you look at shoes, but you don't buy.

Strangely, similar shoes may show up onAmazon later on . I think about that a lot. Restaurants absolutely do not . AndI have yet to run into anybody. I mean, they, they find it like a curious idea.Sure. But there's so much more basic stuff that they aren't doing, andespecially right now with such a labor shortage they're mostly just trying tomake sure the burger's at the table.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, there's aton of room for optimization. There's a ton of room for improvement. There's aton of room for, for harvesting. All the data that we have, I mean, we have allthe data and I, we do track that. You look at the burger, but then you buy, achicken sandwich. But are they using that in any material way?

No, not yet.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Imean, it sounds like there's so much opportunity and maybe. External factorsaren't so pressing to focus on one particular thing they can extract from that.And but tell us a little bit about the traction. So you, you're working withover thousands of restaurants.

What's exciting, not only about theprevious year's of growth, but what you're gonna see and the new year. What,what are you focus on? What are you rolling out and what kind of attraction doyou see this year having?  

Tim: Well, I'm working onstrangely, our fine dining, our first fine dining groups.

Okay. . I never thought I'd see thatday, to be honest. I come out of the, I own breweries, they're casual. One is alittle more elevated than the other, so it is full service and is, higher endfood. But the other one's counter service, so very, very casual. So it'scounter and qr. So you stand line at the counter or you order on the qr?

Yeah. And, fine dining, I love diningout, but fine dining is historically very nostalgic. Right? Right. They, theylike it the old way. They don't want to change. And, and I certainly appreciatethat. And they, they have the money and time to pay for good servers and goodstaff. Yeah. But to the point that we said earlier, it turns out like all thesekitchen efficiencies are still benefiting them.

Yeah. Even if they're invisible to theconsumer. Even if you're in a white tablecloth restaurant and there's no QRSand there's no phones, there's nothing. what Restaurant tour would not say. Iwant a more predictable output with higher efficiency in my kitchen. Yeah. .Even if it includes technology. Right.

So things that make it or easier. Forexample, were rolling out we just rolled out actually a functionality aroundability to, and this sounds so mundane, but it, it adds up, right? Sure. ifyou're a server and you're at a table taking an order on a, on a mobile deviceand small plates is, is very common.

Small plates are top us where you're ata place where everybody's sharing everything for whatever reason. POS is, weredesigned around this idea of like, stake coursing. Sure. It sounds supermundane, but the interface itself we're entering it is very tedious becauseit's not designed for a small plates type model.

Right. And because of that, we, we sawan opportunity and some clients asked us to solve this problem, and so wesolved it and they're like, this is really fantastic. Yeah. Is Davis, to threeminutes of awkwardly reentering stuff and frankly possibly screwing somethingup. Yeah. Because we can do it in 10 seconds or five seconds.

And again, it's that three minutes,times, whatever, 300 table. and then the mistakes that come as a result of it.Yeah. That's all material. And it's, it's those little things that nobody'ssolving cuz they just keep doing it the same way. Yeah. But anyway, coming backto your question, what's the growth for us?

It's fine. Dining is, is actually areally interesting opportunity. We kind of fell into it. More of the largevenue, eat entertainment. We're rolling out some really cool eat entertainmenttype venues where there's like bowling and golfing and darts, and then concertsand food and beverage and some stuff.

We're doing celebrity type things aswell. Yeah. . So that's kind of fun. All kinds people are tired of being coopedup in their house and no one, I mean, people still like food in a box, but alot of people are tired of being food in a box. Yeah. So they want to go placeand places and have fun and food and beverage is often part of that.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What aresome of the biggest challenges that GoTab faces today?  

Tim: Our biggest one is awareness.Yeah. Cause we didn't go raise, buckets and buckets of money over the, the lastthree, four years. And Five years, I guess, whenever they, everybody startedraising, huge amounts of money.

Yeah. And then giving it to theircustomers to buy their customers, if you will. We didn't do that. I, I comefrom a, actually, I come from a professional services background where you hadto pay for growth out of profits. Yeah. So we, we've been pretty lean in ourfundraising. So one of our challenges is, you we're not always in the room.

No one people don't know we exist. If weget the. Chance to, to show them why we're better. We usually win, but if noone knows we exist, then obviously the other guys win.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Ifeverything goes well, what's the long-term vision?  

Tim: Continued organicgrowth. Doing it kind of the slow and steady way, but the, yeah, I don't wannasay organic.

We are raising money, but we're notraising huge amounts of money and we're not gonna. Hyper 10, 20 x growth, wellwe, we will do, a hundred percent or 200% growth, but we're not gonna do 2000%growth in a year. Right. By pumping tons of money in and, and making anunsustainable business.

Because our belief too is our clientshave to be able to afford us. And if you take in, a billion dollars in investormoney you're gonna have to pay it back. . Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. . Yeah. That,that ultimately means you raise prices on your, your clients and they may notbe able to, pay that back.

Julian: I always like to answerthis next question. I, I called my founder faq, so I'm gonna hit you with somerapid fire questions and we'll, we'll see what you get. But what's the hardestpart about your job?  

Tim: I would say thehardest part in last time I was a ceo, it's always the, the people side of it.

It's the HR side of it is, is really notfun, in my opinion.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah.What, what, what particular part? Is it the hiring, it's the managing. Is it,benefits?  

Tim: Well, I'm not a bigfan of dealing with like the benefit stuff, but it's more when people are justnot being considerate to each other.

Sure. And then you have to play thejudge. Yeah. And it's kinda. , that's not a fun part of the job. Yeah. Yeah,yeah. But it comes with being an executive Right. Or a manager really.Right?  

Julian: Yeah. Whether yourteam is remote or local, how do you kind of maintain culture? Like are theresome things that you periodically do to make sure that your team kind of notonly stays cohesive, but also stays on the right track and, and, and stillfocus on the right mission and, and driving the company?.

Tim: Yeah, I wish I didmore, but unfortunately our company did a lot of its growth during Covid and weare a distributed team. Yeah. So I do go into the office along with, three orfour other executives, but for the most part, everybody works from home and warspread is far from basically New England, Hawaii

So our staff is as spread out as youcould do it inside the us And we have actually some people outside the us Yeah.Although, They're not they're more like sales and support people. Yeah. So wedo, we actually have a virtual event today. Someone called me a boomer becauseI still love in-person events.

You know as much as you can do 'em. Butit's, we do everything we can, but it's, it's not as ideal as I would like itto be. We are gonna probably have some more get togethers. Head to being aprofitable business mm-hmm. . But we aren't really in a financial position tosplurge on, incredible company events.

Yeah. Given the current environment.Yeah.  

Julian: What's maybe one or acouple pieces of advice you'd given a founder early in their career, kind ofstarting out in their journey what was helpful for you that maybe you'velearned over the years or that someone maybe instilled in, in, in, into youearly on that has helped you now as a founder?

Tim: Actually one of thethings that just occurred to me, and it's not really a founder that told methis, but on a personal level, people always said live below your means.Mm-hmm. . Yeah. I mean like, just cause you have the money for it, don't, don'tgo spend it. Yeah. I think given the current environment and given what I wassaying earlier about like, don't, don't go raise money cuz you're gonna have topay that back.

Don't raise more than you need . Yeah.Yeah. Don't spend more than you have. I would say that's kind of a, a, aphilosophy I try to adhere to as much as possible. That doesn't mean be cheap.Sure. So do be aggressive, do, have an ambitious goal and frankly do take risk.But I don't know, I ask yourself if it's really sustainable.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. If youweren't working on GoTab, what would you be working on?  

Tim: I have a, a more of a,like my wife says, professorial, bent. I love a lot of research related things.So I would probably be working on misinformation, identification, using sort ofsome natural language and algorithmic approaches.

Everybody calls 'em AI now, but. Theyused to have other names.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I alwayslike to ask this next question to, to really, not only for my, my, my ownselfish and endeavors, but also for my audience whether it was early in yourcareer or not, what books or people have influenced you the most?

Tim: I would say, it, Iwould, this is probably a weird one, but a book that influenced me a ton wayback when I was much, much younger. Was Atlas Shrugged? It's not a businessbook, but it is a philosophy book and it does pertain to business. I did readZero to One recently and I enjoyed that a lot.

Yeah. Although, not say I agree witheverything Peter Thiel says, but that book has a lot of Yeah. Nuggets ofwisdom. There's a book called Five Dysfunctions of A Team. Really Good Aroundmanagement. Yeah.  

Julian: The first one youmentioned. What, what did you grab from that? What is that book about?  

Tim: Well it's funny, I've,I have teenage kids right now. Mm-hmm. . And one of the things you have to faceas an entrepreneur is you do have to deal with the people who want tocontribute and then you eventually have to identify the people who don't wantto contribute. Yeah. And you have to make that distinction. Sort of AtlasShrugged was a point in my life where as a, as a software developer, I was verysort of, everybody can have everything.

Yeah. Kind of open source philosophy.But that was when I kind of, the, the whole point of Atlas shrugged is there'scontributors and there's, there's sort of hangers on. And you have to, decideif, if you are gonna be a contributor. At some point, you're gonna have to askthe question of like, do you want to carry everybody else too?

Yeah. And so it's, it's a hard decision,but like I, even in business we, I, I have a philosophy in all of ourleadership and, I think anybody in a leadership role ends up having to kind ofadopt this philosophy, which is, look, we, we, we wanna hardily reward thepeople who contribute. Or also not running, a, a charity.

Julian: Yeah. I, I alwayslike, to ask that question to really get behind the philosophy, and it'samazing to hear about the distinction between those, those two kind of, Iguess, I don't wanna say personality types, but you know, it seems like inevery scenario there's gonna be that, that difference between those.

Who are either fully invested orcontributing and those who are maybe passively kind of going through themotions of it. And it's hard to identify though without very, like, specificmetrics or outputs, and I'm sure as, as someone so, so focused on the operationscomponent and efficiency it's probably something that that teases your mindmore so than, than other things.

Tim: I was gonna say one,one anecdote. That wasn't something I read, but something I experienced is I'ma big believer in giving substantial, or, real equity to. Leaders because Ibelieve that, equity is the, is the true way of aligning a team.

Mm-hmm. . And so in part that came outof my first job where I pretty much ended up in a running the company type roleas a very young person. And I asked for equity and they gave me none, and Iended up quitting. Yeah. But you know, it, it is the true way to get your teamaligned is to say, look, we're all in this together and if, if I win, you winand we all win.

So, but it does come back to, you don'tgive it to people who, who are not really in the boat with you.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. It's hardbecause it became very popularized and, before Covid at least, and all these,contracts were coming out, employment contracts with companies. But yeah, it,it's it, like you said, it's not as valuable for those who don't alignthemselves with the vision of the.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Tim, it's been such apleasure chatting with you. I know we're at the end of the episode and alwayslike to make sure to give our guests a chance to give us your plugs. Where,where can we find GoTab? Where can be a fan of you? Give us your LinkedIns,your websites. If we're maybe a prospective restaurateur who, who wants toimplement technology, where can we get involved?

Where can we find, GoTab and startworking with? .  

Tim: Yeah. I mean,gotab.com the easiest one. So jump on anything there.  

Julian: Well, Tim, it was apleasure chatting with you. I hope you enjoyed yourself and thank you for beingon Behind. Company Lines today.  

Tim: Thank you Julian. Nicehaving the time.  

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