Leaders Shaping the Digital Landscape
May 23, 2024

Restaurant Technology in the Cloud and On Premise

Host Wade Erickson sat down with Anthony Presley, CTO at NorthStar, to discuss why enterprise restaurant and retail technology requires cloud and on-premise technology to integrate seamlessly.

Join Host Wade Erickson in a live interview with Anthony Presley, CTO at Custom Business Solutions, to explore the integration of cloud and on-premise technology in enterprise restaurant and retail systems.

Key Takeaways:

  • The critical role of seamless tech integration for business efficiency.
  • How cloud solutions complement on-premise systems in real-world applications.
  • Future trends in enterprise technology for the restaurant and retail sectors.
Transcript

Wade Erickson (00:03):

Welcome all to another episode of Tech Leaders Unplugged. Today we're getting unplugged with Anthony Presley, CTO of CBS NorthStar. Our topic today is restaurant technology in the cloud and on premise. So we're going to talk tech about restaurant technology, and Anthony's been in this space a real long time, so I'm really looking forward to how he's seen the market change over time. Of course, there's, you know, all kinds of kiosks and things that are coming into restaurants that are changing how we even order our food and fast food, as well as, sit down locations where you have the little terminals. And so have some, you know, technology is moving quickly in this space, and I think it's going to keep moving, as it is. One of the, you know, major costs for most restaurants is the labor related to running the business. So thanks very much, Anthony, for spending time with us today to talk a little bit about the technologies that you're involved with. Tell me a little bit about yourself and CBS North Star, and then we'll get into the subject.

Anthony Presley (01:14):

Awesome. Well, thanks Wade for having me. A little bit about myself. So I, I've been in retail restaurant technology for a long time. You pointed out, I'm, I'm not a spring chicken. My haircut resembles that. And I've been I've been doing this off and on since 1998. Got into it really hardcore in 2007, and then been in and around the restaurant and really around point of sale and labor tech since 2007. So going on 20 years been a while, needless to say. And during that timeframe in additional labor was on in the, in re retail tech. And so we did a number of grocery store point of sale systems, both from the, the two largest incumbents in the market and then migrated over. We saw a vision for where grocery technology and restaurant technology, and frankly even convenience store technology all of those are, have different foundational problems, and they really don't work together well. And so, as you know, certainly that happened during Covid and the pandemic where you had restaurants selling toilet paper, and you had grocery stores selling prepared foods as hard and as fast as they could. And you have convenience stores that, you know, are, are kind of going through and trying to grab prepared foods and trying to learn what's going on with electric vehicles, and what do you do with somebody who's standing around for 20 or 30 minutes and how do you keep that person entertained and spending? And we saw a need for a lot of that tech to kind of come together. And so for the last four or five years I've been working really diligently on in-store technology and above store technology that runs the, the heart of, of restaurant systems.

Wade Erickson (03:10):

Wow, that's great. Yeah, I, I didn't think about that for the, the EV world, you know, and like you said, with, as things are moving more towards gas station charging you know, what do you do while they're plugged in for 25 minutes? You know, you want to sell 'em a lot of coffee and chips, I guess, you know, and, and entertain 'em a bit too, and maybe have little areas they can sit and they'll pick you to be the, the one they spend the most time at versus you know, these other ones that are out in the middle of just a grocery store or something. So, very, very interesting thought there. So, yeah. So let's talk about the subject. What, what interested you other than your years and years of experience? And of course, we'd love to hear about the, the, the vision you have for the future. Let's just get into the topic.

Anthony Presley (03:56):

Yeah, happy to. So as you may or may not know, you know, the restaurant technology has been around for a long time. Grocery technology has been around for a long time. You can go Google the creation of the UPC code which started to transform a lot of the, the grocery sector and restaurant fell along with that and, and modernized around the modern point of sale. At CBS, we've been around, we're celebrating our 30th year. This is our 30th year in existence. We're, we're not a young startup. We've serviced and supported point of sale systems for decades. And, and actually our, our founder started the business and was actually managing and servicing the old physical cash registers. That's where it, where it started. And as technology's evolved we started supporting other products that are in the market, like silverware, point of sale, and then later PAI Touch point of sale. And then we've also supported and still support Micros, which is made by Oracle. And, and NCR has a product called Aloha. And we supported all of those products for a long time. And in, in very, you know nationally represented or internationally represented chains. And then about 10 years ago, 12 years ago our founder saw a vision to, to move more to the, to the cloud. Nobody was calling asking for a DOS based point of sale anymore. And if you look at, at most restaurant tech, it, it at least inside the store operations, it's often a, a laggard compared to other industries. Certainly the consumer tech has caught up a lot during covid, but the, the foundational stuff, it doesn't need to belle and sexy because it needs to run, right? This is really the, the core menu, ordering, printing charging credit cards, those functionality really needs to be solid and needs to run in the store to a large degree, regardless of whether or not you have internet, regardless of whether or not somebody just came in off the street and is now getting trained you know, they need to be able to pick it up quickly. And so our founder saw the need for a, a newer technology, and we started building point of sale, and we started we started, funny enough from the tech side as a, as a flash product. And so back, you know, 12 years ago it was flash. You've been around long enough, you know how that tech was very difficult to work with. And, and during the middle of our first version, one apple released the first iPad and we pivoted very quickly to using an iPad. And we were the first point of sale on an iPad. And we were deployed to a brand called Stacked. Brand is no longer around anymore, but Stacked was the first customer to put us in. And it worked great, and it was actually at the table ordering with an iPad, and you could order your burger and say, send, and then that kiosk would actually send drape right back to the kitchen, and they would make it, which is, you know, not uncommon today. You can do that in a lot of places today 12 years ago, I would challenge you to find somewhere where that was being done. And so very innovative and, and tech has continued to evolve in this space. And, and we've seen that with a number of providers. I, I, I mentioned Micros, I mentioned NCR. Both of those guys have both a legacy product and a, a newer product PAI Touch, which has been acquired by Shift four, a credit card processor. And that's a, a big trend we see going on in this industry where credit card processors have come in and acquired the software and then they're coming back in with the FinTech offering which is both a carrot and a stick, right? Here's the, here's the new things we've done, and you need to move all your processing. We're sorry, that's going to cost you 2% or 3% more. But the big stick is if you don't switch to our processing, we are likely going to not allow you to open new stores. And to a restaurant, this is really, really disruptive. Because although we don't call them ERP systems, I've got enough background to know what an ERP system is when you, when it's running the entirety, the guts of the restaurant are running on a point of sale. It's, it's an ERP system, right? So you're looking at restaurant operators that are running the entire operation on this. And it's it can be a problem when the, when it gets acquired by a FinTech processor. And so over, you know, we, that was back up 10 years ago. We, we started building this product. We've matured a lot since then. We've now got an iOS offering and a Windows offering because as we look to more of the enterprise, which has always been our experience have been large enterprises with hundreds of locations or thousands in some cases. So you know, BBI and, and Outback has been a customer of ours for a very long time. You know, other folks like Cheesecake Factory and BJ's, and you can see all those on our website, but, you know, very large enterprises that we've built software for, for years and years. And when you go up market, no, nobody really wants to rip and replace. And so you know, if you have a one store operator that you want to rip out a, an offering, that's fine. It's disruptive, but there's not a committee and there's not, you know, 40,000 people that have to go get retrained. But as you go up market and you start looking into these enterprise solutions, you've now got to go, okay, well, we have to replace the POS, but all the other pieces of our organization have to continue functioning exactly the way they did yesterday. Right? It's the, the bane of software development. You build new software and the new software has to work exactly the same way as the old software, right? Because that's what operators demand, right? That's great. It's faster, it's newer, it's sexier, but all the way, also, it has to work exactly like my old software did. Yeah. Right. And so as we, as we look at, you know, how do you do that in a, in a restaurant, in a retail environment, we mentioned FinTech. I would challenge you to find a modern payment, credit card processing group. The biggest of the big bank of America, Worldpay, Fiserv Shift four, all of these guys are riding on rails that were, that were made while I was in high school. And so finding someone that's got enterprise chops you have to go integrate to that product, and there's all kinds of nuances around credit cards and how those work. And then you have the loyalty systems, and there's just a ton of things that you have to slide the, your modern tech stack into and hope it continues to work which certainly creates a lot of challenges. And then you've got the expectation from the user that the cloud is going to solve a lot of problems and the cloud sometimes, as you're well aware, creates more problems. And so it's a, it's an interesting dynamic right now in restaurant and, and in more in general, in retail tech. We do a fair number of grocery store systems and integrations, and both the major players in that space, there's probably four total that operate in the grocery space point of sale world. All four of them are scrambling to make modern app stores and, you know, collect a little money and integrate and, and figure out a way to preserve legacy hardware and then also have a, a path to new software. Sorry, that was a lot. But yeah, it's a, it's a little bit of a different world. It's not quite the SaaS. I'm going to spin up an app on AWS and, and call it a day. There's, there's a whole lot of integration there. Plugins. I think we're, we're maintaining about 115 integrations right now for our customers. And they span all kinds of different integration points in a, in an industry that really has no standards. And so every one of those integrations is unique challenging, needless to say.

Wade Erickson (12:49):

Yeah. Yeah. So I remember early on in, when I moved from being a mechanical engineer in the defense industry over to the software space, this was the late nineties. I worked for a company and we built, it was a Microsoft partnership. We built the POS system for Taco Bell. And so it was early, early move to Windows based servers you know, PC based servers within stores and trying to integrate for that large chain. And I did, I wasn't on that project, but I worked a lot with the folks that were, and that company that I worked for, you know, got bought up and moved on, and I'm sure Taco Bell's got way different vendors, but you know, I just remember there was, it was early days and quite interesting pro, pro process of developing those products. So, so tell me a little bit about, okay, so you, you, you have constraints around the, the environment of they want to use existing technology and integrations obviously means that's what you got to do if you want to keep the old hardware around. And obviously different restaurant chains come in with different technology that they want to maintain. How do you maintain that roadmap and what factors play in the decision process of what do you tackle first and then you know, when do you have to, you know, deprecate features for them versus say, Hey, this is really the future you want to get on, you know, and you, you're probably going to have to retire this stuff. Tell me about the product roadmap development for that.

Anthony Presley (14:33):

Yeah, I'll, I'll start with the, the last one you asked about, which is deprecating. Although we've been around for 12 years now we, for better or worse, haven't had to, to deprecate anything just yet. So if you've got a feature, we maintain that feature. I don't know if that's the smartest business decision we've ever made but it is something that we do because, 'cause users start using it, right? There's that adage in product management that, you know, if you add a feature out there for an MVP, you, you really need to be prepared for that to be the feature in five or 10 years, because when you throw something out, sometimes it sticks. And so we haven't deprecated any of our features or functionality. At this point. We have gone with some, some partners perhaps that that we you know, in, in a partnership that we really look for somebody who's going to take care of our customers the way that we take care of our customers. And so when we find third party vendors that maybe aren't doing that we will sunset that relationship over some time. But typically you know, once we've got it in the field we're confident enough that that's going to be something that our customers are going to are going to be okay with. And that, and that comes up all the time. I mean, candidly, we, we, because we have the POS when loyalty doesn't work, or the kitchen system doesn't work, or the labor management system doesn't work the coupon tool doesn't work they call the POS vendor because all the interaction with those third parties is through the point of sale. And so having strong partners is really important to make sure that that, and, and that that roadmap stays aligned. So it's not only our own roadmap your question about roadmap it's not only our own roadmap, but it's keeping it aligned with all the various third parties. And like I said, we've got more than a hundred of those now. So it is a full-time job keeping up with all of our third parties and, and going back to some of the third parties and going, yeah, but if we, if we tweaked the integration a little bit you know, we'd have something that would add a lot of value for our customers. And then by adding that value, we have something that's more sticky for all of us, and, but also for the customer adding value to them. So road roadmaps, I mean, I'm not going to say anything monumental on roadmaps, they're always hard, right? You know, you've got, you've got the proverbial roadmap with all the thousands of items you want to add to the product, and then you have what the customers are scrambling for. And then frankly, we do a lot of enterprise work and enterprise work. I had a customer years ago that used to say, me, there's the right way, the wrong way, and our way, right? And so the, they, they knew, they knew candidly all the time. They knew they were asking for something that would not apply to anybody else ever. But that's how their business operates, right? You have a, you have a COO of a chain, and they really wanted to operate a certain way, right? Everybody's familiar with Chick-fil-A it's, you know, my pleasure, right? And so that's the thing, right? And so everybody has these things and, and it gets down to the nitty gritty of, you know, how are we going to package up? Are we going to, what kind of clam shell are we going to use? You know, you can see packaging from the delivery side of restaurant businesses and, you know, instantly, oh, that's a, you know, whatever the brand is. And so as we work with restaurant brands and they go, we have to have it, it has to work exactly this way, which oftentimes is because that's exactly how it worked 15 years ago. And that's, they just want to keep doing it that way. Then we have, we have a bucket of features in our roadmap that become paid features, right? And we'll split those costs up if we can find a couple of people that that all need that feature. But if you need it and you need it fast, then we do have a professional services arm and we've, we've always had that. And that goes, you know, you can jump to the front of the line, if you will, with, with something that you really need for your brand. But but yeah, challenging the roadmap is challenging. We, we have multiple products, not unlike some of your other guests. We have, we have our core we've talked a lot about point of sale offering, but we have something we call a recipe viewer which is, if you've ever wandered into you know, a, a Cheesecake Factory or, or Gold Corral and wondered, Hey, how in the world do they manage this menu and know all of these recipes? And the answer is in the back is, is our software and our software's running, and it pops up and there's a, a terminal and it's got all of the recipes and how you make it, it can have videos and all this other stuff. And so we have that, and then we have more of our, we'll call them legacy products that we'll do change management at the store, and they'll change pricing and they'll change menus. And they do that for some of those legacy point of sale products we've talked about. And so we've got you know, multiple products and multiple roadmaps and multiple product managers. And then we have, you know, the things we want to do and the technical debt. We've got to, everybody wrestles with technical debt. I don't care how new your company is. And you know, we've got to wrestle with that and upgrade to the latest frameworks and technologies. And so yeah, it's a, it's a constant battle on the roadmap as to what are we going to do the next two weeks. And, but we try and keep that aligned where the core product still gets upgrades and then, you know, we'll, we'll bring on board a new customer and maybe for the next three months our product roadmap is overrun with new features that they need. But then everybody gets the benefit from that. 'cause We do maintain one code base. So for all of this work, there's one code base.

Wade Erickson (20:31):

Yeah, that's, yeah. A lot of times you got to split it just because it becomes so difficult to manage, but that's amazing. It's all in one code base. So tell me about, you know, how do you stay ahead of some of the emergency emerging trends? I mean, right now, you know, I think about, 'cause the topic here was cloud and on-prem meaning, you know you can't shut the restaurant down if you lose the internet connection. And I think I was it a restaurant not too long ago, a fast food place that they locked the doors because they were having issues with their network connection. So and so, you know, I think about edge computing, which was kind of discussed as a, you know, emerging technology not that long ago, which definitely would handle, you know, help with the on-prem aspect if you did have a little more server activity there and you could lose the internet and still function. And then obviously when it comes back up, push all the data back up to the master, you know, systems for the corporate to process all their data. So tell me a little bit about some of those changing emerging technologies. You know, and I'm sure AI is tickling the ideas of you guys, right? Just like everybody else. Especially with kiosks now and ordering, you know, I log in with my account, boom, grabs my last five orders, and, you know, we're piece of habit, right? So, you know, grabbing those previous orders is a common thing that probably in the older technology, they didn't have anything at all knowledge at all of what you ordered, you know, last week or whatever. So tell me a little bit about how you guys look at that.

Anthony Presley (22:07):

Yeah. you, you nailed some of the trends right off the bat there. So we do have a challenge with, with restaurants. We actually had a customer that had a store go offline for almost three weeks. You know, that's, that's a common occurrence. You know, they're, they're situated in a mall property. The mall operator decided, Hey, we need to redo the concrete in the parking lot. So they tore up that, you know, the, the concrete and managed to cut their fiber. And, you know, now you've got a, a mall property with no internet. Maybe they've got cellular backup, but news flash for those of us that that know, I mean, you, a mall is a large Faraday cage, right? So sometimes you don't have great cell signal inside of a, inside of a large metal container. And so, you know, we, we ended up with a customer that was running back and forth, and they were literally loading data onto flash drives and then driving out in the parking lot onto a, you know, on trying to get data out, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's laughable, but it's like a real problem today, right? We have another customer not that long ago on the east coast that had two or three sites. I don't know what was going on with the construction, but you know, they'd lose internet for six to eight hours at a time, and then it would come back up, but it would only work for five or six minutes and then go down again. And so there are products on the market today. There are competitors that we have that have built a to your point that you know, they're, they're cloud systems. And those cloud systems require a browser and they're doing all kinds of really cool things with embedded Android browsers. And, you know, it can store the cache locally. But now what that ultimately means is that when I go to service Table 35, I have this tablet, and this tablet is responsible for table 35, and that's the latest thing. And now I lose internet. And so now the latest cash, the latest copy of the ticket is on that tablet, but this tablet doesn't talk to any of the other tablets or devices. So I need, as long as the internet's down, I need to keep servicing you with this tablet. And that's, that becomes a problem, obviously, right? You scale the restaurant up and, and you've got 20 tablets and you've got 30 servers and they're all running around and they're and then you have these kitchen systems in the back and like, it's, it's, you know, now the kitchen system is probably down in most cases. And so we took a different approach, and I confuse people all the time. When I say we're hybrid cloud that's not going to confuse you 'cause you're, you're very technical, but we're hybrid cloud. And so what that means is we use the cloud layer for reporting and we use the cloud layer for configuration. And that's really all we use the cloud for. There's a little caveat because we'll do online ordering that will go through a set of APIs of the cloud layer, but most everything that you would need inside a store is not at the cloud layer. And so we have three tiered architecture, and so the cloud layer, it's going to come down to down to our in-store. And, and you mentioned edge computing, we do have what we call a back office appliance or a, a server component. And you can, you can run that in a VM, you can run that on a, on an edge device. It's got a set of microservices, right? And those microservices are controlling what's going on in the store, and we can replicate that throughout the store. And so now as long as you have a switch and as long as you have Wi-Fi, if you pull the internet from that store, everything in the store works beautifully. You don't have to change. I can pick up a different tablet, I can go to another table, I can handle payments. Pretty much everything that you would need to do. You know, there is a pretty much, because there is always an asterisk, if you've got a gift card, we probably can't look up your balance. You don't have internet. But that gets stored at, at Visa or MasterCard or wherever that is with a gift card provider. But we can take payments offline and, and the kitchen display system works and all the function you need to take an order, place the order, take payments and manage the order can all be done in store. And so we do end up using, we have pivoted into those, the edge computing pivoted into microservices and are able to replicate that data within the store so that an internet outage doesn't bother anybody.

Wade Erickson (26:45):

Great. Great. So, you know, we're getting close to the end, but this is like a, where I like to pivot and talk a little bit about your, you as a person and some of your history. So I noticed in the background you were a founder of resolution systems, and I noticed in the family of products, there, you, this is back in 2004, if I remember, you had a table credit card processing terminal, and I only remember this maybe 10 years ago, kind of starting to pop up where they would bring the credit card to you, because I know when I was living in San Diego, San Diego had one of the highest fraud rates, and it was coming out of restaurants because there was a lot of waitresses and stuff, grabbing credit cards, running them through the copiers, and then charging your credit card. And so this obviously alleviates a lot of that. You were way ahead of things. Can you tell me a little bit about how that product and bringing a credit card terminal to the table came about and, you know, tell me a little bit about your competition. I mean, were you the kind of the first to come along?

Anthony Presley (27:49):

Yeah. So, wow, that's digging, digging into the back. But yeah, we, we in college I had a roommate one of my best friends, maybe my best friend at this point in, in the game. But he, his dad owned a little restaurant in Lubbock, Texas sorry. His uncle owned a restaurant in Lubbock, Texas. And his uncle would require that he drive in the restaurants called Zucchinis. And he had to drive in to get his schedule. And so we actually, he didn't have a car. And so I would drive him into hi, and, and we would talk about all the dumb things that his boss was making him do, right? And so, you know, in 2002, three, four, we would hatch these ideas of what, what do we need to do to fix this stuff? And so out of that came an idea for a labor management company that we actually executed on. And, and this idea for taking payments tableside. And so, you're right, we were incredibly early. We weren't the only ones in the market, but nobody there was a product called Order Man that was out in that same timeframe. And we built worked with the university students at Texas Tech University which I was one of. And we built a hardware device dedicated to taking payments. We wrote firmware, right? There really weren't great embedded tablets at the time. So we, we wrote actual firmware at and, and embedded them onto systems on Chip. And we were making our own cutting our own silicone boards and soldering bits and bytes together. We went to go patent it. We paid for a provisional patent. We paid for the first round of patenting, came back and there were other patents out there. We decided not to respond to the office actions. We didn't have the money. I was I had, I was broke. I was a broke college kid. And ultimately we went to go raise capital. I did go out on a funding circle, and we went and, and talked to a variety of folks and found out that very quickly that building hardware is incredibly expensive. And if you get it wrong you are paying a whole lot for some silicon boards that don't they're, they're paperweights. And so we, we ultimately abandoned the idea once we got past an MVP. So yeah, I was very ahead of my time both from a, what I could actually do and execute on and what I and what I think the market was ready for. 'cause Even if we'd gone to market fully with it, I don't, I don't think anybody would've cared to be candid.

Wade Erickson (30:40):

Yeah. I I think that then that's the problem of being a pioneer to all those people that have new startup ideas and don't have competition. You know, sometimes there's a reason.

Anthony Presley (30:51):

That's right.

Wade Erickson (30:53):

And the market may not come around. 'cause If you, you build it, they may not come. Right. So, second thing, as I noticed as well that you you've had a fair amount of companies you started in college a lot, a great story that a lot of people do early in their careers. And you, you, you had a couple of businesses and, you know, around 2014, it looks like you kind of went to working for other folks. Similar to my background too. Sold my, well, got rid of my last business in 2014. And you know, I think there's always the entrepreneur that always is anchoring for something always in the back of their mind. So tell me a little bit about that. You know, inter the entrepreneurial spirit while you're still working for somebody else.

Anthony Presley (31:41):

Yeah, no, that's a fun topic. I, I, I think there are a couple of different kinds of entrepreneurs. I I think there are entrepreneurs that are wholly unemployable by other people. And I try and not be that one, but we all know those guys. Yep. Yeah. And gout. And, and then there are entrepreneurs that I think can be entrepreneurial in lots of different aspects of their life. And so when you, when you in corporate speak, they call those intrapreneurs, right? And so you're inside the organization and you're getting to do entrepreneurial things. Maybe you're standing up a new division, maybe you're, you're moving in a certain way. And so you're right. In 2014, we raised what turned into a Series A for a labor management startup that we had. I, you know, back to that story of we had the labor management in 2004, we turned that into a real product in 2007. We grew that profitably till 2014. In 2014 we went and raised a round of funding. And we got some, some very smart local investors who put some money in. And then we did what we're supposed to do with that. And we, we doubled in size and we spent all the money and growth. And then in 2016, we merged in with one of the strategic investors that had, had been in our series A round. And we, we became part of trau and in the grocery point of sale world. And we did some amazing things with the, the team at Trudeau, smart guy. And they thought enough to go, Hey we want to get into the software business. They had been traditionally a, a hardware and services business. And so we, we, you know, I, I got to go work for some very smart people and got to be a more of an intrapreneur and stood up a whole software team. And so we got to go do that. We did that through organic growth and through mergers and acquisitions and was able to, to get that going and, and built a, a team and, and just about anywhere in North America, most chains and grocery chains in North America are using some piece of software that that team has produced which is fantastic. I mean, we got a lot of market penetration, very smart people, great partners. And 2020 decided to spin that back out. So I spun time Forge back out. And so maybe I wasn't that great of an employee. I'm not, I'm not sure. We'd have to ask other people. But spun that back out and then ultimately joined up with the team at CBS North Star. And so I do have we'll call it a side hustle, if you will. But that side hustle is a, is a reasonable sized company. There's about 1700 customers that use that product, and we have a team that runs it day to day led by a, a smart COO who happens to be my sister. But she does a pretty good job if I'll say so myself and runs that team. And, and there's a lot of synergies with our point of sale offering. So we now have a, a very nice labor management product that can do all kinds of things that you'll not find in any of our competitors. And we're able to do that. So it gives me a little bit of refresh. Sometimes I get really, you know, you know frustrated with one project, I can actually jump over and work on another. And sometimes that leads to a solution. But yeah, it's pretty exciting. And I, I think I'm one of those people that is an entrepreneur that can also be employed. It seems to be working out.

Wade Erickson (35:24):

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much. I want to quick introduce, you know, we're at the top, well, actually we went over a little bit, but that's okay. Wanted to quickly introduce next week's show and then, you know, wrap up with you if that's okay. So next week we have Marcus Kisch, director of Wicked Companies. The topic is the story of Wicked Problems, how reality is Killing AI and Adoption. It's Wednesday the 20 29th. And same time, 9:30 Pacific Time is the live, and then of course, available immediately right after for recording. Okay. So, thanks so much. I learned a ton as, as I always do on these shows. And you know, it was, it was nice to get a little, you know, little bit of a understanding of the, the space you're in restaurants, we all go there and we just take all that technology for granted and, you know look forward to seeing some more tech come move in that way because it it's pretty smooth nowadays, but I imagine there's a lot, lot more that can be done.

Anthony Presley (36:30):

Absolutely.

Wade Erickson (36:32):

Appreciate your time. Yeah. All right. And to everybody else we'll see you next week.

 

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Anthony Presley

CTO / Technologist / Husband / Father

Anthony is an entrepreneurial technology leader with decades of experience building and developing international and diverse teams while grinding out growth. He has years of software development and product management with primarily B2B product lines. Over the years, Anthony has worked in a variety of technologies from the mundane to bleeding edge – from mainframes to mobile apps, monolithic to microservices, multi-step builds to devops and continuous integration. Anthony's background in Restaurant, HR, and Retail technologies allows him to lead cross functional teams, spearhead complex integration needs, and ensure that stakeholders are strategically and tactically aligned. Anthony loves leading entrepreneurial efforts and helping innovators get ideas out the door and a business (or business unit) built around customer pain points.