The $250B Business Expense Nobody's Been Managing Until Now | Ande on Lightwork

0:00Ande: You know, we're pretty confident by the end of the year we'll have about$400 million going through the platform.

0:04Lohit Sarma: Companies spend a fortune taking people out to client dinners, team offsites, field marketing events, and almost none of it lives in one system.

0:12Ande: It's not as simple as like I'm dropping my corporate card because these are higher check sizes and there are limits to where the corporate card goes.

0:19Lohit Sarma: Lohit Sarma co-founded Liffion, the ADP-backed HR venture, then spent two and a half years inside ADP overseeing its money movement and payments portfolio.

0:29Ande: We had the same problem that I did when I joined the B2B Mothership and we had a 2 ,000 person organization.

0:34Lohit Sarma: This week, his company Andy comes out of Stealth, a corporate entertainment network with 60 large enterprises and more than 1 ,600 hospitality groups on it.

0:43Ande: We got to build a network. How do you offer corporate partnerships at scale? And that's why it's taken us two, two and a half years to come out of Stealth.

0:49Lohit Sarma: Lohit, welcome to Lightwork.

0:51Ande: Lohit, welcome to Lightwork. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

0:54Lohit Sarma: Super excited to be here. We've known each other a very long time now, from Red Point to Lightspeed. I feel our stars keep crossing in this magical way. I've had a front row seat to watching you build. What have you been building these last two and a half years in stealth?

1:12Ande: Yeah, you know, one of the things that most people ask us is, what is Andy? Because there's just a simple just website page. Very mysterious. Yes, it's nothing. There's no mystique around it. We just didn't have much to share because end of the day, it's a corporate entertainment network, right? And network being the key element. So we're building for both sides of the network. And as you start thinking about that, it takes time. And given that we're seeing entertainment, entertainment sits across these five verticals. So how do you like build for five verticals in a super fragmented space going city by city?

1:47Ande: So the reason we had nothing to share was because the network wasn't ready. And now that we're at a decent spot, we've got over 1 ,600 hospitality groups, over 93 ,000 venues on the platform. We're like, yeah, we're ready. And we're pretty confident by the end of the year, we'll have about$400 million going through the platform. So we feel like, yeah, we're ready to come out of stealth and talk more about what we've been building. And it's been great getting to know Josh as well from Red Point to Lightspeed. So when I saw him at Lightspeed, I was like, oh, my God, my stars are aligning here.

2:17Lohit Sarma: What took so long for this industry to grow up? Right. Like, I mean, yeah, Nirvana has been around for a long time. There's been Concur. Why hasn't there been something easy where you as an event professional can book on a platform or you, you know, want to do something entertainment with a team? Like, why is it so fragmented?

2:37Ande: Great question. And if you start thinking about this, when we even came across the problem space and we asked ourselves the same question, like, why is this that no one's actually done this? And you start looking into travel. Travel, like companies like Concur, Navon, and all these other companies built on GDS. So you have the Amadeuses of the world, the Sabres of the world, who've aggregated this over 30 or 40 years. Now think about entertainment and where entertainment happens. Entertainment doesn't happen with major airlines, doesn't happen in major hotels. There are these small mom and pop shops or medium businesses.

3:10Ande: So why hasn't it happened and why now? The next question, apart from fragmentation, is there's a consolidation that happened because of COVID. It's the last industry that went through digitization, which was in the tens. So that's also a reason as to why it took us so long, right? Because we had to start aggregating all these forms of entertainment, whether it's dining, sports, catering. And you start thinking about how work is done in an enterprise today. You've got an office manager using a different system. We've got a field marketer using a different system based on the kind of event they're doing.

3:42Ande: It's just because this lack of consolidation that doesn't exist in the entertainment space, right? Unlike travel, which is fully consolidated.

3:50Lohit Sarma: And it's so much wasted time.

3:52Ande: It is. Like the back and forth with small hospitality groups. Oh, my God. Catering, hospitality, sports. It's just the same experience. And the middlemen.

3:59Lohit Sarma: There's so many of them.

4:00Ande: And that's basically - Everybody's taking a slice. Exactly. And that's what drives up the cost of the whole business. And that's why we were like, we got to build a network. And unlike like previous attempts where people have just built to one side, you know, we said we need to build a network because if you directly connect and create this corporate sales channel, these small, medium businesses don't have that corporate sales channels. They don't actually have a way for them to understand who their biggest corporate customers are. How do you offer corporate partnerships at scale? What are the tools to sell to them?

4:32Ande: They can't just walk into any of the big companies saying like, hey, start using it. me because they don't have it. And every time they work with them, it's like they're sending legal contracts across to them. So how do you solve these workflows across the board? And that's basically why we were like, let's figure out a way how we build this network. And that's why it's taken us to two and a half years to come out of stealth.

4:51Lohit Sarma: I have so many questions about how you even thought about the strategy behind building this network and we'll get into it. But before we go into that, I think hearing a little bit more about your background, because you co-founded a company called Liffion. You were at ADP and you saw all this money movement and payments. Why dedicate your career to building in this space?

5:11Ande: So if I go back to my previous life and what I did there, even at that point, you brought up the travel analogy. Travel is consolidated. So while we were building Liffion, we went from two people to 800 people. We had the same problem that I did when I joined the mothership, B2B mothership, and we had a 2 ,000-person organization. Entertainment was always the one thing around the 15th or 17th of every month the finance teams would ask us to pull back on because, again, there isn't that single system for central visibility. They don't actually, and reconciling it is so painful across so many different systems that it takes them 15, 17 days to actually understand how much did we spend, are we over or under?

5:54Ande: So there isn't that real-time visibility that exists. So that is when I kind of started looking into the problem space. Now, the thing that we learned, and I can talk about this a little more, especially on the ADP front, especially with money movement, is just given for us to solve this, we need to become the system of record for entertainment. And there's money that needs to be moved. As I joined the mothership and the scale at which we were operating, we were like, okay, what can we learn in money movement and movement of money that can actually help us build it? So that's the skill set that transfers itself nicely while also understanding what it takes to be like that system of record.

6:31Lohit Sarma: Just to make it a little bit more tangible for folks who might not have been involved in this process, what is the before and after, Andy, for a employee, for a CFO, for a venue planner, all that?

6:44Ande: Let me give you coherent examples. So today, for example, think about a catering event. How does that happen? You have an office manager that's using a random system. Let's call it system A. You've got a field marketing person that's trying to plan a catered event at a client site, a sports event, a dinner. They're using three different systems while trying to figure out what my budget is, how much is my policy, and I have to essentially then the logistics behind it. And that's not even the core job. The EA that's doing it for large group dining and PDRs, right? The merchandising and marketing team that needs to send merchandising to a menu.

7:24Ande: So you've got, now try scaling this for global companies.

7:27Lohit Sarma: Yes.

7:27Ande: Right. So as a result, it's very similar to the world we come from as well, because that's similar to even global payroll. Global payroll, you have different systems in different countries. So it becomes a real cluster of a situation for folks to think through, how do I manage this at scale? So you have all these manual processes at place. Yeah.

7:47Lohit Sarma: Right.

7:47Ande: And you have everyone like chasing everybody saying, all right, file your receipts. So irrespective, like corporate cards have existed. Right. Because but this plays in that gray area because it's not a corporate card that you can put down in this because every company has their own set of policies. You have vendor management that you have to deal with because you have to onboard these vendors because the ticket sizes are larger. Then you have to have budget management as well. And you have to figure out how do you invite the guests. So we're taking the logistical aspect away from entertainment, from day-to-day entertainment, while ensuring whatever tools they want to use, whether it's a corporate card, whether it's payment, it's all flowing through a central system.

8:21Ande: Because think about the finance team. They're trying to reconcile behind the scenes from corporate cards to accounts payables to personal cards sometimes. We have experience where people were like, I don't have a corporate card. I haven't been issued one, but I have to do this. I'm putting my corporate card, my personal card. Or I spend more than my limit, right? And then it becomes the finance team's job to reconcile this. So our goal is how do you simplify this whole piece? And we're going vertical by vertical in simplifying this ecosystem.

8:48Lohit Sarma: And are you able to serve everything from an off-site to dinner to catering? Tell me some of these use cases.

8:54Ande: Yeah, we're starting with the five verticals from dining, which includes small, large, PDRs. We're doing sports. We're doing events. We're doing merchandising. And we're doing catering as well. Right. We're starting with these because solving this in itself is a big portion of the chunk. So if you look at every CFO's nightmare and every field nightmare.

9:16Lohit Sarma: Every field marketer, event office manager.

9:19Ande: And the good the good part of our journey has been we've been able to work closely with companies. And it's not like me sitting in the dark saying here's a problem that needs to be solved. Right. So before we even wrote a single line of code, we spoke to CFOs. Right. We spoke to saying like, is this a problem? worth solving and how do you guys think about this is where I think just our investors that we have were super helpful in these introductions. So our network and the introduction just helped us fully understand how do you solve this problem, where do you get started, and how do you expand?

9:50Lohit Sarma: What was something unexpected you learned from some of these conversations?

9:54Ande: With the CFOs? What I didn't know, and I don't know if every company, I'm just going to take two or three other drugs. Some of these companies have teams offshore in Philippines and stuff just to manage this.

10:07Lohit Sarma: Wow. Okay.

10:08Ande: Right. They're just manually getting all the receipts because it's a compliance issue. And then the other thing that we learned was the amount of fraud that goes in. Oh, okay. The amount of fraud that goes in, and we learned this through people, where the amount of fraud that goes in and - Invoices just submitted and people paying them.

10:25Lohit Sarma: Yeah.

10:26Ande: And invoices being submitted, people paying them. The second thing is also like, Like, you know, apparently people get fired for the amount of fraud that happens. So that's why they had these necessary checks and balances in place, which kind of makes sense if you think about it. Like, you know, somebody may just throw in a personal expense. I haven't seen it, but we've heard these examples as to like why the need, you know, when we were validating the idea with these folks.

10:47Lohit Sarma: Let's talk about the way you went about this, because I think you went away about it in a very interesting way. And that is you kind of built all of these supply relationships first. Why did you do that instead of going out and selling an enterprise product and then maybe building the supply?

11:05Ande: I'm going to reference Andrew Chen's book, The Cold Stock Problem. Right. I love the book. It's something I always go back to. And if you actually start looking at like some of the core theses off the book, he goes, when you're building a marketplace, solve the pain point for the one part of the marketplace that it hurts the most. Right. And then figure out that micro network and you scale it out. I'm just oversimplifying. There's a bunch of different stuff. So for us, when you start looking at our network, the supply wants that corporate sales channel. So we were like, how do you build that? And how do you understand the workflows?

11:40Ande: And what we didn't want to do is, all we don't want to become is, we're not a hospitality tech company. We're not an events company on the supply side. We're still an enterprise company. And then while you're solving that, how do you solve the pain points on the enterprise side? So we were like, let's talk to the supply team, go there first, while then solving on the enterprise side. And again, it takes time. It takes time.

12:03Lohit Sarma: It's also a lot of players. How did you build some of these relationships? I think the numbers are like 1 ,600 hospitality, like 100 ,000 venues or something. Well, yeah.

12:12Ande: I'm blessed and unfortunate that we're HQ'd in New York. Some of the biggest hospitality groups. I went door-to-door. Many of them are here. Yeah. I went door-to-door, sitting down with them, explaining what I'm trying to build. and you'd actually be surprised. So we start with New York and SF and SF, obviously you have more tech forward, actually hospitality groups who get it. But even New York, I was pleasantly surprised as to how tech forward they were. So when I kind of start talking to them about the problem we're trying to solve and how we're additive to the technology stack, I'm not trying to replace the existing technology stack because if you start looking at, let's look at that vertical of large group dining or events or in a hospitality group, their workflows for an enterprise, an enterprise wants either a two-person or they want a 30-person or they want to buy it out or they essentially want catered.

13:03Ande: A hospitality player today uses three different systems, three different POSs to manage that. So it's not like a single layer for them to essentially say, hey, okay, yes, this is how I'll manage all my corporate relationships because the workflows sit across all three. And because we're a private B2B and we're not in the B2C channel, we were able to like integrate with all the online providers and not compete with them. Right. So very often, people go like, oh, what is the difference between booking on you versus booking directly? You can absolutely book wherever you want, but it's the ease of simplification as to why do you use a Concur or a Nirvana or we're going to Google Flights?

13:40Ande: Because you've got all your enterprise workflows built into it. Right. And then we're not -

13:44Lohit Sarma: That and you're able to work out some discounts for folks.

13:47Ande: Yeah, corporate rates. Our goal is not to be a discount platform. We're trying to just build this corporate channel for the suppliers, as well as on the demand side, ensure that wherever they spend their money, whichever group, based on spend, decide the tools to essentially set up corporate partnerships at scale and the tools to manage corporate relationships. because corporate folks want different channels than retail.

14:17Lohit Sarma: Yeah.

14:17Ande: Right? So how do you provide them the tool sets? And what we're seeing is we've gave them a bunch of tools, like AI agents, to just service our existing corporate customers because we have field marketers, EAs who need quick 24-7 responses. So we've given them agents to just manage the communications, and a lot of them are using this on their websites themselves to handle their retail as well. So we're kind of seeing the adoption of AI, which was from one use case, naturally occur elsewhere. as well.

14:43Lohit Sarma: Doubling down on this network that you've built, I think a big part that clearly shows is just building that efficiency from first principles. And it sounds like there's relatively significant savings on entertainment spend. Where are you seeing that mechanically? Is it things like policy enforcement? Is it enforcing no-shows or data? How does that show up?

15:05Ande: It's all of them and a few additional points. So you start thinking about, okay, let's go back to first principles, right? Like how is work, like what is the problem today? Today, the problem is you have teams manually reaching out or using agencies. You pay an agency and agency charges them. There's already 30%. Second is the manual work going back and forth. So much manual work. So much the policy work, the policy enforcement. And third is the hospitality partner has no way today to understand, are you, how much money have you spent with me already?

15:40Lohit Sarma: Yeah. Is that organization a good customer of my hospitality group?

15:44Ande: And can I set up a corporate partnership with you so that I don't have to go back and forth with you on contracts? Yeah. So think about it is, let's say - Removes friction. Exactly. You're on Lightspeed. You guys love this place down the street for happy hours. And you, Lightspeed, you're probably doing it upstairs somewhere here, but let's assume you're like a bar. There's a contract. So Josh, you go in and they'll make you send a contract. Claire, when you reach out to them tomorrow, they'll make you, you'll have to send another contract. That poor mom and pop shop is signing.

16:13Lohit Sarma: And our poor legal department.

16:14Ande: Exactly. They're going back and forth signing contracts on something that should be a one-stop shop. Why am I doing the same contract a hundred million times? So we've had this where we've had these small guys saying like, can we just standardize this please? So all, and this is what took us a two and a half years? How do you standardize that one workflow where everyone knows what they're signing up for? Because the enterprise workflows are very different from retail. And that was our entire thesis is like enterprises, unlike retail, have different workflows. And the tools that are built are built for retail, not enterprises.

16:44Lohit Sarma: Well, you're not just coming out of stealth with a built out product and a supply base, but customers. Which of them can you talk about with us today.

16:53Ande: Yeah. We've got 60 large companies we've signed top down and we have like, when I say top down, we have full contracts in place. We're rolling it out. Some of our marquee clients are Monday.com, Cloudflare, Salesforce, Navon, Netscope, McGraw Health. So these are some of these massive companies.

17:13Lohit Sarma: These are big enterprises that are now using Andi as their primary entertainment booking platform.

17:19Ande: Yeah. And again, just one of the things that I keep... telling the team for us to be proud of is unlike most startups who work with smaller companies, we're working with some of the Fortune 50, 100 companies off the bat, right? So, but it takes time together. And that's why we were like, let's make sure we're there before we start talking about the company. Yeah. So we're working with them and, you know, we've got, we've already got substantial data case studies of how we're driving about 12 to 15 % savings.

17:46Lohit Sarma: So if I'm part of an enterprise. I've watched this video. Who on my team is sort of in charge of Andy? And what are the data points that you've showed something like a CloudFlare or Monday.com that have convinced them to keep using it?

17:58Ande: Yeah. So the procurement leaders, actually, unfortunately, today, this is not a managed category. So you look at what the managed categories are. Entertainment is not because the tools just haven't existed. So we've actually shown, and a lot of these companies have now moved this under procurement, where the procurement leaders are looking at this and then they're rolling it out to teams by looking at their entertainment spin and going, oh yeah, we're actually like, you know, we have our KPI set with them to be like, let's start off with a few of your teams. And then based on the KPIs, you can do a rollout across all the teams.

18:31Ande: So the procurement folks are who we go after and we essentially do a pilot with a couple of teams and then we do a full massive rollout across the larger organization.

18:40Lohit Sarma: This show is all about AI. What part of AI is ingrained into the ethos, of what you're building at Andy?

18:49Ande: Well, we're in 2026, right? The risk of like overusing the word AI native and stuff. Yeah, really. Yeah, at this point, that's just how we're built as a completely AI native function. Before even getting into the product, let me talk about the company ethos, right? Like from a core principle standpoint, one of our core principles is 10X cheaper, 10X faster. First thing somebody gets is a company ethos and one of it is 10X cheaper, 10X faster, which doesn't mean go use AI, right? It is ask yourself, how are you like doing the job today? Not everything's being defined, right? In terms of there's not a tool for everything, but are you thinking about solving this using some of the tools that are available within an AI native fashion?

19:30Ande: And we've retooled our entire process as well. Like even from product management to design to engineering, the entire SDLC lifecycle is completely AI native, right? the way we've created prototypes to the code base, start looking at our sales teams, what they use. We have our operating systems defined for product sale, our go-to-market teams. We still use a CRM underneath it, but a lot of that was built AI natively. So we actually know what alerts to trigger out, who we need to auto-outbound or cold call, or who are the customers that are at risk, customers that need engagement. All of that's been built in.

20:08Ande: And we paused for about 45 days and made sure we actually retooled the organization. The models got, you all know, this model's got really powerful in December.

20:17Lohit Sarma: Yeah.

20:18Ande: Very, very powerful in December. So we took Jan from, I think, the second week of Jan until the end of Feb to just pause and just essentially start retooling the organization just to be more efficient. because we knew if we don't have a strong foundation, if we don't actually build with the foundation of going completely AI native, early part, yes, there were more errors, the success rate wasn't there. So we were like, all right, let's augment it with some of the process that we had. But then the minute the models got more powerful, we were like all in on it. So that's internal processes of how we're thinking about AI.

20:51Ande: But from a pure product standpoint, think of Andy as your virtual entertainment concierge, right? So it's like you having your own admin or assistant that you can have a conversation with. So you can book that two top, the 30 top, the sports game, having the full business context and knowledge with like multi-actor workflows built in, right? And the goal is not to automate and take humans out of the loop, but like the quick, simple things that you need responses to, like, is this available? What's the price?

21:18Lohit Sarma: Agents like negotiating on your behalf?

21:21Ande: Not yet, not yet. Because, again, given that we're in the entertainment space, there is that human aspect that a lot of the entertainment providers value. We don't want to take that away. And that's one of the things that, you know, we learned being in the space is like, how do you build with a human aspect? It's a hospitality industry. That's exactly right. Right. So when you have hospitality as one of the verticals you've got to support is like, there is the human aspect to it.

21:44Lohit Sarma: Just be like, here's a bunch of code.

21:45Ande: This is going to like ask me to walk out the minute I talk to them about it. So there is the component where you could get real-time responses. There's a voice agent that you can call in to give a quick update, being like, hey, I need to make these changes late in the night. And that automatically updates their system. So you're not waiting to be like, can you guys do this? And then you have people on the other side who can respond when they see it the first time. So we've built all those workflows in. But we've also built it in a way which we don't take away the human aspect of it. Because on both sides, if you look at the core users, there is a people element to it.

22:19Ande: The people who are doing this have that people element. And if you just say, I'm going to automate your job away, I'm going to lose my users. And I don't think that's a product they want to use. Sure.

22:28Lohit Sarma: You show up to that private dining experience and there's a person there.

22:31Ande: There's a person there. And from an engineering standpoint, it's like, oh, it's a bug. Fix it. But for them, one bad event is one lost relationship for them and the business that they can't recover from. Right. So we need to ensure that we account for that and give them their time. Take the drudgery, the 90 percent of the work away and take the drudgery away. But ensure that 10 % still remains.

22:55Lohit Sarma: So we're talking on launch day. Yeah. What's the future of Andy as you guys continue to grow and build this platform?

23:03Ande: We're going to go back to always, like, what is the core vision of Andy? I'm going to answer it from that perspective. You know, we want to be that corporate entertainment network where enterprises experience us as that operating system. And on the supply side, folks experience us as a corporate channel. right they've never had access to so consistent with that vision what we want to do essentially is ensure that we launch products expand verticals expand into different cities just to ensure the vision stays the same and the problems that we're solving stay the same right i i know i'm not giving you much but that's that's essentially what we have up our sleeves we have a series of announcements lined up over the next six months, though.

23:49Ande: Well, that's about as much as we can expect.

23:52Lohit Sarma: I'm so excited. For those who might still be skeptical, I think there are questions from maybe field marketers of, okay, where do you fit? Why don't I go straight to the venue? Is this more of a reservation system? Is this event management? For the skeptics out there, why Andy over everything else they've used?

24:11Ande: Yeah, so you touched on field marketing, right? So let me give you, the core job of a field marketing person is to like drive up demand, not do the logistics behind driving it, right? So we're not basically saying we're trying to replace you. We're basically saying that's the worst part of your job right now. Your main job is essentially doing this. Demand gen. Demand gen, that's your job, not essentially saying - Like probably what gets them going. Yeah, so I'll give you a use case for one of our clients that happened. And essentially they had nine dinners, nine sports games, and nine catering events.

24:45Ande: so think about that for a second right so it's like 20 70 81 things that they have to manage now if you tell them okay good luck go on your own forget the booking component there's a guest management component there is the after effects of getting receipts filing expenses there's a budget management so the problem just like when you speak to any of them they instantly understand this is the pain point they live day in and day out and it's the same thing on even like the events teams, the sales teams, the EAs, the customer success teams, it's like they want to be in front of their clients, but it's so painful to do it just given working with legal, working with procurement, working with finance.

25:25Ande: But it's not as simple as like I'm dropping my corporate card because these are higher check sizes and their limits to where the corporate card goes. So they need to onboard this vendor and they need to pay for this. So then it starts becoming this point like I don't want to be going in front of my client because it's so painful. Because a lot of these aren't like a two person dinner.

25:42Lohit Sarma: Yeah.

25:43Ande: Like, you know, taking your clients out, you're taking your stakeholders, you're going with your team. It's like 12, 14, 18. There's a lot of logistics to streamline. And then you're going to a sports game as well. So it's not just dining, right? Or you'd be saying, let's cater in food at a fun spot. So that's where it starts essentially. You know, I'm not even going to the savings component. But what we want to do is say, do more events, take away the logistics, save your money. And just concentrate on building relationships, relationships that can help your business grow.

26:11Lohit Sarma: I love that. As you think about creating a category, you obviously assembled a very interesting team. How have you thought about hiring a team to build this category?

26:20Ande: You know, if you actually look at the makeup of our team, and actually our head of marketing, who's just recently joined us, built out all of Borgata's marketing. And one of the reasons I asked her after she joined us, I said, like, what was one of the reasons that you joined us? She said it's the team you've assembled. So we've got people from Harvey. We have people who was the head of sales at Resi. We have people from, as I said, Workato. Our customer success was employee 12 at Navan and built out all of Navan's customer success. Then we have people who came with me from Lithuania and ADP. Now, these aren't just companies.

26:56Lohit Sarma: Yeah.

26:56Ande: But these are people with skill sets. Oh, our person that runs business operations was the GM of North America, Uber Eats. Yeah, these are people at the category leaders. We're the category leaders. And these are skill sets that we've brought in, right? Because if you look at what is the problem we're solving and you start looking at integrations, marketplace, hospitality industry, system of record, these are skill sets of folks that we've brought into the company, right? So that's essentially how we start looking at how do you build these folks and how do you build this entire product with this right skill set?

27:27Lohit Sarma: Talking a bit with your team, I've heard little tidbits about you as a founder. And, you know, obviously Josh has known you for a while now. I've heard tidbits like you once flew nine and a half hours for a meeting or something and that you're. Just to meet Alex Bard.

27:42Ande: Just to meet Alex Bard. Yeah. Look, the story is a little more dramatic than, I mean, sorry, the whole, the anecdote is a little more dramatic than the actual story. The only reason I did that was one, Alex was on the West Coast. I was on the East Coast. and this was for our A round and obviously there were a couple of people interested. And I'd really enjoyed my conversation with Red Point Alex and our existing investors, you know, had worked with Alex and sat on boards together. So Alex had texted me and I woke up in the morning and my wife was at home and I had the dog. So I had to ask one of my coworkers to come in and stay in my apartment and watch the dog.

28:24Ande: As I flew - That startup life. Yeah, as I flew cross country. But again, if I look back as to why I did that, like you start looking at decisions from a framework standpoint. You know, you've got these two piles, like the cheap ones that are reversible. But then you're trying to build something like what we're trying to build. This is a 10, 12 year initiative, right? You have this person putting capital in the company. Can you sit in a room? So I can't do a deal without sharing a meal with them. I need to be sitting in a room with this person for like 10 to 12 years. So that's essentially why, you know, we decided, I decided like that flight is actually worth it.

29:00Lohit Sarma: Yeah. But I think that ethos shows in, you know, how much time you spend on the ground of customers. It's in the same way like your customers would want to expect to have a meal with you and understand you building this product.

29:10Ande: I am on texting terms with some of our biggest customers.

29:13Lohit Sarma: Wow. Yeah.

29:14Ande: Like if I pull up my phone, I'll probably have a couple of texts from them already. I'll fix this. Yeah. That's the recipe to product market. It's the only way for us to do it. Especially given the problem we're solving, whether there is entertainment and hospitality as a human aspect. If we don't exhibit it ourselves, how do I show them that our ethos match theirs? So 100%, I think, in person, having a conversation with people absolutely resonates.

29:41Lohit Sarma: Yeah. So Andy's on track to route roughly$400 million of entertainment spend through the end of the year. Huge. What does that look like when you're at 10 times that size? and what breaks, what do you need to prepare for?

29:55Ande: If I take a step back and look at where are we today, we're basically a platform and there's a service layer underneath it, obviously AI-led service layer. But at scale, one of the things that keeps me up is that it needs to get narrower, the service layer, and the platform layer needs to get bigger. And the reason is just because of the fragmentation of the industry, right? So I keep thinking about that a lot, But at 10 times that, the things that I know, pretty certain that we have to keep an eye out for because it's already creaking. Like as you start onboarding, like we have 400, 10 times is 4 billion.

30:31Ande: You start thinking about movement of money, KYBing it, the tax jurisdictions, the way we have to like handle that. That in itself is going to be a challenge. Like you start looking at service teams as well, like in terms of how do you make the service teams more accountable? on boarding off venues, how quickly can you onboard? How quickly can you activate different cities? We have to be global by default. Corporate entertainment is global, right? So these are the things as I start thinking about this, like it starts keeping me up at night. It's like, okay, how do we solve this problem? And 10x that is 100 % something that, you know, I'm sure will break at some point and we'll have to figure out a way to like fix it.

31:11Ande: Just have to like roll up your sleeves and fix it. There's no other way around it.

31:15Lohit Sarma: I mean, I think it would be so fun to have a conversation a couple months or even like, you know, just to see a few years out, like what this ecosystem looks like and what breaks. And even just for me, like thinking about agent to agent interaction, there's just so much there that is still playing out in real time. And I think as a founder, it's very clear that you're just thinking years ahead. And it's important to do that.

31:36Ande: So close to the founder, your brain doesn't stop thinking ahead. And you forget to celebrate the wins as well because you're like, oh, my God, this is the next problem that needs to be fixed. by the minute you have a win, you're like, oh, well, there's a problem that needs to be fixed next.

31:48Lohit Sarma: Either way, we should be celebrating this win. Yeah, we're here to celebrate this moment and the launch of Andy. It's been a long time in making. Thank you so much. Congratulations. Thank you. Where can folks find out more? Because I know maybe as of today, it won't be a one-line website.

32:04Ande: Our website's live. It's no longer a one-line statement. So, Andy.ai is the website. And, you know, we've got all our customer testimonials, are all the companies we work with up and running. And there should be some additional media coverage coming up as well. So hopefully with that, people get more information than that one line on our website.

32:24Lohit Sarma: Yeah, I'm excited for this. Thank you so much.

32:26Ande: Thank you so much, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you.

32:41This is Jonas Pras vot RE.