Title: Finding Flavor and Philosophy: Garrett Lang ’01 on Generous Capitalism and Building PlateRate

Christa Downey: Welcome to the Engineering Career Conversations. I'm Christa Downey, Director of the Engineering Career Center at Cornell University. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: And I'm Traci Nathans-Kelly, Director of the Engineering Communications Program. We are excited to bring you this forum, where we will host lively conversations that we hope will inspire you. Thank you so much for being here with us today, Garrett. We're really excited to learn more about everything that you're doing. As I was reading the pre-show notes, I just kept saying, Oh, my gosh, there's so much to talk about, so we're real happy that you're here. So, let's get us all started. What are you doing right now? What's your current work? What are you up to? 
Garrett Lang: So my 60-80 hours a week is with PlateRate. And what we do is we help people earn up to a 60% credit to try top rated menu items at restaurants that we work with. You never pay more than the price ordering directly from the restaurant. Unlike the expense of third party delivery systems, which costs up to 35% more on average than you would normally pay if you went directly to the restaurant. Whereas with us, you trybetter tasting food, you get free food. It's just better than the way that everybody else orders, and we don't cost the restaurant anything, and we don't cost the diner anything. It's a very interesting win-win business model. I'm aspiring to be the most innovative player in the food tech space, basically being better for both sides of the two sided marketplace, for both diners and restaurants, for even wine stores and other people who sell food and drink. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: So is there a definition of what a food tech company is or isn't? 
Garrett Lang: I don't know that there's a firm definition of that. It's a little bit, it's probably a little bit grey, but pretty much anything with food and drink that's using technology to enable the path. Anywhere from where food is grown all the way to people consuming food and drink, you know, is kind of what I see as the food tech landscape from the founders that I've met in the food tech space. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: Excellent. That's a big space. So I just wanted to be sure that I was getting my head around around the right thing. 
Garrett Lang: If you get into the growing of food crops and stuff, that's AgTech. So, you know, there's a, you know, there's probably a fuzzy gray line between AgTech and food tech sometimes, but, yeah, food tech is more the eating of the food side, but, you know, it can be pretty broad. TNK; Thank you for that. 
Garrett Lang: Sure. 
Christa Downey: Okay, Garrett, what does this look like for you day to day? Well, 80% of my time is spent on execution, experimenting, learning and improving until things fit into place. Once they do, it's more a matter of scaling up, and we're starting to be at the beginning stages of that. I read this book that said the best entrepreneurs are like scientists running experiments from them, and I might be biased, but that's how I work. So I hope that I will be a good entrepreneur as I grow the company. I'm trying to do the best I can, and I like to tell people, don't stress just do your best and accept the rest. You can't expect more of yourself than your best. Experimenting and learning is actually why we're here on this Earth, that's to learn, right? You know, learning knowledge and wisdom. And so I've thought about that question since I was about 12. I spent I spent about, probably less than 20% of my time on strategy. That's kind of the most fun part for me. And hopefully someday that'll be my over 80% when I can pay other people to do all the execution stuff. But, you know, this is where I'm trying to create a value proposition that's so good and someone's got to feel like they're crazy to say no to me. And I think we have that with Plate Rate, like for both the diner and the restaurant, which I can explain. You know, we are more profitable. We're more loyalty inducing, and we're as efficient or more efficient than everyone else for the restaurant. And for the diner, you don't pay more than you would ordering directly from the restaurant. You get the convenience of online ordering. And you can get up to a 60, and believe it or not, the early adopters can even get up to a ridiculous 110% credit in free food. I can explain how that works, if you want. It's only for the very early adopters at a restaurant. So that's that's kind of the day to day. You know, I also have some side gigs. As, like a fractional CTO CPO and, you know, some other stuff. But this is PlateRate is my majority of my time.
Traci Nathans-Kelly: And so how does it work? The PlateRate system? 
Garrett Lang: So, basically, the diner can order food from their phone. We just had launched an app yesterday, so we're an app that can use Apple Pay and Google Pay now, which is much more convenient than how we used to accept payment, which is PayPal. But basically, you order food from your phone like you would from  Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grub Hub. And right now, we do pick up and delivery, but probably next month or the month after, we're going to do dine in as well. So you can be sitting at your table. You can have 20 people at the table, and everybody can order their food simultaneously, and everybody get separate checks. Everybody, if you try the top rated menu items at a new restaurant, and you get a 60% credits come back. When you come back, you try new top rated menu items, you get 30% to come back after that. And once those credits run out, then you just get a more convenient way of ordering, and you never end up paying more than the price at the restaurant because you get at least as much free food as you'd pay in a convenience fee. So you never really actually end up paying for it. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: And I'm really, it's such an interesting model, right? I'm like, I'm fascinated by this. How does this not impact the bottom line for the restaurant then? 
Garrett Lang: It does, positively. So the way that it works is the restaurant offers $10 in free food for every hundred dollars fed. Over 75% of the time, that's profitable because the diner spends more money. And so it's profitable for the restaurant to do that. But that fee is our 10% convenience fee. And so the diner never ends up paying more than they would ordering directly from the restaurant. And then the restaurant only pays a 2% credit card fee, which is below cost like restaurant, you know, for online orders. And so the restaurant ends up making more money when we sell their food than when they sell their own food. Plus, we've proven with our pilot restaurant that we get 69% more orders per customer over a five month time period. So it's drastically higher loyalty. It's not a little bit. It's a ton, like I just a huge amount, more loyalty. And we do that at no cost to the restaurant. And you know, that's what I call you'll be more generous for the diner and the restaurant is what I call generous capitalism. And we also share more money with our team members than most companies do. And we give equity to all our team members. So generous capitalism is where in the free markets the most generous company is the one that's gonna win, because let's face it, would you rather do business with a greedy company that gives you less and costs more, or would you rather do business with a generous company that costs less than gives you more? So with that said, I think generous capitalism should be the next stage of capitalism. And I call what we're in now greedy capitalism, where the companies take everything they can for themselves. And I'm trying to create a generous capitalist business, and my dream is, you know, five years from now to get written up in the Harvard Business Review. That generous capitalism is the future of capitalism, and that companies can actually serve society and their employees and, you know, the community all together. And use their profit to do that rather than to just hoard it. 
Christa Downey: Love it. So, can you talk about how this compares to conscious capitalism? 
Garrett Lang: Yeah, so there's a lot of parallels between conscientious capitalism and generous capitalism. Like, similar philosophy. The difference is using generosity as a competitive advantage is part of generous capitalism. Conscientious capitalism is still you make the money, be thoughtful about everybody, which is definitely a step forward. But I think being generous is another step forward beyond that, where you're literally giving a better offer to everybody involved, like employees, suppliers, customers. And so by being more generous, you actually win more market share. Because, again, people would rather do business for the generous company. And by winning more market share at a lower margin, you end up doing just fine. And you can, you know, it's very compatible with conscientious capitalism. You know, a generous capitalist business should be a conscientious capitalist business. It should be a core mission. It should practice stakeholder, I think it's stakeholder capitalism was the other one that is also aligned. The difference is the generosity and putting all of the business partners forward and giving them more. But they all kind of go hand in hand. So it's complimentary. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: It's really such a great model that it's not relying on something after the fact, like a donation. Right? The generosity is built in from the moment you move forward at all. 
Garrett Lang: Right. It's part of the business model. The business model is based on generosity. That's exactly, right. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: And generosity boiled all the way through, not just oh, for a tax break, we give some money away, right? 
Garrett Lang: And that's the other thing. It doesn't rely on regulation, right, which I don't think we should have to regulate this type of stuff. We should do it in the free markets. I think the free markets will bring about a better world if we use them correctly, but we need to get entrepreneurs starting generous capitalist businesses and proving that this is a viable business model. And if we can prove it's a viable business model, which I think very much that we can, you know, you look at companies like, you know, Adobe has, like, a 90% profit margin, right? Like, there's plenty of money that could be shared with other stakeholders if they wanted to. So software has very high margins, and if some of that profit is just shared with all the stakeholders, you know, you can be very generous. And so, you know, I think there's a lot of opportunity. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: So, as you've been building this, or conceptualizing it and then fine tuning it, because it's out there. I was out on the website, poking around, having a good time. What were some of the challenges that you faced or are still facing? And how are you working to overcome those? 
Garrett Lang: Yeah, I mean, so I'm bootstrapped. So that's probably one of the biggest challenges. You know, I can only spend so much money, you know, per month and be able to sustain it. And so, you know, getting really motivated sales people is probably my biggest challenge now. In the beginning, my biggest challenge was figuring out B to C software. You know, I was overconfident in how really I could figure that out because in my corporate career, I would always, like, go into a new industry or something like that, and then I would ask lots of awful questions to experts. And then within six months, I was considered an expert, and I had people with a dozen years of experience asking me questions that I could answer. So I was probably overconfident from those experiences, thinking, oh, I'll figure out B to C software really quickly. It took me, like, three years to figure out how to build B to C software and I'm not sure that I'm where I want to be. I want to be at a place where our UX is better than DoorDash, but they have a lot more money than me. So that's probably pretty aspirational. But we have gotten feedback that we are from some of the people in UX interviews with our mobile app. Um that just came out this week. But, you know, and that probably was my biggest challenge before. Now the biggest challenge is getting into restaurants. I just need to get, we have conversations with restaurant owners, usually the ones that are financially based and, you know, think logically about it. Like, it's a pretty good deal, right? You need to get 69% more orders per customer. Why would someone not want that? There's no downside to them. There's no risk to them. As long as they put us as their preferred ordering system, they get a free ordering system, actually one that pays them. We actually pay restaurants revenue shares, which I can't go into in detail, but we share with, you know, our revenue with restaurants as well, and I think we're the only one in the industry to do that. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: That's great. But those are a lot of problems to solve all at once, by yourself. 
Garrett Lang: I am a glutton for punishment, right? I'm going up against billion dollar competitors, so, you know, that's okay. Like, we have a great team, and I think we're very capable of doing very well in this industry. 
Christa Downey: So I noticed Traci, you started PlateRate by yourself, and, you know, you say, right now, you're one person. I also know that when you put yourself out there and you start talking to people about what's important to you, eventually, you're going to find people who share the same vision or an aligned vision, right? And so I'm curious to know who have you come across so far? You know, are you at that place yet where you've found others who are in a similar or related space or you know, I'd love to hear a story of, you know, someone with an aligned vision, you know, a partner, a coconspirator, maybe even a restaurant owner who said, yes, this is exactly what we need. 
Garrett Lang: Yeah, believe it or not, I actually, I get a lot of those. Like, a lot of people really get it. And it's interesting because when I talk to restaurant owners, there's only two camps. There's the people who get it and the people who don't. And the ones that go, wow, I know I have some great menu items, and I know if people try those, they're gonna come back over and over again. And I know that there's some menu items that not everybody likes, and if they try those, they're not gonna come back. If I give them a reason to try the best ones, of course, they're gonna come back, right? That's pretty logical right? Get people to try the best food. I like to say, good restaurants have some bad food, and bad restaurants all have some good food or they wouldn't be in business. So everyone's got some good food. The question is, how do you find what's the good food, and we're the way to do that. Because, you know, customers are eating the food. And when you ask a wait staff, you know, what's a order, they're trained to tell you two things. They're trained to tell you what's about to go bad? Oh, the chicken's about to go bad. The chicken Parmesan is the best thing on the menu. Or, what's the most expensive, right? The filet mignon Oscar is, like, absolutely the best thing. It's, you know, $80. Because that gives them the biggest tip. But as far as finding kindred spirits, I've found a lot of them, and we have them on the team as well. And those are the best team members because they see the vision, and they see that we're really doing right by all our business partners, and they're motivated to do it. And I have people that are highly, highly motivated to make this company, you know, what it can turn into, which is, you know, we want to be a unicorn someday. You know, that's the goal. And so the level of loyalty and effort that you get from people who are bought into the vision, the philosophical vision of generous capitalism, as well as the innovative vision of getting people to try the top rated menu items. And we have something called flavor rash with some people out as well. And, you know, it creates a lot of motivation for both team members and partners because partners realize, oh, if I introduce this guy to someone, I'm doing the person a favor. You know, it's not like I'm sending someone who's selling snake oil to my friend. I'm selling someone who's like, giving away the farm to my friend, right? Why would I not want to do that? So it makes it much easier for people to make introductions for me. And again, that's part of generous capitalism. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: That whole model of asking, you know, What's the best thing here tonight or whatever? Like, my favorite version of that is I always asked the wait staff, what's your favorite thing, right? Because what things have they tasted? And even just last night, my wait staff person noticed that I was eating all the spicy things cause I do like the spicy things. And she brought over this little container of chili oil infused honey. She goes, you like the spicy stuff. You got to try this. And I have tried hot honey before, but she was spot on it. And so what did we do? We gave her a much bigger tip. Right? So it's just like this really localized example. I was just resonating with some of the things that you were saying. 
Garrett Lang: That's great. And actually, that's what flavor match is about, is in flavor match we we let customers rate how sweet, salty, spicy, savory, sour, and bitter the food is. How nice does it look, how healthy is it and how big is the portion size, right? How much food are you gonna get? Wouldn't it be nice to know that stuff before you get it, you can look at something and see how spicy it is from like a zero to 100 scale, and then you know what to get. And the other thing is the type of service you got is awesome, right? Like, that's a great wait staff, so she deserves a better tip. And the problem is, like, Wait staff are often so busy doing the routine stuff, like writing down your order and typing it into the POS. They can't provide that kind of service. Whereas with the PlateRate, they don't have to do those routine things. They can focus on providing the kind of service you got. And that's what we want to do. We don't want to get rid of wait staff. Some people want to use a system like PlateRate to get rid of wait staff. And that's not what I recommend. Like, maybe in a casual place like an area you could do that. But most of the time, that's not the idea. The idea is to give better service to more people. Get better tips for the wait staff. You turn tables faster so they can serve more people at the same number of tables. You know, people don't have to wait for their check at the end of the night because you just pay on your phone and walk out. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: That part I love. 
Garrett Lang: One of my people, one of my users, said that was his fever part of the app. He's like, Garrett, I felt like it was free. She's like, I know I paid for it, but I never got a check, so it felt free. 
Christa Downey: Like you're at a resort, and you just take your rest. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: With your degree in computer science from Cornell, and you've obviously just used the heck out of that degree. Of course, you know, the elephant in the room right now is AI. And so what is your, like, relationship with AI? With your company? Is there one? How do you see it affecting the work that you do? 
Garrett Lang: Great question. So this does get into roadmap issues. I can't share too much about it, but I can't say my specialization in Cornell was AI. And so I have a lot of ideas of how to use AI. I don't see the AI use cases as being the major differentiator for us right now. So I'm not focusing on doing those things immediately. But when I start to have spare budget, they're definitely going to be really cool features that I can implement. And, you know, I have ideas that will use AI that will transform the way that people do orders from restaurants. You know, I can't go into it in too much detail. Unfortunately, like, I've had over a dozen times where I shared stuff without an NDA. That idea suddenly popped up. And there were ideas that I had had for years that no one had ever done. And then as soon as I shared it publicly within a year, there was a company doing just that. So since that's happened to me over a dozen times, I've become much quieter about roadmap stuff. 
Christa Downey: Garrett, you mentioned that you've been I think you said you've been thinking like this, maybe as an entrepreneur since you were 12. I'm curious to know what you wish you knew when you were maybe not 12, but maybe when you were a sophomore at Cornell. 
Garrett Lang: Yeah, I actually, my mom gave me a letter that I wrote my grandparents when I was in middle school saying how I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I already was kind of an entrepreneur in middle school. I would sell Gobstoppers for that cost me $0.50 for a package. I'd sell them for a quarter per Gobstopper, so I actually had a better profit margin with my Gobstopper sales than I do with PlateRate. But the volume was much lower. Three or $4 a day, something like that, but I made good candy money out of it. And so I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I also wanted to know that I had a good chance of success and I wanted to know what I was doing. So that's why I went into Corporate America first, and I really learned how to a lot of the best companies do business. But as far as what I wish I knew when I was a sophomore, Um, I wish I had known this before I went to Cornell is that I recommend this every student you should choose at ten classes per semester, not four to five that you want, if you have an interest in. You sign up for the four to five that are the hardest to get into, so you can definitely get into them. And then you have five or six that you could audit that during open enrollment, you pick out of the ten classes you're auditing for that you're attending, which are the professors that are the most interesting, the most engaging? And you drop any classes that are part of those professors, and you sign up for the ones that are the professors that are great. And I started doing that in my junior year, and the quality of my classes was so much, I remind you, my first two years was mostly requirements. So I didn't have a lot of choice to to do that, but for people who were in, and I was an engineer, but I would take, you know, a lot of credits. I had to petition the dean a bunch of times to take the credits that I was taking because I just loved learning, you know. And and so, you know, that signing on for, you know, auditing extra classes and just taking the best ones was, like, it just improved the quality of my education so much. It improved it so much that there's a class that I still wish I could have taken on like, Ancient Egyptian and Chinese or Asian philosophy. That was like, really cool. I learned stuff that I still remember to this day and tell people the stories about, like, the books of the dead from the Egyptians passing on their knowledge to their kids. And so I'm going to create a book of the dead for my kids, where I try to pass on my knowledge to them. A lot of my philosophy essays will be part of that. So yeah. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: Yeah, that's really cool. As somebody who has to work a lot with a required course that everybody tries to get into, I wish they would follow your methodology, right? So get all those things that you have to do, and then have some of those things that you want to do. It's a really great philosophy, and then you end up, yeah, with a really nice balance in the end. 
Garrett Lang: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I took I was like, half way to minors in Spanish lit, economics, history and business. So, you know, I just I loved those courses. But I also loved my CS. Like, CS, like, I actually applied to Cornell. Arts and Sciences undecided anything but CS because I did so much technology when I was young. Like, I was working for an ISP. I was a programmer, you know, starting in middle school professionally. And so I just had so much technology that I was overloaded. But then I actually ended up deferring Cornell for a year and going to Spain as an exchange student. And I wasn't that tech focused there, right? Because they weren't very tech focused. I did do some tech consulting with my school and helped them out a little bit, but, like, I wasn't as deep in technology. So by the time I got into Cornell, like, oh, let me try a CS class, and man, I was just hooked right away. I just loved it. Like, I looked forward to my homework assignments and a lot of my classes. Not all of them, but most of them. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: Well, that leads us to a question we also like to follow up on the heels. It's like, what were those favorite classes? You've already given us some of them. 
Garrett Lang: Algorithms with John Kleinberg was so much fun. That was one that I really looked forward every week to my homework sets. And, you know, I would, you know, like, I would just have so much fun trying to, like, puzzle through how to create an algorithm that solved whatever problem he had. And it's really served me well in my career, 'cause I created I've created all my own AI algorithms throughout my career. I actually created ad tech algorithm that, like basically made obsolete and advanced on the last five years of development in just one algorithm, and ended up doubling click through rates for advertising. And I used to say, like, I want ads to be a value add. I don't want to show someone the ad that they're not interested in. And what this did is it showed ads to people that were more likely to be interested in the ad. So, you know, I've also found that in my career, every year of my career, like, without fail, my developers will come to me and be like, Garrett, what you're asking us to do is impossible. My response is always, well, before we give up on it, can we dive into the details together? Yeah. And so, like, one example, they were like, Oh, we ran this query for three days and it didn't come back. And so I said, well, before we give up, let's look at the query. And so I worked with our DBA. We looked at the query. I looked at the algorithm the query was using. And I said, All right, we're going to create an index here, here, here, here and here, like, on these particular fields. And then boom, some sector response times, like, no problem. And that's been, you know, that's just one example, but every year in my career, that's happened and where people said something was impossible. Maybe a little less often when I managed my own development team, but when it was other people managing the development team, they were very often like, Oh, this is impossible. And I've always been able with, you know, that Cornell just has an outstanding, theory based program, and they teach us how to solve problems, not syntax, but problems, technically. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: I like that differentiation there between solving the problems and the syntax. 
Garrett Lang: Yeah, Syntax, you know, I'm not good at it anymore. Like, my developers are way better at syntax for problem solving. I can do that, like nobody's business. Like, Cornell taught me to do that. I was already doing, like, lawyer problems for fun in high school. So, you know, I have a natural aptitude and desire to do that type of stuff, but Cornell taught me to do it even better. And that's also where I learned about Godel's Completeness Theorem, which was my second philosophical essay defending free will, using Godel's Completeness Theorem. But that's another tangent that goes into my not for profit if you want to go into that later. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: That seems like a whole other interview. 
Christa Downey: Wow. I'm learning a lot from you, Garrett, and I'm thinking if there are students who want to learn more about this, who want to learn from you. Maybe they want to get involved in PlateRate, work with you, learn from you that way. What would that look like? 
Garrett Lang: I would love to get students on board, especially, you know, in Ithaca, because, you know, why would students want to get all their friends and family the opportunity to get a 60% credit and free food when they try the top rated menu items, the restaurants. And not only do they get to be a good friend by getting everyone that 60% credit. They get paid every time their friends get it. And it never costs their friends a dime. So you know, why would a student not want to do that? When I was at Cornell, I created something called the College Town Community card, where I got discounts of, like, five or 10% from local businesses if someone had the card, and I sold the card so that we could get fund raising for running communities. I didn't compete anything for that. But if someone does this, they could make $50,000 a year, potentially, you know, getting a bunch of high volume restaurants on board that have become really popular with college students. And we also you know, and you never pay more than you would at the restaurant after the free food that you earn, and you're supporting the local restaurants by making them more money than they would make if you were ordering any other way. You're not paying the 35% extra that Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grub Hub charge. We get 29% more spend per customer compared to the average pickup and delivery order, so they you know, the restaurants making more money there. So people can e mail me resumes if they're interested at Garrett@PlateRate.com if they're interested in getting involved. We have other opportunities as well. I like to say I hire people, not people into roles. And so I have people to come in. I have a guy that came in recently. He's doing sales, customer solutions, and marketing. And he within his second week, not only sold two restaurants, but because he followed my onboarding really well, he onboarded those two restaurants, and now next week, those restaurants should be promoting us, and he starts to make money. So he's also learning how to do SEO from, like, a real SEO expert. So I really like to follow what I call the modified platinum rule. The platinum rule is to treat other people the way that they want to be treated. And my modification is, as long as there's so good reason not to, because you could abuse that, right, like, oh, I want you to do everything, you know, do my laundry, right? Well, no, like, let's be reasonable here. So, but I do, really, when I, you know, bring people on, you know, right now, it's all equity based and revenue share based in the US. And so I really want people to have a good experience. I want to make sure that they're learning from other team members, including myself. That they're working on the things that they want to work on and that they're getting experienced in different areas, which I think is especially good for college students. You know, I wasn't so sure what I wanted to do coming out of Cornell. And I think a lot of college students may have that question is, well, would I like this? Would I like that? Well, come to PlateRate, dabble in marketing, dabble in sales, dabble in customer solutions, and see what you like. And then, hey, now you've learned what job roles you like and what you don't, and you know what it's like to work in a start up. And you'll know whether you like that or you want to be in a big more structured environment, cause, as you can tell, We're actually fairly structured in terms of, like, our onboarding is very structured. But in terms of how we work together, we're very fluid, and we just collaborate with each other. It's very, very flat organization. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: It's really interesting. We'll have, just so that nobody gets nervous, we'll have all the information that you've given available in the show notes as well. But one of the one of the questions we like to ask 'cause you're in a space that's moving and evolving really quickly. So, how do you stay on top of things? How do you get new information and stay atop of what's happening? 
Garrett Lang: So, I actually use Google alerts, and what Google Alerts does is you put key phrases in, and it scours the news every day and sends me a summary of, you know, what food tech companies are doing around the globe. And doing that, I've been able to keep really close track, which is how I've seen my thesis, you know, from, like, when I shared menu and level reviews with someone, I saw, you know, I shared it with someone, and then a small company in India let out a press release, that they were going to start doing it. And then Zomato in India, which is one of the big food tech companies ended up copying that. So they you know, I could watch that I and then Door Dash ended up copying it from them. So you can sort of see when you watch the news really carefully, you can see ideas spread from company to company. And, you know, Google alerts really keeps me on top of what's going on, because most people when they implement something new and interesting, they do a press release, or something is written about it in the news. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: That's such an interesting strategy, and then being able to, like, map it and watch it move through development. I actually keep a Google doc of every news article I read, and, like, what my takeaways were of the Google the news. Sometimes I read news that says, hey, maybe I want to do something similar to this someday in the future. And I keep track of those things. And then when I'm looking for roadmap items, I go back to my news list, and I'll say, here are the ideas that I wanted to look at. In addition to a roadmap that I have with hundreds of ideas, you know, I can use some of those ideas because, you know, ideas are not copyrightable and or they're not defendable now, personally, I think they probably should be sometimes. You know, the idea of one time incentives for repeat business the patent office agreed is novel, but they just said it's not patentable material. I'm still arguing with them about that and hoping that I can get a patent, but the problem is they say anything in software is not patentable. Although there's one caveat that I found, which patent lawyers have agreed with me on. If you can confuse the heck out of the patent office, you can get it patented. So you just have to make it, like, so complicated that they can't understand what's going on, and then you can get and defend a patent. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: The patent thing is really interesting there is this mess with software. Some people are trying to patent it under process, right? Like this relative process. And so it's really kind of a wild ride. The patent office, they're flummoxed. 
Garrett Lang: They don't understand technology, and that's the problem, they have to learn technology. You're right. They're confused. And their confusion is coming out loud and clear with a lot of unclear legal cases and, like, not a clear, the line that I just drew, as funny as it is, is the best that I've come up with after talking for many hours to many, you know, litigators and patent lawyers, and, you know, and they've all agreed that that's pretty much how it works today. And that's not how it should work, right, but that's how it does work. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: Well, that's your big next career move, right? You can go to the patent office and get everything. 
Garrett Lang: I did get told when I was a kid, you're likely to be a lawyer, so 'cause I like to argue a lot and I have no problem in confrontation or having a confrontation, although I always tried to do it politely. And I tried to listen first now, but when I was younger, I didn't so much, and people were like, You should be a lawyer. So, which wasn't always a compliment, but I took it as one anyway. 
Christa Downey: So if you were not doing this right now, what else would you be doing? 
Garrett Lang: So innovating software somewhere. Like, if it wasn't in food tech, it would be somewhere else. I have a list of no joke over 50 businesses that I want to start. So, you know, I'd be inventing something, you know, something that blows away the rest of the industry. Like, I want to innovate in industries and transform the industries to be different than  they are today and much better and much more efficient and much more beneficial to everybody involved. So, for me, it's about using innovation to serve society. And there was a friend of mine that recently sent me a quote, and it talked about how I'm just going to paraphrase it, but it talked about how when some people in society are suffering and other people are doing really well, society is not healthy, and, you know, you end up with problems. They were like, Well, this sounds like a quote from today, doesn't it? Well, it was actually from Pericles in the four hundreds. And so, like, this has been known for a long time. And I think more of us have to be serving society in general rather than just doing the best for ourselves and letting everything else go to hell. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: And you're carrying a lot on your shoulders. You have all of this work to do, all this inspiration, but then we have to ask what you like to do for fun. Recharge. What do you do? 
Garrett Lang: I have a saying, which may be helpful to people. I've had some friends that like to repeat it when they get stressed out. I don't stress, do your best and accept the rest. And I live my life that way. So do I have a lot on my shoulders? Maybe, maybe not. Like, a lot of people won't expect me to change the world, but I still want to, so I'm going to try to. And I have another saying that goes along with that, which is keep your hopes high and your disappointment low. It's the only way to go. And I try to do that every day, too. And with that, I'm highly motivated every day. As far as how to relax, it may sound odd, but philosophy with good company, over wine and spirits is my way of relaxing. And I host events where we talk about philosophy in New York City through my not for profit, the Free Thinker Institute. We discuss everything, you know, from whether or not we have free will, which I mentioned earlier, I think I have a pretty solid logical argument that we do have free will. If I'm right, then it will be very interesting. But I'm not a PhD in philosophy, so I don't know that anyone would academic will want to read it, but if they do, I would love to share with them. And then from that then, how do we do the most good in the world? How do we live a happier, more fulfilling life? We've also talked about politics. And despite the amount of negativity around a lot of the political things that we've talked about, we've talked about the Israeli Palestinian complex. We've talked about the you know, Russia and Ukraine war, where we talked about abortion, you know, very, like, incendiary topics, but we have very polite conversations because I announce at every meeting that the only rule we have is to be polite. And so if someone is not polite, they get warned, we're very strict with that. And so people keep more, calm cool and collected, and I think that we all learn more when we're calm. When we start to get emotional, we make bad decisions. And so I try to keep everyone in the logical part of the brain. The cerebrum, rather than in the mammalian emotional part of the brain or the fighting flight reptilian part of the brain, And, you know, it's been really fun doing that. I'm also lucky to live in a community where my neighbors like to talk about this stuff. And so we have each other over having a wine club, our first wine club meeting tomorrow, actually, with my neighbors and we'll meet and we'll just talk about intellectually interesting things over food and, you know, appetizers and wine. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: Sounds like a best life. Sorry for the pun. Recipe. Right? It can't be helped. 
Christa Downey: Someone suggested this morning that I throw in a question one of those, like, coffee or tea, chocolate or vanilla type questions. And the one I came up with, hopefully, you feel okay answering. It's OK if you don't, but the one that I came up with that I wanted to throw out there is Michelin Star Restaurant or food truck. 
Garrett Lang: So, Christa, I like to say, when I'm given two good choices, I like to choose both. So it depends on my mood. Like, I love Michelin Star restaurants, but I've had some amazing food at food trucks. And I am not a high brow. You know, I'm not gonna eat at a food truck kind of guy. Like, I love food trucks. And the question is, am I ordering the best thing at the food trot or am I going to order the thing that nobody likes but they're still selling because it sounds good, but it doesn't taste good, right? And so even volume doesn't tell you whether or not it's good or not. But if I find the best food somewhere, which I'm looking forward to PlateRate getting into more restaurants and then trying the best food at each restaurant, which is what I really want to try. And then I'm just getting the best of the best from the places that I frequent. But yeah, I like both. 
Christa Downey: I can't wait to get on PlateRate. 
Garrett Lang: Cool. We'd love to have you there. Hopefully we can get some restaurants near you. If you know any commission-based salespeople, have them reach out to me. 
Traci Nathans-Kelly: We just wanted to thank you so much for spending this time with us today and walking us through these wonderful ideas. I explored earlier on the website. Now I'm even more excited because I understand the structure and the philosophy, the generous capitalism is a real eye opener. And I hope it becomes a framework that more and more people can come to willingly and with some great energy. So thank you for bringing that to our attention. 
Garrett Lang: My pleasure, and I'm hoping it catches on, as well. I think it'll be good for everybody. And thank you so much for having me on the show. I know you guys do a lot you've had a lot of distinguished guests, so it's an honor to be amongst them, and I really appreciate it and enjoyed our time together. 
Christa Downey: Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying these conversations, please follow, rate and review on your favorite platform. Join us for the next episode, where we will be celebrating excellence and innovation among engineers whose impact contributes to a healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable world.