S12 Bonus: Harman Narula, Canary Technologies

This episode is brought to you by The Built, a new podcast from the guys behind Sincera, Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in their industry. And that's exactly what this show is about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities, solve their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the process. Listen to The Build with Michael Sullivan, wherever you get your podcasts. My co-founder and I, we didn't think we could just kind of march into hotel and say, hey, we're going to swap out this core platform that you're already on or we're going to bring in this new platform that's going to do all these different things and so forth. We felt like we really need to earn our right, prove the things that we would bring to them would help solve their problems. And so we started on a one very kind of specific workflow which we thought could really help the hoteliers and that is called digital authorizations. So that was really our MVP is how we think about it. What that did was it literally digitized a piece of paper that's called a credit card authorization. My name is Harmon Singh Narula. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Canary Technologies. This is Co-Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Like six months moonlighting. Nothing of the backhand. Who share what it takes to change an industry? I don't exactly know what to do next. It took many goes to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. The company is its people. The teams help each other achieve those proud of our team. Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was that we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, my buddy. To get up to the shelf and test it it off and try to begin. To ride the ups and downs of the startup line. I need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on Co-Story. I'm your host Noah Laphart. And today, how Harmon Singh Narula has built the all-in-one hotel tech platform that drives revenue, automates admin and delights, guess. Today's episode is brought to you by.techdomains. And this one hits close to home. Back in 2016 I was building my startup and went hunting for that perfect.com and found next to nothing. So I did what every founder does. Settled. Here's what I wish someone had told me. You're building a tech startup. Just get a.tech domain. It instantly tells investors and customers what you're about. Don't overthink it. Secure your.tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, slack and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand. So they make better plans. Write higher quality code, use fewer tokens and require fewer correction loops. If you're running clawed code cursor or any agentic workflow, Unblocked is worth a look. Learn more at GetUnblocked.com/CodeStory. This episode is sponsored by Mesmo. If your team is collecting large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, but still struggling to get timely answers, Mesmo can help. Mesmo is an active telemetry platform that processes and enriches observability data in real time. Before it's stored or analyzed, that means lower data volume, lower cost, and faster root cause analysis across your existing observability tools. The C.I. works get a demo at mesmo.com/codestory. That's m-e-z-mo.com/codestory. This episode is sponsored by BrainGrid. If you are building with AI coding tools but your features keep breaking, you need to check out BrainGrid. It is the product management agent for AI builders. BrainGrid turns messy ideas into clear specs, tasks, and prompts that coding agents like cursor and clawed can actually build the right way. Ship real software, not fragile prototypes. Start free at braingrid.ai. Armand Singh Narula lives in New York City with his wife and two young kids. He was born in the States from parents who immigrated to the country from India. The immigrant household, quote unquote, was one that focused on hard work and ethics, and it was fueled by the lore of both his grandfather's entrepreneurial adventures. Armand is also a big nicks fan and likes to take in a game when he can. Prior to New York City, he lived in San Francisco for 10 years or so and picked up bycrading. Though he hasn't picked it back up just yet in New York, he hopes to eventually. Armand spent a lot of his early career in hospitality. His now co-founder worked in this space as well but primarily on the technology side. So all of the conversations he and his friend were having referenced this ecosystem. Eventually they landed on a thesis that the hotel tech stack or operating system should be customer facing. This is the creation story of Canary Technologies. We are a vertical software business focused on hotels. We are the category leader in what you think of as the guest management system space, which is basically the interaction layer between a hotel and a guest. So think solutions like a mobile check-in, a mobile check-out, guest messaging, so when you're messaging with the hotel, once you're on property, maybe you're purchasing things like FNV and so forth, digital tipping is really big in North America. Basically any digital touch point that the hotel has with the guest, that's the space that we're the leader in. We're also the leader now in kind of vertical specific AI applications for hotels, so things like AI Boy, say I message and a slew of others as well. So at the end of the day we basically are helping our tellers ride better guest experience while generating more revenue and running a much more streamlined operation. We work with more than 20,000 hotels in more than 100 different countries including a lot of the large notable big brands here in North America, pretty much every one of them, and we've raised about $200 million of venture capital. It was really a bit serendipitous, frankly, so I have a deep background in hospitality, a little bit by chance, and so I always tell people that like my background is like the illustration of how the dots connect nicely backwards, frankly. So I went to undergrad up at Cornell, I was, they have a hotel school there, so I was actually in the hotel school there. I did the finance thing for a little bit after school, but didn't really enjoy that and I ended up at Starwood after that. Prior to Starwood being acquired by Marriott, who might be familiar, Starwood was one of the largest hotel companies in the world. They owned brands like Weston, Sheraton, W, St. Regis, and a bunch of others, and I did a host of different strategy work there prior to an MBA, then some management consulting at Bain, where I basically focused on hospitality technology as well. And so I had spent a decent amount obviously my schooling and then a bunch of my career, early career, in hospitality, and a good, I started the business with a good friend of mine, and he was serial entrepreneur, prior to Canary, he was working at a hotel technology company, more focused in a different problem space, but that's where he started also learn and get deep into hospitality and learn about the different systems. And that wasn't necessarily working out. All the conversations him and I were having now were about hospitality and what was happening in that ecosystem and so forth. And that's where that kind of metathized into our thesis around the hotel tech stack and how we thought that was going to evolve and be much more guest-facing. So that was that's like the origin of how Canary first came about. I'm really excited to dive into what you would consider the MVP for Canary, that first version of the customer-facing product that you built. How long did it take to build? And what sort of tools were you using to bring it to life? We formed this thesis that the hotel tech stack was evolving pretty, was going to transform pretty significantly and that it was going to be significantly more focused on the guest. And that we didn't see that there was necessarily a lot of the most-fisicated guest-facing type solutions that hotels needed or that other verticals had that hospitality didn't necessarily have. At the same time, I'd say both my co-founder and I, we think it was more like pragmatic type entrepreneurs. We didn't think we could just kind of march into hotel and say, "Hey, we're going to swap out this core platform that you're already on or we're going to bring in this new platform that's going to do all these different things and so forth." We felt like we really need to like earn our right to sell into hotels and prove the things that we would bring to them would help solve their problems and make their businesses better and make for a better guest experience. And so we started on one very kind of specific workflow which we thought could really help the hoteliers and that is called digital authorizations. What that workflow is, and so that was really our MVP is how we think about it. And so what a credit card authorization form is and you might be familiar with this for either at a hotel or something else in your life. Basically for everything that you consider mostly a non-standard type booking, everything outside of let's say you go on an OTA or something like booking.com or hotels.com or something like that or maybe you're loyal and you go to brand.com like western.com or Bonboi or something. Everything outside of that is non-traditional booking for a hotel. So let's say you're a posting an event and you go to a hotel, you say, "Hey, I need X number of room nights, I need some F and B, I need some banquet space, I need some audio visual, et cetera." They're gonna give you a proposal, they're gonna give you a contract for those things, and then they're gonna likely send out something called a credit card authorization form. It was this kind of like PDF or piece of paper that you'll fill your credit card information on and you'll send it back to the hotel, they'll print it out, they'll hold punch it, they'll put it in a binder. That was the first workflow where we said, "Hey, this is something that's not great for the hotel, it's not great for the guests, we can provide a better experience for this." And so that's the first solution that we launched and we're still one of the largest or the largest player in that space today for digital authorizations. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in the industry and that's exactly what this show is about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds at Magni, Jalice, DoubleClick and LiveRamp. To hear about how they identified opportunities saw their hardest challenges and grew their businesses in the process. This show is for you if you've had some of these breakthrough moments yourself or if you're seeking inspiration for the next one. Today's episode is brought to you by Dot Tech Domains and this one hits close to home. Back in 2016 when I was building my own tech startup, I went on the hunt for that elusive.com. Looked high, looked low and guess what I found? Nothing. What I did find cost me an arm and a leg. So I did what every founder does under pressure. Through an extra letters settled for the less than optimal name and here's what I wish someone had said to me back then. Noah, you're building a tech startup. Just get a Dot Tech Domain. Tech startup.tech domain. It could not be more obvious. It tells investors, customers and anyone who looks at your website really that tech is at the core of your build. And I've kicked myself plenty since, especially when I see the clean and sharp names, tech companies have landed on Dot Tech. Nothing.tech, onex.tech, aurora.tech, ces.tech, ultra.tech, aust.tech, neon.tech, blaze.tech, high.tech, you get the idea. So take it from someone who learned it the hard way. If you're building a tech startup, don't overthink it. 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So then you've got that first version that you decided, the first piece that you decided to go out and do better, and you're happy with it, you're getting the traction that you want. How did you progress and mature the product and essentially the platform as you went forward? And I think to wrap that in a box little bit, what I'm looking for is how you built your roadmap, how you went about deciding that, OK, this is the next most important thing to build or to address with Canary. Yeah, so we had this overarching thesis and kind of vision for where we believed the market was going to go, and the tech stack was going to evolve to for hotels. With that said, though, at the end of the day, it's all about the customer, right? And for us, that's hotels. So we spent a lot of time with our hoteliers. We talked to our hoteliers on what are their needs, what are they thinking, what are they seeing, what problems are they facing? And that tends to be the biggest driver of our roadmap. With that said, that's overlaid over our vision of, this is where we believe the market is moving, right? This is where we think the puck is going. We kind of want to skate towards that. And so those two factors, I'd say, the customer comes first and then overlaid with our vision, is how we started to think about what next to build. And so we jumped quickly from digital authorizations and we were scaling that pretty rapidly. We had raised some capital. There were some additional solutions that we built on top of that. And that's when we took our moment to say, hey, this thesis we have around guest facing platforms, like the guest facing solutions that hoteliers are going to need to run their properties and the demands that are coming in from the new types of travelers that are coming to hotels. This is our chance to launch those pieces. And so that's when we took the leap on the guest management system and helped push that space forward and pioneer what that really looks like for hotels. So here you're saying, we, tell me about how you built your team and which it looked for in those people to indicate that they were the winning horses to join you. I'd say this evolves over time, right? When you're a two person business, it's just five folks. The types of folks that you're looking to help to join that journey and join that point in time are different than, you know, where nearly 400 people are growing rapidly. And those types of folks are a little bit different types of profiles. I'd say underlying though, if you were to ask me, like what types of characteristics are important to you guys. I'd say this probably like three things that we think about most. The first is probably curiosity. We think, I think for me, this really shows someone like tears, right? And that's really important. I often talk about this at Canary with our team is in when we're recruiting. We can teach folks a lot. We can teach folks about hospitality and our domain. And if you're earlier in your career, let's say you're a more junior PM, and we have more senior PMs that might be good mentors for you. And so if what's so good being teach you about that, the thing we can't really teach people is can't teach you to truly care. And I think curiosity is an indication that like someone truly cares. They care about their colleagues, their team members, they care about their customers, they care about their craft, they care about their work. And so that's probably one of the most important things. And then I think the other things that we also look a lot for is like this people that have this pursuit of excellence. And that probably talks a lot to our mindset around like strong work ethic, people that are highly motivated, they're ambitious, and they want to like better themselves. And so I talk a lot about how Canary, for our team members here, I talk a lot about how they should view Canary as kind of their vessel for growth. They should view Canary as a way to better themselves day in and day out. Make the mistakes. We are happy to invest in that. We want you guys to be getting better day in and day out and people that really are pursuing that excellence. And then the last is just entrepreneurial DNA. So people that have a high agency, self-starters, that type of mentality tends to do really well here as well. Your coding agents have access to your code base. Maybe you even connected other tools via MCPs. But access doesn't mean context. Agents can't reason across MCPs. They don't know your architectural decisions, your team's patterns, or why the API was shaped the way it is. So agents look in the wrong place and deliver bad outputs. Then you spend time correcting. More loops, more tokens. 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Mesmo integrates with platforms like data dog, dinotrace, and open source stacks, giving teams more control without adding operational overhead. This is especially useful for platform engineers and SREs supporting complex distributed systems where context and speed matter. To see how active telemetry works in practice, get a demo at mesmo.com/codesstory. That's m-e-z-m-o.com/codesstory. Let's talk about scalability. It's going to be interesting to hear where this comes in. How did you approach scale from the beginning? And that could be technology, it could be people, it could be business approach, all those sorts of things. And have there been interesting areas where you've had to fight it as you've grown? We believed, we believed pretty strongly, that the market was going to go through a transformation when it came to the tech stack in hospitality. And so we knew the opportunity. We felt like the opportunity was there for us. And so we had this larger vision. But as I mentioned earlier, eluded to, We were right. we said we wanted to be very methodical in terms of how we built the business, right? So kind of solution, scale, expand, solution, scale, expand, type of fine product market fit over and over again on these different work pieces. And so when we thought about scaling, I think, you know, we felt like it was core to our DNA. It was going to be really important for our DNA for this for vertical software business to be able to find product market fit and scale that getting that in the hands is as many customers as quickly as possible. And that attaching to our long revision, every function as we built it, we were opportunistic, but we also thought about what does the next level, what does the next phase of growth for this function look like? What that said, that doesn't mean we did not nail this every time. There's definitely plenty of times where you're just trying to put one foot in front of the other and you might decide to use a solution or you might decide to hire in a certain direction and then say six months later you've outgrown that already. And so there was definitely those types of challenges. But I'd say like we tried to make sure we're talking to founders that were one step ahead as we were building out each function. We're trying to see around the corner to what the next most important part was going to be. Now, Harmon, as you step out on the balcony, you look across all that you've built us far. What are you most proud of? I would say the team, a business is its own kind of technical legal entity, but at the end of the day, it's really an aggregation of people with a shared vision, goals and values. And so I'd say we're really proud of the team that we built here. I think a lot of the folks within the industry as well that work with Canary Heights are always thoroughly impressed in terms of just the caliber of individuals that we have. We folks, they work hard, they care about their craft. And so that's probably what I'm most proud of as we look back over everything that we've done here. Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it. I'll tell you we signed our first real office lease. The week that pandemic was starting. Now, I didn't say it's 2020, but back then it was kind of like, oh, we're going to need a space. Now, but I joke, I'd say probably the thing that mistake or the thing that we would change is we didn't invest in some of the like company infrastructure as early as we should have. And what I mean by that is like we're probably late to truly build out our finance function as we should have. I think we've been late to building out our recruiting function and as a result, we we have to rely on third parties and so forth. The investment and we've caught up or catching up on some of the still, but I think investing in company building is really important. We went through YC really early. That was like the incubator that we went through and they talk a lot about initially as founders, you are building product. And you're basically just trying to do everything you can to find product market fans and get that to work and get that in the hands of users. And then at some point you kind of start shifting a little bit to like building the company and investing in the infrastructure for the company. And I'd say that that's probably a mistake where we could have been doing that investing in that earlier than we did. Let's move forward then. What does the future look like for Canary, for the product, for the team, for all that you have in store? There's a few different lenses to look at this one is so we're the category leader in this space called the guest manager system or the digital guest journey space where it's every digital touch point that the hotel has with the guest. And so the canvas for the digital guest journey, if you think about that, pretty large, right? All the touch points that a hotel might have with the guest. And so I think you'll see us continue to meet the needs of hoteliers at each of those different touch points. And so that's kind of like one piece of or one lens think about our role man, how we're thinking about moving forward. The other piece shares as many folks in the market, we do believe strongly that vertical players will be the drivers of vertical specific AI platforms and AI native AI powered solutions. And so we're investing very heavily into being that player for hospitality and we've done a lot of work with our large enterprise players in that space as well. And some of these we've announced in summer coming. And so that's the other place that I'd say we're investing very heavily whether that's kind of our AI voice platform, our omnichannel communication platform, and some of the other native AI solutions that we're also launching right now. So let's switch to you, Harmon, who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why? I'm close with my family, I'd say like my parents probably influenced me the most in terms of how I work. There's a pretty strong emphasis around work ethic and academics in my household. As I mentioned to you earlier, like I grew up on those stories about the challenges that they faced while they're working over nights that he could study during the day, mother working and quick service restaurants. And so when they first came to the country and so I think that probably influences me a lot in terms of just like how I think about what it means to just fundamentally work and having that work ethic. That's probably the biggest influence that comes to mind for me. Last question, Harmon, so you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world and can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person having on down this road a bit? I would say two things. One is like as an Ike he's out there just do it like you have to apply the do or mindset as an entrepreneur. I often tell people like, "Head we, we obviously had done a bunch of research and learned about the market and tried to look at players, but. How do we done like even more thorough? We probably never would have gotten started. It's so easy to find lots of reasons to not do something and risks associated with that. I would say like really strongly have a do or mindset. You will learn tremendously more by doing. It's really easy, especially for a smart, motivated, ambitious people to just get caught up in the paralysis by analysis. It's okay to fail. You can only fail if you actually do and that'll teach you something for maybe your next thing that you're going to work on. That's probably a big thing I'd say and then I think the other piece coming back to when you asked about who are the types of people that we think is great to bring on and work with. I take curiosity so follow the balancing ball. Like genuine curiosity will take you very far. You're trying to get to the root and get primary learnings yourself. I think this is probably the other thing I'd say. That's fantastic advice. Well, Harmon, thank you for being on the show today and thank you for telling the creation story of Canary. Thanks for having me now. And this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Laphart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the podcasting app of your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously. And thanks again for listening.