WebProNews

Category: Retail & eCommerce

eCommerce, Online Retail & Retail News

  • The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World, Says Gainsight CEO

    The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World, Says Gainsight CEO

    “What’s happening is that the subscription economy is just taking over the world,” says Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta. It shows up for our consumer lives with Netflix, Amazon, etc. It shows up at work as well. Because of that, all of those companies just can’t afford to just sell to their customers and move on. They’ve got to make them successful.”

    Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, discusses how both B2b and B2C subscription businesses are booming because they are better for the customer in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World

    I just heard about the deal (Salesforce buying Tableau Software for $15 billion) this morning. It just felt perfect for both sides. Tableau is one of the most respected companies in general and Salesforce has proven that they can buy companies and put them through their distribution channel. I think both customers are very committed to customer success.

    I think it just keeps accelerating. If you look at it overall there is a Subscription Economy Index that Zuora puts out and it shows that companies that are in subscription businesses are growing five times faster than the average S&P traded peer company. What’s happening is that the subscription economy is just taking over the world. It shows up for our consumer lives with Netflix, Amazon, etc. It shows up at work as well. Because of that, all of those companies just can’t afford to just sell to their customers and move on. They’ve got to make them successful.

    Subscriptions Are Great For Consumers

    Subscriptions are great for consumers. We get to choose what we want, we get to turn it on, and in most cases, we can turn it off. Sometimes we have to make a phone call to make that happen. The phone call is annoying but we have choice. In the business world that’s happening now. They have choice. Before they used to buy things, install them, and have no ability to switch. You were just stuck with what you got.

    In this new world customers have choice and therefore all the vendors, whether it’s a Salesforce or a Tableau or a Slack, have to proactively make sure that you are using all the stuff you buy and getting more value. Also, not just getting more value, that you are getting more value than any other alternative out there.

    There Is A Huge Megatrend That Is Happening

    Slack is a very special company. It’s sort of this triple threat. Customers love it, we run our whole business on Slack. The numbers are amazing in terms of growth rate, in terms of efficiency and net retention. Their existing customers keep spending more money with more than 140 percent net retention. They are also a great culture. I think Slack is one of those businesses that is built for the long term. They can go public in any market.

    There is a huge megatrend that is happening. We have almost this dissonance where technology in some ways is coming more into our lives and taking away more and more of humanity and the people in business. But on the flip side, all of us are longing for a more personal and human connection to the businesses that we work with. We are not ready to turn the whole world over to AI and machine learning. We need that human connection. What’s happening is companies are saying I need to treat my customers more like human beings. I need to be more proactively focused on customer success and make sure that they are getting value.

    They’re also saying I need to treat my employees more like human beings. I need to give them great technology like Slack, like Zoom, and like other great technologies that are going public this year that are helping employees be more successful. There’s this big approach, we call it human first business, which is really changing the way people think about work.

    The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World, Says Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta
  • Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data, Says CEO

    Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data, Says CEO

    “We sit on reams of data with 750 million visits to Expedia Group properties every single month,” says Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom. “That just gives us an incredible amount of understanding around what travelers are looking for, how we can tailor our search results, how we can tailor the recommendations we give, the advertising that we show, and that’s just the beginning. We’re also using AI to help inform some of our lodging partners with pricing tactics, to help them price more effectively both in the alternative accommodation space and in the traditional lodging space.”

    Mark Okerstrom, CEO of Expedia, discusses how the online travel giant is using data and AI to power its pricing tactics in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    We’ve Always Been At the Forefront of Travel

    We’ve always been at the forefront of travel. We’ve been at this for 20 years. The one thing that has been consistent for 20 years yeah is this is an incredibly competitive industry. Despite all of the competitive forces that have acted on us, Expedia last year did a $100 billion dollars of bookings, multiples of the size of Airbnb and many of these players out there. We’ve got thousands and thousands of the top engineers and data scientists and product minds in the world focused on travel. That’s how we stay ahead.

    VRBO has been around for a very long time. If you go back in time, people used to talk about getting a VRBO for the weekend. It was the noun. s we went through and did a ton of research here in the US and also internationally about all of the different names we could call the new VRBO, VRBO was the one that actually resonated the most. So we decided to put all of our effort behind that brand. We’re pretty excited about rolling out globally in the coming years.

    M&A is always part of our playbook, so I would never say never (regarding more acquisitions). But we’re pretty happy with what we’ve got in alternative accommodations and we’re pretty excited about putting all our efforts behind VRBO.

    Global Travel Industry Generally Looks Pretty Healthy

    So far so good (regarding tariff impacts). It looks like a healthy travel environment to us. Recent research done by Expedia here in the US is 85 percent of people are planning on taking a trip this summer and 15  percent were for budget constraints. This is broadly consistent with what we’ve seen. Americans are traveling. The global travel industry generally looks pretty healthy. We’re fortunate that we are a global business.

    In good times and bad times we definitely see shifts in travel patterns but people often just take their trips. It’s like the last thing they cut. Maybe they’ll take a trip a little bit closer to home, they won’t take that trip overseas, but they travel. If you look at our results over the 2008-2009 period, for example, those were some of our strongest years.

    Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data

    We sit on reams of data with 750 million visits to Expedia Group properties every single month. That just gives us an incredible amount of understanding around what travelers are looking for, how we can tailor our search results, how we can tailor the recommendations we give, the advertising that we show, and that’s just the beginning. We’re also using AI to help inform some of our lodging partners with pricing tactics, to help them price more effectively both in the alternative accommodation space and in the traditional lodging space. Honestly, we’re just getting started.

    We’ve been doing the one-stop shop before it was cool. We’ve been doing it for 20 years. Not only are we about search but we’re also about booking and taking care of people during the trip. No one else can do it.

    Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data, Says CEO Mark Okerstrom
  • Starsky Robotics Launching Fully Autonomous Long-Haul Trucks in Florida

    Starsky Robotics Launching Fully Autonomous Long-Haul Trucks in Florida

    “We are now gearing up to take the person completely out of the cab on public roads in the state of Florida,” says Starsky Robotics CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher. “We’ve been testing on Florida roads with people in the cabs for a couple of years. We are starting off in the easiest conditions, in good weather, and with good lighting. In time, we will start driving in light rain and at night. But to start off we will be focusing on the daytime.”

    Actual Driverless Truck — With No Passenger — Recently On the Road in Florida Test

    Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, CEO of Starsky Robotics, discusses their imminent plans to launch fully autonomous driverless long-haul trucks in Florida in an interview on Fox Business:

    Gearing Up To Take the Person Completely Out Of the Cab

    We’ve been testing on Florida roads with people in the cabs for a couple of years. We are now gearing up to take the person completely out of the cab on public roads in the state of Florida. We are starting off in the easiest conditions, in good weather, and with good lighting. In time, we will start driving in light rain and at night. All of these conditions are within our operational design domains. We see different areas, different things that are hard, and things that are easy. But to start off we will be focusing on the daytime.

    What’s interesting about long-haul trucks is frequently they just drive between different distribution centers which themselves are in industrial areas. That’s where we are focusing on. We are not driving in downtown Miami or mid-town Manhatten. We are driving in places that are slightly more rural between warehouses that are immediately next to the highway. We will be doing broader rollouts next year but we will start doing initial road unmanned tests later this year. We will make sure the local authorities know (which roads we will be driving on) and then we will let the public know afterward.

    Starsky Robotics Speed Record For Unmanned Truck in Florida

    We Are Building Uber Drivers

    We actually operate as a carrier ourselves. If you think about Uber, we are not building Uber or Lyft and we are not building Toyota Priuses. We are building Uber drivers. On the Uber and Lyft side, we are working with companies like C.H. Robinson and Schneider who are then selling our capacities to shippers. So if you can think of a large CPG we’ve probably hauled freight for them. We are building the software but we are also operating the trucks themselves.

    Warning other drivers that a truck is self-driving is actually kind of an open question. The issue is, and this is a thing that we’ve seen in regular tests with a person in the cab, that we will have a lot of people driving next to us and see that there is a bunch of cameras (that get distracted). It seems like that if we had signs (saying that the truck is self-driving) that in itself may cause an issue.

    Starsky Robotics Launching Fully Autonomous Long-Haul Truck in Florida
  • Designed From the Ground Up To Be a Great Medium Of Exchange, Says Facebook Calibra Head

    Designed From the Ground Up To Be a Great Medium Of Exchange, Says Facebook Calibra Head

    Facebook announced today a new digital wallet for a new digital currency. It is currently in a test phase and will launch live in 2020. Here is how Facebook explains the launch in its announcement release:

    “Today we’re sharing plans for Calibra, a newly formed Facebook subsidiary whose goal is to provide financial services that will let people access and participate in the Libra network. The first product Calibra will introduce is a digital wallet for Libra, a new global currency powered by blockchain technology. The wallet will be available in Messenger, WhatsApp and as a standalone app — and we expect to launch in 2020.”

    “From the beginning, Calibra will let you send Libra to almost anyone with a smartphone, as easily and instantly as you might send a text message and at low to no cost. And, in time, we hope to offer additional services for people and businesses, like paying bills with the push of a button, buying a cup of coffee with the scan of a code or riding your local public transit without needing to carry cash or a metro pass.”

    A sneak peek at what the experience of using Calibra will be like.

    David Marcus, head of Facebook’s Calibra, discusses the details of Facebook’s entry into cryptocurrency in an interview on CNBC:

    This Is Designed From the Ground Up To Be a Great Medium Of Exchange

    If you want to compare Libra with traditional cryptocurrencies the first big difference is that typically they are investment vehicles or investment assets rather than being great mediums of exchange. This is really designed from the ground up to be a great medium of exchange. Libra is a very high-quality form of digital money that you can use for everyday payments and cross-border payments, microtransactions and all kinds of different things.

    There are a lot of issues that need to be solved. If you were to get out of the studio right now and ask anyone to send ten dollars on their mobile phones to Canada, they probably wouldn’t know where to start. This is 30 years after the web was invented and mobile broadband is available to so many people. We felt that it was time to try something new and this is the beginning of a long journey to launching this new network in this new digital currency.

    Moving money around the world with Libra should be as easy and cheap as sending a text message.

    When You Can Move More Value Around Profound Changes Might Happen

    We are privileged. We live in a country that has a very stable currency and has very trusted institutions, easy ways to pay each other on mobile devices. That’s actually not the case for many people around the world. Definitely, cross-border payments are still very hard and very expensive. They cost an average of seven percent to send across one border. They sometimes take three or four days to clear. It is a very cumbersome and expensive process for many people around the world. If you think about it from a use case, cross-border payments are definitely going to be a primary use case.

    But when you think about the effect that having an internet of value exists, or protocol for money on top of the existing internet, and all of the things that can be built on top of a low-cost system. Microtransactions are things that we’ve been talking about for decades and haven’t materialized because the amounts we are trying to transact are actually lower than the transaction fees. When all of these things change and you can move value around the Internet in a really easy way I think profound changes might happen.

    Read the Libra White Paper …

    There’s Never Been a Better Moment For Us To Do This

    I have a slightly contrarian view on this (trust). I don’t think there’s ever been a better moment for us to do this because of the way we’re doing it. We’re actually going to launch this new blockchain at some point next year. We’ve launched a test net today that people can start experimenting with. This new blockchain is actually going to be decentralized and run by the members of an association.

    We’re just going to be one among many to govern over this new network and currency. When you look at how much effort we’ve put to limit our influence and limit our control over this network I think it’s a new way of operating. We don’t have control over the network and we don’t have control over the currency. What we have control over is going to be the wallets that are going to operate within Facebook and on top of the network.

    We Aren’t Going To Be the Defacto Wallet

    We aren’t going to be the defacto wallet. There will be plenty of competition. To earn people’s trust we are going to have to make strong commitments notably on privacy, ensuring that financial data and social data never get commingled and really earn people’s trust over very long periods of time. There are going to be a number of wallets that are going to compete with us on the network we helped create.

    Designed From the Ground Up To Be a Great Medium Of Exchange, Says Facebook Calibra Head David Marcus
  • Incredibly Positive For Blockchain Market to Have Facebook Leaning In, Says Ripple CEO

    Incredibly Positive For Blockchain Market to Have Facebook Leaning In, Says Ripple CEO

    “It’s an incredibly positive signal for the overall blockchain and crypto market to have a player like Facebook leaning in,” says Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse. “There’s been obviously a lot of skepticism in the origins of crypto coming from kind of an anti-government and anti-bank point of view. To see major industry players lean in and participate in marketing is really positive for the overall market. What I’ve heard is the technology isn’t quite ready to go live but sometime in 2020 they’ll be out there actually deploying that.”

    Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, discusses their investment and partnership with Moneygram and the impact on the blockchain and crypto market on the eve of Facebook’s entry into cryptocurrency in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    Incredibly Positive For the Blockchain and Crypto Market to Have Facebook Leaning In

    It’s an incredibly positive signal for the overall blockchain and crypto market to have a player like Facebook leaning in. There’s been obviously a lot of skepticism in the origins of crypto coming from kind of an anti-government and anti-bank point of view. To see major industry players lean in and participate in marketing is really positive for the overall market. It’ll be really interesting to see what part of the market they focus on. David Marcus has been an incredible leader and given his experience at PayPal I expect we’ll see them do something very consumer-oriented part of the payment system.

    I’ll be watching alongside everyone else to see what they decide to pursue. What I’ve heard is the technology isn’t quite ready to go live but sometime in 2020 they’ll be out there actually deploying that. For me, what money Graham and the stuff we’re doing today is the key difference. It’s what can we do today with these technologies to solve real problems? It’s been really hard for the people following this industry to separate what is noise and what is actually real and pragmatic today.

    I don’t think (anything Facebook does will make Ripple less relevant).  Facebook is obviously a company with Instagram and Whatsapp. What Ripple is doing is really enterprise infrastructure and interconnecting various payment networks around the world. We’re working with some of the biggest banks around the world, small payment providers, and really providing that interoperability between the different networks as opposed to solving within a network kind of problem. It’s just very very different than what I expect Facebook is going to be doing.

    Ripple Investing In and Partnering with MoneyGram

    The deal (with Ripple investing in and partnering with MoneyGram) is a big step for Ripple but it’s even a bigger step for the overall industry. There’s been a lot of excitement around what blockchain and what digital assets and crypto can mean for the industry. I think it’s the reason why players like Facebook are diving in also. But we haven’t yet seen much beyond experimentation. Really at Ripple, we are the market leader because we have matured aggressively and we’re really solving real problems for real customers. MoneyGram is just the manifestation of that. As the second largest global remittance company we are able to have a big impact with one customer and one partner in this.

    What Western Union said, and they’ve been around for decades, what they said is that in our beta time, the time where the product hadn’t yet launched, they said that we matched the efficiency of what they were already optimized. My view on that was they had spent decades getting to an efficiency that we matched with a beta product. I was actually really pleased that Western Union could come out and say we’re already as good as their (current product) considering the other decades they had invested in building out that capability.

    MoneyGram Is An Undervalued and Strategic Asset in the Payments Landscape

    With MoneyGram we know out of the gates we can actually make their system much more efficient. The key reason is today both Western Union and MoneyGram pre-fund accounts around the world so they can make payments. MoneyGram and Western Union have negative working capital. What our products allow those companies to do is to not pre-fund and to shoot payments in real-time. That’s a massive savings in terms of the efficiency, not just in terms of what is the cost in FX, but the capital cost, and the outlays. That’s really a dormant asset when you pre-fund those just sitting there waiting for people to make payments. That’s really the transformational thing that XRP as an extremely efficient digital asset allows for the industry.

    What we committed to do is to invest up to $50 million. We will end up owning somewhere between about 6 or 7 percent and 10 percent of the company. They decide over the course of the next year how much of that $50 million they want to call down. At close, they’ve called down $30 million at a price of $4.10 per share. We’re excited to be shareholders because we think that actually it’s been an undervalued asset. As you may know Ant Financial tried to buy MoneyGram over a year ago. That was ultimately blocked by CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States). We think it’s a really undervalued and strategic asset in the overall payments landscape. We couldn’t be more excited to have a shared vision of how digital assets can change the nature of how liquidity is managed for payment providers globally.

    What’s next for us is to continue to build out and expand the number of corridors where we’re live today. We work with over 200 banks and financial institutions around the world today. With this new product around liquidity, we’re now enabling liquidity into the Mexican peso and the Philippine peso. We certainly expect to be much broader than that but we’ve only been live with this product for about six or seven months. I feel like we’ve made tremendous progress in a short amount of time. We’re going to continue to invest with the customers we have today as well as expand the number corridors we support globally.

    Incredibly Positive For Blockchain Market to Have Facebook Leaning In, Says Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse
  • The Response To Our Impossible Sliders Has Been Overwhelming, Says White Castle VP

    The Response To Our Impossible Sliders Has Been Overwhelming, Says White Castle VP

    “The response from customers (to our Impossible Slider) has been overwhelming,” says Jamie Richardson, Vice President at White Castle. “And with our 10,000 team members, the response has been overwhelming. We know we have got a winner. In working with Impossible, they’ve really put the study into this and have done it in a thoughtful way and have come up with something that tastes great. You put that in that White Castle original bun with one perfect pickle and you’ve got a winner.”

    Jamie Richardson, Vice President at White Castle, discusses the phenomenal success of the Impossible Slider, their vegan alternative to the original Slider, in an interview on CNBC:

    The Response To Our Impossible Sliders Has Been Overwhelming

    We are a family owned business that’s been around for almost a hundred years. We don’t make short term decisions. We look at things over the long haul, working together, and solving our customers’ problems. The response from customers has been overwhelming. And with our 10,000 team members, the response has been overwhelming. We know we have got a winner. We’re excited about what comes next in our friendship.

    It’s really interesting. One of the big things we are seeing, especially with our younger customers, our GenZ customers, and our Millennial customers, a lot these individuals have gone with a plant-based diet. So if you are in a car with three or four people you can be that veto vote. What we found is we’re getting more and more of those visits and that’s important to us. Oh, and by the way, here among friends, we don’t use the term “fake meat” because to us it’s a plant-based protein and that’s what makes it awesome.

    The Impossible Slider at White Castle

    Our Customers Tell Us They Love the Taste

    I don’t know what they (Tyson Foods and Perdue) are going to be able to accomplish (with alternative meats). But here’s what we do know. In working with Impossible, they’ve really put the study into this and have done it in a thoughtful way and have come up with something that tastes great. I think that the taste quotient is so important in terms of success in the marketplace. There are no tradeoffs. For our customers what they tell us is they love the taste. You put that in that White Castle original bun with one perfect pickle and you’ve got a winner.

    Customers are absolutely aware of the Impossible Slider (by brand name). That’s been the partnership that’s been able to brand it that way. It’s something we’ve known since 1921, the home of the original slider, in offering the first Impossible Slider. Absolutely, we’ve benefitted from a lot of good news coverage and people becoming more aware. A lot of people want to sample and try it. We serve omnivores. We have people who come in an order a double cheeseburger with extra bacon and have an Impossible to go along with it as well. It’s got a lot of broad appeal because candidly, the taste is what separates it from the rest of the pack.

    The Response To Our Impossible Sliders Has Been Overwhelming, Says White Castle VP Jamie Richardson
  • Salesforce Commerce Page Designer – Creates Experiences With Clicks Not Code

    Salesforce Commerce Page Designer – Creates Experiences With Clicks Not Code

    “We have something brand-new we call the Commerce Page Designer,” says Mike Micucci, CommerceCloud CEO at Salesforce. “It allows you to create experiences with clicks not code. You can literally drag and drop things around on the page and just put them right where you want to. You don’t need to be a programmer or a data scientist to do it. Your marketers and your merchandisers can build those experiences super fast to respond to different market changes.”

    Mike Micucci, CEO of CommerceCloud at Salesforce, announces new enhancements to Salesforce Commerce Cloud in a discussion at Connections 2019:

    You Have To Really Put the Customer Right At the Center

    In today’s industry, it’s not just about showing up and having a pretty picture you have to really put the customer right at the center. When they are there experiencing your brand you’re not delivering just the premium experience but you’re personalizing it to them. It’s not just on the shopping site it’s everywhere they go, from how you engage with them on social all the way through on customer service.

    Putting the customer at the center to deliver a premium, a personalized experience, that’s a differentiator today. That’s what the customers are expecting everywhere they go. That’s is the key.

    Commerce Page Designer Creates Experiences With Clicks Not Code

    Our team has been working all year to get ready for Connections. We’ve got some great news that we’re going to showcase. First and foremost, we have something brand-new we call the Commerce Page Designer. It allows you to create experiences with clicks not code. You can literally drag and drop things around on the page and just put them right where you want to. You don’t need to be a programmer or a data scientist to do it. Your marketers and your merchandisers can build those experiences super fast to respond to different market changes. That’s one of the biggest things that we’re producing.

    The second thing is we also have a lot of new tech for developers. We’re connecting Heroku Solution kit and Commerce together in a whole new way. With this new Heroku Solution Kit, which includes templates to help you build mobile apps, shopping apps, and service cloud apps. They are all right there in front of you so they developers can be super productive with this great environment with Heroku where you can manage and build apps.

    Thirdly is MuleSoft. It takes on average about 39 different systems to pull off a commerce scenario. Those are back-end systems like ERP, your order system, and inventory. What we’ve done with MuleSoft is we made it a lot easier to connect commerce through MuleSoft to all those legacy systems through one unified layer. So today, we’re announcing this new MuleSoft For Commerce Cloud Accelerator so that developers have a whole set of preset of APIs so they can jump-start that process.

    Those are three great innovations. One for all your marketing and merchandisers. Then there are two great innovations for the developers that make them much more productive. Our goal is to help you not only deliver premium experiences but do it really fast.

    Einstein and AI Are Really Reshaping Commerce

    So what is next on the horizon? First and foremost, we always listen to our customers tell us here are the things that they need to drive their business. But what you should be looking for is how Einstein and AI are really reshaping commerce. You’ll see that in how Einstein is not just doing product recommendations but reshaping the entire customer experience.

    Einstein takes away of a lot of those things that you used to do manually, let’s say like visual search where you can shop by pictures, where Einstein will figure out, hey, what’s in that picture and make it really easy to add it to the cart. It can take a lot of the guesswork out of it and just really make the shopping experience delightful. So stay tuned for a lot more AI and a lot more Einstein.

    https://youtu.be/Wpu7zVQTZ-Q
    Salesforce Commerce Page Designer – Creates Experiences With Clicks Not Code – Mike Micucci
  • Fiverr Is The Everything Store For Digital Services, Says CEO

    Fiverr Is The Everything Store For Digital Services, Says CEO

    “Fiverr is the everything store for digital services,” says Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman. “The way people usually find freelancers is they post on Facebook asking if someone knows a good graphics designer. What we’re doing is we’re making it a one-click experience. There’s no bidding, betting, negotiating. There’s browse, search, buy. It’s an Amazon experience to buy a digital service.”

    Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, discusses today’s IPO and how Fiverr has become the Amazon for digital services in an interview on CNBC:

    Fiverr Is The Everything Store For Digital Services

    Fiverr connects freelancers with businesses of all sizes. Really, the uniqueness of the platform is that the experience of buying a digital service on Fiverr is very similar to shopping on Amazon. You browse, you search, you find something, you click order, and it’s done. Graphic design is one of our most popular services on the platform. Also popular are content marketing, videography, animation, music services, and marketing and advertising. Anything you can imagine.

    It’s the everything store for digital services. The system helps you productize your offering. You can define what you’re offering, how much time it’s going to take you to deliver, and the asking price. All the buyers have to do is screen through the offerings, find something they like, click order and pay, and they are done.

    It’s An Amazon Experience To Buy a Digital Product

    In the categories in which we operate there is a volume of activity of $100 billion in the US alone. It’s still only a single digit percentage online. It’s a very old-school business. The way people usually find freelancers is they post on Facebook asking if someone knows a good graphics designer. What we’re doing is we’re making it a one-click experience. There’s no bidding, betting, negotiating. There’s browse, search, buy. It’s an Amazon experience to buy a digital service. Nobody has done it before. The average time to make an order on Fiverr is 15 minutes. this is unbeatable. It’s unmatched.

    We take a take out of every transaction. It’s one of the industry-leading take rates of over 26 percent. If you look at the EBITDA margins, you see that they’re shrinking. The way we actually structured the business is that we continue to grow aggressively while shrinking our negative EBITDA. There is a clear path to profitability. We are operating in over 160 countries. Our growth is coming globally from the adoption of freelancing online.

    Our Primary Competitor is Definitely the Offline Market

    Our primary competitor is definitely the offline market. I don’t know if it’s 96 or 97 percent of the activity offline, but we don’t need to eat anyone’s lunch to grow. We just need to move offline activity to the online. The offline freelancing market is massive. we’ve estimated that market to be a hundred billion dollars in the US alone. Europe is 1.5 times bigger than the US. There are over 162 million freelancers between the EU and the US. The opportunity is massive and it’s just starting to come online. This is like 1995 for ecommerce. This is so exciting.

    Fiverr doesn’t hire its freelancers. It’s just the market that connects freelancers with businesses that have their digital needs. The way the marketplace is structured is such where we don’t have any employee-employer relationships. We are not relying on freelancers. We’re just connecting that supply with a demand that comes forward. We’re the platform on top of which they actually conduct their transaction. We just provide the platform to make that happen. It is very different than Uber and Lyft.

    Fiverr Is The Everything Store For Digital Services, Says Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman
  • Cell-Based Meat: Real Meat Without Slaughtering Animals

    Cell-Based Meat: Real Meat Without Slaughtering Animals

    “This is real meat directly from animal cells,” says Memphis Meats CEO Uma Valeti. “People who love meat for thousands of years immediately recognize this as meat. In fact, cell-based meat is called the holy grail of the food industry. This is meat and when people taste it that’s when the magic happens. If someone is a vegetarian for environmental or ethical reasons well here is meat where you can produce it by detaching meat production from slaughter for the first time ever.”

    Uma Valeti, Co-Founder and CEO of Memphis Meats, discusses how the company is going to revolutionize meat production with lab-grown cell-based meats that could eliminate the raising and slaughtering of billions of animals globally. Valeti was interviewed on Bloomberg:

    Lab Grown: “In Just Three Weeks We Get Delicious Meat”

    Memphis Meats is a food company that is growing meat, poultry, seafood directly from animal cells. We take high-quality animal cells from the animals that are typically on the table as meat or poultry and we identify the cells that can renew themselves. They are there in the meat because cells continue to renew and double naturally. What we do is identify the high-quality cells that will make the cut into producing delicious meat. We isolate the cells, whether it’s cows, chickens, pigs, or ducks, and then we put them in a clean controlled environment where we feed them essential nutrients.

    These are very familiar with what a baby calf would eat like vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids, minerals, oxygen, and sugars. In a matter of three to six weeks, we get delicious meat that is harvested and cooked just like you would handle meat. The entire process, the efficiency of it, getting from the first cell to meat being harvested is just amazing. We’ve done a lot of products. We’ve done beef, chicken, duck, and a number of other species.

    How To Make Cell-Based Meat Grown In The Lab

    Meat Production Without Slaughtering Animals

    This is real meat directly from animal cells. People who love meat for thousands of years immediately recognize this as meat. In fact, cell-based meat is called the holy grail of the food industry. It’s something that is part of our culture whether you grow up in India, China, the US, or anywhere in the world. We celebrate the tradition of growing and eating meat at almost every gathering that we have.

    When we think of our potential customers we see very high interest from people who are 55 and under, Millenials and Gen Z’s. That interest is about 60-70 percent anytime someone asks them if they are ready to eat cell-based meat. But it’s very interesting that even in those that are over 55 the interest is 50 plus percent. That’s something that we were really surprised to see. It actually makes sense. This is meat and when people taste it that’s when the magic happens.

    It’s also blurring the definition of who’s a vegetarian or vegan. If someone is a vegetarian for environmental or ethical reasons well here is meat where you can produce it by detaching meat production from slaughter for the first time ever.

    Real Cell-Based Meat From Memphis Meats

    We Introduced the (Cell-Based) Beef Meatball in 2016

    We started the company about three years ago. If you think about it, in 2015 or 2016 this was still thought of as science fiction. One of the things we thought of as a startup is not to be in stealth mode. Almost every startup would love to start in stealth mode and introduce their product when ready. We recognize that this is new and for some people, it can be weird. That’s why we started talking about it really early.

    In order for us to demystify this for anyone who thinks about cell-based meat or clean meats, they have to experience this. They have to come and see it be cooked, smell it in front of them, and then taste it. Our goal as a company is to really get out there and educate consumers as quickly as possible. Why we are doing this? How we can do this? What we are doing? So far, the reception we have received has been tremendous.

    This started when we introduced the beef meatball (in 2016). We can also do it with multiple species. We picked two of the most popular species in the world. For example, chicken is the most popular in the US. We did southern fried chicken and we started showing the fibers when someone cuts into it. Then we picked duck because we wanted to show that this is actually very relevant globally. More duck is eaten in China than the rest of the world combined. We started showing duck breasts and how it could grill and you could get the experience of that.

    Example of What Memphis Meats is Producing

    Focused On Showing What We Can Do With Very Desirable Species

    This is not for everyone right away because they have to get comfortable with this. They have to see their friends and family eat it. Our goal is to get it into the market as quickly as possible. In the last three years, our entire focus was to start showing that we can do it with very desirable species. We are in the process now of building a pilot plant and starting to scale production. We plan to be to market in the near future.

    The consumer really cares where the food comes from. That’s something that is a very clear trend in the last few years. It’s pretty clear that consumers want to feel excited about the process of how food gets there and not merely tolerate the system in place. I’d say that with the current system of raising 70 billion animals we are merely tolerating it. If given the option of producing meat directly without raising and slaughtering animals and someone can experience that, that’s amazing.

    Cell-Based Meat: Real Meat Without Slaughtering Animals – Uma Valeti, CEO of Memphis Meats
  • Disney Takes a Playbook Out of Digitally Native Companies

    Disney Takes a Playbook Out of Digitally Native Companies

    “All of a sudden people are realizing that Disney is going to take the advantages that they have, content that nobody else has, moats that give them actual real leverage in the negotiations, and then they’re going to actually take a playbook out of these more digitally native companies,” says Sean Ammirati of Birchmere Ventures. “They’re going to actually build direct relationships with their end customers. They’re going to switch their business model from transactional to a subscription model.”

    Sean Ammirati, Partner at Birchmere Ventures, discusses how Disney has potentially reinvented themselves with the launch of Disney+ in an interview with Bob Evans on the always engaging and relevant Cloud Wars podcast:

    Disney Takes a Playbook Out of Digitally Native Companies

    Innovation is not relegated simply to 20-something small brand new companies. Large companies are able to leverage their assets and their unfair competitive advantages to play in this also. For instance, Disney recently had its Investor Day and announced its Disney Plus streaming offering. Disney Plus has been framed by a lot of people as a kind of “Netflix Killer.” The interesting thing about what’s happened there is the reaction from Wall Street tech journalists. All these different groups have been incredibly positive.

    All of a sudden people are realizing that Disney is going to take the advantages that they have, content that nobody else has, moats that give them actual real leverage in the negotiations, and then they’re going to actually take a playbook out of these more digitally native companies. They’re going to actually build direct relationships with their end customers. They’re going to switch their business model from transactional to a subscription model.

    How Do We Transform Our Relationships With Customers?

    These are things that we’ve been talking about for four years with lots of legacy companies under the category of digital transformation. But it’s hard every time someone steps up and tries to do that, you’ve got to re-educate Wall Street on how to think about your financial metrics. It turns out that GAAP accounting is not that similar to subscription accounting. To be fair, that’s an easier challenge than it was a few years ago. I remember years ago when Adobe made that pivot and what a struggle that was to say (to investors) we’re going to make less money next quarter and you should be excited about that. Their stock went through kind of a full J-curve there as they walked people through it.

    What was encouraging is after Investor Day there was a massive jump in Disney stock. All of a sudden these pieces that you’d watch the leadership put together for a while kind of came into a full mosaic picture. Not only did Disney stock shoot up but this arch competitor Netflix, they took a hit right away, although they’ve come back a little bit with recent earnings. I’m hoping that other CEOs in other boardrooms are taking note of this and asking themselves the same questions. How do we create products and services that transform our relationships with our customers to allow us to have that same type of growth mindset?

    Case Study: How to Be a CXO In This Subscription Economy World

    We have gotten to a point where we assume that if you’re a company that was born in the digital age and you’ve gone through the full capital formation prospect and gotten out and gotten public you must have certain things in your DNA that makes you the only organization who can win a market. Just look at the grocery industry. Amazon’s coming into grocery so I’m sure Amazon’s going to be the winner in that business. Maybe. But then you see the largest grocery chain in the United States (Kroger) partnering with Microsoft to actually be proactive instead of reactive.

    Companies can actually play in this business that weren’t born in the last thirty years. Disney is a great illustration of that. Now Disney needs to continue to execute. They’re going to need to actually finish the vision that they cast. They’ve got to launch these. They’ve got to make it work. They’ve got to pick the right partners. I really think in a couple of years this will be a case study lots of executives point to and say, man, we can do it. In the same way that the Adobe thing has been how to be a CFO in this subscription economy world that we live in.

    Disney Takes a Playbook Out of Digitally Native Companies – Sean Ammirati on Cloud Wars podcast
  • Tableau With Salesforce Supercharges Our Organizations, Says Salesforce CEO

    Tableau With Salesforce Supercharges Our Organizations, Says Salesforce CEO

    “The third cornerstone of digital transformation is the analytics and the visualization and the business intelligence to see everything in your company,” says Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff. “There’s no more amazing company in that category then Tableau whose mission is to make sure that the world can see and understand data. This is just going to be an incredible acquisition for Salesforce. It’s really the best of both worlds, two amazing companies coming together.”

    Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses their transformative $15.3 billion deal for Tableau, in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Tableau With Salesforce Supercharges Our Organizations

    There are really three cornerstones of digital transformation. The first one is the customer. Of course, we do that in spades. We do that better than anybody else. The second cornerstone, we did that a year ago with MuleSoft integration. The ability to integrate all your data sources together so you can get a more holistic view or what we call Customer 360. But you’re really touching on the third cornerstone of digital transformation, which is the analytics and the visualization and the business intelligence to see everything in your company. There’s no more amazing company in that category then Tableau whose mission is to make sure that the world can see and understand data. That is what excites us as well.

    I was in Minneapolis just last week. When I was with one of our very largest customers, they’re doing some incredible work with their supply chain and the ability to connect with their customer in a whole new way. Of course, that’s what we do for them. But at the very end of the meeting, they’re talking about how they’re going to visualize and provide analytics and business intelligence on this incredible infrastructure that we’ve helped them build. They had chosen Tableau. Then, of course, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, wow, this is just going to be an incredible acquisition for Salesforce. It’s really the best of both worlds, two amazing companies coming together. Tableau is a company at scale. It’s an incredible company and putting that together with Salesforce just supercharges both of our organizations.

    Tableau Didn’t Want Our Cash, They Wanted Our Equity

    In terms of cash flow, I don’t know if you remember our quarter that we just announced last week but we had record cash flows. We’ve had phenomenal cash generation. Our business has done a great job in cash. But I have to be honest, Tableau didn’t want our cash. They wanted our equity. They know that the real value here is in the company that we’re creating together. We would have been more than happy to give them any currency they wanted but ultimately they want our stock.

    Hey, I can’t blame them. Look at how it’s performed over the last decade. It’s been incredible. I have a huge vision and so do they on what’s possible for the future. When you look at that we’re really looking at a company that’s going to fast track to $30 billion in revenue in enterprise software and there just isn’t very many of those companies out there today.

    We Can’t Build the Technolgy Fast Enough

    I’m a huge believer in innovation. It’s one of our core values. Our four core values; trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. Let me just talk about innovation for a second. I so strongly believe in not just organic innovation, and you’ve seen that of course, our core Sales Cloud, our core Service Cloud, and our core platform, but I also strongly believe that companies to be competitive and successful today have to also believe in inorganic innovation. You don’t have to look any farther than things like our Marketing Cloud or Commerce Cloud and our Integration Cloud as well. In these technologies, we were able to acquire great companies like ExactTarget, like Demandware, and like MuleSoft, that became the heart of our Customer 360.

    We can’t build the technology fast enough to be able to deliver to our customers demand.  Now by doing that (acquisition of Tableau) we are able to create this complete Customer 360 platform that gives our customers everything they do to not only connect with their customer in a whole new way, not only to connect with every data source they have but also to be able to have the visualization data analytics and business intelligence to achieve their total success. For digital transformation, which is what’s happening right now, that is mission critical.

    Tableau With Salesforce Supercharges Our Organizations, Says Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff
  • EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    “There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on,” says Qualtrics CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Smith. “So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.”

    Ryan Smith, CEO & Co-Founder of Qualtrics, discusses the genesis of Qualtrics and how it has evolved into a sophisticated and integral platform for the enterprise in an extensive interview with Jason Calacanis:

    We View Ourselves As a System Of Action

    In the beginning, it was very much around being able to collect data, kind of being on the front end of that. You were able to collect data. You were able to put it into an analytical system and then you were able to report on it. Because of that, we were kind of branded as this survey platform for a long time. I’d say over the last eight to ten years all the survey is a form. There’s a form engine that allows you to do anything you could ever want to do with a form. A form can be through text, a form can be through a chatbot, it can be through anything. Then there’s an analytical platform and then there’s a reporting platform.

    A lot of our investment has been into actioning. We view ourselves as a system of action. How do you actually gather data that doesn’t exist? What experience management is — most organizations are in a world where they’ve resigned to the fact that they have all the data that they need. From our standpoint and what we see it’s the opposite. We’ve got operational systems that are telling us what’s happened. But the “why” is able to be collected in ways that never could have been done in 2002 because we have such amazing access to people. We think it’s just starting, especially now that we can go gather the “why” data through 13 or 14 different methods. It all comes together and you get a full picture. You see what happened and now you get to see “why” and that’s pretty powerful.

    If you’re thinking about the Google Analytics side it would be like these people visit our site. These people abandoned their shopping carts. These people are doing this. Or I’m an LA Hotel and I see a bunch of people from LA visiting. I don’t know why they’re visiting. They’re not staying with me. They used Qualtrics and the first ten people say that they’re there for the happy hour menu. The one person shop running IT just pops up the happy hour menu through Qualtrics without changing their whole website. Now they’re at home and they’re delivering a great experience and it only shows up for the people from LA.

    EmployeeXM – Coolest, Easiest, and Most Sophisticated

    If you look at the airline industry one of the interesting things is we power probably all the feedback on the 30 or 40 different airlines around the world. Most people know Qualtrics for the customer feedback because they’ll fly and they’ll get an email or a text that says thumbs-up thumbs-down, how was your experience? What we’ve seen as we launched the XM (Experience Management) platform, and this is what SAP is so excited about, we created this category because of all the uses we were seeing on Qualtrics. Our employee experience was taking off in a way where we were like, whoa, 50 percent of the customer problems have to do with an employee.

    Then at the same time, the average tenure here in the Bay Area is like 18 months. I don’t know one CEO that says we’re going to go recruit and spend all this money but we’re going to bring people in for only 18 months. So there’s a massive gap. There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on. So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.

    The Inside Manifests Itself On the Outside

    From the time they start in the company to the time they exit how do we know everything that’s going? Even in the recruiting process, how do we make sure that as a company what we think we’re delivering is being received on the other side? I believe the inside manifests itself on the outside. We’re seeing this across brands. Now we’re seeing the customer and the employee. If you look in an airline, they’re using us on the customer, the employee, the product, and the brand side.

    If you look at when someone goes and shows up to a gate a lot of times they’re upset before they even get there. The employee deals with an upset customer and that impacts the entire experience. When you rate or you think about how your flight was you’re only thinking about the brand. It’s a bunch of experiences tied together. We’re helping organizations manage all their experiences for the first time on one single platform. It doesn’t make sense that you’ve got five different software’s doing this. We’re doing this at an enterprise level. That’s how people are using it.

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product – Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith
  • Jeff Bezos: We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures

    Jeff Bezos: We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures

    “At Amazon, we still take risks all the time,” says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “We encourage it. We talk about failure. We should be failing. Our failures have to grow with the company. We need big failures if we are going to be moving the needle. We need to have billion dollar scale failures. If we are not, we are not swinging hard enough.”

    Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, discusses how to be a successful entrepreneur by being customer obsessed in a conversation at the Amazon re:MARS conference in Las Vegas:

    The Most Important Thing Is To Be Customer Obsessed

    If you want to be an entrepreneur, the most important thing is to be customer obsessed. Don’t satisfy your customers, figure out how to absolutely delight them. That is the number one thing whoever your customers are. Passion. You have got to have some passion for the arena that you are going to develop and work in. Otherwise, you are going to be competing against people who do have compassion for that. They are going to build better products and services.

    You can’t be a mercenary. You have to be a missionary. Missionaries build better products and services. They always win. The mercenaries are just trying to make money. Paradoxically, the missionaries always end up making more money.

    We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures

    You have to pick something that you actually have a genuine passion for. You have to take risks. You have to be willing to take risks. If you aren’t going to take risks, if you come up with a business idea where there are no risks there, those ideas are probably already being done. There being done well by many many people. So have to have something that might not work. You have to accept that your business is going to be in many ways an experiment. It might fail. That’s okay. That’s what risk is.

    At Amazon, we still take risks all the time. We encourage it. We talk about failure. We should be failing. Our failures have to grow with the company. We need big failures if we are going to be moving the needle. We need to have billion dollar scale failures. If we are not, we are not swinging hard enough.

    Disagree and Commit

    If I have a new idea and I want to see it pursued I do have to build support for it. You need very smart people to embrace the idea and move it forward. We have a framework at Amazon, it’s one of our leadership principals, it’s called disagree and commit. That is extremely useful. After you discussed an idea, you do need to make a decision and move forward. The whole team needs to really commit to that. When I really feel strongly about something and the team disagrees with me I have a helpful phrase that I look to use which is, “I want you to gamble with me on this.”

    The truth is when you are in a position like that nobody knows what the right answer is.  You’re not saying I’m right on this. Go do this. You’re saying I want you to gamble with me on this because I don’t know if it is right either. I disagree and commit all the time. I promise the people when I do it, I’m very clear in saying, “I don’t agree with this. I think it is probably not going to work. But I will never say I told you so and I’m going to be on your team. I will do everything I can to make it work.”

    Broadband Access Is Going To Be a Fundamental Human Need

    A recent big bet (we’ve taken at Amazon) would be Project Kuiper. This is our LEO satellite constellation. The goal here is broadband everywhere. One of the things this does, it’s just the way the systems work, you have equal broadband all over the surfaces of the earth. Not exactly equal, it tends to be a little bit more concentrated toward the poles, unfortunately. You end up servicing the whole world.

    It’s really good because by definition you end up accessing people who are under bandwidth including rural and remote areas. I think you can see going forward that access to broadband is going to be very close to being a fundamental human need as we move forward.

    Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures
  • Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer, Says Amazon SVP

    Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer, Says Amazon SVP

    “The long-term goal (with Alexa) was to try to invent the Star Trek computer,” says David Limp, Amazon’s SVP of devices and services. “I grew up watching Roddenberry and loved it. We all loved watching it and the science had moved up enough where we thought we had a shot at it. It’s still going to take us years, if not decades more, to get to the shining star that is that Star Trek computer. But we think we can do it.”

    David Limp, SVP of Devices & Services at Amazon, discusses the future of devices and Amazon’s role in building trust and protecting privacy in an interview on CNBC at the Amazon re:MARS conference in Las Vegas:

    Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer

    The long-term goal (with Alexa) was to try to invent the Star Trek computer. I grew up watching Roddenberry and loved it. It was a lot more innocent than you might make it out to be. Which is, can we invent that computer? We all loved watching it and the science had moved up enough where we thought we had a shot at it. It’s still going to take us years, if not decades more, to get to the shining star that is that Star Trek computer. But we think we can do it.

    If you have that in your house or in your car or in your conference room, you’re going to find all sorts of things to do with it. Some, Amazon will invent and it’ll help Amazon. But much more, it’ll help developers. There are 90,000 plus skills and hundreds of thousands of developers building around Alexa right now. If you’d five years ago said there’s going to be a new developer ecosystem that’s not about an operating system and that’s not about applications, but about skills in the cloud, you would have laughed at me. But here it is sitting in front of us, all around us, right here.

    Star Trek popularized the idea of the Voice First computer. Amazon Alexa made it reality.

    Our Focus Is To Invent On Behalf Of Customers

    Our focus is to invent on behalf of customers. If we keep our focus there and build cool things that customers love to use and continue to earn their trust, which we have to do every day, then we think the outputs will speak for themselves. We focus on that. Customer trust is kind of the oil of the Amazon flywheel. We think about it every day. It’s thinking about privacy as you think about the kinds of products that we’re doing. Whether it’s a Ring doorbell or it’s an Echo sitting in your kitchen, it has to be foundational to the product. It’s not something you glom on later as an afterthought.

    We think about it at the very upfront when we’re beginning to invent the product. We’re gonna put these in our homes. What do we want to think about privacy? What do we think about trust? We build features into the products and into the services where (those concepts) are first and foremost and paramount. We’re continuing to evolve that as well. It’s not like you’re going to get everything right day one. As we learn from customers we’ll add new features and services that build on that and add more privacy and trust as we go on.

    The First Thing Is To Get Customers To Love A Product

    The first thing is to get customers to love a product. If you build a product that customers love and use then good things usually come in consumer electronics when you do that. For us, that’s the first thing that you want to do. It happened early on with Kindle. People loved it and then we figured out how to build a book business around it. Similarly, the great thing about Echo and Alexa is that customers love the product.

    I don’t think that they’re necessarily buying more yet because of that but they are doing certain things in digital that leads to buying some more things. Specifically, we’ve kind of brought music back into the home again. It had an atrophied in the home. Now music subscription services, Spotify, Amazon music, and Apple music starting last year. They’re growing on Echo and Alexa. People are listening to audiobooks. We have a business there in Audible with the subscription services. Those are the early signs where you start seeing that. In addition, people are buying more smart home products. Whether it’s a smart plug or a light bulb or a robotic vacuum, people are buying those more because it’s easier to control with a voice interface.

    Anything That Advances Privacy For Customers, I’m a Fan Of

    Anything that advances privacy for customers and gives them a more trusted environment, I’m a big fan of as a consumer. I don’t know enough about that product (announced on Monday by Apple) to weigh in on the specifics of it. As you think about Amazon and our credentials and being able to log on to Amazon, we’ve been doing that for 20 plus years. Your credit card number and your address which we ship your products to, that’s sacrosanct. We have to build trust every day. Any other company or any other person that’s furthering that I think it’s just great for the industry.

    Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer, Says Amazon SVP David Limp
  • Everything Can Be Digital At The End Of The Day, Says Wingstop CEO

    Everything Can Be Digital At The End Of The Day, Says Wingstop CEO

    “Everything can be digital at the end of the day,” says Wingstop CEO Charles Morrison. “We still take a lot of phone orders and a lot of people still walk. So every time somebody accesses us we want the opportunity to digitize that transaction. Why? Because the digital transaction tends to have almost a five-dollar higher average ticket and is more profitable for our franchisees which means a better return on investment and more new restaurants to grow on.”

    Charles Morrison, CEO of Wingstop, discusses how digitalization is powering their growth and profitability in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Everything Can Be Digital At The End Of The Day

    We believe it’s a fantastic partnership with DoorDash. What they focus on is making merchants successful. As the merchant that’s exactly what we want. And they take care of the logistics. In our partnership, we’ve made sure that we are always working together to ensure that no matter how you access Wingstop, whether it be carryout or walk-in or through delivery, you’re going to get the same great experience. We believe they’re best positioned to provide that.

    Everything can be digital at the end of the day. We still take a lot of phone orders and a lot of people still walk. So every time somebody accesses us we want the opportunity to digitize that transaction. Why? Because the digital transaction tends to have almost a five-dollar higher average ticket and is more profitable for our franchisees which means a better return on investment and more new restaurants to grow on. I think people spend more time with the menu (on digital). They get to know the menu. They add a couple of items on to that and they’re not as intimidated by the phone call and the rush that they see at the front counter.

    Digital Technologies Create Efficiencies To Help Us Grow

    We’ve been a socially active brand as it relates to social media for many years. We’ve become large enough and have scaled to national advertising. Our franchisees generously added one percent to the advertising spend so they now spend four percent to a national fund. That has been redeployed into fantastic new media and new creative which is really helping drive that same point 7.1% comp that you saw in the first quarter.

    In our brand, we’re pretty well insulated (against labor shortages). We have a very small roster already, so in that small footprint, it doesn’t take a lot of people to operate a Wingstop. I don’t know that you’ll necessarily see us doing anything to remove the number of people in a restaurant. We do believe through digital technologies and further digitalization of our business that we can create efficiencies that create capacity that will help us to grow. This will take the pressure off the labor line.

    Everything Can Be Digital At The End Of The Day, Says Wingstop CEO Charles Morrison
  • McDonald’s Is Seriously Looking At Offering Vegan Burgers Worldwide

    McDonald’s Is Seriously Looking At Offering Vegan Burgers Worldwide

    “We’ve got a vegan burger going in Germany at the moment on a promotional basis,” says McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook. “When you look at the whole meat substitute type ideas what will be interesting for us will be to see who is particularly interested in that. Is it an existing customer who wants just an alternative option? Is it to bring a new customer in? We’re exploring that and trying to understand it better and also understand a customers acceptability of that particular type of product.”

    Steve Easterbrook, CEO of McDonald’s, discusses the possibility of  McDonald’s putting vegan Big Macs on the menu in an interview on CNBC:

    McDonald’s May Soon Sell Vegan Burgers Worldwide

    We’ve got a vegan burger going in Germany at the moment on a promotional basis. When you look at the whole meat substitute type ideas what will be interesting for us will be to see who is particularly interested in that. Is it an existing customer who wants just an alternative option? Is it to bring a new customer in? We’re exploring that and trying to understand it better and also understand a customers acceptability of that particular type of product. There’s a lot of buzz around it at the moment, but it’s clearly prepared in a different way to a traditional beef patty. We’re keeping a close eye on it and watching this space.

    It undoubtedly does bring complexity to the preparation. You’ve got to segregate the tools you use and the grills from beef products because some people are clearly not beef eaters. So we know there’s complexity. The question is will the demand make it worth absorbing the complexity because it’s will drive the business? We had a similar discussion, maybe four years ago, around all day breakfast. It certainly adds complexity to the operation but the demand was sufficient that we wanted to find a way to absorb that. It’s something we’re certainly taking a good look at.

    Review of McDonald’s Vegan Burger in Germany

    I Don’t Think Vegan Meat is Faddish

    I don’t think it’s faddish. Whether it maintains its same level of buzz I think is what’s interesting. Like any other restaurant business, you want throughput, you want to keep serving the items so you can keep them fresh and well-prepared. Our teams in the restaurants, the crew, and the managers are well trained in preparing them. You really want to have a certain volume of those just to keep the finished menu item hot and fresh for the customer. So we’re taking a little look at this one.

    The one thing about the job I have is McDonald’s attracts attention no matter what it is you’re doing. Clearly, anyone who has something they want to get scale to will often look to McDonald’s to be that partner to help them scale in any way, shape, or form. You’ve also got to look at just the sheer volumes that we require just because we serve around the world 70 million customers a day. If I just take the cage-free eggs example here in the US. When we made the announcement, that was going to be a five-year announcement to transition across. It takes that amount of time to make sure there’s that sufficient supply so you can meet the demand.

    Berlin Vegan Burgers Compared to McDonalds Vegan Burger!

    These are all the factors you’ve got to take into account. Do you launch your test just in a particular city? Do you launch in just one particular regional or a smaller market elsewhere in the world? You want to test these things out when they’ve got the kind of volume that can meet the potential demands. So we’ll see, but we’re pretty familiar with trying new items and new products and how we can test and assess. Frankly, the customer won’t always be the decision maker on this one.

    McDonald’s Is Seriously Looking At Offering Vegan Burgers Worldwide
  • How McDonald’s Is Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth

    How McDonald’s Is Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth

    “Our acquisition of Dynamic Yield has brought us a lot of excitement,” says McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook. “Very simply put, in the online world when we’re shopping and we pick an item and put it into our shopping basket, any website will automatically suggest two or three things to go along with it. We’re the first business that we’re aware of that can bring that into the physical world. It’s really just taking data and machine learning and AI, all these sorts of technical capabilities.”

    Steve Easterbrook, CEO of McDonald’s, discusses how the company is using technology to elevate the customer experience and accelerate growth in an interview on CNBC:

    Continue To See How We Can Elevate the Customer Experience

    As we’ve executed the growth plan we’ve spent the first two years, three or four years ago, turning the business around. Now we’ve had a couple of years of growth. We’re confident now that we’re beginning to identify further opportunities to further accelerate growth. That takes a little bit of research and development cost. It means you’ve got to bring some expertise into the business to help us do that. We’re still managing to effectively run the business. G&A is staying the same and we’re putting a little bit more into innovation.

    We continue to see how can we help continue to elevate the experience for customers. With this pace of change in the world and with different technology and different innovations, whether it’s around food, technology, or design, we’re seeing opportunities that we think can either make the experience more fun and enjoyable or smoother for customers. If we can find that we’re going to go hard at it.

    We need to continue growing. If where we are investing that money is helping drive growth across 38,000 restaurants then I think the shareholders and investors would be satisfied. We want to bring our owner-operators along with us as well. They’re investing their hard-earned dollars so that always means we got a business case. The owner-operators will want to see a return on their investment just the same as a shareholder would. We’ve got a wonderful check and balance in the system to help us make sure we spend that innovative money in the right way.

    Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth

    Our acquisition of Dynamic Yield has brought us a lot of excitement. It was our first acquisition for 20 years. It was an acquisition in a way that was different from the past. It wasn’t looking at different restaurant businesses to try and expand our footprint. It’s bringing a capability, an IP and some talent, into our business that can help us accelerate the growth model. We completed the deal mid-April and within two weeks we had that technical capability in 800 drive-throughs here in the U.S. It’s a very rapid execution and implementation.

    Very simply put, in the online world when we’re shopping and we pick an item and put it into our shopping basket, any website we’re on these days will automatically suggest two or three things to go along with it. People who buy that tend to like these things as well. We’re the first business that we’re aware of that can bring that into the physical world. As customers are at the menu board, maybe they’re ordering a coffee and we can suggest a dessert or they’re ordering a quarter pounder with cheese and we can suggest making that into a meal. It’s really just taking data and machine learning and AI, all these sorts of technical capabilities.

    Mining All of the Data Will Improve the Business

    The best benefit for customers is we’re more likely to suggest things they do want and less likely to suggest things they don’t. It’ll just be a nicer experience for the customer. But yes, for the restaurant itself, because we can put our drive-thru service lines in there, for example, the technical capability by mining all of the data will be to suggest items are easier to make at our busier times. That’ll help smooth the operation as well. The immediate result will be some ticket (increases). But frankly, if the overall experience is better customers come back more often. That’s ultimately where the success will be, driving repeat visits and getting people back more often.

    Across the entire sector, traffic is tight right now and people are eating out less. They have been progressively eating out less for a number of years. Whether it’s the advent of home delivery, for example, which is something we participate in, but at the moment it’s just a little bit tight out there. It’s a fight for market share. Anyone who is getting growth, typically it’s because they’re adding new units. People are finding it hard to (increase) guest count growth. It’s something that we have stated as an ambition of ours. We think that’s a measure of the true health of the business. Last quarter, we did grow traffic and we’ve grown traffic for the last couple of years, but only modestly. We want to be stronger than that.

    How McDonald’s Is Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth
  • IBM Says Blockchain-Powered Shipping Industry Platform Will Dramatically Reduce Costs

    IBM Says Blockchain-Powered Shipping Industry Platform Will Dramatically Reduce Costs

    Major ocean container carriers CMA CGM and MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) are joining TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled digital shipping platform, jointly developed by A.P. Moller – Maersk and IBM. With the addition of these carriers on the TradeLens platform, nearly half of the world’s ocean container cargo will be using blockchain technology to dramatically improve costs and efficiencies.

    Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Industries, Clients, Platforms & Blockchain at IBM, discusses the addition of major ocean carriers to the TradeLens blockchain-enabled digital shipping platform in an interview on Bloomberg:

    Blockchain Technology Could Reduce Shipping Industry Costs By 20%

    Essentially we announced yesterday that with the addition of MSC and CMA on to the TradeLens blockchain more than 50 percent of the volume of the containers of the world’s shipping industry will be on a blockchain that we’ve developed in collaboration with Maersk. What this means is full transparency and a massive reduction of paper exchange. An average shipment takes about 200 document exchanges between the multiple parties; the freight forwarders, the shippers, the carriers, customs, and ports.

    The World Economic Forum estimates that’s about 20 percent wastage from inefficiencies in the supply chain. The technology of blockchain allows all these multiple parties to immutably store the records and advance the records as the shipments move. This means less wait times. It means carriers and shippers know where the goods are. It basically means things can be cleared a lot faster, all leading to bigger inclusion in the shipping industry.

    Starting To See Blockchain Technology For Enterprise Really Scale

    The whole ecosystem will benefit so much in terms of the efficiencies. If you think about it, rather than having to interface 200 document times, it occurs once by putting your data on the blockchain. This is a situation when the ROI for every single industry participant is very strong.

    The second thing, which is really important and why we’re starting to see the blockchain technology for enterprise really scale in terms of what IBM has been building for our clients across numerous industries, is that there’s a level of security in here and there’s a level of speed and efficiency. It’s easy to actually set up these networks. The difference is that these solve problems that no one company could solve on their own.

    Blockchain Technology Reducing Costs

    The way that the system works is that all the participants pay a very small amount to belong to the blockchain. It is a flat rate but does change according to volume. It is a very de minimis amount and the real way that the blockchain works is by many many participants belonging to the network and by the fact that those participants have a reduced cost.

    Another example of this is we have a blockchain in the consumer and retail industry called Food Trust which tracks provenance and sustainability of food built in conjunction with the industry. It allows food to be tracked and recalled in two seconds versus six days. That has got such a strong economic and consumer value. The other big payback is that for many of our clients they’re looking at the idea to have trackable, sustainable, consumer presentations. So you can put diamonds on a blockchain and say they aren’t conflict diamonds. This is very powerful for consumer provenance and sustainability.

    Blockchain-Powered Shipping Industry Platform To Dramatically Reduce Costs
  • The Power is Going From Companies To Consumers, Says Drift CEO

    The Power is Going From Companies To Consumers, Says Drift CEO

    “The most important thing for us and the reason we exist is that all the power is going to all of us, the buyers and consumers,” says Drift CEO David Cancel. “It’s going from companies to consumer buyers. We (as consumers) dictate everything now so every company in the world has to modify how they sell and service to make us happy. This is good news for us but it is a radical shift especially in B2B.”

    David Cancel, CEO of Drift, discusses their new partnership with Adobe and the launch of their joint product called Conversational ABM in an interview with Jeff Barrett:

    The Power is Going From Companies To Consumers

    We’ve been working a while now with Marketo and now that Adobe and Marketo have come together it’s going to the next level. We announced a joint product today called Conversational ABM which is the next step we are taking. We’ve been working mainly with the Marketo side which is B2B and now we are going to start to work with the B2C side with Adobe. We will be working with consumer companies and business companies. We will be doing both.

    The most important thing for us and the reason we exist is that all the power is going to all of us, the buyers and consumers. It’s going from companies to consumer buyers. We (as consumers) dictate everything now so every company in the world has to modify how they sell and service to make us happy. This is good news for us but it is a radical shift especially in B2B. We are not going to put up with it anymore. We have infinite choice. We have lots of options. We just want to deal with companies that are going to make us feel better and have amazing experiences.

    Removing Things That Prevent Real Conversations

    We do a lot of stuff with bots and AI. What’s exciting there to me is not just that part but removing the friction and removing the things that prevent real conversations and real relationships from happening. We’ve been spending so much time putting things into Excel spreadsheets and databases that we have lost sight that business is human to human. It’s you and me. Bots are not buying from each other. So until the bots buy from each other and the world is over it’s all about all of us.

    Right now we are moving and prioritizing. We are going back to basics. We are going back to how selling, marketing, and how business has operated for all of time. We’ve just been in a weird 10-20 year bubble where we’ve extracted that away. We’ve removed the humanity out of it. Now we are now going back to what it was before.

    You Just Have To Be a Normal Human

    It’s kind of funny because you just have to be a normal human. You’ve got to take away the business hat. You’ve got to take away the things we did before which is what adds so much complexity in the tool space. What is the most authentic relationship that we are going to have? How would I want to be treated? When you start to do that it becomes obvious and the tools are not that complicated. We overcomplicate it because we are used to selling to people in a way that makes it this kind of world.

    But guess what, an entirely new generation is coming online now who doesn’t think this is normal. There are entirely new generations coming online globally around the world who don’t think this is normal. So we have to wake up. They think that personally buying is normal. To think that on the business side of things you can only buy from 9-5 when there isn’t a holiday when there is someone available and when they want to talk to you. It made sense to a certain generation. It is now the thing that is going away.

    The Power is Going From Companies To Consumers, Says Drift CEO David Cancel
  • Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    “Without data, there’s no great AI, says Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica. “Now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.”

    Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica, discusses how data is the lifeblood of the enterprise in an interview on theCUBE at Informatica World 2019:

    Without Data There is No Great AI

    The language that AI needs or speaks is data. Without data, there’s no great AI. This is something that we’ve known all this while, but now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.

    It has really helped to improve productivity and automate mundane tasks. There’s a massive skills gap and I think you look around the economy is fully saturated with jobs. There is still so much work to be done with more data and different data. AI is helping make some of those mundane activities become a lot easier and autonomous.

    Data is Becoming a Platform of Its Own

    Our data scientists have gone from heroes to superheroes. Think about it. What we are seeing in this world is that data is becoming a platform of its own. It is getting decoupled from the databases, from the applications, and from the infrastructure. To truly be able to leverage AI and build applications on top you cannot let it be siloed and be held hostage to its individual infrastructure components. We’ve seen that fundamental change happening where data as a platform is coming along.

    In that context, the catalog becomes a very pivotal start because you want to get a fuller view of everything. You’re not going to be able to move all of your data to one place. It’s impossible. But understanding that metadata is where enterprises are going and then from there you can have a customer experience journey with MDM. You can also have an analytics journey in the cloud with an AWS or an Azure. You can have complete governance and security and privacy journey while understanding anomalous activity.

    Metadata Is the New OS

    Data is everywhere. It’s like the blood flowing through your body. You’re not going to get all the data in one place to do any kind of analytics. You’re going to let it be there. We say that metadata is the new OS. Bring the metadata, which is data about the data in one place, and from there let AI run on it. What we think about AI is this; LinkedIn is a beautiful place where they leverage the machine learning algorithm to create a social graph about you and me. If I’m connected to John I know now that I can be connected with you. The same thing can happen to the data layer.

    When I’m doing analytics and I’m basically searching for some report, through that same machine learning algorithm at the catalog level now we can tell you that this is another table or another report or another user and so on. We can give you help back ratings within that environment for you to do what I call analytics on your fingertips at enterprise scale. That’s an extremely powerful use case of taking analytics, which is the most commonly done activity in an enterprise and make it accurate at enterprise scale.

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica’s Amit Walia
  • We’re Enabling a New Era of Hospitality, Says Toast CEO

    We’re Enabling a New Era of Hospitality, Says Toast CEO

    “We’re enabling what we call this new era of hospitality,” says Toast CEO Chris Comparato. “We’re investing heavily in R&D. This is a massive opportunity and the restaurant community is a massive market. The market is untapped and we’re in the early days of a major transformation across the entire industry. For us in many ways, we’re still getting started because we’re making massive investments in R&D across the whole spectrum.”

    Chris Comparato, CEO of Toast, discusses how the company is continuing to invest in R&D and innovate as they disrupt the hospitality industry in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    We’re Enabling a New Era of Hospitality

    We’re going to do a lot with the money. It’s a nice capital raise ($250 million). We’ve been busy over the course of the past two years really trying to affect a lot of change across the restaurant community. We’re enabling what we call this new era of hospitality. We’re investing heavily in R&D. We look at all of the stakeholders, we look at the guests, we look at the employees, and we look at the owner-manager-operator. This is a massive opportunity and the restaurant community is a massive market. The market is untapped and we’re in the early days of a major transformation across the entire industry. For us in many ways, we’re still getting started because we’re making massive investments in R&D across the whole spectrum.

    A good example of what we are doing is how do you get orders into the restaurant? In today’s consumer, personalization, and convenience environment, how does the restaurant get orders? Whether it’s a tool like Toast TakeOut which we piloted in Boston, which allows you to do mobile order ahead with your phone. Or possibly a kiosk or online ordering or a device called Toast Go which we released last year that allows the waitstaff to take orders at the table and turn tables faster. Toast brings (to restaurants)  two things. It’s all about more revenue in the door and then operational efficiency.

    Toast Growing North of 100 Percent Year-Over-Year

    First and foremost we’re happy being private and putting investments to pilots and R&D and really breaking fruit to the future for the restaurant community. I’ve had a lot of friends who have gone public recently and we’re in no rush. I think it’s a milestone. We’re after building long-term shareholder value. When we look at the opportunity for us it’s to build a pillar company in Boston for the restaurant community that builds long-term investor value.

    We’re growing north of a hundred percent year-over-year in terms of the customer base (and revenue). We’ve got over 1,500 employees. We’ve probably added a thousand employees in the past couple of years. We have an engineering center in Dublin but we’re still US-based in terms of the restaurants that we serve. We serve restaurants across the United States, whether it’s an enterprise like Jamba Juice or nationally acclaimed restaurant operators like Danny Meyer and Jose Andres. We’re all over the US in 30 markets but it’s still the early days.

    Innovating Across the Entire Restaurant Value Chain

    We look at the entire restaurant value chain and we’re trying to make their lives better. It’s hard to run a restaurant. This week we announced Toast Payroll and Team Management. A lot of restaurant operators are spending hours doing payroll every Friday. If we can give them their Friday’s back and streamline payroll so that they can get hours back on efficiency to spend more time with guests that’s what we’re doing. We launched that this week which is an exciting new venture for us. We’re going to continue to innovate across the entire restaurant value chain. This includes the back-office, front office, supply chain, whatever it is.

    There are areas where we built and there are areas where we partner. I think it’s a space that’s dynamically changing. At the end of the day, we want to help transform the community and move the community forward. The Boston Market (where Toast is headquartered) is tremendous. There is sort of two sides to the market. You’ve got this amazing supply chain of talent with MIT, BU, UMass, and Harvard. There is plenty of talent. Then you’ve got on the other side of the market these companies that are transforming industries like Wayfair, CarGurus, HubSpot, and Toast. It’s an amazing market for us to thrive in and it’s an awesome restaurant community.

    We feel like we’re enabling the community to thrive. A lot of the restaurants that are running Toast are adding workforce. Because we’re making their jobs easier they can spend more time with guests, more time cooking, and more time managing the operations. We see a lot of restaurants that are thriving and adding labor and we’re trying to make it easier for them.

    We’re Enabling a New Era of Hospitality, Says Toast CEO Chris Comparato