The Rundown 7/20/26: TouchBistro’s Collapse, Meta’s $13B AI Bet, and Canada’s Defence Boom

**John Ruffolo** (0:01)
It's the same analogy, replace the word oil with data. If you're just taking the oil out of the ground, exporting it at whatever price, and then you're buying it back at 10X the value. It's the net terms of trade.

**Matt Cohen** (0:15)
Welcome back everyone to another electrifying episode of Tank Talks. I'm your host, Matt Cohen, and joining me as always is the one and only John Ruffolo. Get ready as we dive headfirst into the hottest news and most exciting headlines at the intersection of business, innovation and politics.
All right, John, welcome back to the Tank. It's been a while. You got a bit of a glow on your face here. I guess that means the sun is out from beyond the inferno that we've been living in, unfortunately, here in Toronto. Having the worst air quality in the world was not something on my 2026 Bingo card. Was it on yours?

**John Ruffolo** (0:48)
No, but you know, it's funny. I was just talking to some of my American friends and colleagues and they were giving us a little poke. Oh, hey, you know, it's coming over us in Pennsylvania. I said, hey, you're the one who threw up the greenhouse gases up our way.

**Matt Cohen** (1:02)
Hey, and we showed up with our firefighter planes down to California when they needed it. So it goes both ways. But there is the conversation about the World Cup game, I guess, where people are a little bit nervous about the air quality in New York on Sunday. So we'll see how that plays out. Right.

**John Ruffolo** (1:17)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, exactly. And we'll see messy.

**Matt Cohen** (1:21)
We went to the game. Tell us about that. How was it?

**John Ruffolo** (1:24)
I didn't go to that. I didn't go to the mess.

**Matt Cohen** (1:25)
You went to the Argentina game, didn't you?

**John Ruffolo** (1:27)
No, no.

**Matt Cohen** (1:27)
What did you see?

**John Ruffolo** (1:28)
No, I saw Portugal.

**Matt Cohen** (1:30)
Oh yeah.

**John Ruffolo** (1:30)
Portugal. Yeah. Little side note. This is my fourth World Cup. My first one was 2006 quarterfinal, Berlin, Argentina, Germany. And some young punk comes out as a sub in like the 60th, 70th minute. Didn't know who it was. And everybody's screaming messy. So I was there on his first game.

**Matt Cohen** (1:52)
So that's amazing. All right, John. Well, we've been off the tank for a while, but let's get back into it. Biggest story, I think of the week is something that you were personally connected to back when you were at Omers was Omers, unfortunately taking a big hit on this TouchBistro acquisition from all players, Constellation Software for a hundred million. So for our listeners, you don't know much about TouchBistro well-known Canadian darling tech company, restaurant POS software company.
They were high-flying. They were adding a lot of dollars, a lot of zeros during the time when everybody was trying to get online and trying to get their POS systems up and running. But I think after a little bit of a pullback in the markets, after 2021, the opportunity to sell to potentially Lightspeed and others in the space, they ended up having to pull back the reins, put in a new CEO and was not able to catch up on product or revenue. And this was the end of the story for TouchBistro. I'd love to get your take, John, in the early days of when you invested in the company, what you saw in the business and what you were hoping for, and maybe where you think some things went wrong here.

**John Ruffolo** (2:58)
Yeah, I know. And again, I don't want to play too much armchair quarterback because my involvement with them ended in 2018
So a little bit of the backstory. I've known Alex Barati, the founder, many, many years. He reminds me that I turned him down two or three times. And the issue was, and I'll tell you, the issue in the restaurant industry for me, and it's my bias, it's already a very, very thin razor margin business. And if anything goes wrong, who would have predicted COVID? The economics are very, very tough and there's big churn as a result. So I was very reluctant on that. But what happened is they hit an inflection point when we invested. I think it started at the end of 2017 It may have closed in early 2018 or something like that. But they really transformed into a solid ARR business, and it was a true SaaS business, and it was about, I think, 30-ish million of revenues. But you can clearly see that they were going to hit 50 million very, very soon. And we went in, I think it was a $30 million check then.