The following interview is a conversation we had with Vivian Wang, CEO of Landed, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Vivian Wang, CEO of Landed: $8 Million Raised to Solve the Restaurant Labor Shortage
Vivian Wang
Excited to be here, Brad?
Brett
Yes. So before we can talk about what you’re building, let’s start a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Vivian Wang
Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit on us. We’re a livelihood platform for blue collar workers, so we help them take control of their jobs, their finances, their education here at Landed. And we also have the other customer on our marketplace, which is the employer. So we work with a lot of restaurant groups, ones that I’m sure you recognize, like Kava, Panera, Pizza Hut, helping them hire for their staff. So a little bit on me, how I got into this. So I actually grew up in the restaurant world. Both my parents immigrated to the US. From China, and they both started their jobs as a dishwasher and a waitress at a local Chinese restaurant. I grew up in Ohio, and now, two decades later, they’re both software engineers. They had two kids who went to Princeton University. And through my parents experience, I really learned that blue collar workers, they want to have a career.
Vivian Wang
They want to move up in life. I think that there’s kind of a lot of systemic challenges for the hourly worker. And I studied public policy when I was at Princeton. I also spent some time at Oxford in the UK. And ultimately, what I want to be building here and what got me really excited is really developing that livelihood path for the blue collar worker and offering them that support that my parents didn’t have when they first came here and didn’t have the community to lean on.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. And before we dive deeper into Landed, we’d like to start with a couple of questions just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder. So first one, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about that?
Vivian Wang
Yeah, absolutely. So Tobias Vitobe at Shopify, I think that Shopify is an incredible business. They’re able to empower small and medium businesses around the world, and especially when that entire category of retail, like home goods and just various products that you can buy online ecommerce has grown increasingly consolidated and monolithic. Even though they’re an enormous company now, they have kept that customer first builders mentality. And I just love that Toby has really kind of made sure that they kept their scrappiness, and it’s something that I use as a model for our own operations.
Brett
Nice. That’s a good call out. And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a founder? And this can be a business book, or it could also just be a personal book that’s influenced how you view the world?
Vivian Wang
Sure. I think that the book that really has influenced the way that I view the world, not just as a founder, but also my personal relationships and how I really go about every aspect of my life is never Split the Difference negotiating as If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss. So Chris was a former international hostage negotiator for the FBI, so he was doing a lot of really high stakes and negotiations to get people out of hostage situations overseas. So I think that what I really love is the takeaway. He has nine different negotiation tactics, and he kind of takes you through it via his own experiences and stories. But I think it comes down to in your life, in all aspects of your life, you don’t want to compromise because especially when you’re negotiating, because compromise and meeting halfway, splitting the difference, which is kind of like a common fallacy in negotiation, often leads to a bad deal for both sides.
Vivian Wang
And it’s much better to not have a deal than it is to have a bad deal. And he has a bunch of these different call outs in the negotiation tactics. But I think that I kind of live by that in how I decide to spend my time and the memory relationships, but then also how I think about running Landed.
Brett
That’s one of those books that’s been on my list for a long time, and I just haven’t pulled the trigger on reading it. So thanks for the recommendation. It’s a Friday, so that’s all I’ll read this weekend.
Vivian Wang
Absolutely. It’s a really cool one. There’s so many good stories in there.
Brett
Nice. Very cool. Now let’s dive deeper into Landing. So let’s say I’m a blue collar worker. Can you walk me through what it’s like to interact with the platform?
Vivian Wang
Yes, absolutely. So I can paint a picture of your experience today and then how it works with Landed. So before Landed, a lot of blue collar workers, we focus on hospitality, we focus on hourly roles. You might be looking for your first job. You might be looking to switch your job. Right now you’re kind of shooting blind, right? You’re kind of submitting applications on indeed, you’re submitting applications on Craigslist. You might be walking into stores and hoping the hiring manager is in there. And a lot of the time you’re not hearing back from where you’re applying. So there’s this kind of mismatch. And yes, we’ve all been reading about the labor shortages for the past two years and those have been just crazy to see. I mean, there’s like a multimillion person staffing deficit in the US alone and so you’re kind of like applying different places.
Vivian Wang
You don’t really know what the jobs are out there because there’s a lot of information asymmetry it’s just a matter of what you come across online. And so once you come onto Landed, what we really want to understand is what is it that you’re looking for? So for an hourly worker, there are different things that they hold in high esteem. So the first one is maybe you want to be working within like a ten minute drive of your place. Maybe you want to be working close to public transportation. It might be certain shift availability. On average, hourly workers, unlanded, we see that they hold 2.1 jobs simultaneously, which means that they’re having two to three jobs that they need to be working. So shifts really matter, pay rate matters, benefits matter. And so we kind of aggregate that. And then we also have a whole large group of these employers on the other side who are actually employing these hourly workers.
Vivian Wang
So they have different types of things they’re looking for too. They have need to haves, they have nice to haves, and we match them based on our intelligent matching algorithm. So rather than inundating you with a bunch of different options, we’re really bringing to you like tailored options that really fit exactly what it is you’re looking for. So now if you’re looking for a job, you can just come on to Landed and we can go and find the best fit role for you.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. And if we look at that job deficit, is that really just a matching problem? So we have the workers that do want to do the jobs and we have the companies that do the jobs, but there’s just not a good way to connect them currently. Or can you tell us more about that job deficit?
Vivian Wang
Yes, absolutely. So I think what has happened through COVID and now is the restaurant industry has been completely turned on its head. And I think we probably have all seen there are restaurants that have closed down, maybe because their labor structures have not worked in the past, because hospitality restaurants, grueling hours, super grueling hours, they work super hard. And restaurants are pretty low margin businesses. So when we look at how do restaurants win, they have to become a preferred employer. So workers have a lot of choice nowadays. There’s the boom in remote work. They can explore remote jobs, they’re no longer necessarily geoconstrained. So the restaurants that are going to win and become that preferred employer are the ones who are able to develop 360 degree brands that delight not only their guests but also their employees. So I think that paradoxically for being people businesses.
Vivian Wang
Restaurants often don’t realize the employees full developmental potential, which is why that’s like, a core value of landed is to really help these blue collar workers achieve that developmental potential. I think that capabilities of employees can’t really shine when they just have a lot of rote responsibilities thrown at them to eat up time. So in the future, I see a lot of, like, automation AI to help restaurants tackle commodity tasks with ease and really propel employees towards more fulfilling high value roles that drive business growth. So I think it’s kind of like a category change of the industry and how they’re approaching their employees and really having their previous ethos around how they treat guests come back and actually apply to their employees. A lot of restaurants have done it well in the past. Like, Danny Meyer is like an amazing founder in the space, and he has a really great culture for their employees.
Vivian Wang
And I think that’s kind of the direction the entire industry has to move now.
Brett
And I see on your website that it saves 15 plus hours of manual processes. Can you talk us through what that’s like on the company side and the manual work that they have to do and no longer have to do because of your platform?
Vivian Wang
Sure. So today, if you’re a general manager, by the way, the industry turnover rate in the restaurant industry hospitality of employees is 130%. On average, you’re turning over 130% of your staff every year. So you need to be hiring constantly. And today, if you’re turning over that many people in your staff, I mean, each restaurant, you might see like only 20 people on shift, but they have like three shifts. They might have actually 60 to 100 people on payroll for that single location restaurant. So given that if you’re a general manager, you’re doing a bunch of things nowadays, I mean, restaurant operation has become increasingly complex. You have your in room in store diners. You have maybe a drive through. You might have curbside pickup. You’re managing third party platforms like DoorDash Uber Eats Grubhub. Theme list. I think we’ve all seen that mess of iPads kind of bite the kitchen.
Vivian Wang
And now ghost kitchens are popping up. So not only are you servicing your customers, you’re also cooking up an entirely new menu in the back end. So you need more back of house staff members. So there’s all these things going on. And at every restaurant, there’s one person who’s managing keeping the wheels on the bus, and that’s the general manager. So the general manager is doing all these things that I just described. They’re also making sure that hygiene practices are being met, guests are having a positive experience. Wait times aren’t too long. They have to manage PNL, the financial ledger for their restaurants, and they also have to manage hiring to cover all that turnover. So all that onus is on the general manager. And if you’re hiring like 100 people every year, well, that’s one person interviewing and hiring probably like hundreds of people and reaching out to 1000 plus people every year.
Vivian Wang
So what we do when landed comes in is we take care of that entire process, but we do let the general manager make the ultimate decision for whether or not they want to hire a person. So we take care of the sourcing, the vetting, the engaging, and the interview set up for all of the candidates for their within four wall hiring. And that could be like a server, a host cook, a cashier, a front of house team member, all the way up to an assistant manager that reports directly to that general manager. So now you’re not like a general manager sitting there texting 100 people like, hey, do you want to come in for an interview tomorrow? And managing their calendars and doing all that. We handle all of it real time, and we handle it 24/7 because we have our proprietary artificial intelligence that is conversational and can engage with candidates as if they’re talking to a general manager themselves.
Vivian Wang
So the candidates are getting a personalized experience, and no candidate is getting ghosted by your company, by the way. Like, candidates all have a positive experience, and then if the candidate is qualified and the match was the right match, then the candidate comes in for an interview and you as a GM just get to meet people who hopefully you hire. Typically it’s like a 10% hiring rate with us and how much we’re betting we’re able to literally three X, sometimes more than three X. That hiring rate really helping the general manager make the most out of their time.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. I can see why customers love you. What year did you launch the company? Was it 2019? I think I read.
Vivian Wang
So actually we launched it fully to customers. March of 2020. March 14.
Brett
Interesting time to launch a company.
Vivian Wang
Yes, it was a really interesting time because I was in San Francisco at the time and everything. The whole world shut down March 16, 2020. So two days later. I think that 2020 was a really difficult year for job seekers across the US. And for me, it was alarming to see all the news stories circulating online about the havoc COVID-19 was wreaking on these businesses. I mean, like small, medium businesses completely being shut down with not really an end in sight. A lot of these job seekers getting furloughed and then later let go because businesses couldn’t sustain that many employees and not have a customer base. So that really made our work all the more urgent. So we directed all of our energy after launch into building the fastest way for furloughed or laid off workers to land on their feet with a new job.
Vivian Wang
We actually started with retail. We were primarily selling into retail. My background was in retail before this and tech before that. And we quickly found a really interesting opportunity in quick serve restaurants, fast food restaurants and grocery stores. So that was kind of like what happened in the first 30 days of Landed.
Brett
Wow, that’s a good story. I think for the first month of.
Vivian Wang
Being in business, it was crazy. And we did no marketing. It was absolutely no marketing. And we saw thousands and thousands of people just like, pour onto our platform. Job seekers pour into our platform. It was amazing to see what was.
Brett
Going through your head at that time. It was as a founder and entrepreneur, were you freaking out a little bit? Like, what was your psychology like staring down this unknown, crazy pandemic and kind of feels like it would have jeopardized your whole business just at face value. So what was your psychology like at that stage?
Vivian Wang
Sure. So at Landed, we have three values and five operating principles. And I think the operating principle that kind of encapsulates how I felt at the time was our second one, which is micro pessimism, macro optimism. So at the micro scale, super pessimistic, I mean, we had to think rigorously about everything that was going on. We had all these people coming onto our platform and were like, well, all these people, we need to help a good chunk of them get jobs that’s take a note of pressure. And we also were like, wow, this entire industry that we thought were going to sell into first is completely shut down with no one’s shopping during pandemic. Right. So at the micro scale, were like, okay, we had this responsibility. We have to be very pessimistic about it. Let’s just assume that things don’t open. Let’s go find if there are any bright spots.
Vivian Wang
There might not be any. But then the macro optimism was that we have an amazing team. And really quickly we found interesting crisis for us to be like grocery stores, like restaurants. And the macro optimism is that basically, I know that with our amazing team and with how tenacious we are at solving problems, that Landed will better tomorrow, next week, next year than it is today. And if you know that for a fact, without a doubt, then it makes like, the micro pessimism more of a solutions oriented pessimism rather than wallowing and pity type.
Brett
Nice. That’s really cool when you hear of companies really taking their core values and using them to make decisions as opposed to just being something that’s slopped on a wall that doesn’t really mean anything. So seems like you’re really living these core values.
Vivian Wang
Yeah, absolutely.
Brett
Now let’s talk about market categories. So when it comes to market categories, how do you think about them? Is this a category creation play or is this chipping into existing categories?
Vivian Wang
Yes, so we’re completely creating a new category. So just like how the sharing economy kind of emerged with Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, and now so many other amazing companies, what we’re really trying to build is this livelihood economy. So a livelihood is I define it as made up of three parts, as I mentioned before, right? You got your job. That’s the foundation of a stable livelihood. The second is your finances, the third is your education. So when I think about livelihood, it really is like all those different factors combined. Now, obviously, we can’t build all those factors. Like today we have to focus on the first one, which is the jobs, and then we’ll go into the next one. But it’s really interesting because there are companies out there that are helping restaurants with hiring, but our goal is actually coming down to Brass Tax and really understanding the major problem facing our primary customer, which is that blue collar worker.
Vivian Wang
So we thought about the biggest challenges they’re facing, right? How do they find a job that is stable and going to help put food on the table? The second thing is, like 25% of blue collar workers are unbanked or under banked, so they don’t have access to a bank account. They’re using check cashing shops, predatory payday lenders, and those are huge businesses, but they really shouldn’t be. And then the third piece is how can you provide education? Maybe you don’t need traditional four year degree, bachelor’s degree, technical degree. Maybe you just need to know how to do a budgeting spreadsheet. And then you can go from being a team member making $15 an hour to a shift lead making $20 an hour. And that’s a life changing jump. And then in the future, moving up to being a general manager. A fun fact actually is that at Darden Restaurant Group, 100% of their SVPs actually started out as general managers in stores.
Vivian Wang
So there’s a huge career trajectory for them. And ultimately what we want to do is just help support that livelihood for them and have it all kind of be one platform so that every worker, there are 90 million of them in the US. Both of our workers in the US can come onto one platform and know that their job, their finances, their education are being taken care of.
Brett
Wow, super cool. And we bring on a lot of founders and we ask all of them that same question about category creation. And what a lot of founders say is some investors aren’t supportive of category creation just because it’s costly, takes a long time, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. So in the early days when you were launching the company, were you talking about category creation with investors from day one?
Vivian Wang
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because I think that if you’re looking for investors, they’re going to be with you forever, hopefully forever. So they have to really understand not just what your tactics are to get to the next round of funding is, but really, what is that vision that you’re like? Why is the world going to be different? Because Landed exists. So we did Y combinator and paul Buckeye was one of the partners. He is the founder of Gmail, an amazing person. And he asked each and every one of us in this roundtable discussion, why is the world in ten years going to be different because your company exists, like paint a picture. And so for me, that I go back to that a lot and I think about, okay, I’m a very visual person. I literally just imagine a world with Landed versus without Landed. And that’s kind of what I convey to potential investors or advisors and also people joining the Landed team so that they really understand what is the overarching goal of Landed.
Vivian Wang
And if they’re on board, awesome. If they’re not on board, that’s fine too.
Brett
And on the topic of fundraising, I don’t know if you saw that really depressing article in TechCrunch that women founded. Startups raised 2% of these C funds in 2022. So as a female founder, what’s your take on why this is not getting any better? Because I feel like every year around this time in January, this data comes out about the previous year and it’s like the same stuff. So what needs to change for this to actually see some improvement? And then on your end, personally, are you seeing any improvement? Is it getting any better or what’s your take?
Vivian Wang
So, absolutely, I think that female founders need to really help support one another because there aren’t that many of them. I was just at a dinner last week with an amazing group of female founders, and I think that sometimes the voice of the female founders can be drowned out so you don’t hear about them as much. And I think what really needs to change is just these people who are in positions of power and do have resources need to go and find these female founders. And I don’t think it needs to be like a charity thing. They’re amazing female founders running amazing businesses, and it’s just more about building awareness and giving them a platform. I think that one thing that is kind of this myth about being a startup that sometimes dissuades more women from becoming a female founder is that there’s this ramen founder persona and you have to eat 99 cent ramen for like three years in order to be a successful founder.
Vivian Wang
And I don’t think that there’s any shame in not being like a 99 cent ramen eating person for like three years. Maybe you have kids, maybe you have a family who need support. And so I think there just should be more like education about what are the steps to get to where you want to be, but then also understanding that there’s a diverse set of people who can be successful. There’s not just one brand, and it’s not just the brand that is the most talked about. So that’s really, I think it just comes down to women supporting other women, but then people in positions of power, or who have a megaphone, who have a platform, have women come on and talk about their diverse sets of experiences that may be different than some of these traditional mythological founder personas.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And that’s super insightful. Now, another question I wanted to ask about is just traction. So I see all the epic logos on your website. So are there any numbers you can share about the number of customers that you have today or the number of companies that are working with you?
Vivian Wang
Yeah, so we work with nearly 400 companies in the space, amazing companies that are pushing things forward. Everything from like a bar Taco, that is a fast growth company, kava, fence growth all the way to more established brands like Panera, like Chickfila. And in the first year of founding Landed, we actually 14 X our revenue. And then the next year we eight X. And this year we also have some very aggressive growth goals because the faster we grow, the more businesses we’re able to bring onto the Landed platform, the more job opportunities we’re presenting to the candidates and the blue collar workers on their platform. So that’s really why we’re trying to grow super fast.
Brett
And are these deals sold through corporate or is it to the individual franchisee?
Vivian Wang
It’s a combination. So depending on the type of business, some businesses are more like corporate owned stores, others are more heavily franchised. We work with both.
Brett
Got it makes a lot of sense. And in terms of go to market, which is always very difficult, what would you say has been your greatest challenge so far and how’d you overcome it?
Vivian Wang
I do think that probably our biggest challenge was launching two days before the entire world shut down. That was a big challenge, but I think that the way that we overcame it was really just listening to the customer. I actually still spend probably 30% of my time every week talking to customers. And that’s not just the customer, like the employer customer, like these businesses that are paying us SaaS revenue, but I also spend time talking to candidates on the platform. And when I do that, I think that it helps really accelerate the pace of learning because I’m hearing firsthand what their pains are, what some of their goals are, things like that. And everybody in the business, varying degrees, spends time with the customer. So just coming like our first value at Landed is customer obsession. We’re very obsessed with the employers and the candidates, like the workers on our platform.
Vivian Wang
And what we do not spend our time on is competitors. We don’t really care so much what competitors are doing because ultimately, if you’re making your customers happy and you’re solving the problems, you will win. So I continue to spend, I don’t plan on ever changing that. Like spending a third of my time every week talking to customers.
Brett
Wow, that’s cool. Now last question for you. I know we touched on this a bit in the category question, but let’s zoom out three years from today. What’s the company look like and what’s your impact look like for companies and for the workers?
Vivian Wang
Sure. So in three years from now, we’re going to have launched our second pillar, which is the financial fintech pillar where we’re helping workers invest in their financial futures. So there’s going to be a whole host of different types of things that we do to help them, but combination of credit building, payment streaming, using cutting edge fintech. And for the employers, we just handle their entire hiring process. We already do that for hundreds of companies today, but we just really want to continue growing our market share and continue launching new markets. We’re kind of all over the US. But we have our core markets. We want to launch more and more our core markets and five X by the end of this year. And for the candidates, we’re going to launch that initial like the fintech platform and start learning and providing value there beyond just like getting them that job.
Vivian Wang
So I’m super excited for what things look like, but three years sounds like kind of like a lifetime. Atlanta has only been around for a couple of years and we’ve done all this in that time. So I’m really excited to see what things look like in three years as well.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing and super exciting. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview. But before we wrap here, if people want to follow along with your journey as you build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Vivian Wang
Absolutely. You can find me on Twitter and my handle is just Viv Wang underscore posting. About landed. And feel free to DM me. I’m always loving to talk, especially if you’re a female founder. If you’re a restaurant hospitality group looking for hiring, or if you’re just wanting to chat, maybe looking for a new role at a kick a** place to work, feel free to. My DMs are always open.
Brett
Awesome. Vivian, thank you so much for taking the time to chat and talk about what you’re building and share this vision. This all sounds super exciting and we look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Vivian Wang
Thanks so much, Brett.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
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