Latest / Fractional Frequency / Everyone Has AI. Now What? How Jonathan Lei Is Building What Customers Actually Need
Transcript
- Erin Todus: Hi all. Good evening. Amy Crook: How's it going? Jonathan Lei: Hey, how are you guys? Erin Todus: Going great. I'm excited to jump into this conversation this evening. So today we have we are joined by Jonathan Lay, CEO and founder of WithQ. WithQ is a VC-backed hospitality tech startup building AI to eliminate manual work and redefine the guest experience. So really excited to get into this conversation and pick Jonathan's brain about growing in a fast-moving market. ⁓ and about product differentiation. So welcome Jonathan. Jonathan Lei: Thank you for having me. Yeah, excited. Erin Todus: Yeah. Well, let's get right into it. I'm we always start these conversations by learning a little bit about your origin story. So tell us a little bit about that. What sort of inspired your journey ⁓ to found with Q? Jonathan Lei: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, you know, background wise, I I grew up in China. I came to the US ⁓ when I was sixteen, ⁓ did a degree in really economics and engineering at Berkeley. ⁓ you know, throughout the years when I was growing up and really exploring, you know, what I want to be, ⁓ ⁓ there's a couple ideas that I thought about. It's like really creating new things. ⁓ I did a couple of startups beforehand in college. One of them is, you know, AR, VR for museums and really helping a lot of experimental ⁓ providers or artists in general and ⁓ now like hotels in general. And also build a ⁓ kind of a crypto startup for ⁓ help musicians like self-publish their songs and ⁓ you know, events in general. And ⁓ kind of went from there a lot of attempts in terms of starting my own business. And ⁓ you know, I worked at Ripple for a couple years in San Francisco and ⁓ built out their first NAFT marketplace there ⁓ with thousands of users and also built their entire DevOps program with an accelerator program. And ⁓ yeah, so started with Q two years ago, and ⁓ when we first started, we were actually doing ⁓ voice for pizza and Domino's pizza, so we're around like 50 stores and hundreds of thousands of calls. And ⁓ really realized that the the space isn't as you know attractive as the hotel and hospitality space, where you know I'm really passionate about helping the end user and also helping people that are creating experience ⁓ to create better, more personal experiences. So we kind of got into hotels and ⁓ you know, my co-founders have really good experiences in terms of Working with Marriott and Houghton in the past, ⁓ my co-founder Juan Carlos, we met around three years ago. He sold to six thousand Marriott and Disney resource for geofencing, basically third party ⁓ data collection and ⁓ marketing in general. So and my other co-founder Alex, he worked at Rupo with me, was working on the infrastructure side. So yeah, ⁓ the th three of us works really well. And ⁓ yeah, that's kind of the beginning story of the company. We started a pilot in Puerto Rico. around a year ago and it's been seeing great results for us ⁓ in terms of ROI for our clients and also just in general. Erin Todus: That's ⁓ so you definitely have an entrepreneurial bug of sorts. And I love the sort of early involvement with dominoes. I think that across a number of industries, when people think about great customer experience, they think about the Domino's pizza tractor tracker. I mean, even in our industry, when you think about like, you know, candidate experience and knowing where you stand or where you're at in a particular experience or funnel. it was just such a powerful introduction to the the industry in the world at large. And so I I can I can imagine that if you're taking some of that magic and applying it to with Q, that it's going to be and and likely already is an incredible product for your customers. Jonathan Lei: Yeah. I mean y you'd be surprised with the you know, the number of people calling into dominoes tracking their order, actually. We're we're seeing a lot of those calls, ⁓ seeing where the drivers are. There's always like exceptions to, you know, where your order is, where ⁓ some the there's a lot of human elements in in into you know, UN Pizza delivery and now within travel there's so much ⁓ different factors, right? And ⁓ so yeah. Erin Todus: Yeah. Yeah, no, it's you know, in travel experiences, people are looking to be delighted. And I have to admit, I feel pretty delighted when I see like Brandon has put your pizza into the oven. It's like I feel like I'm really in touch with the experience. but one thing I I want to start and pick your brain a little bit with kind of a ⁓ you know, just a bold question here. You know, I think the market is certainly crowded with AI solutions and products in every corner right now. So talk to us a little bit about that in terms of you know competing in a crowded market. You know, what is that demanding of you and your founder team in terms of leadership as you look to scale your company and product Jonathan Lei: Yeah, ⁓ I mean I think AI's crowded in every single industry, right? ⁓ everyone's trying to find ⁓ different use cases for all around the world, whether it's software or services. And what we're really looking into the competitor landscape is that how do we serve our customers the best and get the best ⁓ public ⁓ information and also case studies out there, and really let our products speak for ourselves, right? A lot of our customers are coming from organic customer acquisition in terms of referrals, people that are really happy with us, making a great RI. guest experiences in general. So how we really want to stand out is first ⁓ the really the economic numbers for for our hotels. Second is basically the personalizations for our guests in general in terms of customizing their trip, ⁓ upselling some of the packages that are more ⁓ appropriate for their occasion. And yeah I mean it it's it's unavoidable to have so many competitors and it's it's a good sign actually ⁓ that validates that you you have a good idea and ⁓ really execution wise in terms of leadership and how we move as a small team, right? We have four people and ⁓ one more engineer, other my co-founders, it's really important to be very efficient in terms of using AI tools and also using just AI and also just our wits end to get to more customers with a with a small team. Yeah. Erin Todus: Yeah. ⁓ we know a thing or two about that of just a really scrappy team. And you have to be, you know, I think really ruthless about the decisions that you make in terms of where you spend your time, your energy, where you invest. So tell us a little bit about that. Well, we talked before, you talked about ⁓ sort of guiding your decisions as a founder team with, you know, clear insights and good data. ⁓ tell us a little bit more about that. How do you make decisions really strategically to move fast with a small team? Jonathan Lei: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I I I think ⁓ startups is all about like running small experiments, right? Like tiny experiments that ⁓ it's more cost effective, also timing effective in terms of hey, product changes, ⁓ what it well, like for example, like which voice ⁓ people like, right? We we have h hundreds of like realistic voices, but for each hotel it's different what customers react to it, right? We listen to every single call. In beginning and ⁓ see the customers' ⁓ sentiments in general. So that's like some of our like really small product tweets ⁓ in terms of even changing the prompts or or one of the workflows ⁓ in the middle of it, and like how to ask guess questions or stuff like that. So th that's on the product side. On the on the go to market side, we we do small experiments with you know marketing, referral, people outreach in general, but none of them are really that costly or takes month to do. And for us, like moving fast. And making lots of mistakes and ⁓ finding out ⁓ a a different decision is correct or not is it's important for us. Erin Todus: Yeah. It sounds like you've built sort of a culture of experimentation. and and hopefully that's you know scalable over time as as your team grows. I think, you know, from from our conversations anyway with other founders, that seems to be a common thread with those who are ⁓ growing fast and and finding a lot of success. Jonathan Lei: Yeah, I you're you're seeing other founding teams, right? Like right now, like the startup AI startup world, people are trying to build like ten billion a ten person billion dollar startups, one person, right? It's really about like using AI effectively and having the right harness and then people know how to direct them. to make those experiments ⁓ to you know ⁓ go from there and for example like i think we're hosting an event ⁓ in june at a conference actually my co-founder just used ai to automatically generate a luma event ⁓ and like you didn't really do anything kind of give it a description and there's like picture that was generated all of that and we're getting a lot of signups already so it's just like a very small thing that you're trying out right Every single day we're trying out AI tools that ⁓ can help us ⁓ increase our efficiency without really sacrificing the quality. Erin Todus: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's incredible. You know, some sometimes that sort of thing can just work. And it sounds like that's a great example of one that did. Do you have any examples of an experiment, an AI experiment that hasn't worked or something that you've tried that you would say, don't try that? Jonathan Lei: Yeah, I mean I think in the beginning we tried a lot of like automation tools in some in terms of like QA and ⁓ and I guess like listening to customer calls and like testing in general, right? What we're finding is that in the beginning the the coding tools and AI models isn't good enough and needs a lot of hand holding. And for us to use a lot of those like cloud and ⁓ open AI models and to really trust it ⁓ step by step, ⁓ there were a lot of In general, in terms of hey, like this does this how how's the analysis of this call? ⁓ did it go right? How how was the customer sentiment? We we use the scoring framework before and it just wasn't good. ⁓ it says it's five out of five, and then we realize it's like a 3.5 or like two out of five, right? ⁓ a lot of times you really have to define what the objectives are, and ⁓ so so they can actually do a great work. ⁓ so that's where. You know, they're saying like ninety percent, ⁓ which I don't think is true, ninety percent of all enterprise AI pilots are not as effective. ⁓ I think it's like multiple reasons of like, hey, you need to really trust AI and also have a harness in terms of them hallucinating, right? A lot of those ⁓ pilots are very high impact and ⁓ there's low like tolerance of error in general. So Erin Todus: Yeah. Yeah, that makes ⁓ makes a lot of sense. And I think that the, you know, those models have evolved just week over week, it seems, in the last six to twelve months. I can imagine, you know, earlier on that it would have been a rockier road than, you know, it it it is today. I wanna dig into something you said and and you've talked a couple of times about this, Jonathan, of of learning your customer really fast. And you know, there are a couple of ways I think to learn your customer and and I think that you know some people have the benefit, for example, of of being in the customer shoes at one point or working in the industry for 10, 20 years. You don't. You have dabbled in different, ⁓ you know, different ventures and you're certainly a leader and an entrepreneur, but not necessarily, you know, a career long hospitality professional. So How do you crack that? Like how do you understand what your customers want and need ⁓ fast? Jonathan Lei: Yeah, I mean so I I don't have the experiences but my co-founder's been selling ⁓ in this space for for months. ⁓ but you know, my personal learning wise is just talk to as many customers as you can. And a lot of times in terms of like I guess like the hotel owners and managers, right? And same thing with VC calls. It's not about whether feedback is after, it's about what kind of questions they ask, right? And you know, when you go into the sales call, you ask them a lot of questions in terms of what their problem is, what are you facing day to day, and what do you wish ⁓ that you know you couldn't have that it should be true. ⁓ you know, the first pilot we actually started ⁓ in Puerto Rico, the entire team was there for two weeks, really, you know, observing all the on ground conver ⁓ guess operations and what the guests are complaining about. So that's really important. ⁓ we have weekly calls with our existing customers about, hey, what are the feedbacks? ⁓ do you have any suggestions in terms of workflow or expressions that we need to kind of incorporate into? So, you know, we've been in this business for a while and we've gone to a lot of conferences talking to people ⁓ you know, ⁓ face to face, which is important. ⁓ and ⁓ yeah. Well that that's why I would say like really learning fast about the industry as well. Erin Todus: Yeah. I think you know spending time with the customers ⁓ is irreplaceable. It makes a lot of sense. One thing that we find in our space is that sometimes customers don't always know how to articulate what they want or need, and you have to tease it out of them. And I imagine that's true ⁓ everywhere. And so I I'll I have to ask you about that. You know, have you encountered customers that maybe don't know what great looks like and and if so, like how do you tease that out of them for their specific niche and and business? Jonathan Lei: Yeah. I mean the the first mistake we actually made was that like hey like you know, same thing kind of we we went into kind of with the V C page was like ⁓ those sixty nine percent of hotels in the US can't fill all the open roles and like 30, 40% of calls are abandoned, right? And then the the a lot of them, their first reaction is like, my hotel doesn't have that problem. ⁓ I'm fully staffed, right? I don't get that, right? And my operation is always perfect. And then, you know, there is also, you know, the insider resistance in terms of, ⁓ I have to get rid of my head count. ⁓ I'm now as powerful before as before, right? But less management in general. So what we really go into is really understanding their pain point acute. and present our solution in a way ⁓ that is easier for them to understand with concrete examples and also in terms of pilots-wise and simplify the use case while we kind of pitch the bigger vision in terms of how we can further improve your ⁓ you know operation efficiencies, improve like those new revenues and also replacing some of those existing softwares you have, right? Because you know, people in this industry has been, you know, very, very dinosaur y where ⁓ the software stack hasn't changed for the last twenty years and ⁓ there's still some Windows ⁓ software ⁓ that's installed on on the computer for them to use, right? It's not even web based. So for us really clearing up and ⁓ honeying our sales pitch and how to go about the product positioning, it's it's still a learning process, right? Where we don't have a perfect. Erin Todus: Yeah. I we've encountered that in a number of conversations with ⁓ people who play in the AI space, whether it's you know through consulting or through a product of some sort, in that it a lot of times, you know, you're looking at a client with like you said, sort of dinosaur age. tech stack ⁓ and you know messy data or non existent data. And sometimes there's like the sort of walk before you run or build the infrastructure 101 before they can even get to you know the modernization and the vision. ⁓ Tell us a little bit about with Q. I feel like we've been kind of dancing around all of the the sides of the product, but tell us what the product actually does. And then I would love your your take on you know when you're looking at sort of a dinosaur esque environment, like it can with queue just drop right in what needs to be true in order for your software to do its thing. Jonathan Lei: Yeah, yeah, definitely. What our product does, ⁓ let's answer that first question. So we build basically voice agents. Now we do SMS and web chat as well, emails, ⁓ that answers every single call. ⁓ how we do this is integrate with a telephone grid and ⁓ intercept everything and ⁓ use very natural language like hey, my name's blah blah blah. I can help you at this hotel. We can help guest book ⁓ room end to end from checking their availabilities. Whether special occasion is anniversary trips, birthday, or something like that. Recommend the best rate possible, ⁓ both for hotels and also for the guests in terms of special needs and accommodations in general, and ⁓ take payments into end as well. ⁓ we do dinner reservations at the hotel's ⁓ restaurants, and also if the guest needs water towel or there's something broke like AC repair, we automatically create tickets ⁓ for the on-ground team to really handle. So it's really ⁓ all encompassing communication ⁓ platform as of right now. But you know, what our biggest vision is to actually, you know, get rid of a lot of those manual workflows that you know the hotel managers and operation teams are facing, right? ⁓ hotel manager in the SF was telling us that like, hey, 70% of the time I spend is in the office crunching some things, like report and the manually typing it or like Excel data and stuff like that, and siloing a lot of those data systems, like you said, either don't exist or it's really old. For us, we're building on top of those integrated. In terms of software. So if you look at each hotel and the industry itself, the softwares are very fragmented and a lot of them don't talk to each other. And for us to be on the layer on top and adding all the propriety data we collect about the guests, the preferences and the interactions make us more effective and really build it, build it from like an AI ground-up AI native management layer, more than just, hey, like this is another software you need to download or you need to use. Erin Todus: Yeah. ⁓ that makes a lot of sense and and sounds pretty easy and that you know how you sort of know what you're dealing with. You can you can plug into all of those things. What to the extent you can share, what's on the roadmap for with queue and what are some of your big ⁓ visionary hopes and goals. Jonathan Lei: Yeah, yeah. First of all, it's not that easy, right? It's it's it's easy to say and articulate, ⁓ but it's really hard to do in exercise. And if you think about product romance, right, ⁓ you have an overall North Star of where you want to go, but day to day it really changes with customer interactions, what the clients want. And for us, really the next step is to release ⁓ a guest facing app that ⁓ help the guests basically personalize their stay, ⁓ where the local ⁓ recommendations, attractions, ⁓ you know, according to the hotel, ⁓ the nearby area or the weather and stuff like that. And really launching that kind of chat GPT feature for the hotel specifically and ⁓ customize things, recommend things, right? They can either chat with it, ⁓ call it or interact it with in you know different ways. And that's where we're seeing that like, hey, we can get into the more guest personalization part. with Forbes, Five Star Sander, other than just, hey, interactive with people calling into hotel. And and the on the you know on the business side, we're ⁓ we're like automating the ticket creation process. So before that they have some like software for creating tickets for for works, right? And there's no tracking there. ⁓ we you don't see the completion time, you don't see a lot of those detailed metrics in terms of what the guests are calling about intense in general. So ⁓ we're building out more Features well to really help the management team to efficiently run their hotel. So, really, yeah, that's the bigger vision to become like the AI hotel ⁓ operator. We don't really want like an AI fully run hotel because we realize that you know hotels and hospitality is a very people-based business. You always need someone there to make you feel like, hey, like someone's tending to me. This is not just automatically a robot run. hotel, right? You want a very knowledge concierge and ⁓ really in person time. And that's a bigger problem. When you walk into a hotel, you know, front desk, there's a long line and they're answering calls sometimes where like they're not answering calls and now your calls dropped, right? Like they should be free from all those private tasks ⁓ tasks and and and get to the things they're most passionate about, which is helping us. So Erin Todus: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's awesome. I'm just thinking about even a guest experience. I'll be so excited when that launches and hopefully we can stay at a property that leverages with queue at some point so we can experience it. I'm just thinking about, you know, checking into a hotel and like you're handed all these brochures and you're like shuffling them around or you get to the room and there's a binder with you know a bunch of pages in it. It's like, where do you start? ⁓ so that's such a cool, cool idea. Very, very exciting. Amy Crook: That's Jonathan Lei: Yeah, yeah. I mean, ⁓ we think that a lot of those there's a lot of products out there that a hotel could be using or brochures like digital stuff, right? Like we think that the best interface is is no interface at all. ⁓ although I think that the the app itself is intermediary, but we're we're seeing this as like guests naturally interacting with it. We instead of like, hey, like navigating this button to get to somewhere, right? Like AI will be able to understand your questions naturally and and help. in that process. ⁓ but yeah it it would be great that if it's implemented in you know every hotel where most of our hotel clients. And really the goal here is also if you're returning guests where you're a frequent traveler to that hotel before you even call or we can suggest you trips, suggest the stay in general. And you know when you call or when you text we we know where your preferences are and just become the you know, Jarvis of your trip, right? So that's kind of the end goal for us. Amy Crook: So. Yeah. I love that. And it's it's so true. And not everything Erin Todus: ⁓ Amy, I don't think we can hear you. Amy Crook: Can you hear me now? Erin Todus: I cannot hear you. We can cut this part out one second while she troubleshoots. Jonathan Lei: Thank you. Amy Crook: It's clicked on. It's clicked on to the microphone. And it's showing me it's talking. Erin Todus: It is so strange. I can't hear John, did you hear it, can you? Jonathan Lei: I No, I can't hear her, no, unfortunately. Erin Todus: You wanna go you wanna leave and come back in? And then if that doesn't work, then I'll just take the rest of the questions. Okay. Sounds good. Amy Crook: Mm-hmm. Jonathan Lei: Yeah, see that. Yeah, how ma how are we doing so far? Erin Todus: So far so good. Yeah, there's ⁓ one of the one of the things that helps drive, you know, a lot of traffic and and listens are the little real shorts that we pull. ⁓ and so I think we've had two good moments ⁓ so far for a little real shorts. So it's good. Anything that feels sort of like natural and like, you know, where we are laughing or you have something, you know, kind of insightful to say, those make really good ones. Jonathan Lei: Great. Amazing. Mm. Amy Crook: Can you hear me now? ⁓ my goodness, that's so crazy. Yeah, it had my little noise thing going up and down and everything. I don't know how that happened. I knew I had to mute it 'cause I needed to blow my nose. I'll mark this so we know where to put it put it back on. Perhaps. Erin Todus: We can there you are. Perfect. Amy Crook: So even some of the something that struck me as you were as you were talking, answering the phones, ⁓ I think is obviously super important. There's nothing more frustrating when you're trying to book something or check on something and your call gets dropped, or can I just put you on hold and then the hold is forever and a day? So I I, you know, love that. I love that you're thinking about GPTs for that concierge service too. Cause I don't know, I think The world is getting more hospitable for introverts who don't necessarily want to sit and chat with somebody to talk through like everything. So having having it available like in the palm of your hand on your phone is just so helpful for those quick questions that you want to ask. and I stayed in a hotel recently and this ri this made me realize how spoiled I've gotten, ⁓ where like to order something from room service, you had to phone them. And I was like, what? So even just having like the functionality of like ordering of ordering something, it doesn't require any AI because they're not making any decisions. But like you it if you have it all in your one app, I think that is like game changing for guests and and for the hotels, especially as you mentioned that they their art their systems are pretty archaic and they don't really talk. To each other. So I guess I'm saying all that to say what has the reception been in terms of like where they should have their people focus their time? Because you're freeing up all this time from a headcount perspective to take care of those repetitive tasks. What do you think this means for the hospitality industry if we have people working, hosting at hotels that have more time? What, where should they spend it? Jonathan Lei: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I think ⁓ the more concrete example I can think of, I also like your point's very relevant, right? ⁓ we went to Hawaii for Christmas and ⁓ it was like a Sheridan hotel, hundred a thousand rooms or something like that, right? Line for check-in, super long. ⁓ there's a concierge desk, nobody there. There's two seats there, right? And there's some kind of activity recommender and the super long too. And then you know when we're in room, I was I think I was calling to check in on some of the hours. And I I I don't really need to do that, right? Like I like I don't need to talk to human. I'm kind of infrared in that way. I don't want to talk to anyone unless I can't find any information online. Right. So so yeah that's really relevant in terms of hey like what are those things that the hotel staff ⁓ as a computer they don't need to answer, right? Like, hey, like the pool hour where like is the elevator goes this where like which tower ⁓ tower it goes to, right? So those are the things like really as a human you you should be creative, ⁓ you should be helpful in a way. ⁓ that's hey, I'm a local expert for this. And ⁓ based on what you want and ⁓ what what kind of activities you want, we can recommend something that is special for you. ⁓ helping them in person really helps them through the phone. Right? Like you go in there. They can, you know, look at you, smile, ⁓ think about things in a very special way to arrange transportation or activities in general. So I think those are things ⁓ that should should be helpful a lot. And another part is basically dealing with issues and complaints, right? You can submit a review on TripAdvisor and whatever, right? You don't get Helped because of this, this, that. And ⁓ if the if the staff has more time to deal with that, like for example, if they do a complaint like, ⁓ a room has bug, or like, hey, I didn't get the service correct, we can give you an upgrade, give you a coupon, or ⁓ resolve the issue in like a very quick, instant way, right? Because if you think about calling a hotel, it's not a lot of people call the hotel, ⁓ especially the younger people, right? Like who's actually calling the hotel? Like I call a hotel sometimes, but not all the time. I I like book on XP DS sometimes, but even less and less. ⁓ a tip for you guys is just like, ⁓ sometimes you call a hotel and ask for a discount, they actually do have authorizations more than just the ETA ⁓ OTAs in general and ⁓ hotel website in general. So that's one thing we have ⁓ that I would suggest people would go and try to do ⁓ a hundred bucks or fifty bucks ⁓ off in general. And ⁓ so yeah, I think those are two areas where the the front desk can answer. And like for example, we're going along with the hotel in Chicago actually, ⁓ Kenzie Hotel. ⁓ and ⁓ The GM's like, can you clone my voice? ⁓ you know, he was a broadcaster for a while and like really, really professional. Like, well, I wanna be like the GM that you can reach twenty four seven and be really hospitable, right? And we're like, that's that's a great idea. We can clone the voice you want and ⁓ really serve as the as a brand voice, yeah. Amy Crook: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's awesome. It's it's it's giving me some hope actually for all the doom and gloom talk that happens around AI. It gives me some hope that actually maybe the reason that customer service in general has seen a decline over the recent years in terms of the quality of delivery, you know, that's probably indicative of kind of an overload of avenues for people to get information. And so they're coming at you in every single format that you can think of. And so by creating something that can quieten down some of that repetitive noise, it should make you know that job a little bit more p pleasant. And so people will feel more more i in in better spirits let's say to offer to offer a better service because ⁓ i definitely not so much now thankfully because i just mostly travel for fun but ⁓ in my corporate days when i spent a lot of time in in random hotels there was definitely some frazzled front staff ⁓ working there that just I could you know they were they were done. I got there and they were they were over Jonathan Lei: Yeah. I mean I like on that point like ⁓ you know, used to be great customer service, now it's just a lot of labor shortage. ⁓ not a lot of young people wants to deal with a repetitive phone call. Now a lot of them wants to be standing in the front desk dealing with ⁓ and stuff, right? And we're seeing labor costs rising and rising. A lot of hotels use overcalls ⁓ oversee calls meters that knows nothing about the recommendations or the whole nearby ⁓ activities or the destination itself. So that's where we're seeing really like customer service quality drops. ⁓ you know, the ⁓ you know the wait time and also even You I was on Uber Eats one time and the the the driver like canceled after having my order 16 minutes after, right? I was trying to get to a human, but it took me a while. And ⁓ where AI is really shining in some areas and a lot of other areas that if you don't have a great product, if you don't have the great design in terms of hey, what can AI solve? How we can solve it in a in a most natural and time efficient way, versus you know. still have to get to your human and you still have to wait like three to four minutes to get there. Right. So you know a a lot of our competitors in the space, it's it's the same. They can handle like very limited use cases and it's not as natural. People are frustrated and ask for a human right away and you're not really solving the fundamental problem. Amy Crook: True. And so my last question on this topic, and now I'll switch screws a little bit, but why focus on hospitality? Do you see a ⁓ future for your product in all customer service spaces? Jonathan Lei: Yeah, I think for us it's really a a passion and the an understanding of the space itself and really helping with. Either the owners and operators to to help serving the guests itself, right? Like not a a lot of other industries have this kind of luxury experiences, experimental products, right? ⁓ if you think about other services like, you know, ⁓ voice AI is seeing a lot of different verticals, for example, like home services, right? When you call home services to get something, to to get ⁓ I don't know, HVAC or ⁓ plumbing and stuff like that, right? It's it's a necessity. ⁓ and for us, we're really selling that experience. experience. They can go to five other hotels in the ⁓ in the area. Why do they choose us? Why do they choose that particular hotel? It's it's it's a lot of training on, you know, specific data, knowing what the problems we're solving and also integrating with all the softwares. The more data we have, the better. Amy Crook: Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. Jonathan Lei: So yeah, sticking in the hospitality space is really our bread and butter in terms of just focus. Amy Crook: Yeah. I think that's smart. A lot of people, you know, have will have a good idea and then try and scale it too quickly or try and put it in too many different verticals and then you lose, you kind of lose a bit of the the magic there. So that makes sense. So I want to talk a little bit now about just life as a founder. So you are a ⁓ you founded your company with two other co-founders. tell me, how do you divide and conquer with all of the responsibilities that come with running a company? Jonathan Lei: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we we do a lot of founderless sales. I I think that's you know, really in the ⁓ you know, age of AI, like really a technical ability to build things. Very important still, but you can see people building a MVP or like a product that can be used like within a couple days. And for us, really about, you know, ⁓ my CTO does a lot of those integrations and also building out some of the features and making sure they actually work and that can actually fail. And ⁓ my co-founder who you know worked with Miraz and Disney before, ⁓ talked to a lot of customers and making sure our operations are wrong right. example organizing happy hours ⁓ events ⁓ at the conferences or even as app in person and ⁓ you know my job is kind of to oversee everything but also participate in a lot of those sales conversation i'm i'm almost in all of the sales conversation right and you're seeing this team being so small and nimble that everybody just do something about it and and you know for for being a CEO your your only job is to sell if you think about ⁓ selling to customers, selling to investors, selling yourself to ⁓ a talent that you might hire. Right. So being good at that as ⁓ as a founder is is it's very, very important, whether you're tech technical or not. Yeah. Amy Crook: Yeah, I definitely would second that message that if something needs doing, it's probably your job if you've noticed it first. Jonathan Lei: Yeah. Yeah. So th that's that that's kinda where you know you you learn a lot of things. ⁓ the last two years. We've learned so much. I don't think I can do it from MBA or Really you're taking responsibility on every decision you make. And ⁓ that's that's sometimes the hardest thing, but you kinda have to face it. Because you're creating a thing zero to one. And ⁓ for that to happen is very, very hard. And you have to go through many, many iterations and learning a lot. So yeah. Amy Crook: Yeah. The resilience and grip factor goes up considerably, I guess, the the longer you stay in the game. ⁓ so Jonathan Lei: Yeah, and you have to be like delusionally ⁓ optimistic, right? Like to think about this gaming in general and ⁓ really having on balance optimism. And you know, that's why you have co founders where if one of you is down, one of us is down, like other people will pick you up, right? Like the morale is always there, the optimism is always there, but yeah. Amy Crook: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. There's definitely been one or two melt meltdowns over the last year that Erin's kind of scraped me off the floor for. So I definitely, I definitely second that too. Okay, so let's think about our audience, ⁓ other founders or potential founders that are thinking about starting their own business. What is one practical tip you could give them ⁓ for scaling an early stage startup? Jonathan Lei: I would say just like don't skip the manual processes. Really talk to your customers, talk to as many people as possible, and do small manual processes in the beginning to make sure that they you understand the product in depth instead of just using AI for everything. ⁓ I I think it's a little counterintuitive, but we use AI for all the coding now, ⁓ for a lot. development, but it really came from the experience of us ⁓ going on ground and creating customer ⁓ solutions and talking to them for hours and hours, right? And interrupting, ⁓ interacting with all the guests. So that's that's why I would say like, you know, don't skip. There's no shortcuts to anything. Amy Crook: Yeah, that's true. ⁓ and so where can people find you and learn more about you and with queue? Jonathan Lei: Yeah, you can go to withq.ai and ⁓ so that's that's our website and I really describe kind of our vision and our product offering. There's a couple case studies and you know there are hotels ⁓ live on our website, you can obviously call it and ⁓ you know try try to mice mess with it ⁓ a lot find it's kind of fun to just do that and ⁓ see you know what AI can do, right? You see like McDonald's or like I think Chipotle's ⁓ AI app ⁓ doing calculus for you and stuff like that, right? We we we Yeah, yeah. And we we we won't do that for you. We we can do like slightly fine unless you declare us an emergency or something like that, right? And yeah. Amy Crook: Okay. Erin Todus: Yeah. Yeah. Amy Crook: A calculus emergency. ⁓ no. Jonathan Lei: Yeah, someone held a gun to your to your face and they're like, what is this equation? So yeah, yeah, I mean like people love messing with AI and ⁓ so you know we tell our investors and other clients to feel free to c just call our AI. And if they do have feedback, let let us know. Right. And it's it's it's not 100% accurate. ⁓ it probably never will be, but we do the best we can to prevent ⁓ the errors from happening. Amy Crook: Ha ha ha. Yeah, that makes sense. It was so great chatting with you, Jonathan, and hearing about ⁓ updates to the business. It sounds like things are going great. Jonathan Lei: They're okay. Iv every day we have challenges and ⁓ Amy Crook: than like a true founder. Like you've got some success. They're good. They're okay. Like I'm not jumping off a bridge this week. They're fine. Erin Todus: Yeah. Jonathan Lei: Yeah. Fighting fires. The fires are kind of small recently. There's not that many and fingers crossed. But honestly, sometimes like more fires you have to fight the the more you learn. And that's that's how you how you do it. So Amy Crook: So true. Yeah, so true. That's great. Thank you so much. Jonathan Lei: Thank you. Good to chat. And ⁓ thank you for your time and thoughtful questions. Erin Todus: Thanks, Jonathan. Good to chat. Amy Crook: Take care. Bye. Jonathan Lei: Right. Erin Todus: All right, you want to stop. Amy Crook: Okay. Jonathan Lei: Are we gonna go?