Reimagining groceries for the everyday shopper, with Andy Ellwood, Founder & CEO of Stretch

[MUSIC] >> Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Tech Can Save Us Podcast, brought to you by Leros Humans. As always, I am Paul David, Founding CEO of Leros Humans, and your host. And we're joined today by Andy Lwood, who's the founder and CEO of Stretch. And we're going to talk about reimagining groceries for the everyday shopper. Welcome, Andy. >> Hey, thanks so much for having me. >> Sadly, we're here. >> Yeah, good to have you in from New York. So by way of introduction, Andy and the company's working. He's leading, I should say. They're reimagining the grocery experience at a time when everyday families are facing rising prices, are confusing choices, and massive shifts in how they shop. Andy's career is one of the most eclectic and accomplished that we've seen on the pod. He sold private jets for Warren Buffett. We're going to talk about that. Built startups that sold to Facebook and Google. Just small internet companies you may have heard of. And led business development at ways, which millions of people on the road are using. So well done there. And coach founders and executives across some of the world's top organizations. Now, a stretch. He's building the first shopping intelligence platform designed to put consumers at the center, turning millions of individual shopping decisions into collective insights that help families save money while strengthening the entire retail ecosystem. And we know that really needs some help right now. Andy calls it "making room for many." And today we're diving into what that means and why grocery innovation matter is more than ever. Welcome back, Andy. Welcome to pod. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like I knew you already from that introduction. Yeah. Let's get into it. One of the first things we ask is kind of help paint the picture. Give us the landscape for why the grocery industry needs reimagining right now. We've talked about families dealing with prices and choices and inconsistent promotions. What is breaking down in the traditional experience right now? Grocery experience. Yeah, I think that the shopper is starting to understand that it's one of the few areas where information parity has not happened for them. You think about a lot of the other major purchases that we make as far as like use of household income, our homes, our cars, the way we travel, even medical prescriptions where we buy gas. There are companies that have come in and defund the space and given power to the consumer to actually be able to understand what their choices are. So, think about what Zillow did for buying a home. Previously, all of the information was held by the person trying to sell you the home and you couldn't do any research on your own. You had to go through somebody else. There was a gatekeeper to that information. Same thing with travel back in the 90s when the airlines they told you the price and it must be called every airline. You didn't know. But then companies like Expedia started to come on board. But even more recently, with good RX for prescription drugs, gas buddy for fuel prices, for a lot of the things that we purchase, we actually now understand what our options are and make the choice that's important to us. Like, I find American airlines most of the time because I've status and, you know, but I don't actually originate my flight choice on AA.com. I go to kayak. I look to see what all my choices are, toggle between the different choices. And I'll probably still pick American, but I like to know that it's not twice as expensive as Delta or United. Like, I'm not trying to fly spirit necessarily. But I want to know that like of the major airlines that are going to the same airports that I'm flying to, what my choices are. And with grocery, the thing that we buy most frequently and for most families is in the top three uses of their household after tax money, we go to a local store, hope that they carry the things that we are wanting to purchase that week and hope that they're charging us a fair price. But we definitely don't drive to two or three other grocery stores to compare those prices first. And even with the advent of retailer apps, families are spending two to three hours a week recreating the same shopping list across multiple retailer apps to see if they can get that information and make that decision. But it's a lot of time and they may or may not be actually getting all the information that they need. And that was what we thought, how do we put the power back in the hands of the shopper? Yeah, I mean, let's get into that. So like consumer expectations. I mean, there's obviously been a shift in recent years and you know, we've got inflation. There's loyalty, fatigue, digital first, you know, shopping. Tell us about how consumer expectations have shifted and how you're trying to respond to that. Yeah, people are doing whatever they can to get that information. You know, the grocery prices are up almost 30% since the pandemic and there really isn't any pressure to bring them down, right? The status quo is okay if you're a retailer. There was like, nope, that's what it costs now. And you know, the question is, is like, does that really what it costs? Like other things have come back down. But once grocery prices go to a certain level, very rarely do they ever decrease. And I think people are pretty fed up with the idea that they don't have any power in the marketplace that their demand actually is not changing the way that they interact with those who supply. And I think that that's what we're trying to show is that in the same way, like when I worked at Ways, we put a ton of traffic, a ton of people in traffic together and they help each other at the same time. We're asking the same question if we put a ton of shoppers together and they're sharing pieces of their information and the platform and aggregating on the back end, do they have more power than they would otherwise? Yeah, and Ways is such a powerful example. Like you can really feel and understand like how the movement of traffic and giving people information about that impacts of how people would drive decisions people make, obviously. So yeah. Well, I've done understand like, what do you see as the biggest gap or the biggest gaps between how retailers are operating? You kind of alluded to this. And what shoppers actually want and need? Yeah, I think that we're all just trying to feed our families at the end of the day. Like the basic function of I need things in my pantry, in my fridge to feed my family. So it's not an optional choice. Like buying a flight, most cases it's actually an option. Like you could drive, you could take a train, you could not take the trip. Fiener families is something we have to do and people have tried all sorts of different ways to have a better understanding of what's best choice for them. But even just the way that different loyalty programs, you know, loyalty fatigued, you know, hear a lot of that these days. But the thing that, you know, earlier this year, we talked to a thousand shoppers in the month of August and we said, what has changed the most about the way that you shop for groceries in the past six months? And there was a lot of people who talked about trading down. Going for store brands instead of the national brands, going to discount retailers as opposed to some of the big bucks more brand name, ordering less online and going more in person. And the biggest shift we saw was not actually in low income families or low middle income families, but it was in upper class families and upper middle class. The biggest shifts were happening in those two sets of demographics because the other ones had already traded down as much as they were going to. We heard from the lower income families that they traded down to the best that they could. They were getting savvy everywhere that they could and they were actually considering it started to skip meals. That was their next choice. And so for the first time ever, because of the price of grocery being what it is now, upper middle class and upper class families are feeling the cost of groceries. And I think that it started to get national attention. You know, talking about groceries, got someone elected president, got someone elected mayor of New York City. And I think that in the 2026 midterms, it's going to be an affordability conversation for a lot of the kids that are running. Yeah, you're hearing and seeing that in the ether there. So you're at the heart of current and forthcoming of political debate. So good luck to you with that. So I mean, that's a perfect opportunity. Let's get into it. So we have the circumstance. We're finally not finally. But now upper class and middle class families are feeling it. Obviously, folks lower on the income scale are feeling the squeeze and being super savvy about it. And I think that's great to have the understanding of respect of what it really means to pinch those pennies at that level. Like, my God, how are you helping families across the income spectrum save money and shop smarter? And so stretch, we just launched our mobile app, available for Apple and for Android. And it's pretty simple. If you give us your shopping list this week, your grocery list, here's things I'm going to buy this week. We run it through our backend and a little little fancy AI and some smart tech that we built. And we show you all of the stores that are on the platform close by to you. And then what the total price for entire basket of goods is at each of those different stores. So you've got 25 items on your list. We're going to show you 25 items at an Aldi 25 items at Dollar General, 25 items at a Walmart, 25 items at a Target, 25 items at Kroger. And you're going to be able to say, all right, so turning left or turning right out of my driveway saves me 30 bucks. And that's what we're seeing anywhere from $20 to $40 per week of savings that are available simply by checking with Stripe First. And that adds up, you know, it's a couple thousand dollars a year when you flush it all the way out. This is simply by checking a free app. And by giving that information to shoppers, it's not always about price. They're also understanding, all right, for convenience purposes, this store is actually closer. And it's $5 more than the store that I could save more money at. But that one's a little bit further out of my way. So I'm, you know, the tradeoff for me because I've got three kids in the backseat of my car, is I'm just having the store that's closer on my way home. For other people, you know, the kids are in school. They're at soccer practice. They're at friends' birthday party on a Saturday. I'll drive a little bit further to save more. But just even being able to decide that before you get to the store is huge, right? When you're seeing this out of the store, I hear from a lot of shoppers that they they price compare once they're at the store. Yeah. But like, you're not going to switch stores. You're not going to go to a different store because Pennay Pasta is 48 cents more, right? So you need to know ahead of time. And so kind of the tradeoff is, you're giving us the shopping list so we can understand. It's kind of a prompt, if you will, in the, you know, the chatbot world that we live in. The prompt is, I want to buy these 25 items. The response is, here's the stores that carry them. And here's what the total price is. And we let you make the decision on what you do next. It's really interesting. I mean, and you're building a whole ecosystem that can use stretch for the groceries. They can use ways to decide how to drive there. I mean, it's really impressive. Yeah. I think about this collective knowledge, right? That when you contribute a small piece of information to a greater ecosystem, you get back a bunch of personalized information and small little bits that if you and I were texting each other, Hey, what price did you see? That's not enough information. But when you band together, when you have a community first approach and say, hey, I'll contribute a little bit of my information, whether it's the price that I paid for something that was on sale or that the store is out of stock on something, all that information goes into the back end and then it helps everybody. So just to be clear, the prices are coming from, are they coming from shoppers? Are they coming from the retailers? Or both? They're coming from the mix in both. Okay, gotcha. So what publicly available information about price and inventory, which is now more available than it was pre-pandemic. Thanks to curbside pickup and Instacart and some of the other delivery options. But then we're starting to have shoppers actually confirm and verify prices as well. And that's something that will continue to double down on. But we've also had retailers reach out to us already who said, hey, you know, I see you don't help us on the map yet. How do we get our prices on the map? And so that's an important thing because they have to be in the consideration set in order for them to be able to compete. Okay, you answered my question. I was like, why are retail's playing ball with this? But you're driving potential traffic to them. So that's the answer. I want to ask about patterns or behaviors that have surprised you as you built the platform. I mean, I'm seeing and feeling this. I consider myself, you know, class over middle class and here in the UK and me and my partner, you know, we're both working double income, no kids. We're starting to be like, okay, simply fresh. Near us, man, we could pop over to Asda. Walk a little bit further, right? Like, and I've never really thought that way before. You know, like, I mean, I haven't obviously grown up, but like, at this day and age, it's kind of like, wow, like, I didn't think I would be 40 years old, a full working professional and like, starting to make those choices about groceries. So yeah, what are you seeing in the behavior patterns that, you know, the users on your platform so far? Yeah, once somebody sees their shoppilist on a map and everybody in the area that will give them, you know, the total price for each of those baskets, they're kind of like, wait, why? Why did this not exist before? And it's funny because it seems like something that is like, no, no, that exists. And that was, you know, our thought when we started to build it, we're like, you know, obviously this exists somewhere. And when you realize that it doesn't, it's kind of like, wow, okay, this took a while. But what's really interesting is if you think about the grocery industry, it was one of the last to really be impacted by e-commerce, right? The idea of online grocery shopping really didn't take off until 2014, 2015 when Instacart started to put a notch in the offline versus online world. But that was because of all of the infrastructure that was necessary in order for online grocery to exist. But when you think about what's happening now and the beginning of e-gentic commerce, it actually might be one of the first things that e-gentic commerce is able to deal with in an appropriate and helpful way, because it doesn't require the AI to understand your style or your taste or what else is in your house or in your wardrobe. If I want to buy a pair of, you know, new shoes, right? Well, what is it? What size do you know? There's a lot of different things that go into it. Like, what style do I like? But if it's, you know, I need to get butter and milk and eggs, the same butter and milk that I got last week, there's a way for it to understand kind of a repeatable thing. And that's something that I think is really going to give us a really interesting grocery as a wedge into the e-gentic future of commerce. And it might actually inform the way that a lot of other things are built out down the road. Interesting. I love that phrase. Grocery has a wedge into the future of e-gentic commerce. That's fascinating. Talk to me about the data piece here. So like, how are you turning millions of individual shopping decisions into actual insights that benefit all consumers and it sounds like retailers? Yeah. Yeah. This has been the piece that we've been in the laboratory, you know, installed for the first four or five months, you know, since we launched. Just really try to figure out because the inefficiencies that are entrenched in the grocery industry have a lot to do with never needing to be cross-retailer data information. So if you think about all the store brands that have popped up, you know, the Walmart brands versus the target brands versus the Kroger brands, there's no reason that for anybody to have ever built an equivalency language model to understand that this equals this equals this. And even when you think about national brands, like how do that Cheerios is labeled something completely different? Well, yeah, Walmart that it is, that target that it is at Kroger. And so being able to understand that this product equals that product equals that product for the purpose of comparing across retailers is a really, really huge data mode that we've been able to solve. And with the use of different language models and being able to understand that at scale, it's given us a head start that I think is going to be really valuable for us down the line. But ultimately, it's because we're going shopper first. Everything we do is how do we save shoppers more money? How do we give shoppers more chance? How do we give that family who's trying to figure out how to make it to the end of the month? More dignity and agency and what they can do with the time and the budget that they have. And if we start there, a lot of other things get solved. And I think that that's where we really feel like there's a huge opportunity for us to be that Zillow or that Expedia or that gas buddy of groceries. Yeah, I really appreciate the tone and tenor of what you're speaking because one thing we really push is really investing in human emotion and behavioral science. Our entire team is trained in it. And just getting brands, particularly B2B brands, to talk that way and a dignity, agency. If you center on that stuff, you build everything else around it. It's what it sounds like, Andy, so I so appreciate that. I mean, it sounds like you're already winning on that. So well done. Let's get into the opportunities and challenges in building a consumer first grocery platform. So obviously, grocery is a massive traditional industry. I want you to talk us through some of the biggest barriers that you've experienced trying to innovate there. And then how are you balancing or serving consumers, but also creating value for retailers and brands there? Yeah, we had to make a choice where we founded the company of whether we were going to try and define a category or help the existing infrastructure be a little bit better. And there are a lot of really great, really great companies that will make the existing industry be more efficient and save time in their other ERP and maybe get things refrigerated a little bit quicker and checked out a little bit faster. And that's awesome. If that's what you're passionate about, like rock on. But we said there's a big swing to take here by going to shop first and being okay with being the one who poked the bear. And saying we're going to not necessarily say we have to care what the existing industry thinks because existing industries exist because they like the status quo. And we said what if we were just to go first principle thinking? What is the purpose of the grocery industry? It is to get food from farms to fork. Are all of the ways in which it goes from farm to fork currently necessary? And what would we do if we did it differently? What if we just re-imagined grocery from the shoppers point of view and said I'm a shopper and this is what I need in order for this to make sense for me. And the lack of information that shoppers have to make decisions based on what's best for them was really where we kind of zero it and we said if we solve that, if we serve the shopper, serve the shopper, serve the shopper, a lot of other things will become available to us. And so that's where we really feel like we have the opportunity to not need to make everybody happy on day one but to align incentives as we go. And I think that's ultimately an everyone's best interest but it does mean some things have to be rethought. And so that's where kind of the position that we've taken, you know, we're all of six months old as a company. But we've done a lot in that time frame and I think that's just because of my background and some of the ways that I've been exposed and thought about this and a lot of the incredible people who have come around the company already. We're just really proud of the investors, the advisors and the team that has already said, yeah, that's worth building in 2025. Amazing. I want to get back to growth in a second but I want to ask a question again about AI and automation and data. Obviously, it's reshaping retail pretty significantly. Where do you see stretch fitting in that sort of ecosystem? And talk to you a little bit more about how you're leveraging AI. You mentioned agentic. Give us a bit more on the AI and automation front if you can. Yeah, sure. So it's been important for us to think through each piece of the puzzle and say, how much of that do we need to do and how much of that can we automate? And we have a rule called the rule of threes, which is if something happens more than three times a week, we build AI to do it for us. And that's just an internal rule. We've got some amazing folks on the team who we do AI show until every Friday and anything that you saw this week that made you say, maybe that's something we should consider in the roadmap. We talk about it on Fridays as a team. And so we think about that, everything from the way that we're running advertising, the way that we're onboarding shoppers, to the way that we're triggering the data, organizing, categorizing the equivalencies that I mentioned previously, the way that we're presenting it within the app. We want to look and feel like magic. But we're not posting, this is an AI. We're saying this is a smart shopping list. And because it's the same that this is AI is kind of like saying, this was created with Excel. You know, at certain point, everybody knows you use Excel, but it's not necessarily the thing you have to brand. You know, there's a moment for the past three years that this is an AI thing. But now AI is technology and it's just the thing we're using. And so I think that that's where we really think about it. But then we think about the learning cycles. Right? Every cycle that we go through, whether it's a day or a week or a sprint, is giving us that much more information to inform what we do next. And so even just thinking about the curation of the most current piece of data around how we treat prices, how we treat products, how we treat retailers, how we treat shoppers, we're very intentional about the way that we organize all of that on the backend. So everybody's operating from the same source code, if you will. Because you can, you know, at a certain point, sometimes it feels like AI is making the map bigger than the territory. And people just have so much slop that's in their database, that's in their Google Drive folder. It's really easy to run a report that no one's going to read. But how do you find those insights? How do you find those pieces? And we're thinking about that for us in the way that we're building the company. But also, if we present anything to the shopper on the front side, it has to be actionable. It has to be something that they can really use to make that simple decision of how do I want to feed my family this week. Yeah, I love that. You know, wanted to look and feel like magic. I think, I think, like, product experience is absolutely critical. And I keep coming back to this phrase from a founder I interviewed in San Francisco in January. But, you know, the best mode is people loving your products. I think I've said it in many episodes. It's just like, I love that. Yeah, and as a marketer, I'm like, absolutely, take me out of the picture. Like, kill your marketing budget. If your product is great and it just sells itself, absolutely. I have enough humility to admit that. So yeah, it's great to hear that you're building with that intention. And, but also, you know, being careful in circumspect about AI's role and that piece about it, you know, making the map bigger than the territory is absolutely true. So, so we've got to be careful. Appreciate that. Yeah. Talking about growth strategy, we'd be remiss if we didn't ask a few questions about this. We're growth checks, Alton C. Yeah. An agency. You're six months in. What's the roadmap for 2026? How are you going to staff your growth function? What are the gaps you're seeing and feeling? You know, what's the trajectory look like? Yeah, so we came out of stealth, first week of October. And then we launched the company, you know, third week of November. And we were really fortunate that we had over 7,500 people join our wait list. And that happened mostly because of social media. Climbed cringe mountain, starting in September. And posted three times a day on TikTok. Every day talking about groceries and how they're too damn high. And found a lot of other people who agreed with me. And it's, I gotta be honest, you know, as a 43 year old new dad, I don't think I've ever said I went viral on TikTok, but it happened a few times. And the comments that we got when I just showed a screenshot of what of what stretch was going to become, we got over 1,000 comments of people saying, "Please make this. I'll do anything. I'll pay whatever cost." And it's a free app. And I just, it was so much fun to just write back. It's free. Here's where you can sign up on the wait list. And so being able to just be building in public and talking to shoppers about something as fundamental as grocery costs too much, what are your strategies for saving and just like actually having a real conversation with real shoppers has been our growth strategy thus far. And it's been fun. You know, we launched, we came out of South, and you know, we have a few thousand shoppers that are using the app now. And you know, we're all of a weekend. So, you know, a lot, a lot to continue to learn. But, you know, we've got a pretty interesting referral program that we'll be rolling out soon. We've got the different ways that communities are going to be able to participate because when you think about it, for a lot of people, how much you save on groceries is almost a competitive sport. And so, we want to be able to be the reason that they feel really proud of themselves. Actually, when I was at Waze, that was one of the big shifts that we saw in our growth. I joined a bit of a couple of million users, and when we sold to Google, we had 60 million users. And so it was incredible to be there and like watch that. But one of the things that we noticed was it changed from Waze saved me eight minutes on traffic to I saved eight minutes in traffic by using Waze. And it was an identity thing that happened in the semantics there. The first was they gave credit to the app. And that was fine. But when they took credit for themselves as being the smart one who knew about the app, kind of the hipster effect of I know about this band before you do, that's really when the growth trajectory took off. And we have like celebrities, like posted about how much time they saved in traffic in LA. And then I saved that much time. That's what we eventually were people to be able to say is, I saved 50 bucks this week by using stretch, not stretch, save me 50 bucks. And so we're writing all of the messages, we're thinking about all of that, even just the way that we download the app, people join the app and the way that they share it. So still early days, but a lot of just hand-to-hand combat and talking to shoppers. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think again, grounding yourself in the humans, what you're doing is such a human venture, you know what I mean? So you must have such great user-generated content, UGC, as we say in the business. And also, it's great that you're putting yourself out there. We're a really big proponents of founder branding. And how does founder-led branding eventually lead to brand-led growth? That's a whole question. But the fact that you're not shy about getting out there, I love cringe mountain. I'm going to use that, that's really, really good. Well, I love to dig into kind of a bit more about your background. And you as a leader, you've gone from the whole private jet market with Warren Buffett to startups that were acquired by tech giants. You've worked at ways. You build companies that were in a sold-to-face book in Google. We'd love to learn what lessons have stayed with you across all those chapters. You kind of alluded to a few there, but call them out for us. Yeah, no, the curiosity is a superpower. That if you choose to just double down on being curious and thinking about every new piece of technology that comes out as a potential new tool in your tool belt, and maybe it's a tool in your tool belt for a couple of months, and it becomes a part of something else. But the skill set of constantly learning new things is the thing that I think is going to continue to define leaders going forward. Because it's easier than ever to find an answer. It's harder than ever to apply it with thoughtfulness and find advantages. And so even if you just test something and you learn that it's not the thing that is what you need, I think it's really, really important to constantly be finding things to test, and to be okay with failure. Like, micro failures are the best lesson teachers, right? Like, understanding that, no, okay, I understand what they were going for. But that's not actually, that's not actually, it didn't actually do the thing, that at least not the way that I would want it to be done. And fighting it so easy for people to vibe code new tools and put it out there, and a lot of people use it at first. You know, a lot of these AI companies say that would do a hundred million ARR in less than seven months. It's not really defensible revenue, right? It's a bunch of people at tech companies who were able to spend less than $100 a month on the corporate credit card. They all put it on the corporate credit card. They all tried it. But they didn't go through a procurement process. They didn't actually close that deal. They just somebody was like, oh, I'll test that. So we'll see where a lot of these companies go in the short term, or maybe even the long term. But thinking about testing things and learning things, but then being okay to say, that's not for me and quit super, you're not going to need behind. And I think understanding how you show up in those moments is one of the best things that leaders can do. I think that's great. I totally agree about curiosity. We have always learning as one of our values of literal humans. I'm constantly urging particularly leaders of our senior leadership team to like be curious. Like start with inquiry before you jump to advocacy. I think people are so quickly kind of like, like, oh, this is my opinion. It's based on this. And it's like, whoa, dude, like just ask a question first. Ask a few questions, you know? So, um, so yeah, I think that's in our culture a little bit of social media. We got to be the keyboard warriors and all that stuff. Exactly. Would love to dig into, you know, a bit of, I actually became a trained coach this year. So I'm very interested. That's this, uh, you know, a question about your executive coaching experience. Like, how has that practice, uh, influenced the culture and leadership style that you're building at stretch? Yeah, did, what became a coach? It was, I was, I had a, had a failure of a company and needed to take a little bit of time away from being, you know, the tip of the spear. And was fortunate to be drafted into coaching by, by somebody who, you know, and one of the largest and best coaching companies in Silicon Valley was wanting to expand to New York City. And he's like, he's like, you've been amazing coached. And I was like, I'm not coached. I'm just friends with founders. And he goes, it's basically the same thing. Uh, and I realized it's not actually basically the same thing, uh, because when you're a consultant or when you're an advisor, you get paid for having really good answers. But as a coach, you actually get paid for having really good questions. And what I learned as a coach is that my job is not to find the answer or to give the answer. My job is to create the neural pathways that allow my clients to get back to that answer when I'm not in the room. When you're sitting in a board meeting, when you're sitting in front of a client, when you're sitting in front of your team, the, you give an answer and somebody says, well, why do you think that their response can't be because my coach told me they have to be able to know why they believe what they believe. And to be able to what I call taking into the container, that's what I kind of call my coaching sessions. Like blast radius, you can say whatever you want, right? Like, you know, having founders admit they want to quit their company and shut the whole thing down. And then they hear themselves say it out loud and they're like, I don't actually believe that. Sorry, I just need to say it. You know, like to hold that space for founders and for leaders was such an honor and a privilege because I really wish somebody would have held that space for me in my early days. I didn't have that space and I kind of kept it all to myself. And I probably detonated a few times more than I should have because I just had it never released any of the pressure. And I think that the best people get coached. They seek out the ability to get that much better. You know, going from like 0% proficiency in a skill to 80% proficiency in a skill takes as long and as much effort as going from 80 to 90. And going from 90 to 95 is the next order of magnitude. But then like when people really get into it and they're not satisfied with being better than 95% of people, they're like 95 to 97 and then 97 to 98 and then 98 to 98.5. Those are all orders of magnitude and as hard as going 0 to 80. That's wild. And I think that that's the people who get coached, the people who are humble enough to say, I don't know everything and I can find that edge is what separated most of the clients that I worked with and what I'm trying to now do in practice with the work that I'm doing back in the founder's seat. Yeah, I love that. I mean, in my experience of coaching on both sides is like, it's a cheat code. It's a way to see around corners. It's a way to be humble and draw in the experience of others. And I think I love that we said it. Build those neural pathways. You know, just like say things out loud. Think differently. You know, problems solve in a different way. And so agree with you. We have a program here called More Happy. Everyone gets to coach it literally with humans. It's something we offer to every single employee. And I've actually been shocked by like, not everyone takes it. And I'm just like, oh, so I got to do more work to kind of, it's that coaching culture. So something's going to work on. Yeah. Yeah. Let's jump into the quickfire questions. This is just a quick fun way for people to get to know you as a person. So yeah, just the first answer that comes to your mind and then a quick explanation of why. So first question, I know you're busy with stretch nearly six months in. If you can paint it, you know, into the future and say, all right, I'm going to start another startup, something you're very want to do. What would it be and why? I think that all of the information that anybody needs in order to become whoever they want to become is already available online for free. It's just not organized very well. It's as if somebody took a library and threw all the books in the parking lot and they're like, your PhD is right there. Just go do it. And my obsession with collective knowledge. I mean, first of all, traffic with ways and now with grocery prices with stretch. I wonder what collective knowledge for knowledge would look like. And how would you organize the world's information in a way that everybody had all of the information that they needed to chase down their personal legend? Yeah, that's really cool. I think a lot about like a big starcheck fan. So like the Vulcan Academy and like the little AI pod that they were in. But they also had in-person stuff as well. So how do we how do we build that? I love that. In terms of tech inventions, going to ask you both sides of this. What invention right now makes you the most excited and what tech invention makes you the most concerned? I am a new dad. My daughter is four and a half months old. Congratulations. And I believe that she will never own a cell phone, never drive a car, and never go to a four-year college the way that we currently understand them. And I think that the technology is moving fast enough that the idea of walking around with the screen will just be really weird in that there will be a. But the most concerning part about that and I don't know what the form factor is going to be. But I worry that the bifurcation of those who have and those who have not will be defined by who still carries a thing that allows anybody to get in touch with them at any time, versus those who have the freedom of flexibility to go offline whenever they choose to. That I think will be the definition of wealth in the future is if you're available at all times, the way that we all are right now, where we're digital slaves to this device that is succumbess in and drain our brain in real time, versus those that have chosen to go analog and only the people who have enough sway in their life can get in touch with them. I think that that will be a bifurcation that we see in the future. That's both amazing if it's available to everybody and awful if it truly just become a have and a have-nots. Yeah, that's super interesting. Yeah, like these things that were signals of wealth, you know, in the past and present that become a signal of sort of deprivation. That's fascinating. Who is a literal human, small L, small H that you'd like to call out? They've been integral to your career journey. Edward Sullivan is the one who recruited me into being an executive coach. He's the CEO of Velocity Group and he just saw something in me that I didn't see myself and he as the CEO of a coaching firm became my first client. He's like, "You're really good at the founder's CEO thing and I'm pretty good at the coaching thing." And so we coached each other for three years every Wednesday. Wow. Every other Wednesday was my Wednesday for him to teach me how to be a better coach and every other Wednesday was my Wednesday to teach him how to be a better founder in CEO. And it was really, really cool in the iron, sharpen's iron that went back and forth, but like I said, the container, right? We had to keep our coaching sessions separate from us knowing each other socially and being friends, but when it was time to drop in for our session, gloves came off and he was really pushing me to be a better coach. I was really pushing him to be a better CEO. And so I'm very, very grateful to Edward. That's amazing. Shout out to Edward. And then finally, what's an inspirational quote that stuck with you through your journey in tech? "There's always room for a man of force for he makes room for many." Emerson said that in his essay called "Power" and every tool that we add to our tool belt gives us more capacity. And I believe that is the responsibility of every leader to find more capacity every day. Because you're not just finding it for yourself, you're finding it so that you can make room for many others to maybe borrow a little bit of your capacity in the moment where they're like, "I haven't done the things that Andy's done, but what would Andy do in this situation?" Like, not that I'm the role model, but if just a little bit of my capacity, if I can make an introduction, if I can open a door, if I can give an opportunity to somebody, that's something that I really desire to do that with as busy as I am, being a new dad and having this, a new company, I still do my best to apply to every email and make time for college kids that reach out and say, "Hey, you know, really old figure brain." And I kind of put them through the paces to make sure that we're not wasting each other's time, but I want to be available. Like, people were available for me and I want to help make room for many. So that's the name of the newsletter that I write, you know, make room for many. That's fantastic. Yeah, I mean, that really resonates with me, especially like we've got a new team member called Mahara, who I went to give a talk at a local university and she popped right up to me and came to talk to me and even the professor was like, "You need to hire this one student." And I was like, "I think she already came up to me." And now she's sitting right over there. She's one of our design interns, you know? So just like, I love that. I like just making room for folks who, you know, who knows, like she might be our senior designer or have creative one day, you know? And, you know, keeping that hope and making that space. So, love that. That's a good place to wrap us up here. I've really enjoyed this conversation and you've got incredible background. And I think you're tackling one of, you know, the most universal and everyday challenges that folks face. It's just, you know, grocery shopping and keeping the cost down and doing it well. So I think you're tackling it with a level of creativity and ambition that, you know, people usually apply. So all the techy things out there, but you're doing it simply and beautifully and, you know, with, you know, consumers in mind. So you're definitely proving that if we give consumers information and we put them for everybody wins, even the retailers and brands. So tell us, working folks find out more about stretch and the good work you all are doing. - Yeah. So stretch4more.com, F-O-R, more.com is where you can find us. Or if you search either of the app stores, stretch, save on groceries as where you can check out what we've done with stretch so far and a lot more to come. - Amazing, amazing. We'll be sure to include those links in the episode description. And I just want to thank you for your time. I know you even did it an hour early for me today 'cause I need to get home to family, but I really appreciate that. I know you're super busy, you're six months in, but I just really appreciate your time and attention today. So thank you. - Yeah. - Awesome things for having me. - Cool. - And for folks listening, this has been another great episode of Tech Can Save. It's podcast brought to you by the little humans. We've been talking about re-imagining groceries for the everyday shopper with Andy L. Wood, founder and CEO, stretch. Please, please, please give us a great review, give us some stars so we can keep bringing great guests like Andy L. Wood onto the pod. Thanks, everybody. Have a good one. (upbeat music)