The following interview is a conversation we had with Tim McLaughlin, CEO of GoTab, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $26 Million Raised to Power the Future of Restaurant Commerce.

Tim McLaughlin
Thanks for having me, Brett. 

 
Brett
Not a problem. So, to kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and maybe a bit more about your background?

Tim McLaughlin
Sure. My name is Tim McLaughlin. I co-founded Gotab in 2016, albeit as I was extracting myself from my prior company. My background is really diverse. I’m a mechanical engineer by degree, software developer by practice, and I’ve started a total of seven companies. Some successfully exited, some shut down, and some still ongoing. 

Brett
What were some of those lessons you’ve learned from the ones that shut down? 

 
Tim McLaughlin
I’m not Elon Musk. I don’t think you can run multiple companies. I think very few people can run multiple companies at the same time. I say that even as I own multiple companies, but I don’t run them. So I guess the lesson for myself was stay focused and don’t get too distracted with shiny new objects. 

Brett
When I was looking at your LinkedIn, I saw one was a restaurant and a brewing company. What was that like? I’m sure that was a fun business to run. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
It is, in fact, fun. My wife owns them. I co founded them with another couple and my wife. And then when I decided to go back into technology software and start Gotab, my wife took over the two breweries. So she still owns those and runs them. And I mostly just have opinions on them, which she also tries to ignore those opinions as much as she can. 

 
Brett
Was that hard working closely with your wife when you were in the business?

Tim McLaughlin
My wife’s an engineer, too, so working may be one of the easiest things we do together. So, yeah, I’ve been married for over 25 years, but no, working has never been a real one of our challenges.

Brett
When it comes to your inspiration as a founder and as an entrepreneur, are there any founders that really come to mind that have inspired you along the way?

Tim McLaughlin
I mean, I think there’s always the know Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Although I will say, I probably shouldn’t say it publicly, but earlier, Elon Musk was much more inspiring than I would say current Elon Musk is, in my opinion. Not that he doesn’t do great things, but I don’t need all the other stuff with it. So, yeah, I’m generally inspired by people when they’re innovating and they’re changing the world. And so, yes, I personally love the early stages of a business of product building. 

 
Brett
Any founders that you’ve personally had experience working with or just encountered, maybe in the local tech scene there or just throughout your career?

Tim McLaughlin
Unfortunately, I came to this through a very different path, because when I graduated from college, I wanted to go into robotics. Turns out robotics when I graduated from college wasn’t a thing, so I ended up going into software consulting instead. And so I started off in the services industry, which is a very different. I mean, I worked with a ton of great people, and in fact, a lot of those people worked with me again in Gotab, but I didn’t really have sort of a startup mentor, if you will.

Brett
What about books for inspiration? So the way we like to frame this, we got this from an author called or named Ryan Holiday. He calls him quickbooks. So a quickbook is a book that rocks you to your core, really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind?

Tim McLaughlin
I read a lot of books. In fact, one problem with reading a lot of books is I actually also forget all the books that I read, and they just kind of meld their way into my brain. But I can no longer remember what it was or cite where the impact came from. I do like four steps to epiphany was a pretty influential book on product development, although some people might think it’s kind of nerdy. A lot of the standard business books, a lot of the standard negotiating books. But, yeah, I pay a lot of attention to product development, although in a very pragmatic sense. Like, I’m not big on product development processes and lots of overhead and things like that. But staying close to the client, staying close to the customer, was one of the essential portions of that.

Tim McLaughlin
And then there’s another heavily influential book. I’m trying to remember what it was called in the professional services industry around how to develop a culture. And I can’t remember the name of the book because it’s probably been ten years, but it had a ton of impact on even how I affected my own business, which is services at the time, a couple hundred people.

Brett
What about any personal books that aren’t in the business world that have had a big influence on you? 

 
Tim McLaughlin
Well, unfortunately, when I cite books, it’s always the most recent ones that I’m reading and never the ones that I read maybe 20 years ago that had a huge impact. Currently I’m reading a lot of anthropology or evolutionary anthropology. So some books that recently I enjoyed was a book called drunk. It was about how the phenomena of cultures wrapping themselves around intoxicants, in particular alcohol, but other intoxicants by a professor at a University of Vancouver. There was another one I enjoyed called ritual. These are almost all humorously kind of anti technology book. So I’m a fan of philosophy as well. So like Max Faber, some of his writings were pretty influential around sociology and how technology causes the reduction of identity within a culture. So I would actually recommend there’s a podcast called philosophize. This summarizes Max Weber’s stuff very well. 

 
Brett
Nice. I’ll have to link to that in the show notes. And I found the drunk book. I think it’s drunk. How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization. Is that correct?

Tim McLaughlin
Yeah, it’s a pretty compelling, certainly, you know, it’s not perfect, but there’s some interesting anecdotes. Mean alcohol is a technology, right? And the question always, evolution is, if something’s bad for you like alcohol, why would it persist? Or why would it become such a prominent part of society? And his sort of basic tenet is, well, it actually is good for society. It may be bad for you medically, but it’s a pretty important technology for building larger civilizations. 

 
Brett
Who authored it? Is this anheuser bush?

Tim McLaughlin
Humorously, I did see the guy present at the craft beer convention, but I read his book before then. 

 
Brett
Let’s switch gears now. Let’s dive deeper into the company. How we like to start. This portion of the podcast is really focusing on the problem. What problem does Gotab solve? 

 
Tim McLaughlin
Guest experience is really what we are primarily focused on. It’s expanded into operator experience. So like I said, my first business was actually ecommerce and content management consulting company. So originally I wrote a product to do that. Eventually, as we evolved in my first company, we ended up deploying other people’s products as well, so wrapping services around larger enterprise systems. Then I owned these two restaurants, and I quickly learned just how broken restaurant technology is. It’s all closed, it’s all proprietary. I mean, as an architecture and data, it’s all proprietary. Massive lock in. No portability, hardware lock in. It’s totally crazy. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
So we started originally with the, hey, let’s make it so guests don’t have to do the things they don’t want to do in restaurants, aka pay split the non fun stuff, not ordering and tasting stuff, not talking to great service staff, but taking away the not fun stuff. So transactional stuff, as I call it. And then that expanded into, okay, great. So if we give guests full control, which is actually, this is something a lot of people in the restaurant industry are afraid of, is if you give the guests full control, then they’re going to create all this chaos for our kitchen or factory, if you will. And that was true. We actually created a ton of problems in the bars and the kitchens because we would actually take more orders than they’d ever taken before at the same time. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
So then we ended up becoming an operational tool to fulfill the. I say, like keeping the promises that we already made to the guests. Do you think of it like taking orders or setting expectations? And then you need to fulfill those expectations. So we end up running to old kitchens. We do them in a very unusual way, and then we ultimately have to manage inventory and get into accounting. And of course, we have to do all those things in an unusual way because that’s just how we are. We do have a lot of esoteric, I wouldn’t say esoteric, they’re incredibly practical capabilities, but they don’t really exist in restaurant technology and other systems. 

 
Brett
When I look at the suite of products and the features and the capabilities you have, I feel like some of those I’ve seen just standalone companies where they say, this is it. This is what we’re going to focus on, and we’re going to build purpose built software for this specific problem. How have you approached deciding what you’re going to build into the product? Because it seems like it’s very advanced and there’s a lot there.

Tim McLaughlin
Yeah, you’re correct. We have gone really deep in the areas of function where we focus. Just to be clear, those areas are commerce, meaning you’re shopping and you’re buying operations, as in like, okay, so now I either have to make it or put it in boxes or both or bags. And then the last part is logistics. And in the restaurant space, actually, none of the technologies do anything pertaining to logistics. That’s ultimately delegated to a whole nother platform. And there’s really no technology that handles on premise logistics. I mean, getting products to seats or getting it to rooms or getting it to patios or whatever. And that’s because most people or most restaurant technologies always not cared about the cost of labor. So running things to tables is really in their mind or used to be a negligible cost.

Tim McLaughlin
So coming back to your question, we think of it as commerce, operations, and fulfillment, or commerce, operations and logistics are the things that we do. And I say this because, yes, that is a lot of scope, especially when we’re going really deep on operations and logistics, where everybody else kind of ignores it. So in doing so, we had to pick a bunch of things we don’t do, because I do believe in focus. As I said earlier, if you look at a typical restaurant, pos, starting back in the ancient days of micros or NCR, aloha, 30 year old products or beyond that, at this point, they do everything. They track your time. They do inventory or Pos, they don’t do anything by modern standards well, but they do it. And the reason was, is because they ran everything one computer. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
In the restaurant, there was only one computer, and so therefore, they had to do everything that had to do with computers in that one product. And similarly, products like square and toast do the exact same thing. They try to do everything. They’re going to do time tracking, they’re going to do payroll, they’re going to do all kinds of stuff. My background is actually enterprise software. And in enterprise, there’s a very clear path for best of breed. And Gotab’s designed as a best of breed open API product so that all the companies who do labor management or payroll, or cost of goods management, or deeper inventory functionality or warehouse management, those can all couple up very nicely with ours. And that was a conscious decision.

Tim McLaughlin
Like, let’s focus on these areas of operations where we think we cannot separate the systems and where there’s clear delineation or clear architectural lines of data. Let’s let our partners be successful with us. And so we have about 100 partners now and ever growing through an extensive API, which is in fact open, which is also unusual in our space. Now, I was looking at some of.

Brett
The different products, and I see you have the pocket pos there. So that is a big question I want to ask. Whenever I go into Europe, I’m just joyed by the fact that I’m not handing them my credit card. They disappear, they come back. I don’t have to deal with that when I’m in Europe. They come to the table, they charge it’s done, it’s way faster. You’re not sitting there for 15 minutes waiting. Why in the United States at most restaurants, do we still have to suffer through this? Because that 15 minutes you’re waiting for the check to get out of there, it’s bad for me as the consumer in the restaurant, and it can’t be good for the restaurant. With all the time it takes and us spilling those seats, how come we haven’t changed that?

Tim McLaughlin
I think that I’m going to answer the question with analogy. In the United States, we have a really robust wired infrastructure. And what I mean by that is like a telco wired infrastructure. If you go to Africa, they actually have no copper wires because they do everything in wireless. And the reason is because they never had the money or the wherewithal or really the systems do drop these big iron maidens across the country and build that infrastructure. I think in restaurants in the US, there’s been a lot of 30 year old capital expenditures on these systems, and they really don’t want to move them. And believe it or not, here’s something for maybe there’s some nerds in the audience. Some of these POS run on Microsoft Dos. That’s how old they are. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
They run on Microsoft DOS or Windows 98, and they’re still in use today. For real? For real. I’m not going to name the ones that are out there that actually have wider distribution, but they do. And one thing that’s not really well understood is the POS is kind of the ERp for a restaurant. And my background is enterprise companies. And anybody who has worked with an enterprise business knows that you don’t rip and replace erps. That’s like an open heart surgery. So as a general rule in restaurants, they really don’t want to change these systems out. They believe that changing them out could destroy the whole business, could make them not be successful. And then they’re just sort of maintaining these old systems. So I would say the reason you see this in Europe is they never really adopted the older generation of PoS. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
And so in some sense, they kind of skipped over to the newer generation, similar to the telco industry. But there’s know, obviously, there’s a newer generation coming out in the US, like the pocket PoS. And the future evolution of the pocket POS is you get rid of that whole folio and a card reader, and everything just happens on the phone, because the front part of the pocket POS is just a phone. And even further, you can do all the same stuff on your own phone. So you can run a full POS take credit cards, everything on an iPhone or android phone, which humorously, I actually saw when I was in Greece a year ago, is all the servers were doing all their order entry onto their own personal phones, which wouldn’t apply in the United States either. Sorry, that was a long answer.

Brett
I like long answers. And yeah, I want to know the answer to that, because every time I’m sitting at a restaurant just wondering, like, why no one’s winning in this situation. So appreciate the in depth response there. When it comes to growth and adoption, are there any metrics that you can share that highlight some of the growth that you’re seeing today?

Tim McLaughlin
Well, a cool one if nothing else, because we get to do fun stuff in our industry, is we just opened a restaurant entertainment sports bar place for Tiger woods and Justin Timberlake in New York City yesterday. Yeah. Called T squared. So that was kind of fun. But on the metrics, we generally grow. We’re expecting to grow about another 100% to 200% this year. We grow an absurd amounts from 2020 and through, but our expected future path is going to be, like, probably between 100 and 300% year on year. And one thing that’s actually very confusing, I think, to a lot of people when they talk to Gotab, is they always think, and I think maybe Doordash trained everybody this. They always think that we care a lot about how many locations we have, like how many restaurants we have and when we actually don’t.

Tim McLaughlin
We care about the size and scale and volume and profitability of our clients more than, say, a doordash does because we don’t have all these minimum fees. And in fact, the way our financials are set up, our operators make us more money if they make more money. So, in fact, if I can go win a $30 million restaurant like this, I don’t know what T Squared will end up being in New York City. It’s actually a lot better for us as a business. And we can also build some really rich functionality for those operators to create a bespoke experience that they want to have. They don’t just want commodity experiences.

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we’ve built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io slash podcast. Now back today’s. Episode when it comes to the ICP. Who is that ICP? Is it Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse? I see you have them on the site. I see Hilton. Is that the ICP like the big enterprise, or is it mid market or just the solo operators? Who do you consider that kind of core customer that you want more of?

Tim McLaughlin
Our ICP? The people our salespeople go after are large, high volume establishments. Like, for example, Maui Brewing will see 8000 people. 8000 guests come through one restaurant in a week, which is a pretty high volume. So that is our ideal customer. That doesn’t mean that a small, casual restaurant that has 40 seats doesn’t want to use our pocket pos. It works just great for that. But at that point, if you’re doing classic full service, you’re not leveraging any technology. You don’t want to use easy tech. We have all these unusual features. Unless you’ve been a Gotheb restaurant you’ve never seen, at that point, it really just becomes a, hey, do you like our interface better and are we cost competitive or cheaper or lower cost than, say, toaster square? 

 
Tim McLaughlin
And at that point, that’s fine, but it’s not as much of a feature battle in that case, because you do get restaurants who strangely, and it kind of totally perplexes me, but they don’t want the technology to help them. Whereas when you get into these bigger restaurants, they have no choice in the new labor market but to leverage all of our technology because they get into such resource binds that they really need the software to do a lot for them. And those are the ones where not only we win there, we stay there. They love us, they make lots of money thanks to us, and we make money because we make money when they do. And so that’s our ICP. But that’s not saying that some standard restaurant that doesn’t want to leverage technology couldn’t use our tech just as well. 

 
Brett
When it comes to the market category, it almost sounds like this is a restaurant OS or a restaurant operating system. Is that how you think about it? Or is it restaurant commerce? What’s that market category? 

 
Tim McLaughlin
Well, unfortunately, in the restaurant world, they think of as a point of sale, because point of sale has become kind of the catch all for restaurants. Most restaurant technology, and I could actually give you some really large names, they spend zero effort or don’t even have technology to run the kitchens. So actually, here’s a really funny example for you, since I’ll pick on them. They’re easy. They’re the biggest new guys toast. Toast is a pretty prevalent system. I know a lot of restaurants that are buying toast and aren’t even using their kitchen operations. They’re actually buying another product to run the kitchen, which is to me, just such a.

Tim McLaughlin
It kind of misses the point, because one of the core tenants we have is that the guests want to know what’s going on in the kitchen, meaning like, how long is my hamburger or pizza or whatever going to take? And in order to do that, you have to have end to end visibility in your product pipeline. So there’s just this perpetuation of old paradigms of know, go buy a pos, go buy a kds and glue them together. Badly, to be honest, in the restaurant industry, and people just don’t really know what’s possible as far as our product. I would say, actually, operations is one of the most important parts of our product. And unfortunately, only the best of the best operators realize how great of efficiency and experience they can get out of a system if they actually leverage it.

Tim McLaughlin
And the one thing I will leave for you is just as a touchstone. We did a quick analysis of our clients and said, what are their operating costs for labor? And there’s a bunch of different variables that drive into that. But restaurants typically try to stay under 30% of their revenue is spent on labor. And our restaurants, on average, have a 22% labor cost, which is basically 25% below the industry norm, which is a pretty spectacular statistic, because most restaurants struggle to stay below that 30% labor cost. And our clients are not just at it, they’re actually crushing it, which means they’re much more profitable. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Now, as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised $26 million to date. What would you say you’ve learned about fundraising throughout this journey? 

 
Tim McLaughlin
I don’t terribly love it. It’s not my favorite way to spend time. My favorite way to spend time is talking to clients, working on the product, watching operations, and really just learning how we could do make a better product. Fundraising is probably the least fun way to spend my day. For me. 

 
Brett
One thing that I see a lot in the media, and I’m sure you see it too, is entrepreneurship. Founding companies, especially venture backed companies, seems to be really glamorized, and it looks so sexy and cool and fun. But as I’m sure you’ve experienced and a lot of the founders that I talk to behind the scenes, that’s not the case. There’s a lot of low points, there’s a lot of pain. Can you tell us about some of those specific low points that you’ve experienced and really just how you navigated those low points. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
Yeah, I mean, I’ve been through a lot. Many of my stories around challenges were outside of Gotab. My first company, as I mentioned, was a services company, and we grew pretty quickly. This is a long time ago now, but we had a single account, single client that unfortunately grew so quickly that they became 60% of our revenue, which was awesome because it was a ton of revenue. It was happening. Just, they loved what we did. The problem is that they got a new CEO who basically overnight turned off outsourcing. So we had 60% of our revenue that was previously climbing, quickly got shut off. So that was a really tough experience. I had to put a bunch of my money back into the company and then kind of believe in the fact that we could get this company back to profitable.

Tim McLaughlin
And were a bootstrap company, so we didn’t have venture money, we didn’t have any of that stuff. There was really no cushion except for our own lines of credit. So we managed to do that. It was hard, but I would say we had a ten year run on that company, and it was probably a two or three dip roller coaster, where the bottoms of the roller coaster were pretty severe, borrowing against your house and that kind of thing. So, yeah, it is definitely not all glamorous, and I’ve been through a lot of them. So on the restaurants, everything ends up costing twice as much as you think. And in the product space, everything takes twice as long as you think it’s going to take as well. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
On the Gotab side, it took us, frankly, about two years to finally get what we consider product market fit. And then we did get product market fit. So we started in 2016. I was extracting myself from my prior company. My co founder was full time. And by 2018, the funny thing about Gotab is what was originally our core product was QR ordering to table. Yes, I know everybody thinks QR ordering to table was invented in Covid, but it wasn’t. It was actually invented predominantly in Asia. And we ripped off the ideas that were seeing happen in Asia and said, hey, we can adapt this to the United States. And in 2018, we rolled out a QR ordering to table for my second restaurant just to try it to see if there was any market for it and how consumers liked it. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
Turns out consumers really liked it. And were really kind of surprised. And that was when we finally realized, oh, shit, there’s actually a product market fit here. Consumers want this. Although then we got basically punched in the face by the industry, which was, consumers may want it, but restaurant operators don’t. And so for 2018 to 2020, we kept selling against a really serious cultural headwind. And I think we realistically or pragmatically really got nobody over the line in terms of adopting our QR ordering platform until Covid hit. I mean, we got a couple of small ones and whatnot, but Covid hit and all the people who told us this is the dumbest thing I ever thought I ever heard in 2019, called us back in 2020, and all of a sudden went from being total morons to geniuses. So I guess context is everything.

Brett
Why were restaurants so resistant to that? As a consumer sitting at a restaurant, whenever I see that option, I’m stoked, because I know it’s about to be a much more seamless digital experience, which I’ve come to expect in the online world. And I like when that bleeds over into the physical world. So it seems obvious that consumers would like it. Why wouldn’t the restaurants like it? Obviously, they want happy customers. I would guess that there’s a big time savings for the staff. Is it about tips? Is that the concern, or what is the concern? 

 
Tim McLaughlin
A lot of it’s honestly just perception. Remember pre Covid, there were a lot more people working in restaurants. Labor was quite cheap. I mean, labor costs in restaurants have probably more than doubled on average since COVID So labor was quite cheap. There’s a lot of financial sort of gaming that happens in the industry, and so they would use tips to cover salaries and whatnot. And a lot of that stuff’s been eliminated, or is getting eliminated. So restaurants are having to get efficient. And I probably didn’t mention, my brother’s a phd economist, works at a think tank. So I unfortunately read a lot of economic books, too. So the challenge is that the structure of restaurants is that the non performing restaurants, a lot of the cost burden was actually borne by the employees and not the owners. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
And the reason is because the way restaurants work is if you show up to work and it’s a crappy business night, you might go home with an effective $5 an hour. In theory, they’re supposed to fix that, but they don’t in plenty of places. So there was that incentive. And then the other thing is that restaurant tours frequently believe that the guests come to talk to them. And that’s probably true somewhat in part, but the reality is a lot of guests come to talk to their friends and eat the food and drink that is offered there. And so there’s just this notion of that they want to interact with the server or staff, and sometimes they absolutely do. But there’s lots of times where if you just want another Pilsner or you just want your check, you really don’t. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
And so that was just a cultural standard before COVID and I think now the newer generation, like yourself, and a lot of people are like, look, getting a check handed, to me is not an experience that’s actually just annoying. Can it just go away and you see that now more? But there’s still a nostalgia for the old way of doing things, and that’s nostalgia is very prevalent in restaurants. 

 
Brett
Yeah, I can see that at higher end restaurants, where you want to have that white glove kind of service or that higher end experience where you kind of want to interact with these people. But if it’s lunchtime, you have 30 minutes before your next meeting. You don’t want that. You just want to pay your check and get out of there. So I can see that just probably varies from restaurant to restaurant, too. Yeah, correct. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
And I would argue even in the higher end restaurants, there’s nobody who says that getting handed a bill is a fun part of the experience. 

Brett
Yeah, it’s true. It’s the worst part. Right now, from my conversations with 500 plus founders so far, what they’ve told me is they can really trace back the company’s success to a few pivotal moments. Sometimes one pivotal moment. Does a specific pivotal moment come to mind for you or a specific turning point where it seemed like it really changed the trajectory of the company? 

 
Tim McLaughlin
Yeah, I mean, so there’s the internal ones. There’s the external ones. The internal one was when we launched my second restaurant at using Gotab QRs for ordering drinks. And went from really kind of struggling to find something that would meet the needs of consumers and operators. So that experience in 2018 was very pivotal for us. The other one, which was unfortunate culturally, but it just changed everything in restaurants, is Covid. Covid forced restaurants to pay more. It forced restaurants to get efficient. It forced restaurants, frankly, it forced a lot of restaurants to close down who weren’t efficient. And so I think it basically accelerated the US adoption of QR by probably three to five years, virtually overnight. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
So the thing that were doing, which was largely kind of made fun of, honestly, became something that not only nerdy idiots who thought that 90s QR technology was cool, now, let’s imagine you.

Brett
Were starting the company again today from scratch. What would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give to yourself. 

Tim McLaughlin
I was thinking about this the other day. I think our challenge has always been, we want to look forward and kind of work our way backward into how restaurants should operate. Like, fast forward ten years, how should they operate? And then say, okay, well, how do we adapt that to how people want to or already do operate? I’m not sure that all the time that was the right approach. And so I don’t know. Hindsight. I’m not sure hindsight is 2020, because sometimes hindsight neglects a lot of the details that occurred back then, and there’s a reason why you chose the path. But. So, for example, the pocket pos. I find it kind of interesting that we rolled that out because I would have thought we’d never have to do it. And so it’s been very well received. People really like it. It’s awesome. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
I just find it kind of interesting that you have to send a server around the table with a phone to take orders. Still, I just would have thought that we would be doing it a little differently. But maybe hindsight is 2020, or maybe I’m just revising my own history. I’m not sure.

Brett
Always hard to know. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
Yeah.

Brett
Now let’s talk about the future, and this will be our final question. So can you paint a picture for us on that three to five year vision? Yeah.

Tim McLaughlin
Our vision is that payments should disappear, meaning that you should really not have to spend time thinking about payments as a consumer, which it sounds like it’s not much different from reality, but it is quite different. So, for example, if you were to go to t squared, that place were just talking about in New York City, and you were to basically go in, maybe you play a game of golf in the golf suite. Maybe you become a member, which gives you discounts on some things, and maybe you’re paying for stuff for some other people, and maybe you buy some retail. And a typical restaurant or food hall. Actually, a food hall is even a better example. In a typical food hall, if you walked in, you wanted to order three things from three separate businesses, you actually would have to pay three separate times. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
That slows you down. It keeps you away from your table. So you actually don’t even know if you’re going to have a table when you come back. And overall, it costs everybody money and time, and it’s just unpleasant. It just adds a friction and pain into something that otherwise should be fun. The same thing in the e squared is like in a conventional model. You would pay for your game, or you would make your reservation for your game. Maybe on your phone. And then that wouldn’t be the same payment as buying a cocktail, and that wouldn’t be the same payment when you walk over to the system to buy a Tiger wood t-shirt.

Tim McLaughlin
And so all those separate transactions and or benefits, like, I couldn’t tell you how many times in restaurants where you can’t even take the same digital gift card that you use for online ordering and use it in the store. In fact, most of them won’t let you do that. So if you’re in the restaurant, you couldn’t use an online digital gift card. So all that pain around payments and friction is all the stuff that we see disappearing. So you as a consumer would have an identity. That identity may be provided by something you have or something you are. So maybe your phone or obviously Amazon’s doing the handprint, but there’s all kinds of ways to recognize who you are and then offer you the benefits of your status, membership, whatever it may be.
 

Tim McLaughlin
I’m not necessarily a huge loyalty guy, but whatever that might be, whatever that status is, and then also including the circle of trust, like the people you want to be able to participate within that experience with you. So I’d say the biggest focus that Gotab does, it’s different from, say, an Amazon or DoorDash, is we are really focused on premise experiences, and we feel like technology should be built to support that. So a lot of the stuff we do is around. How do you make sure that on premise experience is really seamless and everything comes together at the right time? So while you’re ordering these things out at your golf bay at T Squared, how do we make sure that all the food actually hits your table on the third floor across a long distance from the kitchen at the same time? 

Tim McLaughlin
And make sure that your cocktails all came out the same time, even though they’re ordered from separate devices by separate people on separate payment methods? So our whole, I guess we’re doing the Arthur C. Clark thing, we think that the best technology is invisible and magic. And that’s really what we want, is we want all these things to disappear so you can enjoy the experience, so the server can enjoy the experience and talk with you about your golf game. That’s ultimately the long goal in Gotep. 

Brett
Amazing. I love the vision, Tim. We’ll have to wrap here since we are up on time. Before we do, if there’s any founders listening in that just want to follow along with your journey, where should they go? 

 
Tim McLaughlin
I’m not really a public just, I’d say watch Gotab, you’re going to see as much as anything on that. So watch us on LinkedIn or other channels. We publish stuff out through. 

 
Brett
Amazing. Tim, thanks so much for taking the time to chat. Really appreciate it. Absolutely. 

 
Tim McLaughlin
Thank you, Bret. Thank you for the time. 

 
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Keep in touch. This episode of category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.