David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…And it went flop. I’ve forgotten the name of it. I kind of blot it out, yeah. But we literally lost $10 million investing in a business that had order off your cellphone. At the time, we had a test going with 5 or 6 Starbucks and they didn’t think it was relevant. But the complication of understanding this stuff is they didn’t think it was relevant partly because the smartphone proliferation wasn’t as wide as it is now, obviously, and the feature set wasn’t as compelling as it was. So I think the stored value component coupled with the order-ahead became kind of a compelling feature set and now, I would argue that the suite of products that Starbucks has in Mobile Order and Pay is being clamored for by all sorts of other restaurant and retail companies. What I think it’s – I feel like we’re – maybe we can mark the official transition into tech themes on this show at this point, we’re sort of in it. But something that we’ve talked about a lot on this show and I'm just such a huge believer in technology is, it has to be in service of a superior customer experience. Just doing tech or just doing mobile ordering for the technology aspects isn’t going to work, and this is why I think Starbucks has executed so well on in the last few years is, you know, doing the order-ahead in the app with my stored value, like it makes the experience better because I get my coffee faster. But I still interact with the people there and my name is still written on the coffee and it’s wonderful. It’s just, I don’t have to wait in line and so it’s better as opposed to forcing you to jump through technology hoops just for the sake of jumping through technology hoops. Yeah. And where I’ve had the most luck working with technology companies is companies that have a great compelling product but can put themselves in the shoes of the retailer or the consumer company and trying to understand what that customer experience is as opposed to just kind of selling it based upon where we’ve had –…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.