Flippy, Zippy, and the Future of Restaurant Robotics with Rich Hull

Rich Hull (00:00.214) you Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:01.26) Welcome back to the winner's circle, everybody. Today I am here with Rich from MISO Robotics, and they are the makers of the Flippy Fry station. AI enabled, the latest winner in the AI Excellence Awards. Rich, welcome to the show and congratulations on the award. Rich Hull (00:15.712) Thanks for us, we are thrilled to get the award. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:18.604) Well, now this is an amazing product. We're going to get into it, but I couldn't believe all of the numbers that you guys have around this and all the data you have around this, but as robotic guys, I imagine that's pretty common. So give us like an elevator pitch on MISO and kind of a little bit about how you came up with the Flippy Fry station. Rich Hull (00:38.944) Yeah, we live and breathe by data here. We probably gather more data than anyone on the planet about how AI and robots operate in the food industry and have millions of hours of video of all of it. And it's pretty frothy when it comes to our data capabilities. So MISO has been around for 10 years. It was started by some guys right out of Caltech. They didn't want to get a real job. They'd all worked in restaurants and they thought, Hmm, I wonder if we can find a way to modernize restaurants. so they started this company and we're based in Los Angeles, kind of just down the street from Caltech. And in some respects, they were pretty visionary. It maybe didn't happen on the timeline they expected it to, because I don't think restaurants started to modernize until maybe they'll kind of pandemic and later. But I think that their vision was exactly correct, which is that restaurants are going to have to modernize. And so the product that we're really most known for is, as you mentioned, the Flippy Fry Station. It's a robot that works the Fry Station primarily in quick serve restaurants. And more recently, we've just entered our first NBA stadium where we are starting to learn about the food service vertical. So that's stadiums and theme parks and college campuses. And I think that's going to be a really interesting vertical for us because everybody wants to eat at halftime. and it's very hard to staff those, you know, food stands. And I think if you can do it with a robot and allow the humans to do more human things like upsells and communicate with the customers and guarantee quality and all that stuff, like it's a win-win for everybody. So I've only been here for about two and a half years. I was brought here by my partners at Ecolab. So you may know Ecolab, it's a big Fortune 100 company. They've been around for a hundred years. sell cleaning solutions to probably every restaurant you've ever been in. And they invested in me. in early 2023, and then they came to me and said, like, we love this product and we love the market and we love the opportunity. And we really want somebody to take the company into its next phase that has done that before, because founding a business is such a different skillset than really scaling a business. kind of need to have done that before. Rich Hull (02:59.976) And so what we've done is come in, brought on a lot of senior level, very experienced folks to kind of marry with the kind of original employees and founders. And I think that's kind of where the magic happens. And then we've broadened the portfolio beyond just Flippy into other areas that we can surely talk about. And then we built the new generation of Flippy because the generation of Flippy that I inherited was the second generation. And... First and second generations of anything are almost science experiments, but you gotta go through them to get the data. There's that data thing. And then we used all of that data and those learnings and that experience and the collaboration with our restaurant partners to build the third generation. And it's usually the third generation of anything disruptive that scales and creates massive improvement, right? And so we did the same thing. So this Flippy is half the size and twice as fast and, you know, installs in a few hours overnight instead of two days and all the things that the restaurants need it to be. And so it's really this massive leap up. So what we're building is essentially the platform that powers modern food and restaurant operations. And it's not just a single product. Today there are some disconnected products out there, but we think a platform that powers a bunch of products that communicate seamlessly with each other kind of beats those disconnected point solutions. So that's the short version of a long story, but hopefully it gives you some good context. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (04:23.086) Well, I like the idea of it. It seems like a lot of that needs to be connected. And I've talked to other kind of vendors that play in this space in terms of real time delivery of food and real time delivery of inventory and knowing about that space a little bit. It really seems like you walked into a situation where you've got some amazing inventors. They've been at it, I think, since 2017. They've really been powering at those first two versions for a while. What was broken when you got there and what did you decide that kind of had to change? Rich Hull (04:54.079) Well, all young founders make all the same mistakes. So when I came in, I had to correct some of those mistakes. Spend too much money, hire too many people, try to do too many things. And so what I came in and did is brought a lot of discipline into that decision making. Reduced our spending, reduced the headcount to the place where it should be, reduced the product portfolio to really just focus on Flippy. And then as we get better and better at Flippy, we can earn the right to do other things. But we wanted to focus on this giant revenue opportunity, which is Flippy. It's also a giant need, because if you think about it, restaurants have a lot of publicity during the pandemic about how hard it was to hire people. And that was kind of new for the first time ever. Traditionally, you just staff these jobs with teenagers. During the pandemic, everybody thought that that was temporary. And in reality, it just accelerated something that was already happening. And if you pull back a little bit, you can understand why, because every year for the last 20 years, birth rates have gone down and down and down. We have a very aging population, and there's fewer teenagers to take these jobs. And the ones that you can hire, they either don't want these pretty ugly jobs, or they bail out. And so, it's the time to come in and modernize. And if you think about the modernization that's happened in restaurants in our lifetime, It's all focused on the customer. And you even mentioned one earlier, Delivery, DoorDash, last mile delivery with the little robots like Serv and Coco. And then you can also look at OpenTable and online reservations. The former president and CTO of OpenTable sits on our board. He talks about that moment a lot, but that was 20 years ago. And so all of that has been focused on the customer. In terms of the operations, it's largely operated the same way for Russ Fordyce 🏆 (06:42.156) Mm-hmm. Rich Hull (06:50.357) 50 or 60 years. I mean, what was the last big innovation you can think of in a kitchen or a restaurant operations, like maybe the microwave oven? And so, you know, there's not a whole lot. And so I think what you've got now is an industry that has struggled over the last five years with labor shortages, really high labor costs. So, you know, the state of California is at $20 an hour in restaurants. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:00.563) Maybe, yeah, there's not a whole lot going on. Rich Hull (07:19.029) Los Angeles, New York, they're thinking about going to 30. Like it's pretty disruptive. And a lot of that has caused a lot of turmoil in the restaurant industry. There's been more restaurant bankruptcies in the last 12 months than there were in the prior five years combined. So this is like a real fight for survival and most of that is driven by labor. So what happens is restaurants now are suddenly like, well, we operated the same way for 50 years, but we need to future proof this business. We now know it. and they're suddenly open for the first time ever to making relationships with companies like ours because they're looking for technology solutions. And what they really want is one stop shopping. And that's why a platform works as opposed to just a product here or a product there, because they're not really in a place where they can kind of evaluate 20 software vendors and go, I want that one and that one. They just want somebody they trust to come in and be their partner and provide technology solutions that help them make more money and help them make more profits. Right? So revenue and profits, those are kind of the things that really people are asking us for. Because if you think about the restaurant business, if you're really killing it, if you're doing great, it's a high single digit margin business. Maybe get up to 12 or 13 percent. Right. But that's in the extreme. So if you think about the things that have happened over the last five years, labor costs, labor shortages, rising food costs, inflation. even immigration enforcement, because a big chunk of people that work in these kitchens are undocumented, tariffs, whatever your thing is, right? You're starting to chip away at an already thin profit margin in restaurants, and you can only operate on zero margin for so long, even negative margin, right? So what we do is we come in and we say, hey, we're gonna help you build that back up, because Flippi will drive a 3X ROI. In other words, for every dollar you pay us, you're gonna make $3 in return, and all of that drops. straight to the bottom line. So now you're starting to kind of eke that profit margin back up. We have a new product called Zippy. So you get the gist of how we name things here, Flippy Zippy, Schmippy. And it's a really cool employee revenue engine. And so what it does is it incentivizes the employees who are there on the front line to sell more. And if they sell more, they earn more. So it says, here's your sales goal for the day. And if you hit it, Rich Hull (09:41.864) everybody on that shift gets an extra dollar an hour. If you hit two exit, you're gonna get $2 an hour. Well, that really aligns the incentives between the employee and the owner and general manager because everybody's making more money, right? And we see the ROI on that be closer to 10 or 15 X. So for every dollar you pay us, you're making that in return. And so these are the types of things that we can do to help restaurant operators drive net new profits to kind of chisel up that. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (09:59.053) Wow. Rich Hull (10:10.631) net profit margin back up to where it was so that they can survive. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:14.712) So what was it about fries that made kind of that the first thing that they attacked? Rich Hull (10:20.647) It's actually the second thing that Miso attacked. The first thing they did was the grill. And that's where the name Flippy comes from. It's like flipping burgers. And what they realized long before I got here was that flipping burgers is very hard. And everybody does it kind of differently. You're probably gonna prepare a slider different than you're gonna prepare a cheeseburger at Wendy's versus at McDonald's. And so it's different everywhere. Whereas everybody operates their fry station almost exactly the same way. So they evolved the product very quickly away from flipping burgers and over to the fry station and it no longer does burgers, although we may come back to that someday, because we get asked about it a lot. And when they did that, they tried to change the name to something fry related, like Frida. But by that point, Flippy had Instagram fan clubs. He'd kind of become this like crazy cultural phenomenon. And I think part of it is just he makes for a good video. A lot of people have been working in restaurants, everybody's been to a restaurant, people think robots are cool. You put all that together in a video and it's pretty easy to understand. So it's created a lot of brand equity for MISO. So it's actually, the Fry Station is actually the second thing that we did, but it's a giant revenue opportunity for MISO and it's also the biggest need for the restaurant operators. Like, you're lucky if you can hire a teenager to do the Fry Station job for 90 days before they just stop showing up. And everybody burns themselves. I think the stat is 80%, but I think even that's low. And there's almost this weird club that people feel like they belong into that I find a lot when I'm talking to people that have worked in restaurants and I explain the problem we're solving. Half of them will roll up their sleeves and go, look, these are my burns from when I worked at a certain restaurant when I was a kid. And so it's this weird badge of honor. That's not the kind of things humans should be doing. You know, we shouldn't be. walking around talking about our badge of honor because we have burns on our hands. Instead, we should be doing human things. We should be talking to other humans, customers, doing upsells, talking about, you know, are you having a good experience, driving customer quality. There's so many things that humans are good at and that bring a restaurant operator a lot of value, especially when you're paying them, you know, kind of top dollar, that you can automate and modernize some of the things that it turns out humans just aren't good at. Like, humans often undercook, Rich Hull (12:47.165) and overcook things at the fry station. Flippy the robot doesn't ever do that. He doesn't know how to do that. That's not even an option for him. And yet he cooks twice as fast. He cooks anything a human can cook, but he cooks twice as fast. So if you've got the demand, you can even sell more. Your orders come out faster. You can sell more because you can have far more throughput. And it's really impactful. So we can really drive a lot of new sales and it allows the humans to be deployed to the places that they actually bring a lot of value. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:21.826) Well, I was looking at the nomination and read through it and what struck out, really stood out to me was the kind of relentless focus on reliability. And it seemed like that's what they've, those kind of initial versions of the product, that's what they were dealing with. What does it mean to be reliable enough for a commercial kitchen these days? Rich Hull (13:44.054) That's a good question because I think what's happened in kind of the world of restaurant modernization is that the early movers in the space, and I think Miso was probably one of those early movers. The whole industry's maybe been around for 10 years. And so Miso has been one of, if not the only survivor from the early movers, but there are a lot of big companies that we were aware of that have raised a lot of money. that are no longer here in that first wave. so Miso's now kind of in the second wave, right? We're kind of, we think of ourselves as the first mover in the second wave. And that's kind of where you want to be, right? Like think about everything that you can think of. Does anybody remember MySpace? Probably not, but they were the first mover, right? Facebook won that. Does anybody remember IBM Watson? Probably not, but Anthropic's gonna win the foundational model right there. Palm pilot, right? know, iPad. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (14:37.72) Palm pilot. Rich Hull (14:42.261) There's like, we can go through this list over and over. In the first phase, it was about novelty. I go, robots in my restaurant, that's cool. And it was just an experiment. Today, the world is completely different. It's all about reliability and ROI. Reliability simply means does it work? And so I gave a presentation at a Citibank conference a few months ago. And that was kind of the theme of my presentation, which is it just has to work. And someone put me aside afterwards and said, like, you need that tattooed on your forehead. That's how important it is to us as restaurant operators. It just has to work. So Flippi just has to work, meaning it's got to be able to be something that's reliable enough that you can build your business around it. And then we also have to provide the support for that at an enterprise grade, meaning, you know, it doesn't work to say, Flippi's down. Sorry. You know, we'll see you next Thursday. So if Flippy goes down, you can just pop open the doors and cook normally. So you're never gonna lose revenue in your lunch rush. But we also have 24-7 tech support in English and Spanish. We have cameras all over Flippy so we can see stuff. We fix almost everything remotely. We have a nationwide network of trained field technicians that can be there in a couple hours, just like any piece of equipment, probably faster. So like all of that goes into reliability. It's gotta work. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (15:37.229) No. Rich Hull (16:06.195) got to be able to be supported at scale. That's really important. And then the other part of that is ROI. Meaning, I don't know that even five or six years ago, the world had the AI tools to deliver real-time ROI, like in a bona fide way, where you can walk in with your app or a piece of paper to your boss and go, hey, I'm making three times every dollar I spend on this. I just don't know that that existed. Today it does, and we can deliver that. It's just like with my DoorDash subscription. You know, I pay nine bucks a month. my DoorDash subscription every time I open that app, which I do more than I should, it tells me how much money I saved that month. Right? So I pay $9. I actually looked at it last night because we ordered DoorDash last night. I've saved $170 by paying $9. Right? And so like that's a pretty good deal for me. That's going to keep me coming back. Well, products today have to do that. Otherwise, why are you going to buy anymore? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:53.752) this month. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:57.442) Yeah. Rich Hull (17:05.395) So you've got to be able to demonstrate that. think a really good proof point is, it's just an easy one to understand. There's a whole bunch of them. And this is what we provide to our customers during the kind of sales process and the onboarding and in real time, beyond that. We provide that ROI analysis. But if you think about Sweetgreen, I think is a really good example. It's a big public company, so they report a lot of data and they got to be truthful about it or they go to jail. They had a robot called Spice, S-P-Y-C-E. It's like a make line robot. If you think about what Sweet Grain does, they make salad bowls. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:42.762) I was in my first one this weekend in Boston, so for audience members that don't know, it's kind of salad bowls and Mediterranean chipotle. Rich Hull (17:51.189) Perfect, exactly. So they put in this robot called Spice into 20 stores. And when they did that, was basically modernizing and automating the making of the salad bowls. And the salad bowls can be customized in a million different ways. It's kind of a bowl that goes down the conveyor belt and it kind of drops different stuff in. And when they did that, their profit margin in those stores essentially doubled. It went from kind of the 7 % range to the 14 or 15 % range. And so I think it's just a good example with a big brand that everybody kind of knows of what it means to kind of creep that profit margin back up using technology. And those are the tools that we have access to today. Robotics allows us to do that. AI allows us to do that. And I think robotics is a tricky word. quite frankly, especially for restaurant operators who don't tend to always be tech savvy. I mean, that's changing because there's a lot of turnover in the C-suite, even with the public company restaurant brands where a 70-year-old guy is getting replaced by a 40-year-old guy and he grew up with a phone in his hand and he's comfortable with technology. And a lot of those guys are tasked with modernizing legacy brands using technology. So it's changing a lot. But I think it's scary for them. to hear words like robots, because what you think of when you hear a word like robot is humanoids doing backflips on Instagram. But that's not a business yet. We can debate whether that's gonna be a business in seven years or 10 years or 12 years. My kids go to school with Ashton Kutcher's kids, and he and I were debating this a while back. When are humanoids going to be a business? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:28.056) Yeah. Rich Hull (19:45.001) But restaurants need somebody to solve their problems today. So what we do is kind of unsexy. We take AI and robots that are very specialized for the food industry, and we install them today, and we drive immediate ROI. And we do it with no money upfront, and you just pay a monthly fee. And that's it. And that monthly fee is going to be less than you would pay a human to do it. And it's going to bring you tons of net new profits, whether it's kind of an average of 3x on Flippy or 10x on Zippy, like this is like stuff we're able to do today that I'm just not sure was even able to be done a few years ago. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:23.992) Well, I love the zippy-flippy model because a lot of what I'm hearing, especially from the folks deploying AI, is this isn't about getting rid of jobs. Some people are looking at it, and we hear a lot about the oracles. My brother was impacted at Oracle. You hear about the Oracle job losses and Facebook job losses, and those are not AI losses. Those are losses where they need money for data centers. These are not AI replacing jobs. These are, I'm getting rid of jobs because I need more money. Rich Hull (20:46.738) everybody. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:52.526) The people that I find that are finding AI and process flows like this are taking those same people, they know the business, they're loyal people, they like the brand, and they're pivoting them into a different role. And I love what you guys are doing with Zippy. It makes total sense, is if I'm taking away this capability that a human was doing and getting burned on, then let's put them to use in that human to human conversation where we want to have a human interaction. We'd rather not have an AI. So I really love the story there. When you deploy one of these with the operators, what surprised them most once they get flippy running? Rich Hull (21:31.159) Well, to your point about humans, like... We're not trying to get rid of humans in restaurants, nor would you want to. Why would you want to do that? Right? But you're right. We are trying to modernize the things that humans aren't particularly good at and don't want to do. And especially if you've got labor shortages, think about what that means, especially in smaller markets. We get a lot of calls from companies in smaller markets that they just can't hire anybody, which means that they're open fewer hours, which means lower revenue. Right? So they're closing at eight o'clock at night instead of staying open for a late night shift because they can only get two people. You think it's hard to hire people at three in the afternoon, try three in the morning, you know, so it's really difficult. And then remind me of your other question. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (22:15.619) What are they most surprised at once they get flippy running? Rich Hull (22:19.26) Yeah, that's a great question. And the answer is, what happens is it creates an entirely new workflow. And then they're like, my God, how did I live without this? Because they're no longer waiting on the fry station. So it's like, well, that's a different workflow. What are we going to do? And so they figure out other ways of operating that are really new and fresh. And then they're like, I can't believe this. So that's really, that's the consistent reaction that people get over and over and over across all of our customers because it is a little bit different. It does mean you have to kind of reimagine your workflow. If you no longer have to have a human that's sitting there burning themselves and jiggling the fries or the chicken nuggets or the onion rings or whatever 60 items Flippy cooks, what are you gonna do with that person? So it does create a new workflow and it allows you to actually optimize your operations in a different way. So I think that's really it. It's suddenly, then people start to be like, well, gosh, I didn't know that I needed this, but I do. What else you got? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (23:26.188) Yeah, it's funny when people go through changes like that. Usually you get kind of two reactions. One, employees generally hate it, right? It's you're automating me out of work. But then generally what I find is those people are repurposed and generally find better work that's more strategic, more customer facing in your example. I'm wondering what the of the employee feedback has been for some of your customers when they see the Flippy Frystation boxes come in. Rich Hull (23:57.461) The existing employees are terrified of it and by the second day they're in love with it. And today they'll often throw it a birthday party. We got a text from somebody over the weekend saying, could we call it Felipe? So it really sort of becomes like a member of their team. And we track customer sentiment, like user sentiment. And we have 95 % plus. user, you know, love for Flippy. But they love it. So they wear their Flippy t-shirts. We give them Flippy hats. Everybody wears them. So they end up falling in love with it. I think it's really cool. For the new employees, like when you're out there recruiting employees, it's a huge value add. And what I mean by that is we... Last summer, we opened a pop-up restaurant across the street from us. The landlord had this empty restaurant space. It had a bunch of equipment in it. And he said, if I give it to you for free for the summer, can you do something with it just to kind of like keep my building alive? And I was like, yeah, man, put some robots in there, yeah. So we put Flippy and we put some other automation and we turned it into a pop-up restaurant called Cali Express by Flippy. And we did burgers and fries. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (25:11.118) Sure. Rich Hull (25:25.364) And we got a ton of publicity around it and the burgers and fries were really good and it really kind of turned into this Instagram destination and it was really fun. We had a great time. We also kind of proved out that sort of, you know, how humans and robots work together. On the, a week before we opened, we put out a job wreck saying, come work in the kitchen. And we got zero applications, like literally zero. And so we pulled it back and we rewrote it. and we said, you get to work with a robot at the Frey station. And in 24 hours, we'd gotten 200 applications. And I think that that's indicative of like what people are looking for in their jobs, right? They wanna be up skilled. They want to understand AI and digital and technology. Well, think about the person that got that job. They now have that on their resume, right? I've got digital experience. I've worked with a robot. I understand AI. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (26:24.305) yeah. Rich Hull (26:24.838) All they're doing is pushing a button, which by the way, unlocks a whole new labor pool because in a lot of states, people under 18 aren't even allowed to work the fry station. It's considered too dangerous, but with Flippy at best, they're just pushing a button. But they love it. And it's a real value add when it comes to recruiting those people. And then it's also a value add in getting them to stay because it costs an average of almost $6,000 across the industry to, you know, source, onboard, train a new employee. And, you know, in restaurants where the turnover rate can be 150%, 200 % annually, it's a treadmill. You're just constantly replacing people because you can't keep anybody. So if you can increase the retention of the employees that you have, they stay longer. Like, that's a massive savings for you, along with all the things we talked about, the injury reductions and all the other stuff that comes along with this. So the employees love it. They're a little scared at first, but they love it within a day. And we think that's great. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (27:30.255) It's funny you mentioned that because I keep telling my one of my sons that is you You do these things and they're great for resumes, right? I've now worked with robotics, right? What you have it's not a lie. You were trained on that system You learned all about it. You worked for it for a number of months You're now a robotic expert as far as I'm concerned, right? And if I have a flippy or inconsidering one, you're the first one hired, you know So it does give them that credibility, you know on the job front, too Now, one of the things you keep mentioning numbers, which we talked about the data, you guys went so far as to have the third party validation of your results. Why did you go through all that effort and what did it matter to go beyond just having good internal numbers and numbers that you can cite? Rich Hull (28:13.748) Because I want people to believe me. And so, you know, I have a vested interest in, at MISO, you know, telling people what they want to hear because it sells more robots for me. So we wanted third parties that have a lot of credibility outside of us to come in and tell our customers that. And so, and I think that's best practices. That's what you want to do. And I never want to be accused that we cooked the numbers. So we brought in a couple different groups and had them independently do case studies to evaluate the ROI and the effectiveness of Flippy for our customers. And so those are people like Ecolab, which has been around for 100 years, WD Partners, which is a big research. company that focuses on restaurants that's been around for 55 or 60 years at this point, Uber AI, these are like big giant companies that are not gonna put their credibility at risk for us. And so we brought them in, we're like, we want you to tell us the effectiveness of Flippy in each of these situations. And they did. So like a really good example is in Ecolab's report, they said that Flippy reduces the human interaction with the fry station by almost 90%. So like we were talking about earlier around new workflows, what do you do with that 90 %? That's a lot of stuff you can do to redeploy that and retrain that customer. So I think that's a good example of partnering with outside people and then letting them do their thing and creating maximum credibility in doing it. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (30:04.962) Well, and you guys have a really strategic partner in Nvidia as well. And I know, you know, when I heard the CEO interviewed recently who kind of my kids are always knew Nvidia because of gaming and I never really knew the history of why Nvidia is in the position they are in. And it's because of that gaming legacy. And you guys are tacking right onto that legacy of that vision AI that Nvidia has built. that really allows them to kind of see and predict what's going to happen. And that's kind of the basis of AI is they did that for a gaming engine of, you they would take a screenshot of somebody's game and then predict what the next move was through that game. And that's really kind of what made this whole generative AI kind of take off. Walk us through kind of what that actually looks like in your environment. Rich Hull (30:53.938) Yeah, the evolution of Nvidia has just been incredible, hasn't it? I mean, we should have all bought Nvidia stock back when they were a gaming company, but they've really, like... Russ Fordyce 🏆 (31:03.342) Cisco in 1990 or 80 and Nvidia in 2000 would have been good. Yeah. Rich Hull (31:09.252) Exactly. Hindsight, right? I'm an ex-media guy, so I'll add Netflix into that as well. it's, you know, they've been a great partner for us. Really, really an awesome collaborator. And so they give us access to some of their early technology, particularly around AI and vision and their digital twin environment and some of their kind of decision making and planning that helps Flippy. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (31:15.384) I hate me. Rich Hull (31:37.909) better and faster. And we've been the first to commercialize that within the food industry. And so, you know, one of the customers that we've done that with is White Castle, where we will develop something in conjunction with AI, we'll push it out to Flippy in a White Castle, and it's bringing them value. And they love it. And then they'll also kind of become our partner and give us iterative feedback on that too, because I think that frontline feedback is really important for the development of these things. So Nvidia has been great. We love that partnership. We think we've helped them. They've surely helped us. Jensen Wong is such a visionary, the CEO and founder of NVIDIA. And he has been very vocal to say that he thinks he looks at AI and he's like, this is the biggest gold mine in history. Like that's his quote. And he's right. That means for investors, that means for restaurant operators, that means for everybody on the planet. mean, obviously the reason I came here. to Miso, because I had just had a good exit with my last company. And I came here because I wanted to do something in AI that gave me a voice at the leading edge. And I did it because I just thought that AI and robots were going to probably be the most impactful improvement in the world in my professional life with maybe the possible exception of my iPhone, right? And so that's like where it's all going. Jensen and Nvidia have been at the leading edge of that now for a decade. And so to be their collaborator and for them to choose us, they looked across the entire food industry landscape and it was like, who are the people that are gonna win? And they picked us and only us. I think that's an incredible honor. We're honored for that. But it's also been a really great collaboration that has really driven a ton of benefit. for our customers. One of the things that we're getting ready to do is to launch, we've launched this with one customer in a pilot program and it'll start to roll out I think next month with some of our other customers. Predictive automation, which is essentially like forecasting if you think about it. So now what Flippy does today is he starts to learn the traffic patterns at a restaurant and he can make some decisions. Rich Hull (34:02.256) about what that restaurant's gonna sell before that order is even entered into the point of sale system. And so now you're taking the speed of preparing the overall order and you're bringing that down substantially. And what happens is the fries are kind of the first thing that happens in an order. And so if the fries happen really fast, it sets the pace for the rest of the conveyor belt downstream. And so everything moves way faster. And so much of that work that has sort of led to that innovation was part of our collaboration with NVIDIA. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (34:37.826) Well, now you guys have also done some acquiring and you were talking about it earlier about kind of this, I always call it a management layer. Andral is, I think the best, they're the weapons maker from Palmer Lucky, if you haven't checked them out, whoever's listening. They're not just building weapons, they're building the kind of the infrastructure and that communication kind of operations layer to support all this gear. And if you think about it, like you said in the beginning, I don't want to go, Rich Hull (34:52.756) Sure. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (35:06.89) to Ford and buy tires and to Chevy to buy an engine and to Toyota to buy a bumper because those are the best makers of those products. I want to go to somebody who's given me the whole car, right, just what we have. I want my whole kitchen to be automated. Walk us through kind of that operations layer that you have and kind of what's the vision for it and where is that headed. Rich Hull (35:28.98) Well, you're right, we did acquire a company called Signal and Zignal is one that we've rolled into our Zippy product. So we were developing Zippy. They had launched Zignal and had developed it and launched it just like we had. And in fact, they called theirs Ziggy. So if you ever needed a sign from the universe that two products should be combined, it's Zippy and Ziggy. And so we brought in their, not only their product, but their technology and their team. And so Matt Forbus, who was the founder of the Zignal product, now leads our Zipy development team and is doing a great job of adding more more features into the Zipy products. So within a month or so, the Zignal name will be completely deprecated, long-lived Zignal, but it going forward, it's combined with our Zipy product. And so when we get to the National Restaurant Association show next month, it will be fully baked as Zipy. So we have some pretty marquee customers already on that product. it gives you a sense for the value that it brings as part of that operations layer, that digital infrastructure, if you will, that drives efficiency and net new profits into a restaurant. So some of those clients are like Jersey Mike's, Auntie Anne's, Pretzels. Jamba, Carvels, Haagen-Dazs, Cinnabon, Scooter's Coffee. Like you get the gist of some of these names. so they are, they love it. It's a great restaurant operations product because if you think about it, and so what I mean by that is we ingest all of the data that currently powers a restaurant, which is very like disparate. It's a, they don't. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (37:09.025) Right. Rich Hull (37:25.299) ever get to a place where they actually kind of talk to each other and are aggregated into a single place. So that means like point of sale system. So we'll take information from toast, labor scheduling, payroll, put it all into a single system that's Zippy. And then we do stuff with that that drives efficiency in the operations of that restaurant. So one of the things we do is the employee revenue engine that I talked about earlier that drives net new sales. We have a task list. That's typically done on a piece of paper, but there's a ton of tasks that go into successful operation every day of a restaurant. We've automated that. Labor scheduling, we have that. Somebody's got their own labor scheduling software, great, we can work with that. If not, we've got ours. Just plug in, it's like a module, you just turn it on or off. There's dashboards that look at all your data in real time. What are my sales per labor hour? It's... predictive in the sense that it'll tell you like you're going to be overstaffed here. You're never going to make this much money and therefore you don't, you know, in terms of your sales based on the trends and you don't need those extra two people. like, you know, either let them go home or don't schedule them at all. So all of these are things that provide action items that are, you know, really impactful for the employees, the general managers and the restaurant. owner-operators. And if you're a restaurant owner-operator and you've got one or two stores to operate, you can kind of do that on a spreadsheet and that's how you've traditionally done it. But what if you've got 20 or 30? There has to be a centralized place where you can kind of run it from your phone. That's what Zippy is. That's what we built. But the most impactful one that everybody can really understand is the employee revenue engine because it just drives immediate net new revenues, like literally on day one. And so, because there are levers that employees can pull in a restaurant to help you sell more, right? You can do sampling, especially like if you're in a mall location. Like Auntie Anne's pretzels is a great example. Nobody goes to the mall to buy a pretzel. They go to buy other stuff, but they're walking by Auntie Anne's and they get the smell of the freshly baked pretzels and there's a guy outside handing out samples and you're like, I think I'll take one of those. So like, that's a lever that you can pull, suggestive selling. Would you like to supersize that? Rich Hull (39:50.206) You know, these are things that employees can do if they're motivated to do it and if they're being pushed to do it and a lot of them don't even know. You know, everybody wants to do a good job. Why wouldn't you? So you give them the tools to do a good job and they probably will. And that's what we see with Zippy's employee revenue engine. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (39:51.342) That's how it was invented, right? You want fries with that. Rich Hull (40:14.375) But then there are other modules you can add on. You can add on the labor scheduling. Like if you don't have any labor scheduling software and only 50 % of the restaurants in the US do, well great, let us know, turn it on, it's really simple. The dashboards, you turn that on. The task list, you turn that on. It's really, really simple. And that's part of the modernization that's happening. Like people are starting to realize, I need this. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (40:37.228) Yeah, and you don't want to go around looking. I remember one of my children worked kind of health care retail and it was a lot of paper sheets and the schedule would come by a spreadsheet screenshot and you're like, you're a major corporation and you're running scheduling locally with screenshots. You you kind of step back and go, huh. Rich Hull (40:57.575) That's crazy. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (41:01.102) As we, I know you have to wrap up, know, congratulations again on all the success. You're an interesting character because you do come out of the streaming kind of television world and now you're in this robotics, AI world. And you've kind of been brought in to kind of operationalize this product and you've got a little bit of a unique perspective there. If you could talk to another founder out there that is, that's building these robots, what's... What's the one thing you would tell them if you could look back and tell the founder something or a new founder something? Rich Hull (41:34.876) I think it's one of those things that it's just about perseverance. Like, it's not how many good ideas you have, it's really how many you make happen. nobody's gonna tell you that it's possible, you just kinda have to believe it. If you think about it, being a founder is insanity. Like, why anybody would do it is beyond me. Now, I've done it. And in some respects, I'm kinda still doing it. Even though I didn't found this company, but I kind of play that role in some respects as we're really scaling it. You've got to be nuts to do this job. But if you're wired like me, where I get up every day and I'm super excited to go solve big world problems for the first time ever, it's awesome. Because I get to define my whole career around that. Like, you're right, I came out of the media business. I was a film producer in financier. I probably did 30 different movies with most of the big studios. And then that led me into starting a streaming service, which is now known as VIX, V-I-X. It's the largest Spanish language streaming service in the world. It's going to do probably $2 billion of revenue this year. And we sold that to Televisa Univision, which is the large Spanish language media company. And now I'm doing this. Well, when I got into streaming, Spanish language streaming, like it wasn't even a business. People are like, it's never going to replace television. We know how that story ends. billions of dollars of revenue. Well, this is very, very similar, but you've kind of got to be bananas to do this job. So don't let anybody tell you you can't do it. Put your head down. And if you're wired like me, it's a great way to make a living, which is, which is really awesome. So, you know, buyer beware, but if you pull it off, you get to define your whole career by it. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (43:28.386) It's great advice. It falls right in line with what I would have said. Once you're off the bench, just keep going. You're off the bench. Keep running. Rich, thank you so much for joining us. all the accolades from the judges on down to all the advisory boards, congratulations on all the success. I can't wait to go into my White Castle locally and poke my head around and see if I can't see Flippy there. Rich Hull (43:36.178) did. Rich Hull (43:51.987) I hope there's a Flippy in there and it does drive a lot of foot traffic because people hear about this robot and then they want to see it and at least in the White Castle locations you can see it from the counter. And so what happens is they also kind of people end up ordering more in their order because they want to grab their phone and Instagram videos and Flippy and so they want to kind of see it cooking their fries and their nuggets and that kind of stuff. So yeah, please do go go visit your local Flippy. And then I'll also say I'm sure I'll regret doing this but If there are restaurant owner operators out there, general managers, they want to talk to us, they want to learn more about any of stuff we talked about, I'll give you my email. It's rhull, R-H-U-L-L at misorobotics.com. by all means, reach out to us and we'll get you pointed in the right direction and would love to chat. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (44:43.736) Thank you so much again for your time, Rich. Rich Hull (44:45.896) Thanks, Russ. Really appreciate it.