Transcription
[Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of R&D podcast news. R&D podcast today with the CEO, Matt.
Hi Matt.
Hello. And thanks for joining us.
Of [Music] course, you came for the new higher orientation, right?
I try. I try every month, but I don't always succeed. But I think it's important to always be present, um, when a lot of people fly into Prague and like, part of the culture is just being there in person.
And how many do we have this month?
20. It's a it's a quiet month actually. We've had quite a crazy few years.
Yeah. Uh, well, I recently watched some or checked some stats and it's crazy to think how many people are here only less than a year or less than two years because now our new AI tool shows you these things. So, it's scary.
How big were we when you entered the business?
I entered the office that looked like something like this. It was eight people, I think, or nine people. And we are going to actually talk about the beginnings of Muse because I think it's important for people to um know where it came from and you know, you were there. Although I think we will um we'll talk about one myth that may be there, that maybe people think that you are the co-founder, that you built it from the scratch, but I think you joined an established company. Can we call that?
There was a physical company when I joined.
Yes. So how did it look like when you entered the the office?
We were in an accounting office of the hotel, and so I walked in and there was just two developers who were part-time. So they were just walked in whenever, you know, between classes and me and Richard, and it was just the four of us basically in that office. It's very, but nobody used the system yet.
Uh, no, there was not a line of code written on the product that ended up being the Muse PMS, the property management system. Um, so they had an an Apple app that they built for guest experience, but actually when I entered I said, "Well, we've got a hotel to open and it is April and the hotel opens in September. What are we what is that system? Where is it? Show it to me." And there wasn't one. So that was really the moment I said, "We've got four months to start building the the the PMS, the property management system." Um, so let's start on that. Because originally it wasn't planned of Richard, the founder, to have a PMS.
No, it was like to have that app connected to another PMS, but that sort of failed.
So that's why you came in.
Yeah. When I answered it, the app that they had built was incredible. It was this beautiful app that they basically was a guest app where guests can, you know, consume information about the city. They can order room service. It was such a nicely done app, but it needed to know, you know, how how do you get an app onto people's devices? Um, and it didn't integrate because these legacy systems didn't want to integrate with anyone. Like they had these close infra in infrastructures, um, and that's really where we got stuck because the app was there; we now needed to just integrate it, and no one wants to talk to us.
But you had quite a decorated career in Hilton, right? You really progressed from off front office, that's where you started, or
I started as a trainee, so I started right out of hotel school. I've done hotel school, um, and then I started as a trainee for um in London, then South Africa, and then I came out in Prague where we have a massive of like 800-bedroom hotel where I went into food and beverage first, which I didn't want that job cuz I wasn't great with wines. You know, when you go to a fancy restaurant and then someone's like, what wine would you recommend, and that was my worst nightmare.
Red and white, literally it, and I can make rosé, but that's about the extent of my wine.
Make it from the two. Is that not how they do it?
Yeah, it is. Um, so they gave me that job for a year and a half, and I and I enjoyed it, but I really want to I had this passion for front desk. So they finally then gave me that front desk job, and and within a year they said you're actually really good with people, maybe you should be in sales. Um, so they moved me after a year into sales because they're like, great, you you know, you can add more value to the business in sales than in front desk. Um, so I experienced all these different departments at a massive scale hotel, but I felt the pain deeply, deeply, deeply. Um, and that was the moment when I found Richard. Um, and he's like, oh my god, I'm doing this thing with the hotel. Um, like what are you doing at Hilton? Must be so innovative. And I was like, you have no idea the legacy tech stack that we're running on to kind of keep the lights on in this this giant hotel.
So, he felt my frustration and he latched on it and he got me to quit my job.
So, was it a real coincidence?
Uh, and I assume you had to take quite a pay cut, you know, when you went from great sales to sales job in the best hotel in in Prague.
It's strange because when you right out of the school go straight into working for Hilton, you only stay in really beautiful nice hotels and you get a really nice salary and to then get offered a job basically without a salary for a while. Um, I thought, okay, what's the worst case? The worst case is that I go and say, Hilton, please take me back. I need a job. I need a salary. Um, but actually I like, let's make one one decision that isn't this the thing that people expect from me, um, because I'd done everything according to the book up until that moment and it didn't make me happy. I was left really disillusioned. Um, so I said screw it, I'll just quit my job. I'll join with Richard, and if I hate it within 3 months I can be back at the reception desk or in sales in a hotel. Um, and it took a couple of years before we finally were able to get some salary out of it. But they were the best best years of my life. Whilst they were the hardest, they were also the best.
So what was the first thing you did after you joined uh this?
There was no HR. There was Richard. Did he Did you sign a contract?
I may have signed something. I actually wonder whether the documents still exist. I'm I'm sure I signed something, but um I remember that first day really well because you know, I basically had a new MacBook that I just bought myself at the Apple store and I asked um one of the developers, Hanza, um it's like, "So, how do I set up the printers on this thing?" And he's like, "Oh, we're not your IT department. We're developers." I was like, "Okay, lesson number one." And then it became this barrage of lessons that I had to go through. But that was you know, when we started I wasn't a very tech-savvy person. I just felt the deep pain of hospitality and I was just there to help kind of explain that pain whilst we built products around it.
So what did you know about tech? You say you weren't too tech-savvy. So did you know how a development?
Nothing. Like you literally come out of hotels and I could barely open like PowerPoint or connect my printer to the I figured out the printer like that was I had to um but you don't know um and it's almost a good thing um when you just deeply understand the the problem that you're trying to solve, that that blank slate of not knowing what legacy systems look like, you you're not going to make that mistake. And I learned very quickly, like one of the things at Muse is this constant constant learning which I thrive in, like I got so bored by the end of my time at Hilton. Um, and I've not been bored for 12 the last 12 years at Muse because constantly you're surrounded by really smart people who push you and push you and push you and it makes better people.
So walk me through uh product development at that time, or maybe I think we can even go first maybe three years where it didn't change much in the beginning because I know that during the year that I joined uh I think three people altogether joined in that year and you just mentioned that there was a small new hire orientation with 20, so we can see the velocity has changed. So how does the product uh development looks like and who are you in there?
Like in the beginning, because Richard and I were also not attuned to each other, we would have fights because we would just disagree about fundamental things and I was like that is not how this works in a hotel. Um, and he he always lives in this this world where he's 5 years ahead of anyone else in the room. So what he says is correct. That's how we end up. But I'm like, "Yeah, but right now in this hotel, we need to check people in and I need to be able to issue a bill. So, what does that look like?" And and you know, we didn't even know that there was a thing called product management. So, everything was um wireframed on a whiteboard. We took a photo of it. We sent it to the designer. He was not a graphic designer for for mobile apps. That was just a graphic designer. And he would make a beautiful screen and then the developers would instantly start coding it. Um, and then I would quality assure test it and we just throw it out to the wolves to our customers at the time and see like if it if it works, it works, and if it doesn't then we recode it. So there wasn't much of a process. It was just like let's build it, let's ship it and let's see what the feedback is.
Did you meet in some regular fashion or was it simply okay what's on fire? Let's fix it.
What's on fire mostly? Like when you build an entire kind of core infrastructure piece for a hotel, you just have to build as fast as you can. And the the benefit is there's no legacy code to keep in mind. So you can build screens really really fast. And that's what we did. We we had to build within five months an MVP to go live in a real hotel that needed to do their accounting on that system. Um, and god, we messed up. But like again, that was a massive lesson as well. But I guess it helped a little bit that the first clients were sort of affiliated with with Richard and his family.
So how did it look like when you actually had to go and sell it to first real customer?
Um, it was literally me and Richard with our little laptops walking into lobbies of hotels and saying, "Can we meet the general manager?" And then you know, all of the front desk agents are taught, you do not just bring out the GM for a random meeting with these two guys that have just walked in with their laptop. Um, and it was really hard and we got a lot of nos and then a lot of these hotels as I walked down Prague, I remember walking in their lobby and I remember walking in their lobby and the rejections that we got. Um, where we finally got traction was we found one hotel, Hotel Liberty, which is this hotel of Wenceslas Square, and they were so frustrated with their current legacy system and it was the leading system and that that's what made it really powerful. Um, and when we went into that meeting and I remember the two developers, they came to meet this customer and once they deployed Muse, they're like, "Oh, this is a thing. We thought you guys were joking about what you asked us to build for the Emblem Hotel." But then they saw a real customer who'd come from an industry-leading solution and said, "I want something new." And that was the moment for the developers to realize there's a real problem that we're solving here. And if the industry-leading solution doesn't have the answers, then there's magic here. Um, and then luckily I found a few friends who were hoteliers that I was like, please let us just demo it in your smallest hotel and then we can upgrade to the high the bigger ones. But it was a lot of friends and family in the beginning.
I guess it also helped a lot that the hotels from Richard and we can we can send its emblem and and the Old Town Square that they were brand new that they didn't have any customers from before.
So what happened now when you got Hotel Liberty and you had to migrate everything?
Did you do it by hand.
Every reservation that was pre-booked, we had to by hand put into the system. Basically, we didn't have import tools that we have now or now we will connect to like a channel manager and then just push all those reservation data in. With Hotel Liberty, it was literally us punching in all the reservations, checking the rates, checking the segment. It was a lot of painful work. And at some point the pain becomes like when you start doing bigger and bigger deployments when the pain becomes so painful that's when you pull in the developer and he's like, you're doing what by hand, that makes zero sense, like let me fix that for you in half an hour.
Well, I mean, I joined two years after what you were just describing and it hasn't changed much. I remember one big host uh where we messed up the import of the rooms and my one of my first jobs was to actually go one room by one to check where the mistake was and to add it um manually into the system. But at least I I got to I got the hand on on the on the product and you know um you're you and Richard it's like um I always call it like a kind of ying and yang, bad cop good cop uh good singer bad singer.
Who's the bad cop?
Not sure about who's the good singer, Richard.
But it's not so common such dual leadership and you know, you've done it for basically the early early stages for for 12 years. How does it look like and maybe what are the friction points where you hope that oh I wish I was here alone.
Was there any ever a moment like that?
Oh, 100%. Especially in the beginning because you're not attuned to each other. So I don't really know what his triggers are and he's a very complex person in a good way. like I like complex people around me. Um, but because he thinks so dramatically different about problems than I do, I'm like, right, let's solve the problem in right in front of me. Whereas he thinks deeply about okay, what are the five iterations of this and what's the the world going to be like? So we fought a lot, but every time we had a blowout fight in the beginning, we would always walk away saying, "Sorry, I was such an ass in that." Like that was not my intent. And and um we'd give each other a hug and we're good again and we're friends. Um, and it took like COVID, which was such a difficult time for us to to try and navigate that really complex time, that really brought us extremely close together. And I think we've never been more aligned than we are today just because we've been working so closely together for 12 years. And um, and it just works. But it it does require really aggressive working on that relationship because it hasn't always been great.
But now you're very far from each other. He's in New York. You're in Amsterdam originally. You were both in Prague every day in the office. And I know you know back in the day home office was oh this person is slacking. I don't like that. I know you really liked people being in the office. But you changed so much during the COVID and I think for the good for the company because now we're able to capture really talent anywhere and still keep those offices for the people who want to.
What is it that you miss from those times? Let's say, you know, do you miss really the the daily um water cooler talks and the meetings that we had or is it something that you're happy we don't have anymore and you can focus on things uh at home?
It's hard because today I was in the office and I really enjoyed running into people that I wouldn't necessarily have a call with in my schedule when I'm sitting at home. Um, and I do really enjoy those serendipitous moments, but they are, you know, you can have better meetings than randomly hoping to run into a person and have a great conversation. And we try and make sure that people meet each other, but say, "Okay, talk about this thing and solve this thing." And when you give people a purpose in when they're meeting, so we do a lot of offsites and we're like, "Right, this is an offsite and we're going to talk about this really hairy challenge." That is a much better meeting than hoping that hypothetically over lunch I might have a really great conversation with a person and they do happen, but it it doesn't scale well in my opinion. So I was all about I want to see everyone in office and I was this very traditional manager, but I also I'm like if it doesn't work for us anymore then we pivot and COVID was one of those moments where like well it doesn't work for us let's let's try this. like this is actually fantastic and I'm so efficient at home. Um, but also I need that human connection. So, let's do lots of offsite with the remote. So, we're figuring out a new way of remote first. Like, we're not pure remote. We want to see people in person. So, we've just reconstructed our Prague office to make it super accessible for people to fly in, have meetings, and then fly back out to to their homes. Like, the Prague office is just so good. You know, I've been to all the offices basically from the beginning, and I I was telling you today, sorry about that.
Well, well, I usually chose them, you know, I was the one doing the the real estate research and stuff, but uh it almost feels inappropriate to have this leap to this what we have right now because we have so many people actually reaching out to us, loving the space from the outside. So, it's also great for the public um public um kind of picture of us because you know all the Prague great companies have great offices where people love to come. So I'm happy we have that and you can hear people even traveling from afar in Czech Republic coming to the office.
So nice, thanks thanks for finally having that done.
Um, let's we talked about how the product management looked like back in the day. Now fast forward now how much are you still involved in product? Because you know uh I will I will say something one thing I think you even said it once that you are sort of a micromanager uh and I think it's not a bad thing if you kind of can keep it in in recognize it if you recognize it and you do something about it uh how do you now like how do you how do you work with everything is happening and you cannot be everywhere?
Yeah, I find it really hard actually because I love what we're building, um so I try and I'm in every channel where product releases are being discussed and I watch the videos and I pause and I'm like does the screen feel right and I'll comment. So you see me and Richard generally in every uh updated video we will comment in those videos because we're deeply care for the solution. Um, but we also we're also not always the best person. So we we try and not lead too much. I will ask the question saying do we think that this is the right font instead of saying that needs to be this color or this thing because I'm not the specialist. You've got incredible designers, incredible developers and product managers who actually know better, but they do need to be pushed. And sometimes I'm like, "Right, that button is broken." So, I did an online checkout the other day at a hotel and I said, "Look, let me let me record you a video of the experience that I'm having with this online checkout." And a button had gotten loose and it had started floating in the screen and the loading times on some of the screens were bad. And that's one way for me to really engage with the product. I I live it in hotels and then I share feedback through video because it's just faster than the way that we used to do quality assuring, but I really miss it like the the day-to-day, but there's just so many hours in the day and
It is not my job. Um, so I try and dip in and then dip in and dip in, but I can't like make that my like week; like that's just impossible.
So what is your job? You're a CEO. What is it? What does it mean? It's really difficult to explain it. So people are like, "Can I just spend a day with you?" I'm like, "And do which one? You going to sit in my conference calls all day and just watch me?" Um, and it is a lot of like, ultimately I'm in charge of culture and making sure that the the culture scales because, you know, I want to make sure that our team members are engaged. An engaged team member drives way more output. So we want to make sure that the mission is clearly communicated and that we're consistently executing. And that's not one of our strengths; consistency and follow through and pick priorities because there's so many opportunities for us. Um, and this is where my role comes in: navigating the growth, the enthusiasm, the culture, and making the right bets. Um, and no one can point to the work I do. And that's one of the hardest things. Like I used to love working at the front desk in a hotel because I knew I did 50 check-ins that day and I did 50 checkouts, and that was my achievement. Whereas now I influence, and this is you need to be get comfortable with that because I no longer can point to a feature in a system saying I did that. I influenced it in some light way by hiring the right person who then built something really great, and I love it now, but it's taken me a lot to get used to this.
And what do you say to your mom that you do? She never asks; actually, like my dad on LinkedIn, he would post sometimes, and it's so it's so lovely. I I really enjoy it. So I will we we we I posted about Muse unfold, and he would say, "Thank you for sharing on LinkedIn," and I'm like that's it's like it means so much that they're following, but I don't genuinely think that they know what I do anymore at this point, which is okay, and it's hard for parents because they see my struggles, cuz they see they can see in my eyes that I've had a really bad week or a bad month, but they don't know what to do about it, and that's as a parent, and you're a parent, I'm sure like right now you're the end all; like you have all the answers, and at some point your kids will outgrow you, and that's terrifying moments. It's so scary, like you say, like I am I know everything, and I know it right.
But uh, speaking of LinkedIn, so you say that uh LinkedIn influencing runs in your family.
Yeah. I know. How many followers does your dad have? I don't even know. I was like, "Why is he still on LinkedIn?" Like he's retired, but it's nice. So does he have retired like as a progression of his career? Actually, I don't know what he does. And you I mean you are actually I checked in 2022; I believe you were top three CEOs based in Czech Republic in terms of being followed. Um, how did you get there because I don't think you as a little boy you wanted to be somebody on LinkedIn with with posts, and I don't think you wanted that couple of years ago. Uh, so what changed and what do you what do you what are you trying to achieve, let's say?
So, so LinkedIn has become this tool that I never expected, like you said. So, I used LinkedIn when I was a sales manager at Hilton, and I would do trainings on LinkedIn for the sales team, and I'd be like, right, if you want to know which competitors are booking our competitors' hotels, like which corporates are booking competitor hotels, just go to the salesperson's LinkedIn connections and figure out which secretaries from IBM from McDonald's are connected to them; like those are the people you want to reach out to. So already like this was like 15 years ago. I was like pushing LinkedIn because I thought it was such a powerful platform, but it's now transformed in a way for me, one, to communicate to potential new employees, to our customers, potential customers, our existing employees. Like it's become this thing where people are watching what I'm doing, and I'm looking at the apples behind you because I did this random post. My husband at some point said, "Can you do something about the apples in hotels? These green apples are inedible. Why are we doing this?" and I did a post about it, and then now last week at Muse Unfold, several hotel[s] came to me commenting about the apples. Yesterday I walked into the Hilton Prague. I ran into the GM, and he said, "I'm so sorry I didn't check the apples in your room." And it's become this ridiculous thing that I post about, and it's a kind of but it's a memorable thing. You know, we in our U R&D community, we did this claw machine thing, right? And everybody remembers us as the company with the claw machine, and they want us to to have it again. So, I really I think we talked about it some time ago that I take obviously I don't have such a such a follower base as you do. Maybe one day.
Yes, but I have it as a sort of my personal diary uh so that people can see my values, and I don't really care how many people follow it, and I I don't think you care as well. It simply comes with the with the size of the company, etc. But I think it really as you said it like it shows what you're up to, and you can influence those people who are thinking, okay, do I want to join this company with this CEO or do I want to join another one? And I think from your uh because the discussion is all the time on LinkedIn, do the CEOs do it themselves? Oh, the the amount of times people say like, "Who does your social media?" was like me 100%; everything from the videos, the editing, like cuz I actually really enjoy it, and I do it on the weekend, but like I if I can't do that anymore, I'm like, okay, like what kind of CEO am I, and a lot of them are like, "I need a marketing team and a budget," you do not; you need 150 bucks to buy the software on your laptop, figure it out, and then just put it out there, and I this mindset I think is something that you know may be disappearing a little bit from a big company where people can just do anything, you know, that because that's what we had to do at the time, and now we're hiring specialists. So sometimes I'm a little sad that you know some people say, well, I this is not part of what I do. I think this if if you can have that mindset, everybody can have that mindset.
Um, so um, where do I go from LinkedIn now? TikTok. I have not figured out TikTok yet. I'm obsessed because it's such an So this morning um, you know, it was the Met Gala, so I I was like, great, need to be on TikTok for an hour because I need to consume like it is my entire is it in your calendar because everything is in your calendar; like I live through those platforms, but I haven't figured out what my voice is on that platform and if I should have a voice there, and that's also okay. Um, but it's incredibly powerful um how it's come up and how it's influencing um the way that people book and travel and etc. So and I I think every time these platforms come up, a lot of my generation you reject it instantly, like no, no, it's scary because the algorithm is so good. I'm like, yes, so therefore we need to understand it because it's a platform that we can use for our business in some way, and every time something new comes up, I'm like, great, let me let me let me be the first to try it out. Well, somebody some I heard that if you're bald, don't go to TikTok because nobody will believe you because nobody will listen to a bald man. So, I don't think I can. Yep.
Apparently, so when you uh we talk about how you kind of present yourself, how you talk to the audience like larger audiences, how do you talk about our R&D? Like what is it that you say about our tech product? Do people ask it? Like are CEOs from other companies asking about it or not much because it's still so distant to them? Because they are relatively invisible to the orc. um, they don't engage, but I love the stuff that they do because R&D is like 40% of our organization, I think um, and it's a really big investment, much bigger than some of our competitors, and we double down on it because we we need the best developers um to make sure that our product is always five steps ahead of what competitors are doing, and it's why I'm so confidently and openly talking about our product because I'm not afraid of someone copying features because I know what they're working on already now for next year. And I think that's the power of having an incredible R&D team like um, and sometimes it's features that come out and like I didn't even know we were doing that. Like pass key, we deployed the way that you log into the system with your fingerprint or with your facial recognition. I didn't even know we were building that, and suddenly it just gets released, and it just that stuff makes me so happy when our developers are so far ahead of where I even think that they're working on. Um, and and that's for me the kind of I hope we see more of that that developers are just doing these incredible things and they don't allow products that are inferior to get out there, and they're just like, "No, no, we will only put it out there when it's better than anyone else's product." Um, and our industry, the bar is so low in hospitality technology. Like our competitors like and the legacy tech that you see, it just isn't, you know, it's the bar is really low. And I don't want to compare ourselves to those solutions. I want us to compare to like the greatest solutions out there. Like we love Slack internally. Like let's build a product as good as Slack that people talk about. Um, and we've got some way to go. Follow Muse R&D on LinkedIn and Instagram to get all the news that Matt was just talking about.
Uh, but yeah, actually speaking of Slack and speaking of other uh companies outside of hospitality, who are and maybe even people because you you mentioned that, you know, we we talked about you as a CEO. Do you have some CEOs that you like to follow and you like to learn from, or are there any companies that you're like, "This is where I would like Muse to be one day?"
So, I listen to a lot of podcasts more and more. I've gotten into podcasts, and like there's this 2025. Yeah. Like I've always struggled because they're so long form, and I'm like, when am I supposed to do it, and I figured out flights and taxis, and I sit on a lot of those, and I get car sick. So rather than insist on being on my phone, I now listen to podcasts, and I find Diary of a CEO is one of my favorite um podcasts where I get lots of CEOs that talk through it because I don't really care about one person. I'm like, I want all of their perspectives because no one's going through what I'm going through in in the setup that we have. So get as many perspectives. Acquired is one of those podcasts that I they're like three and a half hour long download, but they are so good. Um, and when you really take time and I like like an acquired um like in the weekend when I'm lying in the grass, that's when I want to listen to it. Wow. I would like to see that. It's very rare. But like it's that stuff like that really understanding the business strategies that these incredible companies have had um or the the messups that they had growing and when they had to say, "Okay, this is this is not going to work. We need to cut back." And that's the stuff I love. Um, I try and read, but I just don't have time for for that or don't have enough time. I'm reading a really interesting book at the moment.
How about gym or going for a run? Is that something in your diary or or there is no time for that?
No, no, I'm obsessed. So, I uh I'm a bit of a robot in my my my Monday to my every day of the week. So, I sleep 8 hours. 8 hours is a minimum, and nothing ever cuts my sleep. And then I wake up at 5:00, and I get to the gym at 6:00, and I work out every six days a week I work out. Um, because I need that to de-stress. Like there's so much coming at you. Um, so I I work out, and then I get to work at 7:30, and then I work until seven. Um, so it's quite an intense week, but it's also the life I chose.
Um, what would you like some people who are maybe outside because you have lived the R&D, you have lived the product, you have lived tech, and I know that you know there is always this sales versus tech, maybe sales versus product, sales versus everybody maybe. What would you like people in sales, in maybe finance, in somewhere else, what would you like them to know about R&D? Because one of the things that always comes to my mind and when people is like, "Why does it take so long? It's just a button." So, is there anything that you would like to tell to people like, "Hey, this is simply how it's done," or "This is they're doing their best hopefully."
Like the the biggest challenge is that um people that ask for features or hotel or customers, they always think from their own perspective, and they're like adding a button here makes so much sense. But rolling back a button is impossible. So if we add a button there and it's cluttered the screen, that's one more button on the screen. Um, you cannot remove the button because now people start getting used to that button being there. So maybe the use case for you was really valid, but for 99% of the other customers it wasn't valid. And that's where the discovery comes in where we actually interview we show the designs to customers saying, "Does this make sense," and we learn so much from that phase before a developer even starts coding anything; the research that we do with the designers, the UX and UI designers is so critical so that when we deploy things and it's so nice now when we deploy things we don't roll things back anymore because it's been deeply researched and it's working, whereas in the early days and you were also doing quality assurance for us at the time we would throw something out there like, "Well, that didn't work then," and let's roll it back, and it is incredibly painful for customers to have to go through that. So, you know, I think yes, feedback is always valid when someone says, "Why don't you just deploy this thing," but it's like the context of 12,000 customers we have is really critical.
I have one specific feature in my mind when you mentioned this, and those were the colors of customers that you could assign a color that was around the customer. Where did that go? I don't know. Love that because I remember Hotels always wanted more colors and customizable colors, and then we said, "Okay, we're going to have five VIP. What do we do have?" But they're gone completely now.
I think so. Yeah, it's gone. Yeah. So, maybe you should ask the the team about it what happened.
But, um, what is it that you would like the developers and the product managers know more about the outside world? Because uh I think now we still don't hire exclusively developers that work in hospitality, and we will never do that right; we will always hire from everywhere uh the first developer in Muse, he traveled for the first time with me; he didn't have even a passport when he started Muse, and I think as you mentioned this, not know what I don't know was perfect for the beginning because he was able to say, okay, no, we're going to do it this way um because it made sense to him; what would you like them to know more because I know know that they are spending more and more time with the customers, which is the customer centricity that we introduced some time ago, but what is it something that you would like them to know?
Just go out there and just talk and listen and and see like I remember um we deployed this kiosk a couple of years ago um and it's kiosk for check-in check out at the hotels, and this hotel that was like they had hundreds of rooms, and they deployed this beautiful kiosk in the lobby, and they were just so unhappy, and I said, "I'll come, but will you allow me to bring our product team with?" Um, and I said, "Let's just stand in the lobby for 3 hours. Let's just watch a person walk up to the kiosk and see what they do." And it was the most excruciatingly painful experience that we had. But within a couple of weeks, they deployed a fix, and that customer was happier than ever because they suddenly saw this massive change that we had. But it was only because we had been there, we'd watched and felt the pain. Like we were so embarrassed that we deployed a product that was just really crappy. Um, and I think um, it is really hard for some of the complex features to go and sit behind someone in an office, but we record a lot of design calls with hotels. And I think developers should listen to them to really understand why we're doing things in a certain way. And we often take shortcuts because like, well, that's too hard to code. Let's just do the easy things. But it's hard to cope because it's it's the most elegant, most beautiful solution. That's why Apple products are so simple. um, because they they will not allow shortcuts, and I do still think that we sometimes allow for shortcuts because it's too hard to do. Um, and I think there's a pride that you have to have in making the best solution for the customer and then seeing their eyes when you deploy it and like this is exactly what I was hoping it would be.
Well, it's the constant speed versus quality, right? So, where are you like if we have, you know, speed, quality, where are you on the on the line?
I'm like saying, okay, speed is a thing that I don't have much patience, so I'm definitely on the speed side. So, if you get 70% right, um I'm like, go for 70% speed because we can get it right over time, but don't abandon it. What we used to do is we would build something that was kind of 70% there, and then we would drop it and we move on to the next part of the system. But like what's nice now is we've got teams that are solely focused on constantly iterating. So we might put something out there that is 70 80% there, but we have people that constantly now take feedback based on what we deployed, and there's things we learn that we wouldn't have learned if we didn't have hundreds of customers already using the 70% kind of product, the and and that's why I think it is important to get it out to test it at in large groups, and then we can just iterate it. So we still do these sort of testing with like we ask our clients that hey is there like five properties that want to test this?
Yeah. Yeah. So we do a lot of beta. So um we we have this community platform where hotels engage. Um, and then um we say, hey, we're this is a feature that you upvoted on on user voice where people can say I I need this particular feature for check-in, saying, well, you upvoted it. Are you willing to to beta test this? And then we will test it first with like three hotels, then we expand that to 20 hotels, then to 100, and then like great, ram it out to 12,000 hotels. Um, but we do a lot more than we have ever done.
By the way, there's another feature that I like to remember, and that uh I don't know if you'll probably remember because I think in Netherlands, there was this law that when a room is not occupied for a week, you need to flush Legionella Legionella. And I remember this was the greatest example of the engineers being engineers because you were and me or you simply us who were the software part of the company. We were like, okay, we need to do a customization for the Netherland um uh legal environment, and the developers never wanted to do these custom-made things for well
Like so, to explain, so Leonella, the bacteria forms in water that stands still for several days. So there's a law in the Netherlands that said every seven days that a room is unoccupied, you need to go into the room and open the taps to flush through the water so that no one gets Legionella poisoning.
So the developer said, "Well, that makes sense. Let's just roll it out to the rest of the world." Even though that's just a law in the Netherlands, it's very likely if it's in the Netherlands, it's likely somewhere else. Legionella doesn't stop at the border. So they said, like, just ram it out to the rest of the world. And it was the most hated feature, probably, on the platform. We still have it. Do we still have it? It still exists. It still exists. Yeah. But you can switch it off now. But I guess you're not a very good hotel when you have seven weeks, seven days empty.
Um, but we spoke now about some customization, and you know there is this sentiment by some people that we are becoming a feature factory. It's something that uh you don't like to hear. You know, it has a very negative connotation. What do you have to say about that? Are we still as innovative, or if we're not, why? I think we are, but we are a B2B solution and we are moving up in the enterprise space. So whilst some people feel we're a feature factory, you know, we need to take into account what customers need. The discussions we have with some of the brands, and we have had really difficult conversations saying we're not your dev shop; we are here to listen to what you're asking us for, but then we will do the thing that we think is right, and we push back a lot, but it is hard sometimes. Um, the features that they're saying, yeah, they're things that were on our roadmap, but they're just not prioritized. So the rep prioritization of those things is, you know, what we do, what we can do, but how we build it, that's always up to our product-led growth kind of mindset where we do the discovery, we build the thing that's right; we never build to something that a customer has drawn for us; we just ask what are the problems looking to solve, maybe you don't need a report. Maybe we can automate that whole workflow so that we never have to build the report you're asking us to build because we just automated the whole thing.
Um, and and I think that's the differentiation. We have to really listen to customers because in a B2C, if you're building TikTok, you can just start deploying things straight to customers, and then you see the analytics. In B2B, these are customers that are intensely using it and paying a lot of money. So we have to have a conversation with them, what they're looking to build, but how we build it. Um, no one knows better to build products than our teams. That's a bold statement. I like that.
Uh, do you have an example of a hotel coming, uh, coming to us and say, "Okay, we need this because," and we were like, "Okay, let's have a look at it," and that we suggested actually a different solution that was more innovative, and the hotel was then happy? I know I put you on the spot because this is not in the prepared. Well, so like in the very early days, I remember we had a customer, um, that was a hostile customer, and and we were very poor at the time. So we took their money so that they can tell us what to build, and we really needed the cash because we needed to pay your salaries and some of the other salaries. So we took their money and we said, "Yeah, sure. Here's the 20 features that we built." And then two years in, we're like, "We're never going to build this feature." And I remember getting on a call with a customer saying, "We're we're not going to build this. Like, this makes no sense for us." Um, but keeping the cash, sorry, and we ended up keeping the cash, and the customer is still with us today. But it's it's just having that really difficult conversation saying it actually doesn't make sense.
So there's one feature, um, called allotments in hospitality, and you know my mother will go to a travel agent to book her holidays, and she goes into the brochure and she's like, this holiday, and then the travel agent, like, sure, I got you, it's booked, and she's like, you know, he hasn't even checked the computer, but it's because of traditional kind of systems they had an allotment, and I remember in the early days, like, we will never build this; this is so stupid, um, but here we are 12 years in, we have actually built it at some point because it made sense from a product point of view. We we saw other use cases, and somehow we've built it, not with the purpose of building that feature, but we had just unlocked it through feature developments, but did we build it in an innovative way, or is it the good old allotment? It's uh, it is the good old allotment, I think. Okay, fair.
Um, but I think you mentioned something that one of the hotels simply was happy anyway with us, but there was one case where the hotel was so persistent that they said, okay, just opened the API for us. Oh, yes. And I think that was such a pivotal moment for our company because the open API now is like the thing that you talk about now. That's the first thing that you will start a conversation with. Yeah. This hotel wanted to go live before Christmas, and it was November, and they said we are building a whole kiosk. Not a single guest is going to come by a reception desk, and we love that. But we had no way to do that because we didn't have a kiosk and we didn't have an API. Um, but they're like, it's fine. We've got a development team. We will just build the kiosk ourselves; just give us the API. And I remember the conversation with our CTO at the time. I said, can we just give us the API? And and and he said no because our, um, the code wasn't set; like, we was morphing so fast that if you put an API out there and every time you change the system, you had to backwardly work with the API to make it compatible to the old kind of API endpoints. Um, but luckily we were able to convince him to give us that. And then I remember saying, "Do you mind if I just put it on the website and see if anyone wants to maybe develop through it?" And he allowed me to do that.
Um, and once we put our API on the website, because like, why would we hide this? Why why wouldn't we share this with the world like everyone else had done? Um, suddenly we started seeing all these young startups that were have been dying to get access to this core system of the hotels starting to build their startups on top of Muse. And we're like, "Oh, this is this is a real problem that not only we faced, but everyone in the industry was facing." And some some really great hospitality companies started with Muse, um, and have built their whole companies, and then they expanded, and most of the industry has now opened up their API, and it's actually publicly available on most of the websites. It's not not everywhere still, but it we have 1,000 integrations in our marketplace, making us the most integrated system. Um, and it's powerful, but it took a bold decision from our CTO. Well, it was also very painful because there were times when I was walking around Amsterdam, probably the red light district, and I had to switch off one integration because they were just overwhelming us with requests because we had no uh limitations. But I guess it was it was part of the part of the fun. Yeah.
Um, what is—we talked about features a little bit. Is there anything that you are particularly happy about the past couple of months, maybe even a year, if there was like a big release that you were like, okay, I'm super proud of this; this is something I I you know was hoping for when I started this? So it's a thing that I didn't think I would ever get excited about, which is security, um, and you know we've—and most of hospitality platforms are facing a lot of phishing from um some of these Russian farms where they're just trying to fish access to your systems, and um we were very quick to roll out two-factor authentication and enforce it. So we'd rolled it out years before, but like 3–4% of of of people were using it, and we said this needs to go out fast because that's the best way to protect yourself, and we rolled it out in several weeks and we enforced it across hotels. Um, and then we started, you know, rolled out single sign-on and Pasi, and we are now leading the way for hospitality in the way that we think about security and logging into the system and protecting the systems, and it is stuff like that that really excites me when there's a genuine threat. Our teams come together, and they build better solutions than anything that I've seen really fast. So I could talk about the really fun front-of-house kiosks and things which I love, but what they delivered on the security side, it's so powerful. Well, you became sort of a voice of the security, and I and I think that's another thing, um, uh, that people appreciate about you is that you don't really have a filter, and you—when I was talking to you before this, uh, I was like, is there any no question? I said no, just ask me anything, and I think this this this culture goes well, you know, down because if people are open about things and are not afraid that you'll be uh judged or you'll be uh kind of copied because you know, I even Richard used to say that the how is it like copying is the biggest form of flattery or something like that. I think Madonna said it first, but then Richard maybe took it from Madonna. Uh, I'm not sure. It's either—it could be either, but I think the security is a is a really interesting topic because you know, I think it was our CPO that really started teaching us about security. We had no idea what security was.
Uh, is it something that scares you? Like, because my one of my questions was like, what really scares you in the business? Is is this like one of the things that you are like, okay, we need to take this super seriously? Um, in the moment I I saw the elevated um phishing attempts against us, and the numbers didn't lie, and I was like, I'm really uncomfortable about it, but somebody has to say something because we I was on calls with a lot of hospitality systems, and everyone's experiencing it, but everyone's like, well, we don't want to say anything because you know, legal needs have a say and what have they, and I said, somebody needs to talk about this, and I said, I'll do a video; I said to our team, I'll do a video, and then if you're uncomfortable, I won't do it. But just are you comfortable with me putting this out there on LinkedIn? Um, and that was a video that then got a lot of traction about, you know, how they're attacking you, how smart—this is not a Nigerian prince that's emailing you. This is next level, how smart they're working with Google ads and how Google is not protecting us. And I said, somebody needs to call them out. Um, so I was very worried, and I remember I was like, "Right, before I do this, maybe I need to go into my passwords across like all my 100 logins and enable two-factor authentication on everything because I was a password manager, right?" Oh, 100%. But I I was terrified that, you know, I became a target, and luckily that didn't become the case. But every time I posted about it, we saw an elevated kind of um impact. So um, it's definitely something I worry about, like the rise of AI when that came out. I was I didn't really know how to approach it, whether this could be destroying our business. And the first thing I did, I I went to a marketing team and said like, "Can you find me a stage where you make me keynote?" And that forces me to figure it out. Like, every time I'm uncomfortable, I'm like, "Right, let's set myself a ridiculous goal." And that forces me to dig into it and figure out because I don't want to be on the stage feeling like an idiot. Um, and and it really helps me. So you're now also an AI um guy. I can talk about it relatively confidently, but do not put me next to an expert because I will look like a complete idiot.
Do you use it on a daily basis? Oh, yeah. Like my husband, he's like, "Can you ask your lady to answer this?" So you're you're GP's lady apparently. So, and I randomly like, you know, I was in London this weekend, and I was like, "Oh, oh, this this hotel, how many rooms do you think it? Let me ask." And every everything that comes in my head, I want to see it answered in the right way. Um, and you know it's silly things like we we often talk about a metric at Muse like what's the revenue per square meter, and then everyone's debating how do we get the square meters of a hotel; I'm like, have you tried asking the chat to do a best guess, and it's great; like, it's like this is your how many rooms you have, an average room size is this, your quarters should be this, and it's so good at very quickly distilling really complex kind of um breakdowns into a simple answer, and I think everyone should learn to be comfortable with AI, and I understand that it's not the pace at which everyone is adopting, but we are—everyone around you is. So don't get left behind. I think I liked a quote by one of our colleagues who was saying that you should take ChatGPT as a really skilled and good uh intern, not a CEO, because this—I mean, CEO can also make mistakes, but uh you expect them from an intern, even if it's—so you still have to kind of check, yeah, the the if it's valid what what this lady or or in my case, I think it's a guy because I recently asked—I had a piece of Lego and I didn't know from what series it is. So I took a photo and I series it is. Yeah. So I also embrace it, even though I'm always late to adopt things. I was—and it's like asking—so there's things that make me uncomfortable because as a CEO, I have to have a voice about everything like legal, finance, product development, and sometimes I just feel like I don't really understand what they're talking about, and I literally will throw out a metric that some finance person has thrown my way and I'd say like, explain this to me like I'm a 15-year-old, and it is so good at making things come to life. So it says things like slay, and I think that's 14. Oh, sorry.
Um, if you had a chance to be in a team in R&D, which one would it be and why? I think I know the answer. Let's see if if if I'm if I'm right. Yeah, this is hard. But now now I feel like you've got the answer. So I—if I was an engineer, which I am not, and I I've never had the aspiration, but if I was an engineer, I'd want the hairiest challenge. And I'd probably be in the platform team because they're solving some of the most complex things. And I genuinely want to be in the thing that that's the hardest. And I don't think that was the answer. No, no, no. But I think our platform viewers will love this because I don't think a CEO would ever say that because platform is usually kind of left behind. You know, it's it's you you have to have it, so you have it. It's not like you want to have it. But the thing is the talent we have in the platform, these are the smartest of the smart people, and the way they think through problems, it is magic to to spend time with them. And honestly, I don't know what they do, but I know it's really hard. Yeah. No, but it is magic, and and I think I'd want to be around people like that. Wow. So I thought the GX that would be the logical because I'm so passionate about the problem, but if I was an engineer, I'd be a very different person, and I put myself in the shoes of the engineer. And then uh there was somebody else who thought it would be—oh, I know, I forgot how it's called now—but something like leaderboard, like uh—Oh yeah, like a benchmarking tool. Benchmarking tool. Yeah, yeah, I can see that because you like things to be neat, and then you can you compare where you are. So yeah, if I was this match and I had to work in R&D with the skill set that I have, then I probably do that. Okay. So I had it I had it all wrong.
And towards the end of our discussion, what if you had an unlimited budget? Um, what would we build? I would not—um, so I would probably build—No. So I probably have our own hotel, the Muse Hotel, and we would build the solution that we think is the right solution without any input from anyone else. We we know what the problems are, but we also know what we we think the hotel of in 10 years' time would be. And sometimes we build solutions that like this is this is not the future yet, but we can't shortcut it because we're supporting actual businesses that that have to run today. Um, but if you were to say, okay, time and money is not a problem, I would just stop and saying, let's just build the best hotel that we then would, and that would be the business, you know, the—we would scale; we would build these hotels, and we would like almost what Citizen M started 10 years ago. I thought they were on the right track; it's just they lost their way along the way; it just didn't push far enough in what they were doing, and they just like, this is good enough; let's are pushing it out there, and the brand scaled, and it's fine. It's it's a really nice tech-forward product, but they could have taken that to the next level, and if time and and money was not a problem, I would probably take their vision but like 10 times further. But would you have just one hotel or—Well, I would build one hotel and prove to the industry that we built something infinitely better than any anyone else, and then we would just scale that out. So it would be like like kind of a franchise model. People could like just yeah, like pretty much you can buy the tech from Muse, um, and we would tell you how to do it, um, it's more like a franchise and manage model because franchise is very light kind of you slap a brand on the roof and then you get connected to the infrastructure in a light way, whereas if someone manages your hotel, you get to say when what's happen where, and I do want to say like the micromanagement in me comes up—how close were we ever to having our own hotel because I know this has been out there; randomly somebody will always post it's like we should have a hotel, and Richard will always like, yeah, yeah, we should—how were we ever close to that? Uh, no, not really. So we we've had accommodation; I don't know if you remember when we had—we were renting rooms across the city because we're like, why would we pay for hotel rooms if we can just rent an apartment? Some strange nights in the London one, yeah, like it worked for the time when we were relatively poor, um, so that's the closest we've ever come, but the thing is we have a problem to solve, and it is so hairy that I don't want to get distracted with running a hotel.
Ultimately, I'd still love to do it. Is that something that you would do when you—I know you're not even close to retiring from Muse, but I cannot really imagine you going back to like a market and just look for a job, actually putting like open to work. Yeah, I can imagine. Um, so what is it? I think I'm unemployable at this point. I'm so opinionated that people will hate working with me. But what would I do? Um, something very different. I don't do things twice. I don't enjoy it; I don't learn from it. So I don't think I'd want to run a hotel unless I can go really extreme on on really building something that would transform the industry. But I probably do something completely different that people don't expect. So you always do a different workout because you say you never do
Things twice, or you? Yeah. No workout trying.
All right. Matt, thanks very much, uh, for joining us. I know you have a flight to catch, so thanks for the time. And yeah, tune in for the next episode, and we'll see who's going to be on the hot seat.
Nice. Thanks, man. Thanks.