The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mo Hamzian, Co-Founder & CEO of VEL

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Mo Hamzian, Co-Founder & CEO of VEL Myvel.com What is VEL? VEL is a premium, utopian work cafe focused on providing remote workers and people on the go a quiet working space to stay on task and accomplish their goals while enjoying award-winning coffee. From reservable privacy pods and seating to walk-ins and more, VEL offers a dynamic and adaptable space to gather, work, meet and unwind. Mo Hamzian, Co-Founder & CEO of VEL, took his love for working at coffee shops and turned that into a work experience that offers flexible privacy and psychological safety. Meet Mo As a first generation immigrant to the United States, Mo Hamzian is breaking boundaries while spearheading a fast-growing, seed funded startup and capitalizing on a significant shift that is occurring in the US workforce. As CEO of VEL, a premium utopian tech-forward work cafe, he has focused his efforts on transforming the current workplace for freelancers and remote workers to embrace a new working environment that meets the needs of the age we’re in. Mo Hamzian graduated from Regents University London with a degree in International Business in 1997. In 2016, Hamzian returned to school to earn his Master’s degree in Science, Leadership and Strategy from the London Business School’s Sloan Master’s Program. With over 20 years of experience, his ability to deliver results to investors has led him to successfully execute projects totaling over $150M.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We are live.

Did any of you know the show is also live? I mean, I know a lot of you subscribe to the podcast, but it usually goes out live unless the publishers don't want it to go live and they want it saved until later. But it goes live on five different Facebook groups, the LinkedIn things over there, YouTube and Twitter. So you haven't got a chance to check those out. I'm just doing away to set up the plugs once again.

I get tired of calling the plugs out, and I think you probably get tired of hearing them. But in the meantime, go to goodreads.com for Chess Chris Foss, go to youtube.com for Chess Chris Foss, and linkedin.com for Chess Chris Foss as well. I should get a word for that segue because that was new. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. We're going to be talking about amazing workplaces and the future of workplaces.

You know, we've had a lot of authors that have come on, talked about remote work. People, you know, are now working from home more than ever. I've been working from home since 2004, running companies in other states and stuff that I just go visit every now and then. And, you know, I know what this is like. And so many more employees are going and doing it. We're going to be talking about Workplace 4.0. And that's going to be a pretty interesting discussion we're going to have today about everything that goes on.

We have Moe Hamzian. He is the CEO of a company called Vell vel we're going to be talking to him about what that means and how it works he's an entrepreneur a mentor accomplished speaker and ceo of his own company he has made his personal mission to solve the inefficiencies of today's workplace with his latest venture vel uh he is a graduate of regents university, London, and earned his master's degree from the London Business School's Sloan Master's Program. He has an established leadership record with over 20 years of experience and has successfully executed projects totaling over $150 million. Is that all? $150 million? That's not chump change, people. That's a lot of money. Whether it's building or executing deals, Mo excels at delivering returns for investors and stakeholders and believes a clear

vision combined with performance yields powerful results. Welcome to the show, Mo. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thanks so much for having me. What a great introduction. I feel like I need a drive or something, but I love being here with you. I love your show. Thank you very much. And it's wonderful to have you as well. Give us a.com, wherever we want people to find out more about you on the interwebs and the sky. Hi, we are myveil.com. You can also

find me on LinkedIn, forward slash Moe Hamzian. Come and see us there, or at Veil World Cafe on Instagram. You put in your show notes at the end of the show. There you go. And there'll be a link on the show you can click on. So, Mo, give us a little bit about your origin story.

We got a little bit in the bio, but from your mouth to our ears, tell us a little bit about you and what got you down this road of becoming an entrepreneur. Yeah, thanks very much. I think I love entrepreneurship, first of all. I think as a modality and an industry, it's really grown up over the last 20, 30 years. Entrepreneurship has become so much more structured, lots more frameworks, whether you're incubator and educator and accelerator or seeing other startups, podcasts around your show. So the market is really, really transparent. And entrepreneurship is all about finding a monumental problem,

either it's in scale monumental or it's volume monumental, and being able to find the solution for it and mapping that solution on that problem and expecting the customer to pay for it at a certain value. So I am someone who enjoys finding what's not working really well and being aggrieved by it, getting really passionate about it, finding a why behind it and then being made silly enough or stupid enough to think you can fix it and being dogmatic about it to say I can't sleep until I fix it. And then three years later, you've built a business and wondering how amazing is this? So I think entrepreneurship is just one of those experiences that is hugely fulfilling and I love it. But a lot of entrepreneurship for me

is about one foot in front of the other, marginal gain and getting to a destination. But I love it. For me, just to give you a little bit of background. I'm an Englishman. You can tell from the accent. Don't hold it against me. The two things that happens in the US with Englishmen, two things always happen. One, everyone thinks you're smarter than you are. In my case, it's true. And the second worst part, Chris, is everyone thinks you're richer than you are, which in my case is not true. Yeah. So that's what happens.

But I came to the US five, six years ago. And I tell you something, Chris, the largest, biggest, most fruitful, developed single market in the world is the U.S. And if you're right now operating in the U.S., stand for a second, pat yourself on the back, and feel extremely lucky to be an entrepreneur in this large single market because truly, truly, truly, anything is possible here. And I've experienced it for myself because I've lived in multiple continents, multiple countries, and this country is a real true beacon. And I don't mean that just in an ideological way i'm in a transactional and commercial way so happy to be here and um over to you there you go uh well you come from london the other great thing we have over here is the sun it does it does get dark at about three o'clock in the afternoon in london in february and you're wondering, when is this going to end?

Popping vitamin D tablets. There you go. It's a beautiful city and it's a beautiful country and everything else. But, you know, it does get a little bit overcast and dark there sometimes. So unless you move to Seattle, then you have a whole nother, you know, you have a whole nother, you pretty much replicate London. They have Sundays up there. So you started a lot of different companies I see here going through your LinkedIn history.

And a lot of them are very entrepreneur and investor based. Do you want to tease on any of them or touch on them and on how they led you up to this latest venture? Yeah, I'm happy to. You know, I think it's really interesting. Everything I've done in the past until now has one common denominator that it had lacked was it was still successful. There was a lot of problems.

We found really, really good solutions. I was involved in it either as a CEO or as an investor, and they were largely around real estate, food and beverage, and delivering scalable real estate, food and beverage, and delivering scalable real estate solutions to market or growing an F&B business, multiple markets. Largely, I found them through time and valuable, but hugely opportunistic. The one thing I can tell you that entrepreneurship really needs, and I lacked personally, and that's one of the reasons I went back to business in my mid-30s was to find that was that mission that vision that common thread

was that ability to bring the periscope up and see what's my roadmap going to look like and this company that I created and we've built together over the last three years with my team and co-founder and CFO, Jack, is something that's hugely mission-led. We have an enormous why, and we exist because of that. And we've become really passionate about it over the years. And something that's happened in the market, structural shifts that happen. One of the things investors ask of you all the time is, in a good deck, you should have it,

is this answer of, why now? Why should we care now? Why is this relevant of why now? Why should we care now? Why is this relevant now? Why do you have a differentiation now? And for us, as difficult as the pandemic may have been for millions and millions of people around the world, there are going to be graduates of the pandemic, similar to that graduate startups of the pandemic,

similar to graduate startups of the pandemic, similar to graduate startups of the 08, 09, 010 crash where Airbnb, Uber, these startups were born out of it. So I guess entrepreneurship for me right now is leading a mission-led company to grow as fast as possible and solve these problems as fast as possible in multiple markets. There you go. You bring up some great points, not only there, but a little bit earlier. You know, right now, tech's going through a lot of layoffs. We're kind of in this whole 2008-ish era of layoffs and restructuring and maybe recession,

and no one really knows. But usually, a lot of these tech layoffs and things like that usually bring about the new genre of whatever the new future is going to be, whatever it's going to be. And a lot of people are going to be working at home and doing their thing and doing their remote stuff. You talked about earlier, like I said, the beautiful part of being an entrepreneur is that, like what you said in something needs to be fixed, something bugs you. You can go, hey, I know a way to make this better. This is stupid the way this works. Somebody didn't think this out. I can make this better.

And then once you make it better, you're like, hey, I bet everybody else is suffering from the same sort of dilemma. And you bring it to market and away you go. So what caused you to want to start Vell? And tell us the roadmap of how you got here and kind of the vision of what you're trying to achieve. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'll answer that question philosophically for a second before I dive into the genesis of it. For a very long time, sociologically, the needle has been moving in the workplace, whereby because of just general society society human behavior how we interact

with different spaces has been changing and technology has been disrupting that i mean the internet has totally proliferated lots of these kind of structural workings like for instance our value system and interaction with home is changing over time our the pandemic has shown our mandate and engagement with an office is completely different to what it was 20, 30 years ago, maybe for our parents. And therefore, new spaces are becoming much more relevant, much more sociologically relevant. When I was a boy, the library was a place of great sanctified space for me. I took huge amounts of refuge in the library. I found enormous amounts of reading and space in the library for me just to press pause. That doesn't exist today for a lot

of people. So we live in a really overly stimulated economy. So as soon as you leave home and you're going to the office and you want to do something interesting, the only other viable environment for you is a F&B environment. So that's either a restaurant. Well, check value of a restaurant is pretty high. The friction of getting in is real. You also have to eat. You may not always be hungry. So in America, that place for a lot of Americans is a coffee shop, is a classic coffee shop where people go and socialize as that dependable third space. So then we connected. We said, look, OK, coffee shops are really relevant and it's a very decentralized market. There are, in fact, 65,000 coffee shops in America, of which 50% of them belong to Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts. So about 30,000 coffee shops that are decentralized. So we said coffee shops are real.

The economy has changed on lots of freelancers and, and remote. In fact, half of the U S working population are either freelancing or remote working. That's the population of the UK, by the way, that's like 80 million people. It's remarkable.

So they're not going to home and they're not going to the office because they don't have an office. I don't want to commute to the office. They're going to the coffee shop to work sporadically or regularly or quite a lot. So we then said, OK, so coffee shops are relevant. The workplace has changed. But the coffee shop, from my point of view, and I've been working in coffee shops all my life, coffee shops have never been designed to hold space for you. Coffee shops are designed to sell good beans,

good menu, their ideology of a croissant or a pastry or a frozen drink and ask you to leave, thank you very much, as soon as possible so we can sell another drink. And usually the chairs are pretty hard too. They have the hard chairs without the cushions. A lot of restaurants have that nowadays. They have the hard chairs

because they want to get you out of there. do they do and you know you can't blame them because their revenue stack um is designed to sell you drink and not sell you space so we said what are the best and i love starbucks bits by what starbucks has done in the marketplace to be able to be you know some people say it, you know, some people say it's 60% good enough. Some people say it's 90% good enough, but Starbucks has been able to do, let's just call it 75% good enough, 16, 17,000 times consistently. And that brand promise is extremely hard to replicate. So what they've done is a major testament to the leadership team, to the product and

the consumer base. But Starbucks, 80% of its revenue is takeaway. done is a major testament to the leadership team to the product and the consumer base but starbucks 80 of its revenue is takeaway and these anecdotal rudimentary numbers and therefore they don't necessarily want you to sit so we say ourselves how can we create an environment where you take best of starbucks you take the best of we work and co-working you marry it together create a love child and introduce a huge tech stack, infrastructure, hardware, behavioral sciences into it to create the GoPro of a coffee shop. And we did exactly that.

And the market is responding well to it. This is extraordinary. I was looking at it on your website, myvell.com, and you guys are basically, yeah, like you said, you're merging Starbucks with the WeWork experience and even your, even your menu of drinks and stuff is kind of designed to help focus people, uh, you know, keep, help people keep moving. You know, I, I've, I've used Starbucks, uh, in fact, I tried to use it for write my first book because, you know, so many people

have like families at home, kids running around, my case, dogs running around. And so, you know, sometimes, you know, being in their space, you know, you're like, you know, like I'll try and, you know, I'll try and write something or work on a new book and on the computer. And then, then you get the pop up, you know, it's like, Hey, or, you know, your dog comes in or a kid runs in, I suppose if you have family and you know it's oh you know hey you got to go do this you got to there's lots of interruptions and the nice thing is with a coffee shop you can go out you can you you kind of feel like you're amongst other people you can get something to eat and kind of keep busy but you can also kind of focus on what you need to do whether it's a project or a

client thing or you know whatever you're doing. And you can kind of work on stuff without having those home interruptions. And so many people are doing that from now. They're working from home, whether it's remotely. But sometimes it's a better place to have business meetings. I mean, you certainly can't have people come to your house if you want to have a business meeting. So it's a nice place to meet up with people and have a formal meeting. And, of course, meet up with people and have a formal meeting. And of course,

break bread with people because breaking bread with people really is almost a better rapport builder than going to somebody's office. I agree. And let me prove a point. I'm going to go off script and let you know what it feels like to work at Vell. I'm actually at Vell. We're in Miami right now. We're doing an expo at eMerge Americas. We have a prototype of our product, dropship prototype of our product. And I am in a $5 an hour, $30,000 pod. This thing is built from the ground up. I have my Zoom lighting here. I have my Wi-Fi. Each unit gives its own Wi-Fi but let me open the door and Suddenly once I go out you can Up to this and now you can't hear me. I'm outside. So if I go back into my my space You can suddenly see I'm in a coffee shop

Live recording a show with Chris Vossoss for five dollars an hour with a cup of coffee um real time there you go wow that was i mean that's amazing the difference of the sound between the two and that's one that that's one that you're solving one of the issues that most people have in a coffee shop is yeah i can get a little too noisy or that one guy can start talking a little too loud and you're just like that guy's really starting to bug me now exactly and you know what one thing we wanted to create was you know we wanted to say we wanted to give you relation and which means if you are a nomad digital native remote work freelancer and you want to have a reservation dependability outside of your home. Good luck, unless you're willing to spend 50, 60, a hundred dollars an hour. So we said, how can someone,

how can we give you a microspace that next Wednesday morning at 10 o'clock, let's say you're pitching an investor and all the money we've raised has been over zoom, by the way. So you're pitching an investor at 10 o'clock. You actually don't want to spend a hundred dollars. You just want to spend five to ten dollars but you know you've reserved the space so we've built a tech stack that chris voss can reserve a pod at 10 o'clock next wednesday chris can walk in his pod the wi-fi will already pick you up because hopefully chris is a regular the drink would have been made because we were you've arrived and a robot a robot iris delivers the drink for you um and that's what we've created here and so far chris has spent ten dollars um so

so those are the things we're we're building and when you when you think about it it's so simple none of it is rocking we are reinventing plastic. It's just replication and innovation at its best. There you go. You know, I love this idea, too, because if you're going to have an investor or business meeting, like you said, there's nothing worse than, you know, the noise gets really loud. They can't hear you. And so you guys basically created these like little pods inside of the areas where people can have private space or comfortable space and have their own space, I guess, when it comes down to it. Exactly right. Ultimately, we said, look, what coffee shops are transactional. They're anonymous. You don't have to be a subscriber

to be a coffee shop. You don't have to stand on one foot, touch nose to work with a coffee shop. Anyone can come in and transact with us. So you can buy a drink and sit in a free open seat no strings attached no problem but if you want an additional layer of privacy you can go into a pod if you want a mid-level layer of privacy and i can show you some people they're working in those nest seats right now so you can go into a nest seat so we have a diverse value stack that can be anything from five dollars to $15 an hour, depending on what you are. But the ultimate thing it gives us in this remote setting, and maybe we can talk about that a little bit. And it gave to me, for me, when I worked out of coffee shops when I was younger, I felt guilty and I felt shameful.

I felt not good enough. I felt insecure. I said to myself, you know what, if I was, it was Google was huge back then. Twitter was huge. And they still are. I said to myself, you know, if I was as successful as a successful cousin who worked at Google, I wouldn't be working out of a coffee shop, but because I'm a freelancer or I'm a, you know, a digital native, I'm working out of a coffee shop. I, my self-esteem was affected because of it. And I think WeWork did that for a general population. What WeWork did for a lot of people,

we'll say, or co-working, Industrious did for a lot of people, say, you know what? You don't need a fancy expensive office with one year's worth of lease. Come to WeWork, come to Industrious, and you can stand proud knowing that you're working there. So we said, we want to create that similar culture,

that similar ethos in a coffee shop setting to say, you know what, you actually won the pay-as-you-go flexibility of a coffee shop, the transactionalness of a coffee shop, because you may just want to use us three times a month, no strings attached. You can come in and spend 10 times every time you come, but feel amazing after you've done it, like a very good product. And that's the quest for us, to make it much more meritocratic.

There you go. And I like this setup that you're doing because you're doing something different than just throwing up copies of Starbucks. Here's some of the benefits that come from this. Cortisone lighting, ergonomic furniture, optimized temperature. Ergonomic furniture is important. Like I said, I go into, I go to a lot of restaurants now they have hard, they have those hard wood chairs. Uh, there's, you know, when, when I used to try and go into Starbucks, uh, you know, I'd

always want to sit in those nice leather chairs if they had them. And, you know, there's always somebody camping that. So, uh, having ergonomic furniture and something that's comfortable is going to make a difference. Optimized temperature. Aerospace soundproofing. Flow-inducing music. That's interesting. New tropic coffee.

Rain food. Fast, secure Wi-Fi. That's, of course, the most important. Imagination-inducing scents. That's kind of interesting. And robot baristas. Do you want to talk about any of those? The robot. That's kind of interesting. And robot baristas. Do you want to talk about any of those? The robot baristas are kind of cool.

I love to talk about all of them in actual fact because somewhere along the line, human beings thought having a chair and a desk and an expensive laptop is optimal workplace. But that's not true. It's not true. If you are the fastest man on earth and they take away your really good shoes and put you in sandals and ask you to run the hundred meters, you're not

going to be as cool. You might even get blisters and break your toe. So it is the same thing for us. We said to ourselves, what are the things that activate flow? What are the things that activate flow what are the things that get you there faster so temperature for instance we know colder temperature makes you much more analytical warmer temperature makes you creative so we can create cold zones and warm zones depending on the modality of what work you're doing if you're doing like mathematics and computer design get in the cold space if you're being much more creative and writing and content writing, get in the warm space. That's just a simple example. Yeah.

And another thing is acoustic value and privacy. One thing you don't have as soon as you leave your home is a neuro safety, psychological safety. You're overly stimulated and majority of people are not extroverted. Majority of people are introverted I am an introvert believe it or not, which means I reach I recharge by myself Which means if I leave home the safety of of of mummy wherever it is. I go into the real world I'm going to get bombarded with stimulation. So when I come to a coffee shop I get into this pod I Can just relax. I don't have to be

so agitated um so that's another thing and and and safety and lighting and acoustic value are required for creativity scent is another one scent is one of the low-hanging fruit hotel use scent extremely well to be able to elongate customer stickiness by a factor of 20%. So you can create scent to be able to drive part of the brain in different ways. We use Palo Santo, for instance. It acts like imagination and that mysterious side of you. And believe it or not, even in Miami in an expo, we're pumping that scent out and we're drawing people in. So those are important

and the other thing we decided to do is like for good design the brand the reason the brand exists chris is to help everyone achieve their goal and it's a it's a lofty statement but we stand by it then we say we want to eliminate distractions and enhance focus So our keyword is focus, and our tagline is stay focused. And the way we do that is, how do you stay focused? How do you eliminate distractions? You have to layer out friction. One of those frictions is standing in the queue for five to seven minutes. You don't do that at Vell. You actually order on the app, go and sit down, a robot delivers it. Another friction is at Vell, you can have a tab open. So you can just, as if you were at a bar, you can just open up a tab

and pay on the way out. That's another layer of friction. So we've compressed that onboarding and offboarding of a public space as much as possible. And those are some of the things we're doing and we're really product centcentric about it. That's really brilliant. I like the idea. You know, I've been in that flow where I'm writing something or, you know, I'm working on an email or presentation or a sales pitch or response. And you're like, oh, God, I've got to get up and get me another coffee. You know, and then you've got to go stand in line. And you kind of get a whole interruption, you know, to what you're doing.

And it kind of throws you off. And sometimes your coffee's coming. So I like the concept of having a robot barista just bring you what you want. And there's an app involvement here too, right? People can do a lot of this interaction off the app, correct? That's it. Exactly right. So we have a tech stack, which means you can book space,

you can order drinks ahead of time. And we have two types of users, just like good old technology platforms. Majority of users are going to be everyone, free users, casual users. There's no subscription. You can come and transact with us. But if you're a subscriber, you're a power user. Let's say you go to coffee shops three times a week or more. You can become a subscriber to Vell, which is very, very affordable, $10 a month. For that, you get some enhanced benefits and enriched benefits, both in terms of pricing benefits, but also you get your own Wi-Fi pipe, which is 500 megabytes up, 500 megabytes down for $10 a month. It's incredible.

So we have gamers who come and sit at Vell all day long in a pod, drinking coffee and playing professional games. We have recorded. It's incredible. I love it. I love it. I have some friends that I need to send there

because I play with them online and i'm always the joke is uh what are you using that mcdonald's coffee shop wi-fi what's going on with your wi-fi there buddy and they're like yeah i need to buy some my parents need to buy some faster wi-fi it's like you keep maybe you could give her parents 40 bucks or something so they get that faster wi-fi so that's kind of the joke. You're using that Starbucks Wi-Fi down the block. That's funny. Gamers are using that for the thing. You guys have already started opening shops.

Tell us where you're open now and what the roadmap is for spreading the offices around the coffee shops around the nation. We're open in Savannah. Savannah is growing really, really well. We're six months into Savannah. I love Savannah as a marketplace.

It's net 40 people move to Savannah every day. Savannah has SCAD. It's a real kind of huge symbolic capital outside of Georgia as well. So then we're building in Charlotte. We're building in Charlton then we're building in Charlotte, we're building in Charlton, we're building in Nashville. We just did a deal with Amtrak in Chicago Union Station in the Great Hall. And we're looking at three or four airports I can't announce quite yet. And we're looking at several hotels, some of them in Miami and other markets like Austin and Boston and New York. So, you know, classic business school says GBF, get big fast.

And for us, it's not necessarily a GBF. For us, it's to solve problems at scale as fast as we can because we get emails all day long. I get LinkedIn messages all day long. When are you coming to this city? When are you coming to that city? When are you coming near me? And I want to deliver on that. We want to deliver that.

And it's interesting because we're now also in four different verticals. Right. So we're in residential, hotel, train, airport. And each one has its own nuanced problem. The dwell time in an airport is different to a train station. Airports have luggage. Residential doesn't. The airport customer is different to a train station airports have luggage residential doesn't the airport customer is different to a hotel customer for instance and so there are lots of lots of things for us to think about but we're one of those companies that's growing there you go in fact we've got a uh ring in from the live feed uh mary k evans thanks for the question mary are you going to do california is her question. We are. We love to come there. We're actually discussing some stuff in San Francisco right now, and some of the transport environments in San Francisco. We believe they're hugely relevant for airports, so California is

great for us. We're also exhibiting this 20 by 20 um exhibition we have in in nevada and las vegas in in a couple of weeks so i can share the details with you um at icsc in uh 20th 22nd 24th of may so if anyone is in the real estate or commercial real estate business or economic development or even just really fascinated by real estate and the products that are coming out of that, they should go to that exhibition. They can come and see us. We're doing it in partnership with Christian Wakefield. It's a big deal for Val and for Christian Wakefield.

There you go. She even said it would be huge in Orange County. Orange County is like a great place to do business. Lots of money there. And people are responding very good. So you're selling us. You're selling the crowd the crowd the audience loves it so far i i think it's a great idea because like i said you know i've

tried to do coffee shops uh they're a great place to meet um and and they're and sometimes it's hard it's noisy it's not comfortable sometimes you can't get the best chair you know you've got the person who's you know there's always that one person sometimes in a crowded space who's talking about something that's so insane. That's usually what happens to me. And you're just like, I want to go choke that person. I'm not really, but you know, in my head and I'm like, and you're just like, I can't think about what I need to think about because you're so loud talking about, I don't know, something is so ignoring. I just want to go. So there's that.

But I love the idea. I love the concept, Office Space 4.0. With all the layoffs going on, I mean, the VCs are gearing up for this. They're getting ready because they know this is a new 2008 or dot-com boom where basically all these people got fired off of Twitter and Microsoft and Google and stuff. I think there's a new round of firing going on at Facebook. These are the people who are going to come out with the new inventions and the new innovations

and probably the new Facebook and Twitters when it really comes down to it. So these people are going to be working from home, doing deals, meeting up, putting stuff together. If I recall rightly, Twitter was put together in a coffee shop. If I recall rightly, Ev, Biz, and Jack hashed it out in a coffee shop. So if I recall rightly, coffee shop or restaurant. And look how well that turned out. No, I'm just kidding. It actually did for them. They're billionaires. I mean, I think Elon Musk has a whole different take on it, though. We'll see how that thing turns out. What haven't we touched on or covered about vel that is important that he's out there you know i think we've covered a lot of it but i do want to touch

on this idea of of the schematics of the workplace changing and remote i know a lot of people have been talking about you know that this kind of great great resignation I mean for us and for Val we see it as like a great transition um and that's a huge time of dynamism and opportunity let me give you an example for instance we we are a remote company even though we are brick and mortar the corporate structure of the company is remote um and we celebrate that with an overcompensate with it in terms of cultural values touch points um building information centralization so everyone is commercially intimate but we we put out job posts like um for instance hiring a chief of staff at the moment and we just put out a job post and

we're at you know 1800 candidates apply and um so it's it's remarkable um how people have this new degree of autonomy to be able to say, look, this no longer works for me. I now need to move to this city and I still want to work for that startup in the other city. And startups and companies like us are embracing it, saying, absolutely, you can in illinois and work for our company who's headquartered in the cloud and i live in florida so absolutely that's working and i think that's something to celebrate um and that transition and that change is the thing that uh we don't know how the dust is going to settle there's still a lot of ums and ahs and question marks over a lot of things i mean there aren't that many successful case studies of a billion-dollar unicorn or gorilla that was built remote, stayed remote, unless you're a WordPress or Shopify or a heavy tech company. So to some extent, I think flexibility and hybrid is the way forward.

And I think common sense will prevail, and the truth is always somewhere in the middle. There you go. Well, I think you guys are discovering and opening new territory and actually improving on when it really comes down to it. You guys are improving and innovating on models that have already been successful. We work in Starbucks and everything and what people are trying to do. And you guys are just merging the two together and making it so, you know, there's an environment that's healthy, safe. And you're going to feel like you want to be productive in that environment. And, uh, you know, then you've got robot baristas. So there's that as well. You know, you don't have that snarky barista who can't

spell your name all the time and who's too busy on their phone or something. I'm just teasing, I'm teasing Starbucks. Um, and it, it looks like the menu is fairly inexpensive too as well especially if you're a subscriber is that is that uh is that true it is you know um we know number one uh we we we don't we can't tip at val um so there's no tipping culture here um i'm an englishman i found that enormous amount of friction having to tip. I get stressed when I'm not sure how much I have to tip. And so, therefore, we really like – and I'm not saying – I think tipping is really valuable in the restaurant business and in lots of businesses. It just wasn't relevant in our business. That's all I'm saying.

And so we, therefore, have a baseline salary. So starting salary at a barista level is $20 an hour, which is way above – I'm quitting this job. There you go. I get $20 an hour. Wow. I'm quitting this job. There you go. I get $5 an hour here. Or is it a day? I think it's a day. It might be a minute.

It just throws me a bag of chips and a Coke. Some change, whatever's left in the drawer. $20 an hour is pretty good these days. It's really good. Which means and also if you're paying $ bucks an hour is pretty good these days it is it's really good which means which means we can and also if you're paying 20 an hour an hour and there's no tip culture you can give baristas you know economic dependability like there's no seasonal variety in their earning power so then and then we have pto for our baristas um and um health and well-being programs

etc so it's it's a new way of looking at food and beverage. And we're not the only one doing it. Lots of other companies is cool as thinking about that. But we are a people first kind of company because we believe we're trying to sell an experience. And ultimately, our humans, our people in our company sell that experience. So we have to start off by looking after them first. And I am one of them. So I look after, the company looks after me,

the company looks after everyone else and drive that forward. We build a culture around it and we build a halo around ourselves, which says to some extent, we're the chosen, we're going to change the world. And that's really important in a remote setting to galvanize everyone around a common denominator. There you go. Well, that's an extraordinary

vision. And you can give people some inspiration there and deliver that. And that's kind of what you're trying to do. You're trying to help send some inspiration to the next generation of entrepreneurs and then give them a place to operate. I've got another question coming in. Have you given any thought to putting it in hospitals and large assisted living facilities? There's a whole population there that are computer savvy and need access, is the question I have come in.

I love that question. What an intelligent thing to have pointed out. We have an intelligent audience here. Yeah, for sure. It is. Definitely. For sure. We would love to do that. Having said that, early stage startups, and by I mean early stage, I mean before Series B. So within the first four or five years of a startup, you need to be very precise about your beachhead and penetrate that fast and hard. That doesn't mean that value proposition can't sit in a hospital really, really well.

But in the early days, we're going to have to be very clear about what markets we're penetrating and doubling and tripling down on those to keep ourselves a little bit more focused. But I appreciate the question, and we'll definitely consider that down the line. Definitely. I mean, as you guys expand, there's a lot of hurdles you can get into. But, yeah, building the core out so that you can get that dominance and stuff. Georgia, did you guys pick Georgia because it's such a fast-growing place? I mean, there's a lot of construction going on there. It's kind of crazy what's going on there.

It's kind of the place to be, I think. It is. It's got a net positive environment, definitely, in Georgia. We were looking at multiple territories at the same time. I happen to live two hours south of location number one. So it was important from an early stage management point of view that that was close to us. And Savannah is just one of those cities. We found a very good spot, very good landlord, things lined up.

And we we selected Savannah. But but we also have a one city growth strategy at the moment. So we don't want to do two in a city right now until we get to the dozens or double digits. So we want to grow multiple cities, multiple states. So we're now, we're now in,

at the moment, we're now in five cities, five states. There you go. There you go. You just got some comments back in that keep up and doing what you're doing. So there you go uh lots of southern california i guess that i guess we have a big southern california audience that want you

uh to come there uh so are you guys gonna what about investors if somebody's listening on the line you know we have a big linkedin audience as well uh do you guys gonna go to vcs anytime soon or public are you gonna still work on proof of concept and then control things from there uh how are you gonna work what's the plan that way yeah absolutely i mean we've had uh we've had three rounds of successful funding so far we're one of those starbucks stuff stops we wanted that we want to be like stoppers but we're one of those startups that is growing really fast so we always as soon as the ink is dried we're raising again so we're one of those startups that is growing really fast. So we always, as soon as the ink is dried, we're raising again. So we were around before.

Um, we actually, we're actually starting around on a start engine. Um, so you can go to start engine.com forward slash offering forward slash Val, and you can see, see all about us there. So that's start engine.com forward slash offering forward slash Val. And yeah, if it's interesting for you to take, let us know what information you need. But I think startups

that are growing fast have to be good at raising cash and good at raising funds. And I believe that fundraising keeps companies very sincere and help build better product. Because when you go to market, you get very,

very tough stress tests and questions that you have to answer. You have to think about, and you have to incorporate. Therefore you improve. And it's the same way you're trying to get a mortgage for a house. If the bank says no, it means maybe the house is just not good enough or you're overpaying. And it's the same way. the market keeps you very honest and product

development is is also thrived in the environment there you go well mo this has been pretty insightful anything more we need to cover as we go out no i'm i'm so happy to be here chris thanks for inviting me and uh hopefully i've added some value to to audience i think you did and definitely people will be subscribing it seems to be a favorite among our audience. I think you did. And definitely people will be subscribing. It seems to be a favorite among our audience. And I think what you guys are doing is brilliant. I mean, it's one of those concepts where you're like, why didn't I think of that?

Like I've seen the stuff over the years that you're just like, yeah, you just take WeWork and Starbucks and merge the two and make it better. And why didn't I think of that? And so it's a great idea. And sometimes those are the most brilliant ideas i mean most of if most most of the great business ideas like airbnb and other things came from basically the the for sale or the help wanted areas of craigslist so

you know they weren't they were sitting there the whole time in people's face going you know you really should try doing this because it works someplace so So there you go. I mean, eBay, I mean, I, I used to, I had the idea for eBay back in the day, um, because we used to run these bulletin board auctions. And of course, somebody who started eBay got, got, you know, saw the same thing and went, Hey, we should just make this like this auction thing, like a centralized unit. That's better than bulletin boards. So there you go. So, Mo, give us your.com so we can find you guys on the interwebs and get to know you better. Yeah, sure.

Our domain is myvell.com. You can find us there, find us about our product and how we see the world. And if not, find me on LinkedIn. I'm sure, Chris, you'll put in the show notes. I'd like to engage with you. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Mo. We really appreciate it, and you give us some insight and hopefully some inspiration to future entrepreneurs.

Thanks so much, Chris. All the best. There you go. Thanks, Manish, for tuning in. As always, go to GoodReach.com for Chess Chris Foss, the big LinkedIn group. There's 130,000 people over there. LinkedIn newsletter is just huge. It grows every day.

It's crazy. Go to YouTube.com for Chess Chris Fmas for the show to your family friends and relatives thanks for the recent five-star reviews over there give a five-star review on itunes when you get a chance thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time that should have a sound