 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante from Wikibon and this is theCUBE. We come to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here at the tug event, the seventh annual wine event. A lot of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, cool people hanging out. And we caught up with Phil Borgard, who's the CEO of a company called Objective Logistics. Wait until you hear what these guys do. Phil, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. So tell us a little bit about the company. We were talking off camera. It's a great idea and I want to learn more about it. Thanks, I really appreciate that. So essentially what we do at Objective Logistics is we dig our hands into POS systems and restaurants and retail environments. They're really the computers that you see your waiters or waitresses typing your order into. And they house just an absolutely amazing amount of data on transactions, guests, and also the servers. So what we do is we rank every waiter, waitress or retail salesperson based on their performance and automatically reward the best performers with their choice of shifts, sections, non-monetary compensation. So we really try to create meritocracies in these work environments and these high turnover workforces because we see waiters and waitresses as some of the largest sales forces in the world when it comes down to it. And it's based off of commissions or tips. So in order to provide guests with the best experience possible, you got to make sure that no matter how, and I mean this is the restaurant industry, no matter how hungover anybody is or if they had a bad night the night before that they're at the top of their game that next day giving the customers the best experience. And our software figures out who those people are. So it's really kind of money ball and freakonomics of these different workforces. It's a phenomenal idea. I mean you're absolutely right. When you think about a good waiter or waitress that essentially upsells you or at least helps you understand their product and your needs and understand the customer. I mean it's a brilliant idea. Are you an economist or are you a geek? I guess I'm a little bit of both. I mean I worked in restaurants from the age of 14 and on until I was about 21. My parents really never believed in just giving me things. I was working to get a car at the age of 14 washing dishes. And then I went off to the Wharton School at U Penn to study applied math and microeconomics. So I guess I'm a little bit of both. But I took a very deep liking to game theory, Nash's work and microeconomic concepts of eliminating deadweight loss, maximizing efficiency and utility and ergo leaderboards and really creating meritocracies. The reason I love this idea so much is you're right. I mean essentially waitresses are a sales force and you talk that it's a non-monetary but it's commission based but it's non-monetary incentives. But the incentives that you're offering in some regards directly affect their compensation because you mentioned shifts for example. So if I understand it right, the winner can pick the choice shifts and that's where you're going to make the most money, right? So in most places, I mean, it's based off of tenure and complacency. Somebody's been there for a long time therefore they've earned Friday night shifts. We're saying that's wrong when it comes down to it. You don't want David Ortiz batting ninth in your lineup. You want him hitting cleanup or you want him hitting where he's going to bell balls out of the park. It's the same thing for servers. When you have a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed new server coming in who really wants to work their butt off and earn the tips on a Friday night, which, by the way, can be the difference of about $900 in the city of Boston in cash. The difference between a Monday day shift and a Friday night shift at, say, a game on in Boston is $900 in cash. And far be it for me to say, but I'm not entirely sure that all of that's being claimed on taxes either. So I mean, it's a very lucrative business. So tell me more about the company, the funding, where you guys are at with Headtown, you know, where you're headed. So currently, we've raised a seed round and a super seed round. So we're funded by Atlas Venture, Jeff Fagnan and Dustin Dolgenau. And we're also funded by Google Ventures, Rich Miner, and Lee Howard over at NextView Ventures. We've raised about $2.3 million. And, yeah, so I mean, we're doing pretty well. We're at 15 employees right now, but by the end of the year, should be anywhere between 25 and 30. Now, when did you start? I'm sorry if you said that in here. I started the company when I left an investment bank at the end of 2008 and just kind of, and you know, it was really just a rough draft of a mess of an idea. But we really started in earnest coding the product after we did some customer development and found out that we weren't totally crazy in January of 2010. Okay, so you're shipping the product, right? And you got real customers? We believe in, we believe in shipping products, we believe in real customers, and we believe in revenue. So how does it work? You essentially super glue yourself to the POS system. Is that kind of how it goes? I don't really know much about that business. Is it going to the cloud? How's that all affecting things? So POS systems are very, very old legacy technologies. And what we do is we kind of send what is kind of like the Mars rover in to pick up moon rocks for us or data. So it sits halfway on the POS and halfway in our cloud. And it translates all of this information to us that we need. And then we have a very, very nice front-end software as a service web portal where waiters and waitresses and managers can log in and all of that data is being populated and that's where they see it. On their mobile phone or on their, you know, home computer or anything else along those lines. And the users can, or the buyers can customize the incentives and there's some level of customization involved. Talk about that a little bit. At the end of the day, I mean, you want to build a product but you also want to build a toolkit. You know, because there's certain things that certain customers won't want to use. For instance, you know, different parts of the ranking. You know, you could have a customer satisfaction element like tips go into the coefficient algorithm that rates waiters and waitresses or it could just be per person average sales or it could be survey results. So we try to make sure that we make it as flexible as possible but with also, you know, you don't want to build too much software. So, you know, the simplest software in the world is the software that is the most amazing. And a good example of that is Google. It's literally, and always has been, a search bar and it populates the world for you. So if I could build one big red button that somebody could push and everything would be great in their restaurant, that's what I do. But unfortunately, it's not that easy. Now, is there a developer play here? Are you sort of interacting with the developer community or is it pretty much, you know, you guys are developing the code and working directly with the customers? Is there an ecosystem play? I don't know. So I mean, you know, at the end of the day, you do want to create a platform where people can actually access POS information or even some of our widgets by open APIs. But that's a little bit of a longer pull in the tent. You know, you've got to maintain focus, especially in a small company. So we're very, very focused on our own ecosystem right now, but we'll sure as hell open source things in the future. Well, potentially there's a data play there as well, I would think. I don't know. We've had almost every major player that you can imagine in the payment space and elsewhere contacting us, asking us for access to our ability to communicate bidirectionally with the POS system. Awesome. Well, stay focused. I love the idea. Best of luck and we'll be watching. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. Okay, this is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest.