#149 - From Selling Private Jets to Solving Grocery Poverty w/ Andy Ellwood - Authority in the Wild

Introducing Andy Elwood The first thing that you put out in public doesn't embarrass you. You waited too long to put something out in public. Speaker 2 Andy Elwood is the founder of Stretch, a new AI platform reimagining how families navigate the grocery aisle. Speaker 1 The stat that was the one that really ripped my heart out is 17% of the people that we talked to had skipped a meal so that somebody else in their household didn't have to. Speaker 2 A serial entrepreneur behind companies acquired by Facebook and Google. Andy has built everything from global learning communities to purpose driven tech startups. Speaker 1 You have to fall in love with the problem that you're solving, not the solution you're making the problem that you're solving. Speaker 2 His philosophy make room for many guides his work as he used technology to create more access, clarity and opportunity for everyday consumers. From Selling Private Planes to Entrepreneur Andy, you start by asking people, have you thought about your debts as the top life insurance salesman? You then sold private jets from Warren Buffett, then end up at the center of two massive acquisition. What's the common thread that runs through your career? Speaker 1 Wow, so it's a great question. Curiosity of what could happen next. I think that's probably been a thing that I've been working to constantly understand about myself, but also understand about the people around me. Thinking through each of the steps that I've taken. I wasn't sure I could do any of them. But there was something about it that truly to it. There was something about the challenges or something about the way that the opportunity was presented or who presented the opportunity that gave me some excitement around man. Yeah. I wonder if I could step up and be the person who could do that thing. And forcing myself to learn something new, forcing myself to try something that, you know, I didn't know if I would succeed at, actually was part of what really allowed me, I think, to have as many different adventures as I have. Speaker 2 Love that answer. I love the word curiosity. It's a dear word to me. And I think we live in that world currently in which we need to be curious. You need to be experimenting all the time and so on. And truly you do with what you're currently doing right now and for Stretch, and before we get into that, I love to ask you like when you're in those position in which you're basically having one of the hardest rules to sell something that might be useful for in case of something bad happened, like the insurance part. Like, how'd that experience shape the man that you are today? Lessons from Life Insurance There's an old story that somebody told me, and I don't know if it's true, but it is directionally correct. And the phrases run into the roar. And the way that the person told me the story was in the fields of Africa. The female lionesses do most of the hunting, but they're quiet, they don't make a lot of noise. And they position themselves on the West, South and east side of a field. And they put the angry old cranky male lion at the top of the field and he roars. And the animals that react to the roar and run away from it are running to their death. But if you were to run into the roar, he's not going to chase you. And so sometimes when fear alerts us to something, it's actually the direction that we should go because it it is more likely that it's the IT made itself known to us. And so hard things are actually signal, not noise. I think, I think so many people, especially in the world we live in today, spend so much of their time trying to find the next comfort zone. They view discomfort as a thing to be avoided. And I think that's what selling life insurance, which is very uncomfortable, taught me is that if you could sit with the hard things, there's opportunities there. And it was because of my success doing the hard things, selling life insurance, that other opportunities present to themselves. Speaker 2 Another time like that, because it's so true, like us humans, we want to be safe and we want to avoid the danger and so on. But often the opportunity, the opportunities are there. We need to kind of embrace it in a way and not just to run away from it. The Grocery Problem and Stretch’s Mission And is this the reason why you came? Keep on coming back to grocery we reserve with basket and now stretch. You clearly obsessed by solving a problem in this space. What drives you? Speaker 1 Yeah, the, it's been said that the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. And I am a huge fan of the incredible entrepreneurs and investors and innovators and disruptors that I've had the chance to beat in my time as a as an entrepreneur, met some incredible people and had the opportunity to pitch celebrities and athletes and billionaires. And some of them even said, yes, I'd like it has opened a lot of doors for me, but it's a privileged position that, you know, I've worked very hard to be a part of. But the thing that I feel like my upbringing, it like my sensibilities growing up as the oldest of four in Texas, you know, my family's all from the Midwest in the US, is a lot of my family and friends back home have not seen technology do for them what it's done for me. And something as simple as how much will my groceries cost this week? Something as simple as I would need to feed my family, how much does that cost is a guessing game every single week for hundreds of millions of Americans. And that kind of just drives me. That's because the data exists, the frameworks exist, but it's never been organized in a way that makes it easy for a busy mom to say, I have this much money to spend on buy groceries this week, I need to make this many meals, this is what I already have in my pantry, in my fridge. What can I do? And just something about that simple idea that is actually very complex on the back end of the data side because we're working across all the different retailers within any city or town just keeps it treating me as a mountain that's worth climbing because it's happened for other parts of commerce. For travel, there's Expedia, for homes, there's Zillow. For fuel, there's GasBuddy. For prescriptions, now there's Good RX. These are all price and transparency unicorns, huge companies that have been a tremendous amount of money by serving a lot of everyday people with a thing that they need. But the interesting part about all of those is you're buying one item, right? You're buying gas today, you're buying a home today, you're buying clean ticket today, grocery. The reason I believe that the opportunity is still there is most people are spending are buying 20 or 30 items at a time. And the math of the complexity of that across 7 or 8 local stores to figure out what the actual optimized shopping list is pretty hard, especially when not every retailer loves the idea of pricing transparency. And so there's something about, there's something about going up against the giants and something about going up against the status quo that still really excites me. And so with the opportunity to step back in and not just become a founder again, but try and finish what I started with Basket, my previous company that ended up not making it through the pandemic, I was really excited about the opportunity and felt like it was something that I was being called back into the arena to fight the good fight. Speaker 2 And kudos do for doing that because, well, it might seem a quote UN quote simple problem as you mentioned, it's so complex and just looking for example, at me and my wife, like when you're doing the and looking as we use here in Europe, different apps to do that. And I'm like, wait a second, how come you spend so much money on groceries comparing to anything else? Why eating healthy and everything? It's important we for sure can optimize this a bit better than like spending a ton of money on groceries and after we don't realize when we do that as much like switch me to stores and oh, I forgot to buy that and so on. But having a way to do that more efficiently. I think you're in a good fight here. And before you share a bit on how stretch works, can you go a bit back in time because you mentioned that basket didn't go through the pandemic. Challenges and Lessons from Basket What were the lessons there that you took with you? Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. So the way the basket worked, we were trying to solve a similar problem, but the way we were gathering our data was we actually crowdsourcing it. So my, the company that was at prior to building basket was Waze and I opened up a New York office for Waze and LED partnerships for them until we were acquired by Google. And in doing so, I saw the power of collective knowledge where everybody contributes a little bit of what they have and then on the back end of platform turns it into information that's really valuable for everybody. And I and when the retailers said that they were not going to help basket build our company, when we said, hey, you know, we want your data feeds and they said absolutely not, we will never give you our data feeds. We had to figure out a creative way to go get that data and that was to send people in the stores. And so we crowdsourced 118,000 grocery stores with two million different products in our database. And all of that was early machine learning and AI before, before it was what it is today. And the challenge was that when your entire business model is predicated upon people going into stores to get the data and then people going into stores to buy the groceries, and a worldwide pandemic happens where nobody goes into stores, you're in a tough spot. And there's a lot of other, you know, things that we learned in the process. You know, I think that we were probably a little bit too grandiose into the visions that we had. We were trying to do Step 14 before. We'd really done a good job on September 6, but we never had the chance to learn those lessons because we were cut short pretty quickly. Speaker 2 Yeah, but it was a crazy time for everyone. And especially when you rely on like people actually going into stores to gather data. It's you could go into stores and during the pandemic just with permission and stuff. At least I was cut in Spain and the rules there were like very hard anyway, but like how you get your data now. How Stretch Works So I assume it's still a lot on data in order to make stretch work. Like how do you make it work? Speaker 1 Yeah. So the big thing that changed after the pandemic was curbside pickup became a very popular choice in the US It was a very fast growing. I think it's, I think it's about 10% of groceries are now curbside pickup, 10% or delivery, 10% of curbside pickups, over 20% are now transacted online before you go to the store or you never go to the store if it's delivery, but 80% is still, you know, it's or. But the biggest difference in the way the data was structured now because of that is that in 2014 when I was first building ambassador.com, if you wanted to buy a box of cornflakes, walmart.com would sell it to you for $5.79, even though in the store it was 369. But they're like, if you're willing to spend a lot more to have it delivered to you. This is before Instacart and before Amazon Fresh, you know, if you were willing to spend a lot more than if you're willing to overpay, we're willing to ship it to you. But as a result, all the online prices were not the same as the in store prices. And so that was why we had to send people into stores to go gather all that information. Because of the pandemic, all major stores have structured their data to allow for zip code level certainty of both inventory and pricing. That is the type of data that we're chasing down and accessing now for Stretch, but it's still a very complicated data problem because every store sets their data up differently. They describe products that are the same product sold at different stores, have completely different descriptions to completely different attributes. Some are SEO optimized so that if you were to Google looking for for cereal, it would be the 1st result that would pop up. Others are just like it's cornflakes. And so being able to understand that this product equals this product at other stores, but then take it a step further, because store brands right at the Walmart brand or the Whole Foods brand or the Target brand of products are now like 30 or 40% of a lot of stores. And so those products are not actually carried everywhere else. And so being able to understand that this is a store brand and this is a store brand and this is the same product that this is. And so when you write your shopping list, we can literally give you the, you know, an apples to apples comparison across every store. Now it's been a huge data problem that we trade some really impressive models for equivalency for swaps, all in the service of the shopper. Speaker 2 And that's I think the key right there that you mentioned at the end, because if the shopper doesn't mean, you don't mean and you, you saw that you do as you saw that you need to put that first. But beyond this narrative that the shopper and usually the consumer needs to win, like how do you make that happen in in your life when it comes to stretch? Like how the consumer win if they use stretch. Speaker 1 Yeah, so Stretch very simply is if you give me your shopping list for a week, so you wherever most people have their shopping list, this is this was my shopping list before I started using Stretch right here, just the back of the envelope, right. I wrote down what I had on my list. And now with Stretch, I take a photo of my handwritten list and Stretch converts it into a digital list. And then you click get recommendation and then Stretch goes out and looks at every store in your area that's on the platform and says this store carries all of those products or similar products. And this is the total price for your entire shopping list at this one store. And so I mean, it's kind of funny that I was using hotels tonight over the holidays and it kind of feels like hotels tonight where you're like, show me close by hotels and here's your choices and here's your trade-offs. And you know, we like this for this reason. We like this for this reason. That's kind of the experience that you'll see very soon inside of Stretch where we're just showing you, hey, here's what the trade-offs are. At the store, it was mostly all the products that you selected, but we did a few substitutes because they don't carry that brand or whatnot. And here's the total price, it's $114.00 there, it's $133 there, it's $160 there, but they'll deliver it for you. Do you want the delivery cost more? But at least you know, again, going back to the kind of this like why do I keep thinking about this? It feels like a thing that should like when I tell people were noted, they're like, that already exists, right? I'm like, no, it doesn't like and I really believe that it should. And so I'm grateful that you know that the opportunity is still here for us to build it. And I think that the technology is finally up, the the data structure is finally caught up, the machine learning that AI have finally caught up to be able to do this complex of a challenge. Speaker 2 Come to Europe please as well. We need that here So yes, indeed it's well people think, oh, easy solution, sorry, not such a common problem and so on. It's actually very common and people are like struggling everyday to by paying extra, not having the transparency that you mentioned. And I think some apps like Global and others are still not having the equivalent of the actually store prices of certain products in their apps themselves. And you end up usually overpaying even though they advertise like free transportation and stuff like that. So having just that part like the transparency of things, it's a huge win for consumers. And while might not be much in a month, but it piles up over time and you end up in a position you just overpaid for what For nothing basically. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. People are saving about $1000 a year using stretch is what we think is possible. So average American family, you know, spent somewhere between 8:00 and $10,000 a year on groceries. You save 20%, that's over 1000, closer to $2000 depending upon how, how much, how big of the trade-offs. But even just knowing like I'm from Dallas, TX, and so I've flown American Airlines for a very, very long time. I'm probably going to fly American Airlines because I have status and there's a chance I might get the upgrade. But I don't start my purchasing decision on aa.com. I go to Kayak. I checked Kayak first because I want to make sure that like it's probably going to be American. But if Delta or United has the same flight for half the price, I'm going to start a budget. I'll take the deal. And I think that's one of the things that I learned when I was working with very rich people, the luxury days. You know, they don't care about saving money, but they do not want to overpay. They want to know how much it actually costs, and they want to know if that's the best that you could do. And I think that is a universal principle. Nobody wants to overpay. You know, not everybody cares about saving money, but nobody wants to overpay for something that they didn't need to. Speaker 2 Indeed, because often while at a basic human instinct, you feel quote, UN quote, cheated because you pay more than you should. But in the same time, like a metric, you can have a lot of savings just by doing that without overthinking. And that's the beauty of technology. And Speaking of technology, like how do you see this process in terms of when do you know, it's quote, UN quote time to stop building and actually start like growing this maybe expanding overseas and so on? Building and Validating a Startup Yeah, Reid Hoffman said the founder of LinkedIn that if the first thing that you put out in public doesn't embarrass you, you waited too long to put something out in public. So many people spend so much time tinkering and trying to make something perfect, but never get in front of, never get in front of a client, never get in front of a user. And then by the time that they do, the opportunity that they saw if somebody else did a worse version of it faster. But like if you capture the mind share of somebody and the shoppers be like, oh, that's what this app does. I think about all the apps on that phone as a button that does something right. There is a button on my phone that when I push it, a black car will show up downstairs and take me to the airport. I don't care that's called Uber. Like it's just it's a button that does something for me, right? And that's kind of the way I think about every single thing that's on all the apps that are on my phone 15 years ago when the apps were first launched. And you know, I was part of, you know, a few of those early days, like we put so much time into branding. And I'm not saying that's not important, but it's not why somebody's going to remember your app today, right? They're going to remember your apps today because it did something for you that made you feel magical at the app gave you superpowers. And that's what you want to get out there and kind of own that mind, share that when it comes to this type of activity. This is the app that I open. And so I think that's what we want to do. We put out stretch probably too early, but we've been very intentional about it. We've left, you know, a few thousand shoppers that have already joined slowly. We have over 8000 people on our wait list and so it's exciting to see all those people like starting to get those emails saying hey, stretchers ready for you and then get their feedback. When you put something out, you're like, I think this is what people are going to say and there's some things that we were correct about and some things that we weren't. But what it's all said and done to your point earlier, like if you're not serving your shopper or your user, it doesn't matter if you think it's pretty or if you think it's great. If nobody's using it, if they're not obsessed with it, doesn't matter. Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely. And that data that you gather at the beginning is gold and as you go as well. And yeah, so true when you mentioned the fact that so many people like wait for the perfect moment, build the perfect brand or whatever and perfect tools and they pushed out there and no one uses it. But even if you launch a quote UN quote messy app or messy products, if people start using it and they provide feedback and so on, it's so much better than just waiting for that perfect moment. And when it comes to these like, how do you? Draw a line between, let's say, nice to have features and things that people actually need. Like How do you identify those? Speaker 1 Yeah, There's an old teacher that I used to follow. He talked a lot about via negativa, which is growth through subtraction. And when you think about anything that you have figure out if you can cut away 20% and then look at it again and say, can I cut away 20% and look at it again and say can I cut away another 20%? And just keep going until you understand the one thing that this piece of technology does for somebody is this one thing. And if you own that one thing in their mind, then you can start to add back. And then it could also do this. But you know, minimum daily activity is something that I think a lot about when they open the app, that what's the one thing that they're going to do every single time? When they open your software, what is the one thing they're going to do every single time? When they walk into your store, what's the one thing they're going to do every single time? And optimize your entire business plan around that repeatable behavior to where when they think about doing that thing, they only think about you. And I think that's, you know, that's the challenge that I've given to our products team, you know, is that, you know, if you think about all of the things that you could do with a grocery list, all the information that you learn about somebody from a grocery list, all the ways you could make it healthier, you can make it cheaper, you can make it faster, you can make it more convenient. You could, you know, make it dairy free. You could make it vegan, you could make it, you know, protein rich, all of those very fun, great fun features. But if we don't do the very, very first thing, which is price my shopping list at local stores, very simply, if we don't do that, nobody's going to return for all the other stuff that we'll be able to do one day. Speaker 2 Exactly And that basically the foundation of success of all the major apps out there like the national bar and others like ways and so on. Like every single time I look in ways, I know that's all right. If something happens on the roads, I'll know it's before I arrive at that point and you'll drive me to the destination way better than Google Maps and so on. So all these more details that for us that maybe most of us would take it for granted, this type of convenience. But at least I'm in my 40s and I, I didn't grow up with apps and so on. And I had to wait for the bus for half an hour, not knowing exactly the moment it arrived. But all these small apps that are doing so much better and being a convenience in our life, it's a lot of saving when it comes not just to money, but mentals like cognitive wise as well. And that's a big plus because often if you don't do these things automatically, Oh, I have to go in that place. I order, I have to get my shopping list. I use stretch and those small things that takes now a few seconds to do. It could took half an hour just to oh, if I were to go to that destination, I have to plan this. If I have to purchase all these shopping of these groceries, I have to like check, I don't know how many stores enter all those stores comparing prices and whatever you do. And that takes time, mental energy and a lot of effort. That's we take it for granted. And that's why I'm so passionate about people like you that are truly saving a huge problem that we face without even realizing you're facing it. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, when I'm also in my 40s and last year this was not on my bingo card, but I kept going viral on TikTok for telling people that there was, you know, that I was building an app that was going to make it easier for them to, you know, have price of transparency for their groceries. And the first time I put up a screenshot of the app, it was, you know, it was like early days. It's different. It looks different now that you know, what we launched. Like I just want to show conceptually this is what I'm trying to build. You know, I have a few 100 followers and that, yes, I said this is this should exist in the world. And that video got 1000 comments of people being like, please let me know when this happens. Like it was a very simple, it was like, here's my groceries, here's the prices, right? Just that simple, you know, price by price. My shopping list at local stores and people saw it from one screenshot and they just were like, please tell me when this lunch is live. You're a hero, not wearing a Cape, you're doing God's work. All sorts of really funny, you know, Internet comments, but all very encouraging for me and for my team to say, yeah, we're on to something, that people really want this. Speaker 2 That's a nice validation to get early on, and I think that's a huge green flag for everyone listening. They have that problem that they're facing and they know probably others are facing too and they don't know how to approach when it comes to validation. And apart from that, because often you didn't have a lot of control over that potential of the video and so on. But what other validation methods are using or using the past in order to validate business ideas? Speaker 1 So there's nothing better than talking to the people who will get the most value from the idea that you have, not talking to them about hey, I'm going to build something, but say, hey, would you do this activity? Would you engage in this routine? What what? What hurts what? Where's the pain? What's the most annoying thing? I would tell anybody who wants to build a company. If you spend one month writing down everything that annoys you, just write down all the things that like, really, really bother you. You're going to find one of those that is the thing that bothers you the most, that you should think about creating a solution for. The only thing that's holding people back is their imagination. There's so many problems to solve. And if you find the thing that is, this is the problem I want to be responsible for solving, it makes such a huge difference. The Business Idea Test I think that like, whatever I think about a new business idea, I asked the question in my head, is it a multivitamin or is it a painkiller? It's like this morning, you know, leaving my apartment all the way to an investor meeting and I realized, Oh my gosh, I didn't take my multivitamins. I didn't take my vitamins this morning. I'm not going to pull over to a pharmacy and buy my vitamins so I can take them before I go to work. I was like, I forgot to do it today. I'll do it tomorrow. But if I have a headache, if I'm in pain, like I'm 100% going to pull over, go to the pharmacy, get some aspirin, get some pain relief so I can go on with my day. The best ideas are painkillers, not nice to have multi measurements. Speaker 2 Absolutely. And especially if we face them on a daily basis or often, even sometimes more often than that, then it's a good sign. Like, all right, maybe I should do something about it or look to see if there's already solutions and if even if there are solutions out there, maybe the solution are may not ideal or doesn't work the way you think it should work. And, and then the follow up comes like that you mentioned, like talk to those that might have the same problem and see if indeed that that validates. And so now we are having a waiting list as well. So, but at the beginning like how did you truly start to get a traction and see right guys, we are building this. Understanding Your Customers with Surveys Yeah, we interviewed over 1000 shoppers last summer. We did a survey and it was like 33 questions. And we just said, we just want to understand what is it like to be a grocery shopper in 2025? And so that report is available on our website. So we can see all see all the things that we learned. We've actually been able to give it to a lot of people in the grocery industry to say this is the reality. You know, 84% of Americans are worried about the price of groceries. They're worried that they won't be able to buy as many groceries next month as they bought this month. You know, doesn't matter your socioeconomic class. Everybody is feeling it for the first time in a really long time. And I think that the stat that was the one that really ripped my heart out is 17% of the people that we talked to had skipped a meal so that somebody else in their household didn't have to. And it's just such a crazy statistic, right, To think that's the reality that we're living in. And and the buy now, pay later companies like those are supposed to be used for like emergencies. Your car broke down, but you have money saved. You know, people are using buy now, pay later to buy their groceries, right? And, you know, buying groceries, feeding your family is not optional. And I think that's where you just, you know, it just really breaks my heart. You know, it's the reason that me and the team wake up and crack as hard as we do. There's 10s of millions, if not 100 million Americans who really need to have better control of, you know, or better information to control how much they spend feeding their families. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's crazy when you think about it. And I personally grew up in a community, Romania. And like for four years after I I was born, Romeo was under comedies. And I remember the stories of my grandparents. I remember the stories of my parents like having to do this type of sacrifice, like skipping meals in order for us to get some food or not having access to to like proper food and so on. And nowadays, like we are in 2026, it's crazy to think that we still have this type of issues around the world, not just in the United States, but all all over the world. Like prices are skyrocket for various reasons and still there are solutions and there are solutions to find options in order to be able to still get your groceries even if it's the minimum necessary. But you can do it if you make smart choices like using apps like yours and and what better drive as an entrepreneur to have than to solve such problems. And Speaking of the the anti the entrepreneur, what do you think about the new grow when you wake up? Like apart from all right, So we need to push this to as many people as possible so everyone can make an informed decision. What else goes through your mind? The CEO’s Role Yeah. You know, as as the CEO of the company, you know, I have three jobs, commitment to the vision. My boss is the vision. I am the first follower of the vision. That's the vision. I'm ruthless about where we're going and what we're trying to do, who we're trying to serve. I'm flexible on how we get there, but I'm like the destination that's not waivered. So that's number one. Number one is, you know, commitment to the vision #2 don't run out of money. That's number two, right? Through sales, through fundraising, whatever it is, don't run out of money and #3 is make sure that my team is unblocked to do their best work. And pretty much that's my entire day is ruthless commitment to the vision, working to make sure we don't run out of money. Make sure that I can just move blockades and Rd. barriers for my team doing their best work. If they're slowed down by anything, my job is to figure out how to make them go faster, how to help them there. You know how to help them do their best work. Speaker 2 Sorry, can you give me some specific examples like some of the challenge that they face on a daily basis to kind of paint the picture of what it looks like behind the scenes? Speaker 1 Yeah. So I can I go in order with commitment to the vision, because everyone grocery shops, everyone has their version of grocery shopping, right? And some people, and so they're like, oh, and then you're actually do this. And even on our team, right, we all come from different backgrounds. We all are different stages of life. Where some of us are, there's a member of our team who's 25. There's a member of our team who just turned 60, right? They grocery shop in very different ways, right? But they both feed themselves. They both feed their families. They both buy groceries. And so their point of view is, well, this is how I do it. And the app doesn't let me do that yet. I was like, OK, understood. But here's the thousand shoppers that we spoke to, and here's the common denominators around local price. My list at local stores, right? But here's all those ideas. So these post notes that you see on my shoulder are like future things that we want to do. So they're acknowledged, they're logged, but they're for the future. Running out of money. You got to think about the timing of your next funding round. You got to make sure that you have enough time to introduce the concept to people that investors know who you are, that you're, that you're in cadence with that, and also that you're building out revenue channels. We're super early. We're less than a year old, but we raised $1.5 million in about 3 weeks last summer when we told people what we wanted to do. And I had a lot of connections previously. And so I was able to do that, call friends and said, hey, this is what we're going to do. But he knew it was working when investors started introducing me to other investors like, hey, you should invest this too. And so that's a whole piece of the puzzle of just like understanding, especially early stage, like what's the timing? What's your burn? How much time do you have before you either have to go raise more money or you have to, you know, break even with revenue? But then the third, and this is the one that I think I spend I will spend most of my time on for the rest of the history of Stretch, it's just making sure that every team has what they need to do their best work. With the rise of AI and all the tools that exist there, you know, we have a rule at the company that if anybody does something three times a week, we have to build an AI workflow to do it for them, right? If you have to do something three times a week, you shouldn't do it anymore, right? We can build an agent, we can build a workflow that will help you do that, and you can automate it and figure out the endpoints and what it should look for on your behalf. But between cloud Co work and cloud code and everything else that's popping up, it's pretty incredible to what the efficiencies that happened, but also just freeing people up to think more deeply about challenges. There's ultimately what I hope that these tools are going to allow us to do so that we could be even faster as we move forward. So that's a little bit of what the any given day for me looks like is thinking through who are we building this for talking to shoppers as much as I can. Make sure that we're committed to that vision. Don't run out of money and make sure the team is. Speaker 2 Unblocked. Nice. I like that. Fundraising and Maintaining Control And I want to dive a bit deeper into the never running out of money part because at least from outside it might come to the expense of your vision. How do you make sure that doesn't happen like when you when you draw a line between all rights. This can be a huge investment rounds but I may lose control over the app I. Speaker 1 Mean, I think that if you build the right company and serve the shoppers, right, and you can serve your users and you can get to the point where you have a fanatical audience, right? You know, it's not the best app, but you have a fanatical audience and if you took the app away, they'd be really mad. When you have that type, you've built that type of company. Fundraising is just as much finding the right partners as it is finding somebody who will write a check. And I think that's the most people are able to raise funds because they haven't built something that has that type of commitment to from their audience or from their clients. But if you do, you get more options, you have better choices. And so I think that's where we're building a really, really great product opens up those doors for you. But I think that it's being very clear when I talk to investors about what we're building this for the shopper. And that means we're not going to have vertical integrated B to B SAS revenue in year 1. And if you want us to be a vertical B to B SAS company, then you should not invest. And it's OK. It's OK. You know, there's a lot of different VCs, there's a lot of different investors, but being very clear about what you are and what you're not is one of the most important thing that they that a founder can do. Because there are far too many stories of people giving away control their company because they weren't clear about what their actual intentions were. And VCs were like, hey, look, if you're not going to do it, we're going to have to do it. And they either replace the founder or they had to vote out the Co founder or whatever it is. I've unfortunately experienced that, but in companies that have been a part of where the leadership team just wasn't as committed as every hope they were and either sold too soon or they made compromises to please an investor. And you hate to see it, but it's pretty easy when you're about to run out of money and they're like, you got to change this. And then we'll give you a check. You're like, OK, I'll change it. But if you're really going back to #1 if you're truly committed to that vision, then you know, then you'll say, OK, then we should shut this thing down. Because there's literally nothing worse than working really hard building a company that you hate. Speaker 2 Yeah, true. And the reason why I ask is because I was as a contractor, part of the marketing team of a startup. And I was part of that team because I love their vision. And they race around that around until one point in which they literally give up control because the pressure of the the investor were so high that they just start pushing out features that the end user didn't need and then replacing team. All the crazy stories that you hear in this space. And that's why I'm like, what if at one point, let's Fast forward to five years from now, it's your app is across America, it's used everywhere. You're pushed to expand to Europe, to Asia maybe, and so on. And in order to do that, you need to raise more money but give up more control. What do you do? Speaker 1 I think, you know, it's a question for that time. You know, for what's worth, I hope I have that problem of answering that question, But I think that with grocery shopping in particular, there's a certain way it's done in every country and it's a little bit different. And if it felt like there was a real clear opportunity to be able to take what we've built and we would be able to launch new markets with it, then we would obviously we would consider it. There's so many different ways that data is structured in every market. And it's hard enough just in the US with the US players, right? I think that we're, there's hundreds of millions of Americans who are are struggling to feed their families right now. And we're going to start there. And if we're successful there, I think the there will be other opportunities. Our friends in Canada have already been like, wait, why is this not available in Canada? And Canada is a little bit closer to the US as far as like the way the grocery stores work, but we're pretty heads down focused on this. But I think that there comes a time in every company where, you know, the question is, do you still believe in the vision? And if the vision is serve the shopper and price out your local, price out your local grocery list, that doesn't say serve the American shopper, it says serve the shopper. And so if that still was true and there was a clear path for expansion geographically, then of course, we think about it. If it's at the expense of the vision, if we have to give up the vision to go to expand, that would be a very hard board meeting and I'd probably pound my fist on the table. Speaker 2 Yeah, as you should. And now I want to throw a cover ball at you. Like, how do you address the fact that maybe at some points, at least judging by the way major AI players look at things, what if they launch a competitor and they have, of course, bigger infrastructure, manpower and everything? Facing Competition from Major AI Players How will you see that or address that? Speaker 1 Yeah. I think, you know, it's a thing that we think about a lot, but I think that what one of the things that's been really encouraging for us is all of the big players are building things that serve the retailers. Speaker 2 Good point, yeah. Speaker 1 They're all building for Walmart, they're all building for Amazon, they're all building for Instagram. And that makes sense. They should. It's actually, you know, that makes a lot of sense, right? They can just, they close one big corporate deal and have have a big play, but no one's building for the shopper because it's too fragmented, it's too complex. The data sets are all are very disparate. The personalization is challenging. And I think that's where you know where we have a real opportunity is to build for the shopper and to start from the ground up for the shopper players. They already have all their contracts in place with the retailers and with the brands. But if we start and say hey, from day one we are shopping first, From day one we're doing this and building price and transparency, we know that it'll probably frustrate some people. But the Realtors didn't like Zillow and the travel agents didn't like Expedia and the pharmacists don't like Goodrx. Because people like the status quo. If status quo works for you, you like status quo and a lot of no shade to, you know, to people at Open AI and Tropic and Gemini, but a lot of what they're building is they're taking something that works and they're making it 10% better. It is not different, right? The fact that I can, I can complete a transaction inside of ChatGPT instead of on walmart.com is not interesting. It's just different. It's not making me smarter as a shopper. It's just selling me things on a different website and I don't, I'm not very impressed by that. And so I think that there is a real opportunity to build shopper first to say this is what shoppers are looking for. This is the pain that shoppers are in. This is the help that shoppers say that they need. And if we do that, we win. Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely. And you have a swelled the history talking about is like apps like Uber and others focus exactly on that commodity and consumer first, not like serving, let's say I don't know, some big taxi companies or whatever. And that's what the future, at least in my view as well, looks like. Now of course time will tell, but I truly admire what to do and truly admire and like truly solving a problem that is real. It's putting pressure on a lot of households when it comes to grocery shopping. And I think if more and more people will start looking at things as you do as an entrepreneur, we'll be in front of a better world to each. We'll have less problems and more time to think about the real challenges in lives. And I want to end up with that like you as as a human being, like what are your biggest problems as an entrepreneur that are maybe not necessarily related to to your business? Balancing Life and Work as A Founder I'm really, really hard on myself. I don't think I've, I don't think I've anywhere close to being to, to doing good work yet. And I've done a lot of cool stuff, but I am constantly looking at ways that I can be better. And so sometimes I'm kind about it, but a lot of times I'm not that kind about it. A lot of times I'm pretty, pretty hard on myself and lay awake at night beating myself up about like how I could have done something better yesterday. And, and that's pretty, that's pretty common for high achievers and for entrepreneurs and for people that are kind of unreasonable with the world. I've always had really high expectations of myself and of others of the world around me. And when you, when you have a vision for how things could be better and they're not yet better, you just get really frustrated. I'm not as good as I want to be. My company's not as good as I want it to be. The world's not as good as I want it to be. And I can see how all those things could happen, but I'm not very patient and I really want these things to happen sooner. So I think it's something that I'm very grateful that I have amazing friends. My wife is absolutely the greatest thing that ever happened to me. She lets me be crazy, but then she's like, alright, enough crazy, Come on back, come on back. Give me a hug, give me a hug. You'll be a little too crazy right now. So I'm very grateful for her. My daughter, 6 month old, my daughter, six months old. And when I get home from work, I just get to hold her before bedtime. There's nothing better than that. That's the best drug in the world. You know, I just hold her. It's give her a kiss of the forehead and settle down just a little bit. But during the work day, if I'm spending any minute away from my daughter, if I'm sitting any minute away from my wife, like I wanted to be the most impactful minute possible. And sometimes it is and sometimes it's not. And when it's not, I get frustrated with myself. Speaker 2 Yeah, man, I can resume it so much. Like I literally listened before entering the recording. I was in the gym and I was listening to a podcast episode. Shout out to Doctor Margaret Rutherford. The podcast is called Self Work and was exactly about this. Like this self talk that you have and often negative might be driven us forward but in the same time is like putting a dent on ourselves. And we definitely as entrepreneurs and as different people, we need to be more kind because we already achieved so much and in the same time we are moving forward without having to be so harsh. So, but I appreciate the fact that you keep it real and paint us all the picture of what tree means to to be there in the trenches and building businesses, solving humanity basically problems. And yeah, I wish more people would talk more open about this, because we need to know as well that it's not easy to do what you do. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. That's why I tell people all the time, you have to fall in love with the problem that you're solving, not the solution. You're making the problem that you're solving. Because the solution will change. It'll change a bunch of different times, but if you fall over the problem that you're solving, you will keep fighting until that problem has been solved. And that is it was a much clearer sign of success then I was able to launch watch an app, you know, OK, cool. But do people still struggle to feed their families? Yes, that I'm not done. And that's that's what I would encourage people to do is fall in love with the problem that you're solving. Follow the people who have that problem and do everything you can to serve them better than anybody's ever served them, and success will follow. Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely. And you throw it back at me with that. I want to know just one thing, like what would be the next step then in the process of solving this problem once the app it's like serving millions and so on. Do you have anything in mind already or? Solving Grocery Industry Inefficiencies I think that there's a lot of inefficiencies in the grocery industry, inventory, pricing. There's a lot of a lot of old ways that things have been done. And if, if we're doing a good job of helping shoppers, we're going to listen to the shoppers and say, you know, what's the most annoying part about buying groceries? What do you wish was different? What do you wish could change? And I think that that's the, that's what we're earning the opportunity to do is to understand what is the next problem that is second order effect or a third order effect from the problem that we're solving now. But we started with the big problem. And then if we do this right, we earn the opportunity to expand into other things. Speaker 2 Love it, love it. How do how you progressively thinking about it and for anyone listening, this was Andy Elwood on at 30 in the wild and make sure if you check him out and stretch AI platform to see how you can make better this year when it comes to shopping your groceries. Thank you so much, Andy, for joining us today and thanks everyone for tuning in. Until next time, put a video.