Randall Hom, Hostie Co-Founder & CEO on AI for Restaurant Hospitality

**Grace Gong** (0:02)
We're live. Yeah, every time I'm like, just having a heart attack, but hi Randall, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Randall Hom** (0:12)
Nice, glad to be here.

**Grace Gong** (0:15)
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If it doesn't work, just count me. But anyway, how are you? Congratulations on the new round of funding.

**Randall Hom** (0:59)
Thanks. Thanks a bunch.

**Grace Gong** (1:02)
It was such a successful fund announcement because I feel like my feet was flooded by the congratulations or people posing about you guys, and then you're invested by all of our friends and also myself.

**Randall Hom** (1:16)
Nice. That's awesome.
Yeah. It's incredible how much preparation these things take. I'm finally here.

**Grace Gong** (1:25)
I know. Congratulations. I want to start from your journey as a designer, and then you started your tech journey as a designer, and then you have worked at I feel like great tech companies like BetterWorks and Flexport and Instacart before you started your own restaurant, and later on you started your own tech company.
Hostie, maybe we could start with what were some lessons that you've learned in the design or product design era, that shape you into a founder today.

**Randall Hom** (1:59)
Yeah, for sure. The first thing that comes to mind is empathy, right? And building a great product only comes from actually listening to your users and solving a problem, right? So that's how Hostie started by solving a problem that I was experiencing at my own restaurant, Back to Back.
So yeah, I think solving problems.

**Grace Gong** (2:32)
I love that. Honestly, I feel like some of the best entrepreneurs are designers, like the Airbnb people. And I wanted to ask, I feel like you were also a founder of a restaurant. Obviously, Back to Back is so successful. And do you think running a restaurant and running a tech company, it's like the same? Or like, what is the differences?

**Randall Hom** (2:51)
Yeah, I mean, I think the overlaps are, you know, just kind of going from zero to one, right? Like when we started Back to Back, we took over this restaurant space that shut down and it was operating for 30 plus years, right? And they essentially just like gutted the whole thing. So we were starting everything from scratch. So there were a lot of, you know, learnings to figure out what a grease trap was, which is like, you know, this pipe that like catches all the grease from, you know, the sink runoff, right?

**Grace Gong** (3:29)
Wait, there's the actual pipeline. I mean, I typically just throw it like in the trash can or something.

**Randall Hom** (3:35)
Oh, yeah, you shouldn't do that, actually. It's like not good for the pipes.
But yeah, so there is a huge learning curve there, right? So I think just in terms of, you know, starting from something from scratch, going from zero to one, almost doing whatever it took to actually launch and get people in and, you know, make money. Those are probably where the overlaps lie. But, you know, restaurants are very analog and you're doing a lot with your hands and, you know, talking to people, yeah, every single day, every single service, right, on your feet. So those are the differences.

**Grace Gong** (4:23)
For sure.
I wanted to like start with like, I feel like there's so many people who are trying to solve the problem in this space, but it's like really difficult for like a few reasons. One is like people are saying the restaurant is like the most like hardest to sell category because it's like it's very decentralized and it's very fragmented as like people are, there's like, sure, there's like the big chains that are like a few people own a few big restaurants, but also there's like the local stores, like you guys, I don't think you guys are that local anymore because you guys have a really huge name now. But I guess like there's a lot of stores that are like only recognized by the local people and it's owned by like a person and like I guess, how do you really think about like from the designing your own business perspective? Like since you guys are charging $1.99, and like I guess like how many, like how do you think about like from that to one day becoming like a $300 million ARR company? Because like I think in the past it was like $100 million ARR, but like by the time that the company IPO, it's like $300 million ARR, just saying.