Restaurants Are a Team Sport. AI has been a Single-Player Game (until now) with Eli Feldman
#153 Josh sits down with Eli Feldman, co-founder of Shy Bird in Boston and of Colette, an AI platform built for restaurant teams. They start with takeaways from recent AI panels Eli did in San Francisco and New York: give AI tools context, since the models are close to commodities, and do what is best for your own restaurant when choosing between an all-in-one platform and point solutions. Eli explains how Shy Bird uses its space to fight isolation, from the Work from Shy Bird program to Don't Be Shy, a dinner series inspired by Enlightenment era salons, and the two talk through new revenue streams for restaurants, such as groceries, product placement and brand partnerships. Josh describes the slow first 30 minutes of a service before a team finds its rhythm. They debate whether technology removes complexity or just moves it, using Waymo as an example, and whether it is time to reintroduce some friction on purpose. Eli argues that saving half a point on food and labor cost will not fix restaurant profitability, and that guests used to frictionless apps may lose patience with restaurants, using a DoorDash order that showed up almost an hour late and ice cold as an example. In the last part, Eli explains why restaurants are a team sport while AI so far is a single player game, and how Colette brings groups of people and AI agents together. He demos asking Colette by voice how a day went at Fenway, shows a replay mode of a full day of service, and walks through how Colette pulls recipes from meez. They close on open data and why operators should check a vendor's openness and API access before signing any agreement. Links and resources 📌 Visit meez: https://www.getmeez.com Follow meez on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getmeez Follow Josh on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshlsharkey/?hl=en Follow Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-sharkey-406965b/ Visit Colette: https://askcolette.ai/ Visit Shy Bird: https://www.shybird.com/ Read Eli's Substack, Elided Opinions: https://shybird.substack.com/ Timestamps 00:00 Restaurants Are a Team Sport 01:06 Kids, Duolingo and Gamification 05:13 Takeaways From Recent AI Panels 07:19 Why Context Matters More Than the Model 10:51 The Bay Area Restaurant Collective 13:59 Platforms vs. Point Solutions 16:51 The Size of the Restaurant Economy 22:37 New Revenue Streams for Restaurants 23:19 Work From Shy Bird 25:43 Don't Be Shy, a Dinner Series Inspired by Salons 29:38 Groceries and Product Placement 31:12 Monetizing Attention and Brand Partnerships 38:20 The First 30 Minutes of Service 43:13 Restaurants as a Broadway Show 46:05 AI Agents That Do the Work 48:43 AI Inflection Points 52:41 Waymo and Abstracting Complexity 57:38 Reintroducing Friction 1:02:26 Why Restaurants Are Still Hard 1:05:04 Has Hospitality Gone Too Far? 1:06:56 A Late DoorDash Order 1:08:31 AI, Kids and Schools 1:14:51 What's New With Colette 1:19:13 New Org Charts for Restaurants 1:21:26 A Live Colette Voice Demo 1:27:23 Replay Mode for Service 1:31:07 Colette and meez Recipe Data 1:35:29 meez APIs and Open Data 1:37:39 Advice for Operators




