Tony Aiazzi (05:27.246)We all have similar backgrounds, so it's all relevant. Yeah. Well, thank you for inviting me to the podcast. I've been waiting to go on for a long time. I started in the restaurant space, just like many people. I was a chef. I went to the culinary Institute of America, graduated in. Wow. 1998, quite some time ago. worked for Charlie Palmer for a good bit of time, probably about 10 years.
A times in there, I went to Paris and Stag in restaurants there worked right up the chain from garbage all the way up to executive chef. was the kind of Charlie was growing at that point at that time, but every time I quit, he was opening another restaurant. So I got to like take a step up the ladder every time. you know, we'd go and work for two years then look for another job, but he always had another job for me. So it was an easy place to stick, stick around and keep on growing my skills with him. and then it came to a point where.
I just had to kind of do something new. I ended up moving to Philadelphia after a trip to South Africa, where I took a break from the restaurant industry and learned how to fly airplanes for six months. I needed to make a, make a clean break from that every day, six day a week, New York style restaurant life. Cool.
Joshua Sharkey (06:45.324)were you when you were flying planes?
Tony Aiazzi (06:47.618)Wow. this would have been, I was 35 ish, something like that. Whoa. It was really just, you know, I dabble here and there. I got to get my new license because I have a South African license. So I have to get a, I have to get an American license, thankfully my.
Michael Jacober (07:03.918)VFR only or are you IFR rated? What's your...
Tony Aiazzi (07:07.938)VFR, single engine, that kind of thing. thankfully, or fortunately, my father-in-law has a plane and we go up a few times a month pretty frequently to go up and just kind of practice around. it's still, it's still in the mix, some regard. And we have a property out in the Catskills where we cut a little landing strip for him so we can fly out there and land, do some stuff. It's pretty fun. Then I relocated to Philadelphia.
met my current co-founder, Xavier, Marias, Karenna. hope it in butcher's name and we. That's a good way to get Marias, Karenna, Marias, Karenna.
Joshua Sharkey (07:42.068)never pronounced his name. never heard it pronounced. How did you say?
Joshua Sharkey (07:49.686)Never, never actually heard of an out.
Tony Aiazzi (07:51.744)you know, Basque letters in a row. we were going to open a restaurant there, a big restaurant. It was like a whole city block. And we were planning that for a year. And during that time, we're like, what is something that we just couldn't stand doing in the restaurant industry? We just wanted to remove that from our workflow, so to speak. And it was invoices. I had had some issues where there was a lot of theft going along at the end of my restaurant career that was kind of mentally debilitating.
and really wanted to get back beyond that endless kind of invoice management life cycle that was existing at the time in restaurants where we'd have to fill out a spreadsheet. We fax the fax, the invoices somewhere. we'd meet mail them somewhere overnight FedEx to our main office in Las Vegas to re-enter it again. this is still going on. Elements of this are still going on to this day, 10 years, 12 years later, after starting shoebox.
But we wanted to remove that from the system. So it kind of started on something. started on an invoice automation thing that was only going to be for ourselves. Just to kind of remove it from that workflow and free up a lot of time and be able to have really good insights into our costs and visibility and all that. And the restaurant ended up falling through as most, of them do. And we were left with this platform, the beginnings of it. And we decided let's just.
go with this and see how it goes. So we kept working on it in a little bit more earnest and ended up with something that we thought could help the industry as a whole. And that kind of quickly took over to being our full-time jobs in managing the architecture and the project management and getting customers to use it and all the different permutations that that insights with starting a tech project. And it just kind of kept growing from there. Just kind of kept taking over into
morphing into all new and better technologies and faster streamlining and ended up starting a company in the Philippines, which happened really organically also because that's where we were starting the technology. And we quickly found the need to fold people into this, like people who would do the data entry into the system. Because first off, it was just a place where chefs, sommeliers, whoever could enter their own data into a system that would be a single workflow.
Tony Aiazzi (10:17.496)for whoever had to have access to it, but quickly learned that you can't really take a product 80 or 95 or even 99 % of the way. have to take it a hundred percent of the way. we started doing data entry there to remove the, the restaurant side of the application from having to do all that kind of manual redundant work. And we started doing the data entry and automating and start to finish. And it's just been a slow, steady march from that point on to get to the point where we're automating.
tens of thousands of documents a week.
Michael Jacober (10:48.462)So many places to take this next question. I guess, why don't we start with, you, you kind of touched on outsourcing the service to the Philippines. Talk about how you did that. How did you recruit talent? How did you centralize an office? How did you project manage? How did you kind of, did you work with a centralized service there to help recruit? Like what was your process in actually?
spinning up a team in the Philippines, how did you train? Can you talk us through, you know, what those dynamics look like from how it started? And then I'm sure it's changed a lot over the past, know, several years.
Tony Aiazzi (11:24.295)Many of the
Tony Aiazzi (11:30.872)Definitely has, and many of those things we're still working on today, you know, as it goes. But as I said, we were, we started as just a platform in which people could enter their own data one time and that would be facilitated through the AP process without having to have, you know, those invoices mailed to a place to be re-entered and all the kind of funny business that can happen there. So we had a developer in the Philippines. We started the platform.
We started the program with a firm that would help us develop the technology and that got to the minimum viable product, the MVP as it's called. About six months later, it was clear that we just needed to bring the development more in-house in order to have more control over it and to manage the costs as well. And we were able to hire a team of developers who had some familiarity with what we were already doing. And so we hired them.
continued the development of that product. They're still with us to this day, our CTO, James and his wife, Jen. they now oversee a team of 10 or 12 people. Then we got to the point where we had to start processing the data entry aspect also, which was not something we had originally anticipated. So we had some contacts there who had a business entity wasn't necessarily a restaurant specific business entity, but we had some friends over there who were from the restaurant industry and
used to work in Philadelphia with my co-founder. And we got them to help us form a company that could help do this manual processing that continued on for about five years. I want to say where we just started hiring. I'm sorry, one person we hired the brother-in-law of our developer first, just to start to dabble in the data entry process and just to kind of prove it out, see if it worked and it worked very, very well. So then we started to,
hire more people and do more data entry and used this entity to help us get to a point. I think it took about five years where it just got kind of too big for that to handle also. So then we started our own company in Manila to help manage it more effectively under our own umbrella. And that's the company that we started and we own and operate today.
Joshua Sharkey (13:51.374)It's super interesting that when I first met you, everything was through the lens of invoice processing, shoebox, and now you guys have transitioned into so many other...
Tony Aiazzi (14:01.902)We had to, you know, we had to, because it's, got to the point where people were requiring the technology to do things that were very difficult to do for, you know, 199 or $99 a month. They get questions like, where can I put my schedules? How can it, how can I tell if my dishwashers are working overtime? How can I, you know, all kinds of things. And it just kind of, it started to, we started to understand more about how people view technology and what they expect out of technology as well.
But there certain things were just too difficult to kind of shoehorn into the shoe box service as it was. And a lot of bookkeeping questions also, like, how can I budget? How can I write checks? How can I do all the, you know, do statement reconciliations and all this, you know, I thought I'd be working with chefs and I very quickly found out I was working with more accountants, which was another kind of eyeopening trajectory that we went.
Joshua Sharkey (14:55.886)What I think is super interesting is Mike and I were actually talking about this last week and I'm getting a lot more clarity on this in terms of like thinking through software versus a service and you guys sort of transitioned to becoming a service in addition to the software because as we all know and we all deal with this, I deal with it obviously a lot as well, we're like, you know, there's this software but then everybody has all these other things that they need and they're like, wait, the software.
that doesn't do this? Well, no, like only you would know how to do that. You know, you're going to need to give us information. And now I think what I would love to hear, because we haven't talked about this a lot, Tony, is what I would love to hear how things have now shifted for your two companies, because they're basically two, right? So have Shoebox, which is basically the tech that powers invoice processing. There's people plus tech involved there. And then you have the other entity, is really service, everything else, services, you know, like,
Tony Aiazzi (15:46.126)process.
Michael Jacober (15:49.294)Primarily like outsource CFO services at H like what are these other services other than financial services at your
Tony Aiazzi (15:55.978)Any kind of bookkeeping services that a company could need besides moving money. That's the one kind of thing we don't really get into is like writing and sending checks. Although we're starting to dabble in that arena, but all the automated things that need to happen for a restaurant to be able to view its numbers and close its books on time. So statement racks are a big one, you know, things like that, that require a person to go into a number of different, web portals as it were, and collect information and then.
you know, do the statement recs and things like that.
Joshua Sharkey (16:27.854)Well, and also just, there's a lot of just general data entry you guys are doing, right?
Tony Aiazzi (16:31.704)General data entry amongst a lot of different platforms, a lot of different services. we saw the need kind of, I want to say early on, but to, we wanted to work within the, I would often quip that the other restaurant techs were our partners and the industry itself was our main competitor because they were so resistant to certain things. So we wanted to work with them on a more,
an easier basis, I should say, rather than against them. So I saw a lot of products out there would start to fold in, like provide many, many more services that maybe they weren't as, as good at doing. So when we, on the over easy office side, we're able to work within our competitors platforms and collecting voice data. And they don't have to use shoebox to be an over easy office customer. could use any one of a number of invoice management platforms or accounting platforms or, know,
to go order delivery. Some restaurants will have three or four different delivery applications that they're using.
Joshua Sharkey (17:36.91)I want to hear how invoice processing has changed and what, how much of it is, is actually just a, something that many, many people can do. And it's more of a, like a table stakes and today, and then like fast forward a year from now, given how, how fast AI is moving, what's your take on restaurants and businesses ability to sort of process and digitize invoices today versus even six months ago and how, like, how are things changing? Because yeah, most of these
places have invoice processing, and which these services have invoice processing, but it's sort of a one piece of a larger puzzle.
Tony Aiazzi (18:12.782)Sure. And when you're working with invoice processing for restaurants, for sure, there are ways that can be automated such with EDIs. I'm sure you're familiar where you're getting the data directly to accounting platforms and all that. There are also still handwritten invoices, still credits, returns, shorts, don't want to pay for that, that kind of thing, which is where we come in and are able to articulate that data in a way that makes sense to the restaurant at the end of the day. It sounds like something that's very, very automatable.
But you know, ice cream melts and you send it back and then the EDI information isn't correct because you're getting it the same day as if it was all received and all was good. The wrong Apple show up. They substitute things that they shouldn't have substituted or that you're not going to use and send it back. So there's a lot of volatility at the loading dock is, which is where we come in to make sure that those costs and credits especially are assigned properly and you can collect those back.
Joshua Sharkey (19:08.878)Yeah, that's beast. don't deal with them. That's a beast.
Tony Aiazzi (19:12.578)Yeah. I mean, look, there's still handwritten invoices. There's still, they're not in all the same format, right? There's a lot of very messy data that comes in that we parse through and organize into a format that can be consumed by these different accounting applications.
Joshua Sharkey (19:31.414)Yeah. Well, I imagine at this point, and this kind of transitions into price leaks a bit, is you have this massive corpus of data, of purchase data. You've been indexing purchases for 10, 15 years.
Tony Aiazzi (19:43.01)It was actually a huge battle of ours to make sure that we're managing all as one database. And it was a little bit of a labor of love at first because we saw the ability to normalize this data across the country. So it was, it was tough at first. had a lot of people told us that we shouldn't be doing that. We should just create separate databases of people's purchases and stuff like that. But it definitely has helped us along the way with the data entry because
If something's coming in from a brand new restaurant group that we're working with, for example, and we've already seen these items before, we don't have to reenter them. We just enter the item code or our tech can pick up that item code and it's, we just have to maybe adjust the unit price or whatever's going on there. But we're referencing the same unified global database of vendor items across the whole system, which has greatly helped us improve our speed at data entry and make sure that it's exact.
Joshua Sharkey (20:37.55)Yeah, so the first time you buy Avobie avocado from Baldor, even if you've never bought it before, but you're using jukebox, it's automatically going to know that's an avocado, you know, a 48 count avocado from Baldor.
Tony Aiazzi (20:51.736)And, know, belt door might have 80 different of a B of a C of a three. Right. So then we get in and tag the tag that all the B all those different item numbers as avocado and whatever counts so that we can kind of normalize that data even further.
Joshua Sharkey (21:07.906)You know, it's fun is when they just have a wholesale change of their entire skew bit. yeah. And all the skews just...
Tony Aiazzi (21:12.672)Or when they recycle invoice numbers, right? It'll get to a point where they start using, they start again from zero, zero one. Right. And then we have to go through and manage that. God.
Joshua Sharkey (21:24.056)So what's, what's price leaks and what's like the status of it?
Tony Aiazzi (21:27.618)So, is an app where any restaurant person could go in and source and view items using our database to find who's carrying what and for about what price. So, we don't put the exact price that it came in, but we put an average of the price over six months so that people can search for who's carrying what and about what price it's going for. You got to stay away from the exact price because, you know, a steakhouse might get mushrooms for
50 % off from the same vendor because they're thousands of dollars of steak a week and beef a week from there. So we don't do the exact pricing, but we do an average price.
Joshua Sharkey (22:08.43)Yeah, it's funny because I think people people always like oh I want to know what others are paying but so there's so many things going so If you get a delivery five times a week versus two times a week you're paying more yeah Yeah, so if you have a smaller footprint, you know
Tony Aiazzi (22:14.862)How many different things?
Tony Aiazzi (22:25.39)They get a little bit of a bad rep. Like they're always trying to, to hose me on my prices or creeping up things, but there's a lot of restaurants that go out of business, a lot of money to these vendors also. So they have to, they have to figure out a way to make it up somewhere.
Joshua Sharkey (22:39.48)Yeah, yeah. I imagine they have, I would be super curious like what they earmark to like write off every year. Like what percentage of their business. It's like, yep, this amount is just gonna, it's just gonna go underwater.
Tony Aiazzi (22:51.682)Not huge margins either, but huge volumes, right? Of course.
Joshua Sharkey (22:55.295)yeah, exactly, it's all volume.
Michael Jacober (22:56.622)I've got a question that kind of ties a lot of this together. It seems like you've spun up, you know, several different businesses from what started as a pretty simple concept. love talking to founders who weighed the venture backed route versus the bootstrap route and hearing about all these different things that you've done that spun off of this, you know, original idea of invoice processing. You clearly like.
You breathe out bootstrap. Yeah. know, a company that like really the purpose was to make money. Their purpose wasn't to, you know, change the world and build a unicorn business. So I'd love to kind of hear about the methodology of why you decide. mean, this was years ago. You started this business, why you went the bootstrap route. I'm sure you had the opportunity to, raise capital and, know, tell a different story, tell a growth story. Why did you decide very.
definitively to take the bootstrap route. And I would imagine over the past, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 years since you've started this business, you must have seen so much capital raised by other competitors and deployed along the way. And now you're still here. You're still standing. I would love to kind of talk through what that must have been like, you know, swallowing your pride, seeing all this capital deployed.
thinking to yourself, my God, like, what did I miss? I'm going to, you know, I'm just running this, this, this cash flowing business. This sucks. I'm not going to be, you know, the, billionaire that I thought I was going to be kind of talk me through that whole journey from decision-making behind bootstrapping all the way to watching. I'm sure several of your competitors get swallowed up or not be able to raise more capital either fold or.
Joshua Sharkey (24:45.87)It's funny because Tony, I've talked about this a bunch of times, I know exactly what he's going to say because I'm always so jealous of how he's thought about his business because it's probably slightly different from how you're positioning it Mike, but Tony go ahead because I'm glad you asked this because I'm always like, it's always grasses greener but yeah.
Tony Aiazzi (25:06.638)I would say it's always grass and screener. if it's not, it wasn't necessarily by design, I would say it was one of those revolutions we had to make. actually went to an accelerator program early on 500 startups where they take a little investment. They provide you some capital to concentrate on the business and grow it up and get going. and my
co-founder Xavier, we're we're restaurant guys, you know? So it was a little bit of a difficulty to understand the whole tech world as it was.
Michael Jacober (25:40.078)You didn't have a product. You didn't have the team member to build the product.
Tony Aiazzi (25:45.72)we like, that point we kind of did, we were kind of working on it, but it was still such a labor intensive product at that time. That we were in a lot of conversations about tech and tech and tech and tech. we really saw ourselves as a tech service, but there was a lot of service on the other side. So it didn't feel as scalable early on at that point, because we still had to hire a lot of people to do a lot of data entry and it didn't feel as a pure tech play.
as we had originally anticipated or originally thought that it may be. And we were, we talked to some VCs and stuff and they'd say, well, we'll get to this number and then we'll talk and then we'll get to this number and then we'll talk. And we kept getting to that number and then we're like, well, let's just keep going. Let's just, let's just keep growing it. And those conversations were always difficult for us to, I want to say difficult to manage, but it just seemed like we were so busy with running the actual day-to-day operations.
that we weren't really, we weren't gonna have the chops really to do all these like crazy paperwork and stuff that they always kind of expected. And it just kind of kept going from there. We were just so busy with running the business. We took kind of a restaurant centric idea behind like get assets and seats and keep them there. Right. And that will, that's how your business will grow. And that's kind of what's continuously happened throughout the, throughout the whole evolution. Not to say I don't want to be a billionaire. We'll get there. It's just going to take a lot longer.
Michael Jacober (27:13.024)Yeah.
Tony Aiazzi (27:15.214)So one thing I would say, anybody who wants to get into this and they want to take more of a bootstrapped approach, it's not like a two, three year, even five year exit, right? It's certainly become something where you're constantly evolving the product and constantly growing it. it's more of a, became more of a lifestyle business in a way, rather than something that was valuation games.
Joshua Sharkey (27:40.11)I mean, you know, you're, I think running the business as opposed to trying to nurture, develop relationships with venture to inject capital so that you have now a 10x bigger growth.
Tony Aiazzi (27:54.742)Yeah, it wasn't easy. wasn't easy. you know, who knows if, if I would do it the same way again, I'm not so sure, but you know, you've learned a lot along the way. That's for sure.
Joshua Sharkey (28:04.558)So you have teams in the Philippines and Colombia. One, like how are you spending your time? And then I remember, because I have like Jules who works for me who's from Philippines, and I remember hearing about sort of culturally, very specific cultural things about folks in the Philippines that you want to make sure you're empathetic to as you're working with them. And you helped me with some of this, but I'd love to sort of get your 50,000 foot take on what you've learned about how to work best with.
teams in the Philippines versus the US and then how that's different from Columbia.
Tony Aiazzi (28:36.906)so the Philippines, have approximately 400 people there now. So it's grown quite considerably over time. It's certainly is difficult thing to manage from New York, you know, because there are 12 hours ahead and there's a lot that, you could, things might take a little bit longer to get through because you're on this like 24 hour type of situation where you're having conversations at 9 PM and then you're not really realizing them until two, three days later.
Michael Jacober (29:04.032)Your team, your team works working hours and in their local time, they don't work Eastern.
Tony Aiazzi (29:10.158)For the most part. Because the whole concept was that restaurants would close, the data entry would happen. And then by the time the restaurants get back to work in the morning, everything's good. So it works well, really, really well from that component for, from having like an overnight operation. turns everybody into a 24 hour operation. Certainly working in the Philippines isn't without its own difficulties, but I think that working with the workforce anywhere that kind of.
getting out of the tech and just into like the people management is always difficult. I think in any, in any group, in any workforce anywhere. However, the Philippines is great. They just, they like to be together. They like to throw pizza parties. There's a really, a sense of cohesiveness over there. The culture really gets together and does things as a whole unit, which is really great. Now team building exercises and stuff are always good. We go there about two or three times a year. And it also just got two or three times a year and we'll
you know, meet everybody. I think it's important to work face to face with people a lot of times, instead of just trying to do it over emailing chats and zoom chats and so forth. Eventually it did get to the point where we had to hire somebody to manage the team more full time. And we did that about a year ago. So we have somebody there. We actually have a guy who lives in my hometown, Reno, Nevada, who went to high school in the Philippines, speaks Tagalog and is managing the office there.
no, he's American German. That's awesome. German and Spanish and went to high school in Manila. speaks Tagalog. So I'll talk about a diamond, right? Like it was just a perfect kind of situation and is like friends of my family in a way. So for, for whatever and is an accountant. So we, found her great with him. He was working in casinos.
Michael Jacober (30:41.368)Wow
Joshua Sharkey (30:48.803)That's
Joshua Sharkey (31:03.272)Stars aligned
Tony Aiazzi (31:04.11)Stars definitely lie. It took a long time for those stars to align, but once they did, it was really great. It was definitely, how long has he been with us?
Joshua Sharkey (31:12.086)No, how long has it been? Since like, how long would you consider shoebox or-
Tony Aiazzi (31:17.198)I think 12 years, I was saying 10 for a while and people kept correcting me. So I'm just going with 10, 12 now because time goes by so quickly. You know, then the whole pandemic, you know, whatever that's been a, it's been a wild ride for sure as it has been for all of us. Um, but we do try to get over there for about, I think with overlap, there'll be some either myself or Xavier or my sister who actually is our CFO is over there right now, kind of managing the financial part of the team.
Joshua Sharkey (31:47.234)She's Reno based too, right? I mean, Shoebox is kind of the company that many people don't know that they're using. Yeah.
Tony Aiazzi (31:54.71)Well, I think that that's a testament to, we did see very long, we just wanted to do invoice processing as good as possible. We didn't want to kind of keep having so much overlap in the industry. So like with Me's, right? We don't do recipes, we don't do inventory, but we got the data that we can supply so that it can be exact. And these other companies don't necessarily have to work on that aspect of the process because you need the data somewhere to get it, whatever else you want to get done done.
So we just concentrate on getting that information off the paper as quickly and as perfectly as possible and supplying it to wherever it needs to go. Whether it's an accounting system, an inventory system, a recipe management system, we just want to be that hub of getting that information together and wherever it needs to go.
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Tony Aiazzi (33:52.224)We wanted to support the industry, not only the restaurant industry, but the, industry of that is assisting restaurants. Yeah. Be more successful. That's where we didn't want to compete against those other services that were helping restaurants be more successful. We wanted to align with them. So we kind of went, I guess you'd call it stealth mode at a certain point. And we just stopped selling shoebox proper as a standalone product because we just saw so much competition.
within the invoice processing sphere that we're just keep driving our prices down to the point where just trying to get business at all costs. And we just kind of took a step back, stopped selling it or stopped competing in the open market with other competitors, quote unquote of ours, so that we could just supply good data entry or good data to wherever it has to go, whatever else, whatever ends up helping the restaurants. Shoebox. Well, that was when we thought we'd be working with chefs who'd get the
Joshua Sharkey (34:44.342)up with the name by the way. Yeah.
Tony Aiazzi (34:51.297)Triple entendres of the jokes. Now, now, That was actually the wife of one of our first co-founders who worked in pastry and she thought shoe box shoe box, know, shoe box on your bed with the receipts, know, pet a shoe, cabbage, money, all that kind of thing. It was, we thought it was quite funny at the time. then all the time with our accounting.
Joshua Sharkey (34:56.492)Was that you or X or together?
Joshua Sharkey (35:15.15)The only frustration I have with this
Michael Jacober (35:18.638)Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey (35:20.374)My only frustration with your name is I do voice to text all the time. I don't like the voice memos, I do often talk to things. And I say shoebox often. it always comes up. say, he's spelling his two words, shoebox. They need a way to train the Apple voice to text on, here's words that when you hear it, it means this. Because it happens with me's. Every time I say me's, it picks like 12 different things other than obviously.
Tony Aiazzi (35:47.182)Yes, of course. Yeah. Well, that's what we don't really go for with shoebox that much anymore. Yeah. For one of those reasons, it's just hard to understand what it is as a branding tool. Um, so we'll often sell it as over easy invoices, um, as a, a partner with our.
Michael Jacober (36:04.814)Is this function is invoice processing? Is this going to be entirely commoditized and, essentially just that specific function go to zero, uh, terms of value perception to the customer? Are you no longer, you just said you're not really competing with that product in the marketplace anymore. You're more selling it as a service either for your services business, which I imagine it's just, it's a baked in included product. And then you're obviously selling to other businesses like.
You know, like Meeze powered by, you know, invoice processing powered by shoebox. I don't even know if you're doing the powered by anymore. Is this just a fuck?
Joshua Sharkey (36:43.534)We say powered by Tony. We get real specific like Tony and X.
Michael Jacober (36:49.664)Is there a scenario where distributors start offering the service? Is there a scenario where basically this is just becomes a, a given?
Tony Aiazzi (36:57.176)I would anticipate so yeah, we've actually been in some conversations with distributors in the past that they could, you know, supply this to their customers to automate their invoice processing. I think it's going to take some work for the distributors to want to be able to strangely enough have access to all that information. The one distributor we were talking to some years ago, they didn't want their restaurant customers buying anything from anywhere, anywhere else. So they didn't want to.
offer something where it would manage all of their invoices, even though would give them great detail into all the other things that they're, the restaurants are buying from it. Long story short, I think that it's ultimately going to go that way, but it's going to take a little bit of change in the industry for in the vendor industry specifically to like want to have all that information and then know what to do with it.
Joshua Sharkey (37:51.805)Mm-hmm. Well, it's interesting what you said though about the actual like digitizing of the invoice, which we think of as invoice processing. That piece is getting easier, but then everything that happens after you actually get it in, if it's accurate, which by the way, most of the time, you guys did an incredible job at this, but most, it doesn't always happen that way. Where it's super accurate, you all are obviously very accurate, but then the real work is then after it gets in, what's everything else that happens after that?
What did you return? Right. What actually says two cases came in, but it was actually one case.
Tony Aiazzi (38:23.694)that. And, you know, a lot of our work, I would say most of our value is in those like five to 10 % of invoices that do have those note of notations or, you know, a restaurant will get 250 invoices per month. And they're not just food and beverage invoices. We deal with all the operational expenses as well, from power bills to, you know, they buy t-shirts for their staff, all of them. So there's a lot of variety in the way that those invoices come in and a lot of
different ways that vendors handle credits and so forth. So it's, it's a huge data set. It's not just, you know, getting stuff from Cisco, for example, that can be more easily managed and consumed readily by any kind of platform and then regurgitated wherever it needs to go. And we're dealing with food. Like I think we'll have some conversations here about restaurants that get into robotics and tech and all that kind of stuff. I was remembering, I saw that Sweet Queen was one of our possible.
topics and I remember reading something about them years ago that they said that opening a restaurant was just like spinning up another server. And I'm like, all right. And it just jumped the shark for me. that's not food is still going to be food. It still has to be grown and packaged and ripened and all the different millions of things that can happen with food products. And then to think about it as a tech product that can just be so easily configured.
And written on an invoice and what's the pack size of, you know, a 10 poundish piece of meat that is a catch weight applied to it. Right. There's a lot of variability there.
Joshua Sharkey (40:06.67)I think, you know, whenever we hear I say we, because I'm assuming we're all probably thinking similarly, like completely automated in the restaurant business. There's I think actually in any business, because I'm seeing this now even with my company as I'm more promulgating kind of the use of AI with all my team and teaching them how to use it. Even the ones that were maybe maybe not so bullish on starting is that it's it is an incredible sort of 90 to 95 percent. But that last mile is actually where
the real value comes, it's like the AI plus the human. Right. think it's very infrequent where like, there are things that like, of course, like it just automatically does X, Y and Z. But I think where the real value comes for any of these things is then, OK, now what more can you do because you have AI, you know, automating all of these processes. Now you can actually make sure that there's zero latency between, you know, statement invoices and things like that or whatever the thing that you're doing. I find that like the human piece is actually now like.
even more critical because you have all this extra.
Tony Aiazzi (41:08.016)that's one thing that we've always really concentrated on is that what you're exactly just speaking about the human component being more critical. Many times we were in conversations about like, you know, tech can do it, right? Tech can automate all this, but tech is, you know, something that the human uses to, as an engine to drive the business, right? But it's not going to be the end all be all of just getting stuff from A to B. Someone still has to be in the driver's seat. Yeah.
Michael Jacober (41:36.206)Let me push back on that a little. Are you referring to the customer in terms of using the technology or are referring to you as the operator using tech to run your business?
Tony Aiazzi (41:47.352)We as the operator using TechTron in our business.
Michael Jacober (41:50.402)Got it. Okay. So yeah, I look, think where I will push back a little bit is these rule. And I don't want to take the conversation in terms of like, you know, AI is going to disrupt everything. We're all, but I will say it seems that rule-based businesses where language is the kind of integral component of, of what the business is utilizing to function, you know, in the instance of accounting, finance, you know,
things where humans are using very clear rule-based guidelines on how something should be done. Those seem to be very disruptive. and if the tech isn't there, you know, in this moment today, it seems like we are like super close to being able to strip out a lot of human labor from these functions. Can you kind of just talk a little bit? And again, I don't want to spend too much time talking about like AI doomsday stuff, but just talk a little bit about.
that concept and how you see that effect in your business in terms of operations.
Tony Aiazzi (42:54.094)Here's kind of what we talked about this quite a lot, you know, and I'm always seeing, you know, this kind of friction we'll call it between like what's, what's a good AI use of tool and what, how do humans come into the component? And I'm always going to come back to like the self-driving car component. Self-driving cars are obviously there. They're very, they could do a lot, right? They can be the answer to a lot of questions, but
They're only going to really be fully autonomous when there are roads built specifically for robotic cars to drive on exclusively. as soon as humans are in the mix or there's a system in which there's a human component that's in the mix, it all kind of only gets to a certain point. It all kind of like falls apart at a certain place. So I think that the restaurant industry will be able to utilize a lot of these services, but those restaurant concepts will have to change.
in order to fully fit a fully automated service versus the service that has humans kind of somewhat in the mix. Does that make sense? It does.
Michael Jacober (43:58.614)I think I'm more referring to your business and how you run your business as opposed to how a restaurant back office is going to function. understand that.
Tony Aiazzi (44:08.59)Yeah. You know, it'll get better. It'll get definitely better, but we'll have to see some normalization in our business on just the invoice structure and the way that the information is received. When we're talking about tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of vendors out there, some that just deliver ice cream, some that just deliver pickles, literally, they just sell pickles. Right. And, know, they all come in a different formats. They all have different units of measures. Some are handwritten. Some are.
just a receipt that's like stapled to the back door. Right. Um, so it would take something along those lines of total normalization to be fully automated. As I said earlier, like I would say the majority of our work is in those 10 % of invoices that have returns and are somewhat messy or are crumpled up or have chicken blood on them or, you know, all that kind of randomness that the restaurants experience.
Joshua Sharkey (45:04.91)I think the more that I've been getting more in the weeds with how incredible and how much opportunity there is I mean I have things being deployed right now as we're like I think that what ends up happening is That me look there is gonna be a subset of things that just become completely automated and that's for sure the more that I see Even just my team jumping in more the more I was worried about like well I don't know not everyone's gonna figure this out. I'm seeing
like more inspiration and more ideas that, you know, in aggregate are just net new ways to even just think about running the business that we can't even come up with all the variables of new things that can happen when all this stuff is automated, where we can just start solving bigger problems. And if you distill down any business, you know, over easy, right, is making sure that everybody understands their finances is one thing.
But there's probably a bigger thing that you're helping people with that once a lot of that table stake stuff is automated, you can just do more for them and you can do it faster.
Tony Aiazzi (46:11.764)Even just with our current and past, you know, what did invoice management used to take a restaurant to accomplish? mean, even in this system, which I was working where the chefs, literally the chefs, the highest paid position in the restaurant were taking an hour minimum at the end of a day to enter it in, enter by the line item into compete or into a spreadsheet or wherever. that's, that was a huge saving for restaurants just to be able to scan it, send it, forget about it.
Right. Then to send it to somebody that that's in another place or look, we still have people who are going around collecting invoices from a collection of five or more restaurants in a town to scan them or do data entry. We're still having the same conversations that we were having 15 years ago. same ones. Yeah. Yeah.
Joshua Sharkey (46:57.134)Yeah, I was at a, to my daughter, the same bakery in our town that we always go to. And I saw the owner literally with a folder with invo receipts, writing them onto a piece of paper. And she was writing on a notebook. I didn't, I was like, you know what, my daughter, uh, not, not, I wasn't even worth it, but I look, here's what I think is that every day I get more excited and more optimistic about this because the chef's a great example.
an engineer is a great example. You know, the chef, when we talk about, the chef's processing an invoice. That is not why you started becoming a chef. And let's be clear, to be honest with you, you didn't become a chef so that you could figure out food cost. You became a chef to make great food and because it was enjoyable, because you like to do that. And you like to work with other people that like to do that. And that feeling of putting out the food. And that's a chef, by the way, every profession. If you're an engineer.
You didn't become an engineer because you like typing on keys all day long. The real like, you know, energy that gets that you get is when like you figure out a big problem like, oh man, that's such a smart way to think about solving that problem. Then you got to go type the keys. Now you don't have to type the keys anymore. That all is agentic.
Tony Aiazzi (48:12.238)I hate it doing invoices so much as part of my restaurant life. And I saw it as such a ridiculous use of my time that I developed the system. now it's my full-time job. I just do it for everybody else.
Joshua Sharkey (48:26.574)But that then becomes the thing that you get to solve that problem. think what it means is I just want to build things. I don't want to, you like, you know, got all this other stuff that you have to do. And like, what if you actually didn't need to worry about any of those things? Those things were taken care of and you could focus. Everybody's focus is different. Yeah. And forgetting the cost savings for a minute. Right? What I'm most excited about, like, I don't know, we all started Lesbians chefs, like we like to build things for whatever it's worth. But I'm excited about
Tony Aiazzi (48:40.94)Huge cost savings.
Joshua Sharkey (48:56.722)is independent of cost savings. Everybody is going to be able to spend more time on the thing that they like to do. That like is the reason why they did their business. And any bit my wife has like a she had like a floral design business and she does other thing. And I remember, remember like she would the hardest part for her was the administrative stuff. She's like, I just want to like peel the flowers and come up with designs and then have the things, you know, but there's a lot of other stuff you have to do in your business.
I think that's where this gets really exciting is that lots of people have lots of things they want to do and lots of people, yes, there are people that are doing jobs that are, you know, where the workflow of what they do is going to be taken over by, you know, an automation.
Tony Aiazzi (49:36.686)It allows them to work on what really want to do.
Joshua Sharkey (49:38.828)The Lawson Mood
Exactly. Yeah. And that's, I do think that that becomes like a forcing function where from this sort of like builder standpoint, it means there's going to be a lot more cool shit that can be done and built and created. And also there's going to be a lot more GDP that's created because you know, there's far less GDP created from somebody that has to process things, you know, from a data standpoint versus somebody that's actually creating output.
Tony Aiazzi (50:04.27)That's the one thing that we really wanted to concentrate on was to give people the time and give their money back really so that they can concentrate what they wanted to concentrate on. You know, we were placed probably thousands of dollars worth of time spent doing this down to, you know, a pittance, right? That really just kind of helps manage the storage capabilities and stuff like that. Getting back to that question about will it ever be free? Sure, but there's still a cost somewhere, you know, kind of.
already is in effect free. It's just a sales component when you just say it's complimentary service in a way, like 99 bucks a month is pretty free to a restaurant. But I do understand how it can change the conversation, but yeah, a hundred percent Josh. Like it's about like allowing people to work to their strengths rather than forcing, you know, someone like me who was a college dropout to like then go into an accounting style work at 11 o'clock at night.
You know, trying to like, make sure you did everything the corporate wanted you to do and to make sure that there's enough money in the bank so that you can hit payroll on next Wednesday. Right. So we can automate all that. Like it's incredibly onerous, the restaurants and this necessity to stay on top of these numbers. And it was a huge part of our things that we would do. This was going back way back to my days, but we would be doing like March profitability conversations for January, you know?
Yeah. For like, do we make money in January? It's March. We don't even know yet. And how are going to course correct this thing? So enabling a restaurant to course correct on Tuesday for that week, instead of two months later is a huge value.
Joshua Sharkey (51:42.124)Yeah. Yeah. 100%.
Michael Jacober (51:43.374)Let's move away from Tony, Tony's business and Tony's story. heard enough. Talk about some, some new shit.
Tony Aiazzi (51:49.518)Survive.
Joshua Sharkey (51:53.294)Actually, can we just, can we take like two minutes and talk about Federer knives? Of course. Because we've talked about it, but I want to hear, Tony has started this business with a knife maker named...
Michael Jacober (52:04.628)I was just checking it out. knives look beautiful by the way. make incredible knives.
Joshua Sharkey (52:09.142)And again, I was just like, man, the fuck did Tony do this to-
Tony Aiazzi (52:12.75)Strangely enough, things like lead back to the restaurant industry somewhere. Jeff, who is the knife maker and is a sculptor by trade, used to manage the restaurant that I worked in like in 2000, like right after 2000, 2001. We worked at a little restaurants down on 22nd street called kitchen 22. It was part of the Charlie Palmer portfolio. was like a little bistro.
with like three courses for $25. But we worked on that restaurant together until he kind of went back to doing his sculpting and things like that. Metalwork, he worked in a lot of restaurants. actually went to culinary school as well. And we always kept in touch. We were always very friendly and probably about six years ago he's like, you know, I think I want to start making knives. I'm like, that's a great idea. Let's, let's fire it up. Let's go for it.
And we've been making knives ever since he makes them in peak skill, which is about a half an hour for me here. And it's been a lot of fun. It's been a way for me to like get out of the, from behind the desk and spreadsheet land into just a shop where you're actually making things is, is quite a good foil to have when you leave restaurants for a desk job.
Michael Jacober (53:25.983)How are they distributed? it, is it just a direct consumer? Do you guys do shows? Like how do you, how do you sell these things?
Tony Aiazzi (53:32.588)Like Knife shows every once in a while that it's a, what a cast of characters that is. mean, everybody's preparing for the zombie apocalypse sometimes. It's pretty crazy. But we've focused on the culinary side of things. And it's been a really, it's been a great ride. It's been really fun just to get in there and learned a lot about knife making. That's for sure.
Joshua Sharkey (53:52.686)What is your involvement today?
Tony Aiazzi (53:56.042)I help with the invoice processing.
Michael Jacober (53:58.07)Hahaha!
Joshua Sharkey (53:59.758)All that metal coming from wherever it's coming
Tony Aiazzi (54:06.126)No, I help with that. You know, he's the hands. He does it. you know, we shoot the shit every once in a while in talk shop and decide like how certain designs should be and, you know, kind of have some fun doing it. It's very artistic.
Joshua Sharkey (54:18.702)You have a whole fleet of those knives in your house.
Tony Aiazzi (54:21.134)I do have a lot.
Michael Jacober (54:22.862)That's really why you started there. Help this business. You just want to, you just wanted some knives.
Joshua Sharkey (54:28.558)I mean they're pretty dope.
Michael Jacober (54:30.326)They're beautiful.
Joshua Sharkey (54:32.394)And his daughter actually works at the bakery in town.
Tony Aiazzi (54:36.526)She's going to school in LA, but she when she comes back, she takes up her job in the bakery.
Joshua Sharkey (54:40.302)room for one more topic. can either go the David Burk route, what about him? The BKAI Patty. I don't want to call it a, well, news, the BKAI Patty news. Or one of the other ones. And Donnie, I'll let you.
Michael Jacober (54:58.894)was gonna say I would throw sweet green in the mix there because I did hear Tony mention sweet green. So yeah, BK Patty, David Burke, or sweet
Tony Aiazzi (55:08.558)I don't know much about what's currently going on with Sweetgreen or the BK Patty, but they're certainly relevant to our conversation about folding tech into the restaurant kind of space. So that makes sense to me. I don't think the David Burke thing is really about tech, right?
Joshua Sharkey (55:24.694)No, I just thought it was interesting given like where we've been, where we all came from and people don't talk about him a lot, but he's... Let's go for it. I think he's a pretty innovative chef. He's the only chef that holds a patent, by the
Tony Aiazzi (55:37.752)For what?
Michael Jacober (55:38.798)I just, I saw that in your, you did. Yeah. Himalayan salt drying.
Joshua Sharkey (55:40.586)I think I put it in the notes here. He has a patent for... Hemaline Sultry. Yeah.
Tony Aiazzi (55:49.038)Talk about a guy who's always, you know.
Michael Jacober (55:52.12)He's so commercial and you just wouldn't, you don't sort of.
Joshua Sharkey (55:57.55)He was the earliest, one of the youngest, was the executive chef of the River Cafe at 26. Holds a patent for Himalayan Salt Drive. Mike, can you Google what this Himalayan Salt Drive? Well, I guess he has some, I don't know what these are. He said that these are some viral dishes, the clothesline bacon. I remember the clothesline bacon. Yeah. Cheesecake lollipops and the angry lobster. don't remember the angry lobster, but I do remember he had.
Michael Jacober (56:08.62)Yeah, hold on.
Tony Aiazzi (56:23.118)It's like on a bed of nails, I think, the angry lobster. remember having it once. It was like a spicy lobster that was served on kind of one of those things that, well, as a florist, you know, those things you put at the bottom of a vase to hold the flowers up. Pretty sure that's what it was.
Joshua Sharkey (56:36.6)Yes, that's funny. And he keeps opening more things. It's funny, he's not, you don't hear his name a lot, but he's always doing new things and he's really, really into He certainly is.
Tony Aiazzi (56:47.438)Any of the sprays also was they working on some like aerosolized food sprays at some point? Like butter flavor or something like
Joshua Sharkey (56:52.952)Probably. Yeah, I'm reading this thing about the, about left or the puppet. Cause he created a doppelganger during COVID. Yeah. A three foot tall.
Tony Aiazzi (57:01.39)that was during the pandemic.
Tony Aiazzi (57:05.592)We're all going a little crazy during the pandemic.
Joshua Sharkey (57:07.734)Yes, yeah, but yeah, I think I remember this. I mean, he's got all these whimsical, you know, things that he does and the food's really good too, but it's funny because you hear a lot about similar kind of things with the linea and things like that, but you don't hear as much with David, but he's been doing it for longer, actually. Did you find out about the...
Michael Jacober (57:24.878)Did, yeah. So, I mean, it's definitely a, I would imagine it's a process patent. So basically the aging occurs in in a cold room for, uh, for up to a hundred days. The meat is kept between 34 and 40 degrees with 60 % humidity. And it's rested on a Himalayan salt brick, which apparently tenderizes the, uh, the beef in a very specific way and provides it's saying like, uh, a new mommy, rich, nutty and sweet flavor. So.
It's interesting that he thought, I'm sure he probably, you know, tested this process several times, probably perfected it. was like, shit. See if I can pass.
Tony Aiazzi (58:05.282)Is he still, is it still like an active pattern?
Michael Jacober (58:09.41)Good question. would imagine he is. Yeah, he's still doing it at Prime. David Burke, Prime in Connecticut. it looks like he's also doing it Red Horse in Rumson, New Jersey and his restaurant in Orchard Park. So still, it's still happening. I think he does.
Tony Aiazzi (58:25.326)Any restaurants still in New York City? Certainly a lot of, a lot of chefs of a particular generation, um, mine as well, or maybe one ahead of me. Certain started like to open restaurants outside of New York City, which I think is interesting. That kind of, I don't want to call it Exodus, but a lot more opportunities seen outside of New York City proper.
Joshua Sharkey (58:47.117)Yeah, and he's Jersey based, think.
Tony Aiazzi (58:49.678)He used have a restaurant right up by Oriole on 61st street. I think it was on 62nd street. I think it was DB Bistro Moderne. So we'd hang out with his cooks stuff a lot. He was always a fun time. you're right. What was his restaurant on 62nd street?
Joshua Sharkey (59:01.742)I thought that was Dana Blue.
Michael Jacober (59:05.986)He's got David Burke Tavern, which is still there.
Tony Aiazzi (59:08.103)cool, I think it was a different name at the time.
Michael Jacober (59:10.516)I think it was too. Yeah, think it was a different name.
Joshua Sharkey (59:13.154)what's Charlie Palmer doing now?
Tony Aiazzi (59:14.966)I don't know. got it right. But there is a place opening up here. It's one of these big resorts in Beacon, New York. And I know he has a restaurant in the same group up in Reinbeck, New York. So I'm looking forward to seeing his restaurant open here and just right down the road.
Joshua Sharkey (59:33.408)So there was Oreo, but there was the other one. Like right around the same time he had another spot.
Tony Aiazzi (59:38.318)We 12 restaurants when I was the corporate chef for him. so there was Oriole New York. When I left Oriole, I left the Charlie Palmer group and that moved Times Square.
Joshua Sharkey (59:48.47)Wasn't there one like next to it or close to it or something?
Tony Aiazzi (59:51.634)in Oriel now where it is, there's like a rooftop situation somewhere. You know, look, the part of this is with me is I thought I'd be working with all these restaurants and knowing what was up to the date, all the stuff going on in restaurants all the time. And now I know who's accounting platform, which accounting platform are they using? I'll be able to answer those questions all day.
But it was really definitely one of the things that we had to accept in this change, which is why we started our podcast over-seasoned also is because we wanted to be able to get back into restaurants and like, enjoy the talking about restaurants more because we just found ourselves for years, just talking about the accounting that's going on with, different partners and so forth that we became very much removed from the day-to-day restaurant ops. So we started this.
podcast, which we only really do when we're traveling internationally. We'll find a podcast studio and record something about what we're doing there or where we're going. And we're going to Vietnam, for example, later this month after a Manila trip. And we'll do some podcasting there, which is always a lot of fun to see like different restaurant cultures and stuff around the world. So we started the podcast over seasoned, so that we could.
Joshua Sharkey (01:00:59.246)What are you doing?
Tony Aiazzi (01:01:03.998)Talk about restaurants more, talk about food more, talk about appropriations more and suppliers and great cuts of, you know, whatever and different products that these restaurants use. and just have a little bit more fun with it and we'll do it generally when we're traveling for work. from Manila.
Joshua Sharkey (01:01:20.706)So you're making like a pit stop in Vietnam? Yeah.
Tony Aiazzi (01:01:23.342)We'll meet in Vietnam. to some restaurants. We'll do a little market tour. We did one in Thailand as well. We did it in Japan. We did it all around Columbia. And then we're going to do one in the Basque region later on, early summer.
Michael Jacober (01:01:40.014)Do you travel with business partners? You travel with your wife? Do you have kids? What's your story?
Tony Aiazzi (01:01:45.506)I have a six year old who's not quite ready for the 24 hour flight experience to Manila yet. I'm waiting for it, but you know, I'm not really willing to put myself through that much pain, but at some point, yes. And my wife hates to travel, he has to fly. So she's not making that trip that often, but to Spain, I can convince her to do that.
Joshua Sharkey (01:02:06.389)When's the basketball game?
Tony Aiazzi (01:02:07.342)We're going to do that in June.
Joshua Sharkey (01:02:09.486)I I heard that like that might be a good one for you to bring me. Yeah, why not? I'll try to bring stone.
Tony Aiazzi (01:02:13.518)Totally invited. Xavier by co-founder goes there quite a lot. has family there. He has lot of contacts there. So this is kind of where he goes to recoup a little bit. So we'll go there and mushroom picking and the whole rest of it. It'll be great. We're going to be there for about two weeks.
Michael Jacober (01:02:32.206)Very cool.
Joshua Sharkey (01:02:33.23)I'm always, every time I hear Tony's stories, I'm always like, man, this is... He's doing it right. He really is.
Tony Aiazzi (01:02:39.864)Trying to.
Michael Jacober (01:02:41.55)bootstrapped. He bootstrapped Josh.
Joshua Sharkey (01:02:43.608)Crap is really, you know...
Tony Aiazzi (01:02:45.474)It's different sides of the same coin, I tell you. It's not without its own difficulties for sure.
Joshua Sharkey (01:02:50.124)Well, I'm really stoked that you came on. was hoping a little bit that there was a time when you and X were on so that you could bust his chops a little bit. I don't know where he is.
Tony Aiazzi (01:03:00.492)If you could tell me where he is at any point, because that guy's been flying around the world for three years now. if he could get us in the, we have to go internationally to be in the same place. So I have to be like, to Vietnam at this hotel, meet me there next month on the fourth and then he'll do it.
Joshua Sharkey (01:03:19.202)That's funny. That's funny. Well, you're upstate right now. Yes. Well, this was a pleasure.
Tony Aiazzi (01:03:25.614)Thank much.
Michael Jacober (01:03:26.392)Tony, thanks for joining, was great to have you.
Tony Aiazzi (01:03:28.805)Thanks for having me guys.
Joshua Sharkey (01:03:30.926)Thanks so much for listening to the show. If you liked this episode or any other ones, you can actually check out more of this at getmes.com slash Josh. That's G-E-T-M-E-E-Z slash J-O-S-H. I have my podcast there, The Mese Podcast, plus some other shows and interviews. Starting to write some stories and blog posts, some recipes, recaps, things like that. So I think you'll enjoy it. Again, it's getmes.com slash Josh. G-E-T-M-E-Z.
Thank you very much. Very grateful for all of you.
