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This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio.
I was out in California last week. I know you know that because you were filling in for Yeah, Carol and me here at the studio.
It was super fun, actually good.
It's always fun. It's a fun show. We have a lot of fun. We got a great team also. That makes it really fun in the control room right now. But we left the event Bloomberg screen time, and I was walking in Hollywood, on the sidewalks of Hollywood, California, with my brother, walking to his car, because that's what you do in La. My brother, Michael, he's funny. He's very funny. I'm glad you know him. He is very funny.
And we ran into this little robot on the sidewalk and it was not something you see in New York City.
So for me, did you take a bat?
No, it's very rude, I know, but it's because there's no person inside of it doesn't mean you should take it back to you.
Didn't put anything past an American anyway.
He was I've seen him on those on the streets of Santa Monica before, but never Hollywood. So this is the first time seeing it on the sidewalks of Hollywood and it was delivering something to somebody. Yeah, and I don't know if it was a robot from our next guest, co founder and CEO of Serve Robotics, Ali Kashani, who joins us from Redwood City, California, which is the headquarters of Serve Robotics. Ali, was this one of your robots that looked exactly like the ones that I see on
your website? Was this one of yours?
I'm pretty sure they're very unique. I'm Katie, Come on, that's your first reaction hearing about robots.
I'm sorry. So for a little bit of context, I had Ali Kashani on the TV show a couple of weeks ago, probably a month or two ago at this point, and Ali, I did ask you that how often people attack these robots and you said not too often.
Yeah, yes, that's right. It's they're actually kind of like a mailbox at this point. They're just doing their thing and people just pass by. Sometimes people can be curious, especially the children, but overall they're very well received and accepted in the community.
Well, that had a camera on it, and my brother said, you know, I think it's actually opera. I'm just looking for foot I think I took a picture of it. I'm looking at My brother said, you know, actually I think they're operated by somebody remotely. Are versions of these operated remotely? I know the current the newest thing that you announced today is not operated remotely. Are older versions of these operated remotely?
So they're all what the call level for autonomous, which means that they can do a lot of things by themselves. So there's a good chance when you saw it it was actually navigating by itself. But if it actually needs help, it can ask for help and someone can help remotely.
Oh interesting, So it's a mix. It's kind of just like you know, you'd have the way they thought about driverless cars back in the day. They haven't implemented it yet this way, but it's like you kind of ring a bell if you're in a sticky situation. Oh yeah, okay, So talk to us about level four automation here, because I don't think general can you know Ed Ludlow, who covers this stuff all the time, understands levels one.
That's like his bat signal basically, But.
For the normal person. What are the different levels of autonomy?
Yeah, I guess the best pace to explain it is if you have a tesla, it's level two, which means you have to have your hands on the steering and eyes on the road. And then the highest level is level five, which is when the robot or the vehicle never needs any help at all. It can do everything one hundred percent by itself, which if you ask folks in this space will tell you is mostly sci fi.
Level four is the holy grail where robots can actually move indepenality by themselves quite a lot of the times, but whenever they are outside of the comfort zone, someone
can help them. And when you think about it, financially, there's a point at which automation doesn't make any more financial sense because let's say flight controllers sitting somewhere looking at hundreds of you know, planes, that's perfectly fine use of human intelligence, and it makes a lot of sense to actually keep humans in the loop at that level. But the important things that the robots can do a lot of things by themselves, and that's where a lot of the leverage and automation comes in.
I find this so delightful I know I made a joke at the very Star about beating them taking to these robots.
But that's an interesting turn that you've had in such a short time.
I mean, I just, you know, I find it endearing these little robots.
There's cute eyes on them.
Yeah, they're buzzing around, they're giving you food. I'm in New York though, you know, I've never seen one. Of course, I don't spend a lot of time in California. What are your expansion plans, I mean, what other cities are you potentially thinking about here?
Yeah, we have plans to come to new cities next year as soon as in a Q two, we are going to have our next major market beyond La. First, they are going to expand in more LA neighborhoods. In Q one, we have two hundred and fifty more robots in Q one being deployed, and then by the end of the year, we're going to have two thousand robots and we're going to launch a few more cities, which
we'll have more to share about that soon. We have recently discussed the fact that we'll be doing a pilot in Dallas with Wing, which is a subsidiary of alphabet. They make drones where are robots pick up items from restaurants and then hand them over automatically to a drone that would then bring them a few miles away, a distance that the robot can't do. So it's a really cool collaboration where robots do half of the deliveries that are short distance drones to the other half that are
long distance. That's will be one of the next places you will see them.
I dream of a future where I can just open my window and get my fries.
Delivery in New York City.
I don't want to go downstairs. Well, you know, I was going to ask about New York City because Okay, in New York City, I feel like one of these robots would get attacked, like immediately. And Elliott, the question I have for you is, I mean, what's your ideal city.
Obviously these robots work in LA You're thinking about, you know, expanding to Dallas, which is the ideal make up both in terms of sort of the temperament of the people but also the geography of the city that would work for these robots.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's really first and foremost the question of where are our partners mostly concentrated in so Uber is the largest player in LA, so it makes a ton of sense for us to start there, and LA being the second largest market in the country. New York is the largest market, so it's just a
matter of time before you see robots there. But given the distribution effectively the partnerships that we have in place, we've started in Los Angeles, but most cities in the country would have a need for robots because restaurants are usually in very congested areas where you have, you know, more car traffic, more parking issues, and within that business couple miles at that business district, you have a lot of population, so they can benefit from robots.
New York's a unique market, though we have the e bikes and the delivery people, so I don't know. I would like to see how it would would work here.
If you get hit by one of those e bikes, that.
Would hurt, hurt a lot more than getting hit by one of these robots. So then go seven miles an hour. Hey, Ali, before we let you go, very briefly, how much do these cost? We only have twenty seconds left, but give us the cost equation here.
We don't share the bomb costs, but they cost half as much as the last robots be a building, So we bring that cost down and they cost less than a brand new car, the cheapest band new car you can buy in the US.
Wow.
So they're pretty expensive.
I would say that pretty cheap with all that smart the sensors, the computer computers on board, they're they're pretty reasonably priced.
But I imagine they're going to be getting cheaper and cheaper with the technology, really cool stuff. It's a publicly held company ticker seer v uh. The company stock up four point five percent today. Ali Kashani, co founder and CEO of Server Robotics. This is Bloomberg. The hospitality market expected to grow to nearly five trillion dollars this year.
I'd believe it, you do, Yeah, I mean Americans they love experiences, they love going places, and they love eating well.
Several factors wellness, tourism, flexible booking options, sustainability initiatives, collaboration, and health and safety standards.
That all sounds right, and they love going places absolutely.
Longevity and senior living facilities also a factor. And that's where our next guest comes in. Let's get to Richard Shankle, founder and executive chairman of Restura Hospitality Group. It is looking to bring tech and innovation to senior living. He joins us from Walthnam, Massachusett. It's Richard, the founder and former CEO at Unidine, which provides food and dining management services across the country for senior living facilities, community hospitals,
behavior health clients, corporate environments and more. Good to have you with us this afternoon. Richard, give us an idea of the white space that you see here because you've spent some three decades in the larger hospitality business, what's missing when it comes to senior living facilities at the marketplace?
And thank you Tim, and thank you everybody for having us on right today. All the hospitality industry focused on senior living is about twenty years behind the times in innovation. And as we looked at the launch of Resstoer, we spent the last eighteen months with market research and really trying to understand what that act of adult lifestyle, community and senior living really wants.
And what really came out is they want choice.
As we go back in life, as most of us will remember airports, airports were probably the most stoic type of business where there was no freedom of choice. And now we look today, whether it's local brands, national brands, or things to do when you're in an airport, it's humbly very different. In our opinion. The same thing went on in the college and university market place back many, many years ago. It was just a board plan a you got, you've received three meals a day, two meals certain days.
And that was it in one dining room and senior living has Yeah.
I remember when my parents dropped me off at college. They were like, oh, this is why tuition is so expensive. Why are they spending all the money on the dining hall and on the lawns and on the dorms.
Right right, And if you look at colleges and university, some of the CNU business has some of the best reputations from a culinary perspective.
Then you go over to senior.
Living and I spent the large part of my career in it, and it hasn't evolved. There are three major competitors in it, and it's a very stoic, poorly innovative marketplace.
Your point, I know from experience visiting my grandma.
Yeah, yeah, well, Richard, I'm curious. I mean, we'll get into what you're trying to do and how you're trying to change that. But why do you think that's the case. I mean, you bring up some great points when it comes to college, even when it comes to airports, for example, the dining options getting better. Why do you think we haven't seen that same energy being brought to senior living even though the population is aging.
Well.
I think it was a couple of different things. Number One, the type of active adult that was prior in senior living was very comfortable with just one choice or two. I think as the market has changed and you look at the boomers coming in and just even active adults sixty five and seventy and seventy five, they're.
A lot more sophisticated today.
If you kind of look at the restaurant industry thirty years ago, it's very much evolved, and I believe right now, as these active adult and senior living continuing care or types of communities go up, it is a much more sophisticated consumer today that has an expectation. Research that we did prior to launch, only seven percent of the individuals looking at senior living active adult communities felt it would
meet their food and dining needs. Ninety three percent felt it would never meet the mark of really great dining. That's a major disconnect.
I'm wondering about the cost equation here and how that looks for senior dining, for senior living facilities. These places, Richard, as you know, can be incredibly expensive.
That's correct, And I think given that, you know, we're looking at the marketplace and saying, why isn't there the opportunity to upgrade the dining services or for variety choice, you know, things like pop up restaurants, you know, with proprietary brands launching there to offer that what we'll call consumer, those choices and be able to keep them within the confines of that community by offering them that high level dining experience when they want it, but also offering them
to other things besides high level dining.
And it's interesting. I mean, I'm curious, you know, how tech plays into it, because you point out in your notes that when we think about, you know, this this shift from cafeterials cafeteria style when it comes to colleges to really tech forward experience, I mean, how do you incorporate tech into what you're doing?
Yeah, well, we spent the last eighteen months pre launch of October first envisioning what technology would be, and the industry is definitely a laggered in that area. Just imagine you walk into a dining room by a facility operated by Restore and by the end of the meal, we have technology that will allow that executive c suite as well as us, to know how we did, what they liked, why they liked it, and what they didn't like, and be able to immediately change anything.
From a menu offering the next day.
All but getting the results immediately of what we'll call consumer satisfaction and analytics on a dashboard for both us internally as well as our consumer there as well as the executive suite can be a complete game changer for those facilities. It's never been done. Today, we go in and get our car fixed, and I use the analogy. We get constant updates of how that car is getting fixed, what they're doing, and at the end, are you satisfied?
In senior living. I can tell you nine times out of ten, a once a year survey of how the food and dining is is completed, and that's unacceptable in today's day and a from a consumer perspective.
What's the technology that the end user has to interact with. I'm not talking about the executives at the place. I'm not talking about the staff who works there. What about the tech that somebody like my grandmother would have to interact with?
Right, Yeah, it's very interesting. We spent a lot of time and what we came to find out is, you know, the phone, whether we call on an iPhone or Samsung, a smartphone is what almost every one of them have in a facility. And we are very much involved in, you know, building out and we have built out the applications that will allow that person internally to be able to get us information as well as for us to push information to them. And it hasn't been done. We've
done things like paper surveys. They are so outdated in today's day and age.
Yeah, I have to say, I mean, I don't know. I think of my own grandmom, who's in her nineties. She was using an Uber up until a few years ago.
Oh really, yeah, my grandma doesn't even have a smartphone.
That's we have very different grandmother.
But she's one hundred and two. Actually tomorrow's her birthday.
Oh my goshdred and second birthday wew, no kidding. Well, anyway, we have different grandmoms. Mine's ninety five.
So it's like almost yeah, yeah, that's so she uses a smartphone obviously.
Because yeah, yeah, she loves emojis and stuff. A text her all the time. Anyway, that's awesome, Richard, I am curious talk to us about how how you make money because you think about your last venture in this space. For example, you point out in your notes that you delivered a nine hundred percent return to shareholders. Talk us through again. Obviously, we know the opportunity set here that you see and what you're doing about it. How do you make money?
Yeah, so it's fundamentally on on site food service type of operations.
We have two ways that we get involved.
We operate on a cost plus base basis where we have different overheads and fees built in. And then we also operate a lot of the times on what we'll call profits loss arrangement, where we'll guarantee our operating costs. And obviously, if we operate the way we envision, there's profit and if we don't, we take risk on that end, and we make guarantees throughout our agreements. So it's pretty fundamentally a business that provides margin back to us.
How hard is it to get into these facilities that have been working with incumbents for years and might have long term contracts.
Well, you know, you know what I would say is, I'll give you some statistics about eighty five percent of the senior living marketplace, which is you know, thirty to forty billion, is not outsourced. They presently are self operated. The other fifteen percent is outsourced to competitors. So there's a huge amount of white space to be focused on. And you know how we look at that other fifteen percent, We don't believe we are building or have built restore
to compete with the other companies. We think we have such a creative, innovative approach. We also know, as part of our whole value proposition, I've provided back to all of our employees over thirty percent of the company in equity to our employees. All of our employees are owners
of the company. We subscribe and are a participant with ownership Works in New York City a not for profit, and I think we're one of the first startups that they've ever involved themselves in where a percent of the company was provided prior to the company being profitable.
Wow, Okay, what's your outlook in terms of how you roll this out? When you roll it out? Just we have thirty seconds left. Give us an update on timing here, right?
We started October first, after eighteen months in stealth mode. We are in constant communication with prospective clients. Now we're coast to coast from the east to the west provider, and we envision that over a very short period of time, we already have many prospective clients that we are moving forward with. And as I said, we have just spent the last eighteen months making sure our systems, technology and
culinary resources are in place. Executive team has been hired, and we're right now already involved with some clients.
All right, Richard, come back visit us again. Richard Schenkel, founder and executive chairman of Restoa Hospitality Group, looking to bring tech an innovation to senior living, joining us this afternoon from Waltham, Massachusetts.