Mike Montero - Co-Founder and CTO at Resy

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Kate identified a member of her team to invest time into, and then met with them to find an initiative that they cared about that also moved the company forward and then empowered them to achieve it. This statement is an example of an action value statement from a Leaderbit challenge titled "Empowering People." Wouldn't it be great if every week your people were taking the same actions that the greatest technology leaders on Earth do? Have your direct reports be like Kate by enrolling them in the Leaderbits leadership program. Each week, your direct reports will spend ten minutes taking action and growing as a leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) You can even track their progress and hold them accountable to improve as a leader. Leaderbits.io is the only leadership program built specifically for technologists. Learn more at leaderbits.io. Now get excited, because today we are talking to Mike Montero, the co-founder and CTO of Resy, and we discuss how a company's culture reflects that of its leadership, the benefits of in-house development, and how developers aren't paid to write code—they're paid to ship code. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Mike Montero at 00:01:12) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:13) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. I was actually just getting, like, my team—they give me all the insights, all the cool behind-the-scenes research they find about everybody. And you're like a geek like me since a young little individual, young little carbon-based life form.

(Mike Montero at 00:01:41) It started young, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:44) So what was your first computer?

(Mike Montero at 00:01:47) Commodore 64. I was probably twelve or thirteen, and my family was mostly a bunch of artists and writers. And so, but I looked at the thing and was like, I need to understand what this thing does. I'd always loved taking the alarm clock and opening it up and looking at what it did inside. And so for some reason, I knew the computer was expensive enough that I shouldn't open it up, or that might have been the first thing I did. But then I learned about programming. I was like, okay, this is a way to get on the inside without actually wrecking, because my parents would have killed me. And I started learning how to code about thirteen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:26) So you saw the alarm clock and you're like, that's something I could break and not get in trouble.

(Mike Montero at 00:02:31) Yeah. Yeah. I really wanted to know what it does, how the inside looks, because it was like, you know, one of those early digital ones. So I just wanted to know what it looks like. But I knew, man, if I tear this computer apart, my parents are going to kill me because it's so expensive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) So what are you really pumped up about? I mean, I'm watching the growth of Resy. It's looking fantastic. But what are you really excited about that's happening, like, this week right now?

(Mike Montero at 00:02:51) I mean, I don't know if you saw, we did our first annual Product Summit on Tuesday.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) Oh, nice. How'd that go?

(Mike Montero at 00:02:58) It was incredible. We basically announced five new products. So, yeah, big-time innovation in the hospitality tech space. We announced RGS, Resy Global Services, which is essentially a platform that allows us to integrate all of the supply and demand from any company anywhere in the world like Resy, so that we can all share reservations and users. And we're launching with two partners. We announced—we acquired a company last year called Survevy—so we announced sort of the V1 integration of comprehensive surveys. We announced Resy Select, which is our take on a loyalty program. It's pretty innovative. We can't stop getting requests from people for more info. We announced Resy Fly, which is by far the biggest thing we're doing—a brand new, slick, very, very technically interesting inventory management system—and a new Resy.com. So we've got, for however far into the year we are, we're taking a very, very big swing this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:12) I've got some questions now.

(Mike Montero at 00:04:14) Yeah, I'm ready. I got answers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:16) All right. When you said Resy Global Services, it kind of reminded me—can you explain a little bit more about that?

(Mike Montero at 00:04:24) Yeah. So the basic idea is that—so we have—I'm not sure if you're aware, but we have a partnership with Airbnb. We did an API integration with them, pretty, again, very technically sophisticated, certainly groundbreaking in the industry. But if you go to airbnb.com or open up the app, you can book restaurant reservations through Airbnb. We, together, have built that. It's largely powered by Resy's API. So we have a pipeline, a two-way pipeline between Resy and Airbnb and Airbnb back. So that means that Airbnb guests can discover and book restaurant reservations from the Airbnb app. So there's a lot of things you want to do—you're going on a vacation, you've rented a home, you're going to be there for a week—let us book you five amazing dinner reservations. So we essentially, by virtue of that connection, have a pipeline directly to 200 million yearly travelers. That's the size of Airbnb's network.

(Mike Montero at 00:05:21) So, but with Resy expanded to—we're now in 15 countries total—we're trying to create as much coverage as we can for Airbnb's travelers. So we're in Paris, we're in Madrid and Barcelona. We announced the acquisition of Club Kviar in Spain. We're in Dublin. But there's a whole bunch of places in the world that we aren't. So we're not in the Netherlands, for example, and there's our amazing partner there, Formitable. They're just like Resy. They have amazing restaurants and all this technology, and they would love to be in front of 200 million Airbnb travelers. So we've created a standard—it's a tech standard and a bunch of APIs—that you input that both Resy has implemented and the partner implements. And once the pipes are hooked up, in about three to five weeks of tech integration, we are passing supply and demand between each other. And then there's sort of a multiplying effect. We add Ristorando, who has 5,000 restaurants in Latin America, and all of a sudden we have 10,000 restaurants in the network, and all of that data is going back and forth between every partner involved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:35) Yeah. So here's where you threw me. You just passed it so casually.

(Mike Montero at 00:06:41) I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:41) My understanding of it—I almost went off on this tangent about how great it was, and I'm like, hold on a sec, I'm going to back up and have him explain a little bit more because I don't know if I got it right off the bat. No, I got it right off the bat. You guys just changed the game, and you're like, yeah, 105, boom, just pass it off.

(Mike Montero at 00:06:56) Yeah. It's funny because it's our moonshot, and we're there. We're going to—it's going to be live. But it's this highly technical thing. It's not—you know, Fly is incredibly sexy. If you're a restaurant operator, you look at Fly and you get it. I can show you screens. RGS is, you know, it's bits and bytes. But admittedly, it's huge, and it's going to bring extraordinary value to—so far, there are now four partners in the network. We'll announce a bunch more coming, but it's going to bring an extraordinary amount of value to everybody in the network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:30) Well, yeah. And then, so I mean, it's like you're like Nasdaq, right? You're like the platform on which these reservations are occurring, right?

(Mike Montero at 00:07:37) I mean, my goal as a CTO: I want 100% of restaurant reservations in the world to somehow touch some piece of technology that we've built or are part of or are offering up to restaurants. Where you'll see us start offering a lot of, you know, call it inventory management as a service, software as a service to companies like Resy that are, you know, hey, you know, inventory management is really hard. Well, we're really, really good at it, and we're putting a ton of resources behind it. We are going to have the best inventory management system on the planet. We want to make this stuff available to everybody. We want to integrate with everybody. We want the restaurant industry and our partners to be thrilled and for diners to be thrilled. And so, you know, we're taking a pretty big shot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:26) So this is amazing. But now I've got to know, like, how did this specific project come about?

(Mike Montero at 00:08:32) So Airbnb—we started talking to Airbnb, and they basically said, we want to start—when a person travels with us, we want to be able to offer them all of the things that they're looking for. They're looking for local experiences, like pasta-making with a pro in Italy. And that's a business that they've been running and have had huge success with. But they said, now we know that when people travel, they need to eat, and lots of people build their vacation around where they're going to eat. So they started thinking, we want to offer restaurant reservations in a way that nobody else is.

(Mike Montero at 00:09:06) They approached us and said, what do you think? And we said, listen, the whole—our whole DNA is around openness and APIs. And of course, we can give you API access the same way that our apps have access, and we can do a tight integration. And we started talking about it. It very quickly became clear that we wanted to do things that were much harder than the basics, including full two-way messaging integration. So restaurants can message Airbnb guests anywhere in the world to the Airbnb app, and replying in the Airbnb app will go all the way back through to the restaurant. Payment—all payment occurs using your Airbnb wallet. So there's no insecure exchange. They deal with all the money. But we came along and said, we're going to do this really, really difficult integration that no one's done before, and we did it. We pulled it off, and it's incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:07) Yeah. That's a lot of endpoints, right?

(Mike Montero at 00:10:09) It's—yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's a surprising—given how large they are, it's a surprising amount of tech. But the beautiful part is that we integrated one way to Airbnb, and they integrated one way to us. So I didn't create new endpoints. They're using essentially all the same plumbing and endpoints, quite frankly, that my own apps use. So maintenance is really low.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:38) That's the idea, right?

(Mike Montero at 00:10:40) Yeah. As we add features, they automatically become available to Airbnb. But we started saying to ourselves, well, so the relationship included, okay, you're going to do this for us, and now we want coverage. Because we've got the pipes hooked up, we did the hard part. Now, everywhere our travelers go, we want restaurant recommendations. And we said, okay, we're going to expand internationally, which we've done. But how can we acquire restaurants even faster? And we thought, let's find partners just like Resy that think the way we think and that have the DNA that we have, and let's hook them up to the pipe. Let's just see if we can do it. And it turned out to be, you know, a set of API standards that the partner integrates on their side and that we've integrated on our side. And we've got two partners pumping in restaurant reservations, and Airbnb is going to be pumping back bookings to them in the next, hopefully, couple weeks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:36) Oh, man. But you definitely have to have a great team to pull this off. How did the company get started as a whole?

(Mike Montero at 00:11:43) So Gary V and I were having conversations about doing something. Ben Leventhal, my partner and the CEO and the founder of Eater, and Gary were having conversations about doing something. And I'm the tech guy, so it was like this moment of serendipity. Well, Ben's got this idea, and we all know each other. Let's get together and try to do something. And the original vision, which Ben had sort of formulated over, you know, a very long history of loving, being obsessed about, and knowing restaurants—he said, pardon the analogy, but I want to be Uber for restaurant reservations. Like, I want to walk out of my house—I love it. Yeah. I want to eat in thirty minutes. I want an amazing dinner at a great place. So we launched the product initially to sell restaurants reservations at the best restaurants last minute. And so the revenue would be split between us and the restaurant. We would guarantee the inventory. It would be this amazing relationship. We came out. Users loved us. Restaurants loved us. The press thought we were scalping. They thought it was horrible. And over time, I think we just started building relationships with restaurants and proving both that we could deliver on the tech and we can deliver on the diners. And so we started getting questions like, hey, can you build this? And we'd be like, sure. And can you build this? Sure. And it became pretty evident that what we were being asked to build was essentially a replacement to whatever they were using at the time to manage their inventory.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:17) There was a lot of, like, half-baked stuff around the industry because, I mean, I've personally just seen a lot of it out of my own consumer frustration with, like, oh, maybe this is the solution, right, to a consistent booking with, like, a great experience. And I'm like, nope.

(Mike Montero at 00:13:35) Yeah. Right? I mean, I think what we're going to argue there is that all of these, you know, the large incumbents were built ten, fifteen years ago. The world's changed. The way restaurants operate have changed. What users' expectations have changed. And there haven't—you know, the bigger players in the space just haven't done anything to really address those changes in a meaningful, technology-forward way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:01) Lucky you.

(Mike Montero at 00:14:02) Yeah. Lucky us, right? Huge opportunity. But, you know, that's why when Resy started, there was a burst of people on the scene. I think most of them have fallen away. But because a lot of people at the same time sort of identified, you know, the days of a couple of players with closed systems making it really, really hard for restaurants to operate, those days are over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:24) In every industry.

(Mike Montero at 00:14:26) In every industry. Fair enough, right? That's sort of the exciting thing, and we see that on the POS side and other places. But we took our shot. And I think we're really, really good at restaurants because we love them, and we're really, really good at tech. And so we've started, and Tuesday was about us saying, you know, you might not have been looking at us, and you might consider us a little startup. Yeah. Those days are over. Like, we're here now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:51) Oh, you guys are past the "will they make it," and you're into the, like, how fast are they going to grow? You know, like, you're going to hit multiple headlines—what, 20%, 100%, 200%? It's like, oh, it's an exciting ride to watch. So how—you said Ben and Gary, right? You knew these guys already when you got into business with them. How did you initially meet them pre-Resy?

(Mike Montero at 00:15:14) Oh, man. So I had never met Ben. Gary introduced us. But back in, I don't even remember, 2004 or five or something. But anyway, I founded a company called Fotolog back in 2002 with Scott Heiferman, an entrepreneur that I'm in love with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:30) He went on to do Meetup.

(Mike Montero at 00:15:33) Yeah. He and I founded FotoLog as a side project. We built FotoLog. It was a browsing success. It was huge.

(Mike Montero at 00:15:40) It was a $90,000,000 exit. But, you know, my sister had come to me and said—she and her husband are entrepreneurs in Oakland—hey, you know, we know this photo thing you're doing, but there's this whole video thing going on now. And the person that they referenced was Gary V.

(Mike Montero at 00:15:56) So we went on to build essentially a product we called Enfuego, because why not pick a horrible name? Right? It was a video upload product, and we supported every video type so that people could upload their own videos and the world could watch them. So this was in '04. But Gary was the inspiration.

(Mike Montero at 00:16:20) I think we emailed him, and there was a small exchange with him around what we were doing. Because at the time, he was doing all this vlogging, which was blowing up and blowing him up. So a couple—this is a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) Oh, so you knew Gary, like, pre-Gary?

(Mike Montero at 00:16:34) I mean, I don't want to say I knew him. We interacted. Yeah. We interacted with each other. But he certainly was a part of the inspiration.

(Mike Montero at 00:16:43) Oh, awesome. And this is me bragging a little bit, but I hadn't spoken to him. And I was working a job, and I started interviewing for a company here in New York. And one of the investors of that company's direct competitor called me because I happen to know him. And he said, I hear you're interviewing with my investment's direct competitor, and that's unacceptable because you're going to make my investment's life harder if you become the CTO.

(Mike Montero at 00:17:09) So super flattering to me. He said, I want you to give me a chance to help you find something else to do before you go do that. And I said, okay. I have a lot of respect for him. I said, let's talk.

(Mike Montero at 00:17:20) I met him, and he said, you and Gary should catch up because you two should definitely do something together, and he wants to do some stuff. So I met him again. I said, hey, how's it going? What's up? We started talking, and he said, we're going to do something. I've got a couple of things percolating. Let's see what happens. And over I don't even know, a couple months.

(Mike Montero at 00:17:39) We just on and off meeting, talking, and then he called me one day and said, okay, I'm ready. I've got the idea. I've got the other partner. Like, we're going to do this. And we met, and it was easy. It made perfect sense to all of us. We whiteboarded a few times, and that was—two, two and a half, three months later, we were live.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:58) Yeah. And then it wasn't like a brand new thing, right, because the different co-founders had experience in the space. Right? Ben co-founded Eater. Right?

(Mike Montero at 00:18:09) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:09) And then Gary with the wine. Right?

(Mike Montero at 00:18:11) With the wine. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:12) And then you with the technology. So you guys, like, it was a nice trifecta of coming together of experience.

(Mike Montero at 00:18:17) Yeah. And then even better is you throw on Gary's, you know, incredible competency around user acquisition and social media marketing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:25) Well, not just Gary's. I suppose that's just everybody showing that.

(Mike Montero at 00:18:27) Yeah. Yeah. And right on that. Right? And, uh, but yeah.

(Mike Montero at 00:18:31) I mean, in many respects, you know, you couple it with Ben's sort of knowledge of the industry and the people he knows and the—you know, nothing is better than being able to have direct access to your customer in a real, very legitimate way. And so we could call on, you know, some great restaurant operators and say, what can we build for you that you're going to buy? And we did that a lot. And, you know, I've done this for a long time, so building the software and building out a team is what I'm good at. And so there was—you know, it was—we went—it was a straight line on the first version. And then there was, I hate to use this term, but then there was the pivot, so to speak.

(Mike Montero at 00:19:11) So it's not quite straight. But once we knew, okay, we're going to start building a full inventory management system, full front-of-house management system, that line was straight, and we've just been on it ever since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:24) So you know that this podcast, this whole show and the book and everything, was inspired by Gary.

(Mike Montero at 00:19:32) Oh, was it really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:33) Yeah. I didn't even know you two were connected till fifteen minutes before the show, by the way.

(Mike Montero at 00:19:37) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:37) I had no idea. You're on my—it's like on my show notes. It's like, oh, you did Resy with Gary. I was like, oh, that's cool because that's a good talking point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:47) Yeah. This whole thing started because Gary came through my feed. Right? And then I'm like, who's this crazy dude? Right? And I ignored it. And a couple months later, it came through my feed again, and then I had a break in, like, in between things I was doing. Right? Like a breathing moment to where I learned or was intentional about learning. And so I started to follow him some more. And I was like, all right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:09) I really like how he talks about customer value and then giving back, and I really liked his giving, giving, giving. And then so I said, all right. Well, at the same time, I'm getting lots of questions doing private equity due diligence for startups, right, for technology. And the same things kept coming up over and over. So I said, you know what?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:27) I'll start writing about it, and that'll be my way of kind of giving back. And then so I gave back. And then boom, like, crazy. People started replying, like thousands of shares, comments, and I was really surprised they were finding them off of organic searching. Right? And then from there, I decided, you know, decided, well, you know what? Why don't I take this guy Gary's advice?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:49) Right? I listed it out. I started paying attention to him. I completely immersed myself in everything he says so I get a full understanding of how he thinks because that's the best way to do it. Right? And I said, I'm going to take this guy's advice and I'm going to just purely execute it for ninety days and that's going to be me doing my life science thing, see if it works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:09) Right? So I do it. I start. I make my little to-do list, like, what would Gary do? And then I said, all right, here's the plan. I'm going to execute for ninety days. And within the first thirty days, boom. Like, an—like, it was—you didn't—you don't have to wait. You don't have to wait for it. So, like, you—

(Mike Montero at 00:21:28) Wait. Tell me. What was the idea for the first ninety days?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:32) So I'll actually go back and get it for you. But the idea was that I would reach out and help people based off of my experience—my seventeen years of experience in programming and my decade of experience leading teams and, you know, building technology teams and scaling them. So I said, I'm just going to start reaching out to people and offering them help and having conversations with them about what I've learned, sharing experiences and just being there and just putting myself out into the world because I was slightly intro—well, I was primarily introverted. Right? I knew my investors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:02) I had my relationships with my equity teams. And I built my teams and I built my products, but I was mostly internal. Right? And I said, I'm going to start talking more to people. And so I started reaching out, helping people, writing, sharing my writings, helping, giving small talks, stuff like that. And then just, like, insane. I started getting emails every day, then the emails started bumping. Right now I get between 16 and some days, low end, it's like 16, high end, like 40 emails a day, people asking me for help now.

(Mike Montero at 00:22:31) Yeah. I mean, I'm not surprised. If you look at the amount of tech—I mean, first of all, guys like us, just in New York alone, I mean, there are a thousand ideas for every one person who's able to build a team and put the tech together or even build the tech for that matter. So I'm sure if—I mean, I don't think I've done my part nearly as big as you have, and that's—I can see where you'd get a lot of that from Gary because his message in that respect is amazing. But I can see you going out and saying, hey, tell me how I can help you as a founder, as an existing CTO.

(Mike Montero at 00:23:03) Any of that, you're going to get—I mean, people have got to be thrilled to be able to, you know, get in touch and get a little bit of help because it's tough. It's tough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:10) Oh, it's tough. And so the other benefit I pulled from watching him that I didn't get from listening to him was learning that I can have fifteen minute meetings. Like, not every meeting has to be an hour.

(Mike Montero at 00:23:22) Yeah. An hour. Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) Yeah. So what I do is I have meetings and micro-meetings on my schedule. And, you know, I have a team that helps me with it too. But I'll do seven to fifteen meetings a day, Michael. Like, yeah. It's crazy. Right?

(Mike Montero at 00:23:34) And what are they? Who are they? Why? What are you—what are you getting done in fifteen minutes?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:40) Okay. So they're—we schedule them for fifteen because they end up—you know, I can get in and out in thirty. So they—there's a wide variety, but they kind of fall into these categories. The first one is startup CTO looking for help.

(Mike Montero at 00:23:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:54) And there'll be the typical 12 to 15 pieces of advice you can give to them based on where their attention is focused. Right? And so there's that. There's the mid-level growth ones. Oh, a big one that's kind of surprising is their company is growing and they're at that 12 to 20 person stage, and they actually—they feel this need to step down from CTO and move into product because they don't love it.

(Mike Montero at 00:24:17) Sure. Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:17) That's a big one. Another one's, like, when they're in the 40 to 60 person stage and there's one or two things that they're still holding on to that they don't want to process out. So I consider a company being—I go in and I'm doing this thing and I, as the founder, have to come up with the processes, create the processes, understand them, and then automate them until I grow to a point where I have enough people that are automating their own processes as, you know, when you get into the higher level range.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:46) But it's basically me finding out what works and then having people do that. And then as it builds, cash flow builds, you can hire really great people who can then replicate and build process like you can. Yep. So you'll find that in my experience, people will get into the 40 to 50 person area and there'll be a process or two that they're holding on to that they don't want to automate that's keeping them from being able to experience hyper-growth or, like, really go farther. So, like, some people, they're scared about an internal tool that they don't want to let go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:16) Like, they feel like all the success was because of this one specific attribute, and so they're keeping their head and they're keeping their attention in that. And then they have to ignore the business technology type growth and kind of shut that out so they can go work on it and maintain it. And so that's something that's happened. That's probably more on my mind this week because it's happened twice. It doesn't happen a lot.

(Mike Montero at 00:25:36) But it's super interesting because I'm part of a CTO network here in the city, and we meet once a month. And it's a bunch of phenomenal, phenomenal operators. And it's funny to hear you say that because a lot of the conversations are around, okay, I'm getting to this point. I have to start letting go of things. Okay, I'm really big, and, you know, I'm not exactly sure what to do next. I'm getting into having to do things that I'm not necessarily good at or interested in. And then we've had a bunch of conversations with—people come in and out of the group, you know, depending on whether or not they've, you know, started a new company or just not interested in the role anymore. And we've had people who've come along and said, you know, I've decided that I've sort of, quote unquote, you know, hired my way out of my own job, and I'm bored now.

(Mike Montero at 00:26:23) I do this high-level architecture stuff that—I want to go back to the beginning. But I definitely, like, I've heard a bunch of stories that are very consistent with what you're saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:32) Yeah. Well, they can also innovate inside their own company again, just take it from a different angle. Like, they innovated up and out of their current role, but they can take that business and expand it and redo it within that same business. They don't have to go start an entire new business. They can just look at their business in an entirely new way.

(Mike Montero at 00:26:49) Yeah. Yeah. I'd say that I think my response to that would be, and I'm trying to think of a good relevant example, is that, you know, there's this pressure from the other founders or the non-business or the non-tech founders of, like, okay, you need to now run the team and manage and—you know what I mean? Like, they're usually—the path is you're either going to manage or you're going to go do some architecture thing.

(Mike Montero at 00:27:13) But I do love the idea of being able to put yourself in a position, certainly with your partner, to say, listen, things are moving. We've got lots of people that are managing stuff. What we did together to start this business, I'm now going to do again within the business. Yes. But I'm not sure lots of partners would recognize that and be like, okay, what does that mean? But it's a fascinating thing for me to think about if it were like, hey, Ben, remember what we did back then? Look, man, Resy's 90 people now. We're just going to keep growing. But, hey, we've got this amazing system. Tons of teams are operating. What can—not that you should pull away as a CEO. You've got a lot of stuff to do. But what can I start to do that sort of, you know, that's sort of start-uppy mentality within these walls to go to the next level? I think we're doing that well at 90 on the product side. But also interesting to your point, I'm getting to the point where I'm saying, okay, I have to start to pull myself out of sort of the day-to-day, you know, coding and operations in that respect, which I'm working towards for the middle of the year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:08) Well, you can also, you know, go develop relationships with these—you were saying one of the big things is international expansion. Well, there are CTOs at these companies that have those five and ten thousand, you know, groups of users or restaurants connected. You out there building relationships with those, having a product architect experience, developer experience, you're the best person to sell them on the qualifications of Resy and the partnership. Right?

(Mike Montero at 00:28:31) Yeah. For sure. And we spend—you know, my philosophy has always been just don't say no to any partnership. If somebody calls and says, hey, I'd love to—sure. Let's have the conversation. I, you know, I think some people look at some of the integrations we have, and they question whether or not we're being—you know, we're giving important information to a competitor. And we don't look at it that way. Like, if we happen to be competitive on a product, but I'm providing you value and the restaurant wins, great. So I like that.

(Mike Montero at 00:29:00) I like the idea of saying—I mean, I do it already, maybe not quite as consciously as I should based on, you know, what we just talked about. But I do like the idea of going on and saying, look, I'm really good at this. I know how we should integrate. I know how the business should operate. I know what the stack and the universe should look like in hospitality tech. I should go build those relationships and talk people through, you know, becoming part of Resy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:21) Yeah. You gotta give them the sample of you. Right? Like, if you're out there holding samples in the mall of the food, if you're not giving the person the actual sample of the meal they're going to get, then you're just creating an extra step and, you know, gonna kill your pipeline. But if you're out there talking to them about you, then you're gonna get people that say, I like Mike, and I just wanna integrate. I wanna find an excuse to integrate with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:44) I happen to have this massive, you know, restaurant industry business. I really like Mike, and now, you know, your role has changed to where you're out meeting and interacting with these great technology leaders of people who have the potential to partner with you.

(Mike Montero at 00:30:00) Yeah. And I appreciate that. In the past, we've done that. I've tried to be very open and honest about those kinds of relationships. We're not threatening here. We're not looking to, you know, like, form a— Tableau when we first did the integration, I think, was a little nervous. Like, I'm giving you all of my restaurants and their phone numbers and all this stuff. What's to stop you from going right around me and starting to use that as a list to call on, to close on, to convert my customers to yours? And we've always been very straightforward. Like, that's not the kind of business we are. It's not— you know, we'd rather consider acquiring you before doing something to hurt your business or stab you in the back. And so I think I communicate that well because it's quite frankly the kind of relationships I wanna have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:44) Right.

(Mike Montero at 00:30:44) I'd be very happy to be considered, you know, the guy who brought a lot of amazing people together in the hospitality technology industry over, you know, the guy who, quote unquote, just runs it or leads it. I want there to be these amazing partnerships between Resy and restaurants and Resy and POS vendors and POS vendors and restaurants and the whole thing, just so that everyone's working on cool stuff, and we're moving the tech on this stuff forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:09) Yeah. You gotta point them at the bigger carrot is what I do. Whenever I've had integrations with people and they're concerned about data, I'm like, oh, you're looking at that carrot. Right? Now look at that carrot.

(Mike Montero at 00:31:17) Right. This one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:18) That's where I'm going. I'm going over here, and if I'm trying to fight and scrap over this carrot, then my attention's there. But I'm over here, and they're like, whoa, that's a big carrot. Let's do it. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:27) Yeah.

(Mike Montero at 00:31:27) Our RGS is the very large carrot that we put into the world on Tuesday.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:33) Oh, man. Along with, like, four other absolutely massive improvements to the business. I mean, I like it. And looking at your business to that conversation, going in new and fresh, like, one of my favorite people recently is Adrian Jura, and they have 600 developers, game developers. They're the largest gaming mobile, like, iPhone, Android gaming company in the world. A lot of people buy it and rebrand their games as theirs. Right? So they're making the real high quality HD games. And he's always telling— he cofounded that with his friend as a night and weekend startup about seven years ago. Right? Now they're 600 game developers. It's crazy. And they've had to invent their own technology to make their games better and do some really innovative stuff. And one of the conversations I was having with him the other night on email back and forth was his ability to continually readjust how he valued his effort and his work over time as the company grew because, you know, he's looking at Git commits and features when he's at the beginning, and now— then he's looking at the quality engine, like, the types of tests he's creating to find the best quality engineers when he's in his mid-growth stage of 50. Right? And then he's at a hundred and 200, 300, 500, and then he's constantly changing how he looks— as his business grows, where he needs to be applying his time.

(Mike Montero at 00:32:55) Yeah. Look. I love that, and I find it super interesting because I've been through that whole transition. It was very hard for me the first time at Community Connect. It's gotten easier over time, but it's always very interesting. I think a little difficult sometimes to try to mentor somebody through that. But, you know, a lot of times, hey, this is what I love. I happen to love programming. So the transition out of programming for me is tricky. Some people don't love programming. They actually like managing. So they're very excited to get to the stage— some people like growth. They really love— you know what I mean? Yeah. I'm fascinated with that, with sort of figuring out, okay, how do you explain to people and help people through the transition? And sometimes, you know, and I'm certainly guilty. I have my passion, the things I love and the things I don't. So I'd like to think that I know what I'm really good at and where my gaps are. But you meet a lot of people and you start talking to them. And after a while, I'm like, oh, yeah. You really don't like managing people. You really like to program, but you're the CTO. And now you've got to go to the next step. What do you do? And, you know, I would say I'm certainly going through that transition as we go from 90 to a hundred and beyond people. And then a bunch of my right-hand folks are going through it too. All of a sudden, it's like, hey. Listen. You need to have a team of three engineers. And I know that that's not eight, but it's enough to start pushing around how you have to think about what you do every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:15) Right. And it's also like you're limited by your creativity. You can make a— you can pay attention to your happiness and make a list. You could say, I like writing some code. So here's how I'm going to satisfy that need of mine while still growing forward.

(Mike Montero at 00:34:31) Yeah. I mean, I have committed to getting myself out of the day-to-day development. I love it. I do a bunch of it today, but we are— the growth rate has been incredible to be part of and, you know, sometimes scary at the same time, but we're hiring a ton of people and it's time to sort of sit back and say, okay, I've gotta start to nurture a much larger team than we have today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:56) So are you mostly in-house or remote, or what's your mix right now?

(Mike Montero at 00:35:00) Yeah. So I have a lot of strong philosophies about this stuff as we get into some of these topics. I cannot advise people to do remote work. So everyone is here in New York. We have a very specific— I don't allow people to work from home, come in, do your work, get in and out. But everyone in the same room, the speed of communication, the face-to-face communication, the collaboration, I just learned over the years that you get more done. It's quicker. It's better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:35) You sound like you get a lot of flack for it, the way you're presenting this idea.

(Mike Montero at 00:35:39) Because it's not— you know, you have companies that are now, like, we're fully distributed. We don't have a single office anywhere. I think that's a thing lately. And it's an odd thing to me because, you know, as part of the CTO group, we've helped a lot of people through— one very large company in particular. Oh, we've acquired six companies all over the world with different specialties that are relevant to us. And we're having this problem with speed and quality and performance and management. Like, of course, you are. You have these massively distributed teams, different languages, different time zones. So I do think people think of it as very strange. I get that impression. And then, you know, developers are used to, well, you know, I can work from anywhere. So if I wanna work from home, I should be able to work from home. And if I wanna just take a trip to, you know, Montreal and work out of Montreal for a week, I should be able to do that. And that's not how we roll here. So all of our developers but one— the first engineer we hired, phenomenal individual who moved with the love of his life to LA, and we said, look. We're gonna give it a shot, and we're gonna see how it works. Everybody else other than that is here in New York.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:52) So a couple things because I've had experience, like, across the board. I'm sure you have too. That's why you came up with the fact that you like them all in person. So first of all, I am on the side of being in person. But here's a couple points that I've learned as to why I have this preference. The first one is the culture takes on the people you're physically around. Like it spreads like wildfire. So if you're in the room, people feed off my energy. Right? They literally— I can walk in and they can be all down and then I will just boom, bump everyone back up. Being able to recognize energy and pull it up or down is one of the qualities you and I have as leaders. Like, you can just— you walk in your room, boom, you just know. You can craft it however you'd like. Right? And you can't do that even a tenth as effective when you're remote. Yeah. Your appearance, your presence in a Slack channel isn't gonna do that the way it's going to do when I can hear your voice and see you moving around in front of me. Right?

(Mike Montero at 00:37:52) Yeah. Yeah. And I think what we hear a lot from our developer in LA is, you know, all of those side interactions that you're not involved in but you're hearing about matters so much for building culture and learning about what are the expectations of the other people of me, of Mike, of me. How does Mike interact with non-engineers? How does he talk to partners? I think when you miss out on that stuff, a, I think you make a lot of assumptions around what is actually happening and how things run, and sometimes those are good and sometimes those are bad. But you just miss out on this. That to me is a lot of the culture building. You know? How do people operate? How do they talk to each other? When do they come in? When do they leave? You know? When things are tough, how do they operate? When things are great, how do they operate? I think when you miss out on that, you fundamentally miss out on, you know, like, essentially what makes Resy Resy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:44) Yeah. We're monkey see, monkey do computers. Like, if I'm walking— the culture at the office, like, if I'm walking across the office and I decide to pick up the piece of trash versus walk right by it and look at it, my team sees that.

(Mike Montero at 00:38:57) Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:57) You know, and, like, I was reading Ray Dalio's book Principles. I don't know if you've come across that one yet. But he mentions that specific example. And he's like, look, everyone sees what you're doing and that is setting the culture. It's not happening in a meeting. Like, they see that. They see everything that you do and that determines your company.

(Mike Montero at 00:39:18) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's certainly— you know, that's the one thing that's led it for me. And the other one was just, you know— and I can't believe I'm gonna go on the record and say this, but I have a real issue with Slack as a communication tool also. You know, and this started with email, but, you know, the number of times you'll go back and forth on an email trying to figure something out. And then you just say to people, hey, that's the eighth time you've gone back and forth. Can you guys just get together and talk or call each other? And you've got resolution in thirty seconds on the phone. And so I just, you know, being able to look over someone's shoulder and debug something on a screen or do a quick code review. Oh, look. You just forgot the parenthesis there. You're done. You know, that took thirty seconds. That's how I operate. I wanna move really fast. I don't love the stuff that gets— you know, everyone says, oh, I read your email. You know, why were you assuming that tone? Email doesn't have tone. People read email—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) In the state that they're in.

(Mike Montero at 00:40:14) Yeah. The state they're in with the voice in their head. And, like, and then all of a sudden, it's triggered this horrible sort of, you know, the relationship's a little off. Does he like me? Just call each other. Hey, man. What's up? Good. How are you doing? Great. Yeah. We have this problem. Let's resolve it. What do you think? What do I think? Great. That's the solution. We're done. And I've gotten really tired of watching people just go, you know, play ping pong on email and Slack. Like, it drives me nuts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:37) No. So one of the things we have here is my office. I call us the family, and we are— I went to the furniture store and bought two nice long dining room tables.

(Mike Montero at 00:40:47) Like, they're— Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:48) Yeah. They're like nice wood. They look modern and cool. And we bought two of them, and we stacked them together. We got three computers on each side, and that's our team. Here is the benefit of that because I've never done it like this. The benefit of this is that every call I have, every podcast I have, every phone call I have, every meeting I have, everyone can hear everything, which means the amount of time spent on relaying communication if we are in separate boxes, right, is tremendous, tremendous overhead to an organization relaying communication. Now, obviously, I'm not saying that this is how you would have a hundred person organization. But for me right now at this stage, while we're creating the processes that will be scaled, this is very beneficial for us.

(Mike Montero at 00:41:32) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have another great example of that. We have a new employee who sits right near me, and he was having a conversation with somebody else about how something should function. And, you know, like, I heard immediately, okay. They're unaware of a bunch of stuff that I know really well and being able to sort of just pick that up. Hey, guys. Let me just help you out really quick. It should do this blah blah blah. Oh my god. The amount of time I just cut off of them going down the wrong path and building out a whole product around an assumption that wasn't correct. But I don't fancy that being the way Resy runs forever. We have an office. You know, we acquired a company in Spain, so we've got an office in Spain. We've got an office in London. You know, we have Airbnb. They've been incredibly gracious in welcoming us. Anytime we go there, we welcome them every time they come here. But I do believe at some point, we've gotta be a little bit more distributed, have dev centers, have the opportunity to have dev centers around the world. But my goal there is to be able to give an employee an experience. Hey. You ever been to Spain? No. Cool. Why don't you go spend a week there and we'll work out of our office, you know, check things out at night, hang out with the local staff, go try the restaurants. But I see us going forward with that, and it's gonna be interesting just, you know, like, I had outsourced teams at Community Connect, but it'll be interesting to sort of understand, okay, how do you— when you have a very, you know, an important large group of people remotely, and we do today, how do you keep them really well plugged in and the communication flowing, and everybody sort of knowing each other and communicating at a pace that sort of supports the speed you wanna move the business at?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:09) Right. So one of the ways I've seen large teams do that is they will have the team all work on a specific area of it and then be really careful about who the leader is and make sure that that leader is emitting the culture just like the founders would. And then that's how they were able to scale in physical new locations that were in different places.

(Mike Montero at 00:43:29) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:30) But that's the hard part, though, because those people are really rare.

(Mike Montero at 00:43:33) They're the hardest people to find.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:36) Yes, they are.

(Mike Montero at 00:43:38) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I spent a lot of time hiring. I spent a lot of time obsessing about hiring, and I love to meet people where I'm like, okay, yeah, that feels a little bit like how I approach the world, and I really like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:50) So is that one of the biggest things? What are the top two or three things that come to mind when you're hiring people? Like, what's right off the top of your head?

(Mike Montero at 00:44:00) I'm very specific and on record about, you know, speed being the baseline for me, because I just believe in it, is having a computer science degree. Not because I want you to have a college degree, but I want you to have spent four years studying in the engineering discipline. And if you have an engineering-related degree, I'm happy with that too. That's the baseline for me. After that, the most important thing is that you're fast. And I think, you know, gauging whether or not someone is fast in an interview is much harder than you'd think. You know, can they type? Yes. Do they know how to find answers to questions quickly? Sometimes it's just a matter of what kind of things do you type into Google, you know what I mean? But that's the one thing that I obsess about more than anything, is speed. And then I really want—I just wanna work with cool people who understand the urgency. I don't want stressed out people. I don't want mean people. But I want people who understand that, you know, we're a startup. And even when we're not a startup, you know, computer programmers think that their job is to write code. That is not a computer programmer's job. A computer programmer's job is to ship code. And there's an extraordinary difference between writing code and shipping code. And to me, shipping code is about speed given a number of constraints. So I really obsess about people that can understand that urgency, do it really quickly, be cool about it, be confident about it, be professional about it. And, you know, we say no more than we say yes. And sometimes, we've turned people away that, you know, like there are a couple of people we turned away that I really regretted for a couple days after.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:42) I'll—by the way, I'm gonna quote you on that, not the regretted people thing, but the job is not to write code, it's to ship code.

(Mike Montero at 00:45:50) Yeah. And it's—I'm not being cute. Like, I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:54) No, no, no. It's good, man. It's like I resonated with that, like, in my soul because it just sounded really, really good.

(Mike Montero at 00:46:00) A lot of people say, oh, you know, Mike, you know, you're so fast. You know, how do you do that? It's just—I am fast. I type fast. So I always, you know, I tell people if you're a computer programmer, you should be able to touch type. You should know your environment. Right? I use Vim. I know seven commands in Vim, but I know them incredibly well. They get me through my day most of the time. But I just, you know, I just understand that, you know, you can write code for days and days and days. And if I—you know, the really good engineers understand that I have to get to a place, and it sometimes requires a lot of compromises. I have to get to a place where I say, I'm done. This needs to now go out, and I'm going to learn a ton for it, and I'm going to find bugs and that's okay. And then I'm just going to keep shipping really fast. And so I think I don't necessarily know that I'm a better programmer than some of the people that work here that I've hired, but I'm probably—I'm certainly the fastest. I ship more code than anybody I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:58) Yeah. I used to tell people, like, I'm the least distracted programmer you're gonna meet.

(Mike Montero at 00:47:01) I'm the least distracted programmer you're gonna meet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:04) If I needed to do that, I don't start thinking, well, when we—it needs to do us. It like, you can—alright. Keeping something simple is the most difficult thing to do in this universe, period. I don't care if you're building an app or a business plan, whatever you're doing. Keeping it simple is the key. Like, if you can say, I need something that does X, and you not creep your own feature, like, instantly, and you can actually skip that, I need it to do X. And then, you know, one of the tricks I use is look at it from the customer's perspective. Like, is the button on the screen, can the action be performed? Yeah. Okay. Well, then just make that happen first, then worry about everything else later. But no, we just ship the feature. Like, get it out.

(Mike Montero at 00:47:41) Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, you know the struggles. You're building something, and you're like, oh, look, there's this other thing I can do. And I, you know, I can write this that I think is innovative and cool, and I'm gonna go do that even though it's not, you know, the core thing we wanna build and ship? And I think the best engineers know how to avoid all those distractions to your point. They don't, you know—I think the really good, the really, really good ones know this is an innovation, and I have to push this up the chain. This is a distraction, and I'm gonna put it on my personal list of things to maybe think about or implement. But I'm not gonna—it's not gonna take away from the fact that I'm just gonna ship this code out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:21) Oh, that and one of the disclaimers I always give to people is I'm not preaching saying that, like, I thought of this and, like, I'm the—I frustrated myself into learning this. I spent the better part of a decade not doing this. Yeah. And then the last seven years of my life, I did do this, and that's when I started, like, really getting things to work and making money and growing teams.

(Mike Montero at 00:48:45) Yeah. It sounds like you and I have had a very—I don't consider myself the fastest learner in the world. And so, you know, I don't wanna—I also don't wanna be like a stuck, stoic old man, but I spent a lot of time getting really good at this. And, you know, there's a fine line between sort of convincing people that I'm right by virtue of experience and sort of letting them learn it themselves. But but I'll tell you the other thing, because I like to talk about this a lot that we obsess about here is, you know, we look at people's resumes very carefully, so we will not poach anyone or unless they've approached us on their own, of their own volition. Anyone that has been in a job for less than twelve months because we look very specifically about how much people jump from job to job. So if you've had nine jobs in the last five years, Resy's gonna pass on you. You gotta be suspicious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:37) You gotta work on yourself for that.

(Mike Montero at 00:49:39) Yeah. You gotta, like, you gotta stick around, show some loyalty. You know? So we spend a lot of time looking at resumes and really finding the right person that we like. And then I tell people all the time, we don't salary negotiate here. So that means that you're gonna tell me what you wanna make, and that's what I'm gonna pay you. And so we don't—well, you know, we like you, but we don't think you're worth X. We think you're worth, like, five or $10,000 less than X. Because we wanna hire, you know, we wanna hire people and be additive to their career and their resume and pay them what they're worth. It's led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with recruiters, but, you know, we just have an amazing team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:17) You found what works, and you're doing more of it.

(Mike Montero at 00:50:19) I found what works. I'm doing more of it. And I am, quite frankly, I think avoiding, you know—I'm making up for all the horrible things I did as an up-and-coming CTO manager.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:32) You were right and wrong. It's like—

(Mike Montero at 00:50:33) Right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just trying to make up for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:38) So if people wanna—this is fantastic. This is an amazing conversation. I really like you.

(Mike Montero at 00:50:43) I appreciate it. I really appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:45) So if people wanna find out more about you, they wanna look you up, what would be the best—you more on LinkedIn, Twitter, where do you hang out?

(Mike Montero at 00:50:51) Either or both. Twitter at Michael Montero. LinkedIn, Michael Montero. Certainly, you know, if you're in the hospitality tech space, we'd love to talk. I really do try to give my ear to CTOs and founders. I've done a lot of work and been offered adviser agreements and said, you know what, man? Keep the agreement. I don't need the equity. I just wanna help you. I'm definitely giving back because a lot of people gave to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:23) I saw the Techstars thing. You were doing some mentoring with Techstars?

(Mike Montero at 00:51:26) Yeah. And I love working with those guys. I went through the program with CrowdTwist, so I know all angles of it. I love helping entrepreneurs. I have found that being a CTO mentor is a little tough. If, you know, I think two things play into that. One, a lot of CEOs aren't trained to do their job, if that makes any sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:51) Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah.

(Mike Montero at 00:51:52) And then so they're just like, you're a CTO and you're gonna help me. I don't get it. And then CTOs, the—and this is what I love about what we do. Like, by nature, we solve problems. So I often find people a little bit reluctant to come and say, hey, I need you to help me with this very specific problem because we just love solving them. So it's an interesting one for me. I'd say that, you know, I probably help fewer companies through Techstars than most mentors. But I believe when I do, I'm significantly more additive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:29) Yeah. I mean, because you can't take somebody somewhere where you haven't been.

(Mike Montero at 00:52:33) Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes, quite frankly, like, the—you know this as well as I. Like, sometimes, it's just a very particular tech innovation that matters, you know, like, and you help people cut that corner off, and it makes all the difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:48) Mike, I'm so glad I came across you. You're a great—

(Mike Montero at 00:52:52) You did that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:53) I like it when I find people that are, like, you know, where we have commonalities and share similar ways of doing things. It's almost like, hey, you've been hanging out in this place called life, and you found, like, the same things to be true as me. Let's learn more from each other.

(Mike Montero at 00:53:07) Let's do it. I really appreciate reaching out, and this has been great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:18) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then cc me, [email protected]. If you cc me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.