Neil Howe
Hello and welcome to the show. This is your host, Neil Howe and today my special guest is Robert McNulty. Mr. McNulty is currently the founder and CEO of Tryp Technologies Inc. is a rideshare technology company that is a disruptor in the business sector. He is an accomplished entrepreneur with over 40 years of significant experience in specialty retail, e-commerce branded consumer products, startups and developing new concepts and technology platforms for utilization of the consumer. Mr. McNulty founded Shopping.com and served as its president and CEO. Shopping.com was the world’s first online retail selling a comprehensive range of consumer brand name products on the internet in 25 major categories and offering two million SKU’s while utilizing comparison shopping engines to drive sales. Shopping.com was acquired for $220 million in an all-cash transaction by Compaq computers. And now Mr. McNulty is using his experience with founding another company under Tryp Technologies. Bob, welcome to the show.
Bob McNulty
Hey, thanks, Neil. I appreciate you inviting me.
Neil Howe
Well, give us a little bit of a background on Tryp Technologies because it started up in the rideshare industry. But now it’s more in the restaurant delivery industry under Trip Delivers. Give us a little bit of that backstory there.
Bob McNulty
Yeah, so what happened was, I didn’t know anything about the rideshare industry. Up until about four years ago, I’d never been an Uber Lyft. And then, by circumstance, my son and I were going to a business meeting had to drop his car off at a dealership. So we took this car and I didn’t even I kept asking my son, where’s the car gonna pick us up so we can go to our meeting, because I like to be punctual. And he said, Don’t worry, Dad, I got this. So then I asked him again. And then he pulls out his phone and shows me says See that little car that’s moving out? He said that’s our car. And I go, what, how is that our car, and then literally 10 seconds or 15 seconds later pulled up right in front of us. And we jumped in. And that’s how I got to look at the rideshare industry. And then, because it was so convenient, I started using it all the time in Vegas here. And but then you started hearing the problems from the driver. If you don’t have happy drivers, you’re not going to have a happy client who is the recipient of the ride, right? So that kind of triggered me to look at the business model. But I had no intentions of going into it, I was just curious. And over about an 18-month process with me, I started thinking about geez, I could do this. I mean, you just got to change the model, you make more money drivers pocket, lower the fares for the consumer. In other words, surge pricing was an issue I thought. And I thought the way that the drivers were being treated, not just economically treated, but they weren’t valued for their information. And now every car I got in what I probably talked to, you know, 30 40, 50 drivers over time, it was always the same stuff. One is they don’t respect us, you know, we did this and that. And then the money thing came. So I just, you know, one day was really thinking about it, start doing some research. And then said geez what this business needs is to figure out how to put more money in the driver’s pocket. How to make a little bit start looking at from a retail perspective, squeezing the margins down, squeezing the operating expenses down. And then could you come up with a disruptive business model. And that’s kind of how we got started, we were going to go on the rideshare space, we started building out our technology and became more complicated than the tech guys I’d hired. And so we had a number of false starts. But finally, you know, we’re up and running now everything’s, you know, tier one, it’s all enterprise. But we made a pivot, because of COVID, we are getting ready to launch in January. In the February timeframe, we’re going to do a beta launch on just rideshare. Then COVID hit. And then and we’re always going to go in the grocery in the pickup business in the restaurant business, but it was going to be our second part of the dance we put together. And so we decided to pivot. And then we spent the last five months putting the restaurant programs together and we finally launched. You know, in the last couple of weeks, we launched in Nashville and now we’re looking at other multiple markets. We’re going to start going after, you know around the United States.
Neil Howe
Excellent Yeah, there’s certainly a lot of money in both those markets. We look at Uber and Lyft, which are multi-billion dollar companies. And it seems like they are getting the majority of the money in their business model. But if you can’t keep…one the consumers happy and two, your workers, which are the drivers, then you’ve got a problem. But there are some interesting numbers that I’ve heard you talk about recently, about the industries, which are the restaurant industry now, which are having some problems, as well as the grocery industry. Can you take us through some of the issues? Or Well, first of all, some of the numbers for the restaurant industry? Just how big is it? And what portion of that is delivery? And, what kind of problems are they experiencing with the likes of Uber Eats and Grubhub and Doordash Post mates, all these other companies?
