Talking Shop with Anil Aggarwal

Announcer

Welcome to another episode of Consumer Engagement in an Omnichannel World. Our co-hosts, Sri Rajagopalan and Peter V.S. Bond explore how brands and retailers engage with consumers in-store, online and everywhere in between. And now, here are Sri and Peter.

Peter

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Consumer Engagement in an Omnichannel World. I'm your co-host, Peter V.S. Bond. I'm also the vice president of retail strategy at PowerReviews. And as always, I'm joined by my co-host. He's a CPG e-commerce luminary. He's an entrepreneur in his own right. Please join me in welcoming my co-host, Sri Rajagopalan. Sri, how are you?

Sri

Thank you so much, Peter and we can't wait to get started today. We have a special guest for you Anil Aggarwal, the man himself.

Peter

Yeah, I'm very excited about our guest today, too. I've known him for 17 years. I even worked for him for a hot minute. He is a self-described seven time startup CEO. Most recently, he launched a series of omnichannel trade conferences known as Shoptalk and Groceryshop. And late last year, he and his partners who founded that sold it to the Hyve Group for an enormous amount of money that I can't even begin to fathom, but good on him. And I'll finish by saying that were it not for the pandemic, we would most certainly be conducting this podcast interview table side at his permanent spot at Keen's Steakhouse near Herald Square in Manhattan. So with that, please join me all in welcoming Anil Aggarwal. Anil, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today?

Anil

I'm doing well. Peter Sri, thanks so much for having me. 

Peter

Yeah, we're very excited to have you on board. We love your conferences. I think, you know, Anil, when I attended the 2018 Groceryshop event, I penned an article on LinkedIn about how game changing it was. And we're just so excited to be able to talk to you about what's going on there and how that all came about. But what I wanted to do is start off with just getting a background on you personally and what led you in this direction. Back in the late 80s, you graduated from college. You went into accounting. You decided to get your JD at Boston College, rather Boston University. Pardon me. Don't wanna make that mistake. At BU you then went to Clark for a state Supreme Court Justice in Pennsylvania, joined after that, a few law firms and M&A and suddenly you get the startup bug. Can you tell us a little bit about what led you to get into the prepaid financial services business after having gone a much more traditional M&A route in the legal profession? 

Anil

Sure. We're going way back and I'm happy to do that and share some of the early journey with you guys. Sure. You know, it wasn't as much of a change as it appears to be. I grew up in a very entrepreneurial family. I remember as early as 11 years old coming home from school, calling my dad, who owned and ran a plastics manufacturing business in London and asking him if he could come pick me up and take me to the factory with him. And it was really a way of life for us. He would bring home various products that they would create in the factory that were most mostly costume jewelry. And my mom and a team of a small team of people at the house would package the costume jewelry up and my dad would be out selling it. Everything from major retailers to vendors and flea markets. So the entrepreneurial bug actually bit me really early on. Although you look at my experience and education in the 90s, it might not seem that way. What I did was I wanted to get a good, solid education. In fact, in the early 90s, I, when I was applying for law school, had thought about applying to business school and getting an MBA. But there was a recession in 1990,-91, and there was a lot of question about how useful an MBA was, especially coming out of the roaring 80s. So I decided that law would probably be a better education. And I did that and decided to go back to school for as a premise to eventually go into business. And actually, my first business was not on my LinkedIn profile. And it's going way back. And I don't talk about it a whole lot. But I actually started an agro business in Kenya when I was 27 in 1997 and became one of the largest farming operations in East Africa, and it produced specialty vegetables for airfreight to the European market. So it wasn't as much of a shift from from being an accountant and being a lawyer, neither of which I really admit to that much and most people don't know that part of me, which I'm entirely happy about. But it wasn't that much of as much of a change in direction as it might appear to be. 

Sri

Wow. First of all, Anil, Thank you again for joining us today. Having spoken on many of the trade show that you've actually started with as a keynote or whether as a panel guest or, you know, one of the classes, the master classes that have actually given it the shows, it's an honor to have you today. But as I think through what you just said, agro business in Africa, and that at some point I'm sure I've heard you say that you did Hilary Duff gift cards. Take us through the journey of how you got from  agro businesses in Africa to Hilary Duff gift cards to omnichannel retail trade shows which came to be known as Shoptalk and Groceryshop. Just give us the journey. Give us the scoop here.

Anil

So. I guess you're talking about a 15 year period there, so if I were to spend even 30 seconds on each year, that would be a seven minute answer. I'll try and keep it short of a mass roasting lamb. I am known for squeezing fifteen minute discussions into an hour. But let me give it a shot here. So when, you know, I remember sitting in Bunda in in Tanzania at a Citibank in a car and thinking, you know, when I get in, this is in 1999 and I and I thought when I go back to the U.S., I really want to start on that entrepreneurial journey full time. And it seemed like the absolute right time to do it because of everything going on with technology, with the Internet and with dot coms at the time. So as someone who had always wanted to be an entrepreneur, it felt that this was really the right time. The question was, what do you do and what do you do in the face of what appeared to be an endless amount of opportunity and possibility. So I walked through a lot of different business models. I did a lot of research about the different types of companies that were being created at the time. I went to a lot of new media and Internet events myself. And ultimately what I settled on was using the existing payment networks, Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Discover to automate payments outside of the traditional uses of those networks, which were deposit access and credit access with traditional debit cards and credit cards, using those payment networks in new use cases by Internet enabling them. Now, I wouldn't have been able to tell you in 1999 and 2000, that kind of articulated way exactly what we were doing. But in retrospect, that is probably the best way to describe it. So when you talk about creating, you know, Hilary Duff gift cards, the use of these payment networks to create gift cards that can be sold online or even sold on J-hooks at retail stores was one of those use cases. There were many others. We created a technology company that allowed for these products to exist. That technology held the balance on the cards so that when the card was used at a merchant and that that transaction was routed to us to be approved or declined, we had various from user facing front-end capabilities that allowed people to check balances and engage with their accounts. So we created a comprehensive, what is called issuing side processor. And we were the first processor to do things like create a flexible spending account card where you could use your flexible spending accounts directly at a health care or transit provider, and we would reconcile those on the back end with payroll. That was another use case that we did the use of of these products and the incentives industry, what's become known as general purpose, reloadable cards that are used by mostly by people who don't have access to traditional credit or might be maxed out on their credit lines or or frankly, don't even have access to traditional banking services. An example of that as we did a program with Russell Simmons where we created the Rush card. And there were many unique components to the types of products we were creating, for example, with the Rush card, we needed the ability to be able to load that card with cash offline. And so we didn't integration into MoneyGram and we became MoneyGram's, largest New York area client loading rush. So I love the reference to the Hilary Duff card. Peter, I remember us working on that together. It's a great memory, so I appreciate you bringing that up.

Sri

Peter didn't mentioned that to me, that he actually worked over Hilary Duff gift cards with you.

Anil

He did and many others. In fact, this was one of the areas and specialty that that Peter had, which was co branding gift cards with celebrities and doing licensing deals and and other things, create a whole new products that 

Peter

I still have my Elvis Presley gift cards framed and they hang on the wall in my office.

Sri

I'm going to want to see those. 

Peter

Those were fun times. I look 

Anil

As do I. 

Peter

Well, Anil, after after selling that business to TSYS and launching their prepaid division, you spent some time at Google, you created an industry association for prepaid, even a number of other activities around there. And then this shift in to omnichannel retail. Where did you see the opportunity? How did that come about? 

Anil

That is a great question. So. This experience that I had in creating what was essentially an entirely new product line of financial services. Obviously, we weren't the only ones doing it. There were some other, you know, many great companies, in fact, that were doing that kind of pioneering. But one of the things that became evident to me was that there are some things that individual individuals or individual companies can accomplish. But there are some things that are done better if you act collectively. And you mentioned at all, you're one of the things that I did in this particular sector of what's become known as prepaid network branded prepaid cards, I created a trade association to bring the industry together to help inform media and consumer groups about the utility and usefulness of these products to help educate legislators and regulators about the products and work on things like disclosures for the industry that we could all get behind that would be fair for consumers. So my first experience in really community building activity, let's call it more broadly, was creating a a trade show, a publishing business and a nonprofit trade association for this segment of financial services. And after the sale of this particular technology company, starting another one and then selling that one to Google, as you just mentioned, that happened all over again. This time, it wasn't about a specific segment of financial services.It was all of financial services. So in 2011, I look back at what had happened in financial services over the last decade and specifically the impact on financial services of the great financial crisis. And if you were to go back before the financial crisis and you were at a cocktail party and you would talk to anyone about being in FinTech, that was a surefire signal for them to go refresh their drink. Fintech today is one of the hardest segments of tech and the great financial crisis is one of the key events that facilitated that transition. Let me just explain take a minute to explain why that's the case. You know, up until the financial crisis, it was really hard to innovate at the head of the demand curve in financial services. What I described in terms of prepaid, what others were doing in the late 90s and early 2000s relative to financial services, can best be described as long tail innovation. They were not reinventing the core bank account experience or banking experience or traditional credit card. They were basically taking heavily paper-based and manual processes within financial services and automating them. And that was the definition of FinTech. Coming out of the financial crisis with the creation of things like the CFTB, with the enactment of Dodd-Frank, financial services started thinking more openly about innovation, about the consumer and about how they needed to change that their products, their consumer experiences, their relationship with the consumer around things like fundamental fairness. And so you saw a change in organizations and their willingness. But I would even go further and say, you needed to innovate. So in 2011, using that same experience that I had in community building in the prepaid world, I started an event called Money 20/20 to bring together the broad financial services and payments industry so that they could work collectively on creating a future that integrated innovation far more in the next 10 years than they had an integrated in the past 10 years. And so Money 20/20 was an incredible success. I think it was for a long period of time, probably the single most important industry wide initiative in bringing people together to collaborate to create this new future of payments and financial services. And I like to think, because a lot of people have told me so, that actually it also served as a catalyst for the development of the of the FinTech. Industry.

Sri

Anil, I was part of PepsiCo back then in 2011 when you started it. And I remember we used to even have attendees from PepsiCo Financial Services going to the event, which I think is nothing short of extraordinary what you accomplish there with Money 20/20. 

Anil

Well, I appreciate that and thanks for being part of it so early on. We sold Money 20/20 in 2014. It was done as an initiative to really help bring the industry together. As someone who worked in the industry, my vision for what it should be was, was to be the show that I would like to go to. And so once it was established, it seemed to make sense that it was time to move on. That was 2014. In 2015, I sat down and thought, you know, what should I do next? And what I what I realized was that that that the same thing that happened in FinTech and financial services in terms of transformation of the industry was beginning to happen on the other side of the coin, the commerce side of the coin. So, I started looking into what are all of the different ways that the industry is innovating when it comes to retail and e-commerce. And just as importantly, where is the industry focus right now? What are they doing? How are they embracing that innovation or are they not embracing it to the extent that they should be? And in fact, what I found was something very, very similar to FinTech in 2011. And so innovation in retail, from my perspective, sitting down in 2015, looked like innovation in financial services in 2011. And so I felt that there was the same opportunity to bring to the retail an e-commerce industry, the kind of community and benefit of creating community that that I had been able to bring to the FinTech world through Money 20/20. And that was the genesis of Shoptalk. So that could finally connect the dots. Peter and Sri, of how do you get from Hilary Duff gift card to Shoptalk? 

Sri

What a fascinating story. I know, but if I think about shoptalk, you know, I was at the I've been to each one of these virtually every year you had threm. And if I think about the success you've had in scaling Shoptalk and I look at all the other industry events because I've probably been to every industry event in e-commerce that possibly exists, starting with the ones from Kantar to RetailNet to Planet Retail, you name it. None of them have experienced the success that you did. Your attending base grew from about 500 in year one to thousands within like two years and then literally peaking somewhere closer to the five digit marking like four years. What do you think when went didn't do that successfully, why did why did Shoptalk succeed extraordinarily well compared to the others? Does it have to do with, like, consumer centric thinking, like what was on your mind that got it to scale quickly?

Anil

It had to do with the culmination of a few things. One was. I think from looking at it internally, one of the reasons was that we weren't trying to start another event. We were trying to create a new community that we felt would be critical. And so when I described to people what we were doing, they heard me describe the creation of a new event rather than really the creation of a new community for the most part. And so so when people would focus on that and ask me at the very beginning how did Shoptalk compare to other events in retail, I would simply answer it by saying, I don't know, I've never been to a retail event. We didn't create Shoptalk by going to other retail events and thinking we could do a better job than everybody else does. The entire premise of Shoptalk was to bring together everyone from established retailers and brands to start-up DTC companies, startup tech companies, established tech and Internet companies, but also Wall Street in the form and sell-side analysts, the media, the investment community, and help them to do all of the things that they were already doing, but way less efficiently, but in a distributed fashion, which was create the future of retail through community. So inward looking, I think that part of the reason, a main part of the reason we were successful is that we just had a different mission from the very beginning. I think the second reason we were successful is that we looked at what was happening in terms of the conversation that people were having. And at the time in 2015, the retail conversation was dominated by Omnichannel and Omnichannel was focused mostly on systems integration, inventory alignment around the off-line channel and the online channels. You know, off-line and online had been created as two distinct channels and that was OK before the smartphone. But once the smartphone really gained traction, it needed to be a single, unified experience. But in 2015, that probably represented 20 percent of what the retail industry should have been focused on. But it was it was 80 percent of the conversation and it was crowding out the rest of the opportunities and challenges that retail had. And what we wanted to do with Shoptalk was help reset the conversation. And so that was also something that I think it was difficult for people to understand early on. And suddenly in 2015, when we first introduced Shoptalk, it's something we felt was critical for the industry, but it became pretty obvious to people really starting in Q1 of 2016. If you look at pretty much any stock price chart of any major retailer, with some key exceptions, starting in Q1 of 2016, is really when retail started its decline. And by decline, what I mean is that kind of a period of transformation that started with going from a period of certainty to a period of uncertainty and creating a lot of confusion. So, for example, you know, up until that period of time, if you wanted to grow as a retail business, the path was kind of clear. You opened another store, but you don't open too many stores when you've opened one too many store stores. You realize you've you've overstored when you've created way too many stores, way more stores than you actually need. And so 2016 represented kind of this tipping point of a reckoning of things that people had done in the in the past that was overbuilding over storing, you know, a reckoning of the mall experience. But it was at the same that was happening at the same time as, you know, the rise of digitally native brands as more consumers were shifting to shopping on their mobile devices. So you had this unique convergence of factors where if you add in what we were trying to accomplish, you had a unique period in time in 2015 and 16 in retail, just like you did with FinTech in 2011 and 2012 for the industry to really rethink how do we work together? What does our future look like? How do we disrupt ourselves or let us disrupt us? And so, you know, in an engineered way, I guess we were at the right place at the right time. Part of how we looked at it was that the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. So one of the ways that we communicated to the industry that their world was going to change was simply to look at what the hundreds of venture backed companies that were already creating the future were doing to organize that information and then present it back to the industry as a a possible view of what the future would look like. And what we found with that resonated and it resonated, Sri, I'm going to correct some numbers here. Even more than you mentioned, the growth of Shoptalk was actually greater than the the growth of Money 20/20. We had 3,000 people at our first event in Shoptalk. And our last event, which was the fourth held in 2019. Unfortunately, we haven't had one in person this year ,had been to almost 9,000. And we were well on track to be past 10,000 March 2020 when we had to cancel the event at the beginning of that month.

Sri

Oh, I would be surprised if it wouldn't have it closer to the 15,000 because listening to you, I dissected quite a few words of wisdom you passed on here to entrepreneurs. One was you don't need to copy, do something unique. But you also are very humble when you said right place, right time. To me, the difference between success and no success as an entrepreneur is having the saavyness to know when it's the right place at the right time in 2015, I remember sitting at those NACDS conversations when every SVP and EVP of merchandising would specifically ask about omnichannel. It was early in the game, was exactly what you said, which was a lot about IP and the systems and technology. And the third thing I know you said is the word community, which we will definitely talk about later. But the difference between creating just another event to be there and capture share, which our industry obsesses over that metric, versus creating a community and giving people exactly what they want to hear. Very different from just another random. Just fascinating to hear that. 

Anil

You know, it's interesting what you say about advice to entrepreneurs. You know, I think that there is a temptation at least to try to benchmark against the competition. And, you know, my view of entrepreneurship is very simple, that that things that are done today can be done 10 to 100 times better. You are unlikely to figure out a 10 to 100 times better way of doing something by

 looking at what someone does today. You're way more likely to figure that out by looking at how things should be. And that means focusing instead of on the competition, on things like the customer or the consumer, or more global shifts and trends in values, for example, that different generations have. And when you when you see where where things are heading, you can build for that. And it is unlikely that if you have someone who's established that's been doing things the way that they've done them for and being successful with it for for quite some time, they're unlikely to be thinking that way. And so my view is that unless you can create something that is at least 10 times and hopefully more like 100 times better than what's already out there, then it's just simply not the best use of your time. There's probably other things you should be doing. 

Peter

So, Anil, when I think about creating a community in the omn channel commerce space, the parts of the ecosystem are the retailer, the manufacturers and the solution providers. And it's kind of a trickle down. The solution providers shop if the brands are there and the brands show up. if the retailers are there. I think what impressed me most about Groceryshop and the very first launch of that is you didn't just have a couple of big retailers and big titles. You had a whole lot of them. And I'm really curious to understand how you were able to get such influencers in this space to want to participate in this community. 

Anil

I think it was a few things like anything else. It probably doesn't come down to just one thing. I think one of the things that I saw was that large retail definitely followed start up retail and same is true with brands manufacturers. At the very beginning, I made about 100 phone calls to the CEOs of some of the best known and most disruptive brands from Casper to the Honest company Stitch Fix. And in some cases, these are hybrids as well. But a broad range of retailers and brands. And and I remember out of those first hundred phone calls, it didn't take long for the CEOs to buy into what we were creating with Shoptalk. It resonated with them. They felt that it was it was needed and they were willing to sign on. At the very first Shoptalk, if I recall correctly, we ended up with about one hundred and thirty five CEOs of these types of companies, and I think that resonated with traditional retail. Not with all retail at the same time in equal measures, but over time it did. We saw, you know, the early adopters be very curious with that, want to learn from that from large retail. But we also saw laggards. I had several conversations with very prominent CEOs of retailers who are very late and understanding what was happening in retail. And I understood that through their reaction to Shoptalk and their willingness to support it, I had  CEOs that I had asked to speak in year one, declined to speak, buy tickets and attend to join the event as an attendee in year two. And so I think that part of it was this critical mass of the startup community. I think some of it, as I mentioned, was that by 2016, Q1, right before we held the first show, there was already a sense within retail that things were about to change dramatically. And so individuals responsible for digital, for e-commerce innovation, you know, it took a little bit longer to get people from things like store operations on the brand and manufacturer side.

I think that there was a sense that some of the more traditional older brands were not resonating in terms of that authenticity and other reasons with consumers that the way that they had in the past. And so there was this, you know, gradual build of people recognizing that we Shoptalk was perfectly aligned with with the real changes they were experiencing. And it seemed to make sense for them to be part of that. And so we not only got amazing very, very senior level speakers, but the attendees were C-level. They were EVP, SVP and VPs and continue to be. So I think it was this combination of everything that that just made sense. And our standard for our shows is that we want people to love our shows. And when something's resonating on that level where, you know, they feel that they need help understanding what's going on or they want to showcase and contribute the special things they're doing, they want to be in a peer group of people that are charting the future in the same way. I refer to these people. I think of them not as attendees, but don't think of them as as professionals, but in retail. I think we live in a world where whether these are change-makers and that the ability to make change is actually now distributed down to the individual within even within large companies. And so it's people recognizing that they have the ability to make a really big difference and then giving them the tools and platform and experience and access that allows them to engage in that change that they want to undertake.

Sri

You know Anil, when I look back at both the community Shoptalk and Groceryshop, I think a scale come by, the both of those were having decision makers at the senior most level have almost become an automatic where it's created an aura of if you weren't at Shoptalk in Groceryshop, you really don't belong to the tribe. Which which again, I think is it's fascinating how you made that happen. But one of the secret sources we've been Peter and I were kind of discussing of the success of both communities at levels maybe down the decision maker, maybe at the director level, the senior manager level, the brand manager level, has been the hosted meeting programs that you'll have where you have service providers meeting with maybe given attendees of six times over things of that nature. Tell us a little bit more about how you work that out and why do you feel that it resonates so well with brands and even retailers participate in it. And then obviously service providers are the ones that really want to be in the middle of it. But how does all this come together? 

Anil

I think the hosted retailers and brands program did unbelievably well. And the reason that it did so well was because it solved a problem. And I think that that the things that scale quickest and then get the best feedback that give you the highest NPS score. I think that that address problems where., especially where people knew there was a problem, but nobody ever really did anything about it. And that it was going on for a really long time. So, you know, if you take the example of an exhibit hall, you know, if we were to go back to, say, 1995  or earlier than that, going to a trade show, walking through an exhibit hall was of incredible value. You know, you would be able to find all the different technology and solution providers that could help you run your business more efficiently, modernize your business. You go booth to Booth, you're having lots of valuable conversations. You're taking materials back to your office or your home. You're going through them. And then there's an incredible amount of discovery that is happening is an incredible amount of relationship building that that was possible. But when you add in the fact that that that kind of discovery and research can be done online, means that the utility of an exhibit hall has has declined. And and its role has changed. But for the most part, the approach that event organizers take to creating that exhibit hall and the experience that that that attendees have hasn't changed. So I think that what happened was that exhibit halls had greater value 25 years ago than they do today. I think that's still valuable and I'll talk about that. But the role of exhibit halls has changed and their value has changed, but the format hasn't the approach to creating the exhibit hall hasn't approach to using the exhibit halls for lead gen has remained the same. And so simply what's happened for both sides, the buyers who are there looking for solutions, the exhibitors that are there selling and promoting their solution, they continue to do the same thing they did 25 years ago, but they just simply less happy with it. They get less out of it. It's less productive for them. And so what we did with leading up to our 2018 show, we focused mostly on the exhibitors that we knew were there for to generate leads, the exhibitors that were that grab the attendees that's walking by and try to sell them something. Frequently, these were the exhibitors that had smaller booths. Generally, what we found was that exhibitors with larger booths were there to have meetings with established partners, with existing clients to showcase new products to the media. And lead gen was a lesser part of the reason that they were exhibiting. And so we went to over 100 companies that we had already signed booth contracts with. and we said we've decided to not sell 10 by 10 booths anymore. And I can tell you that people were absolutely shocked. I had a CEO call me up and say we already put a deposit on a booth that we were buying. And it's non-refundable. So can we please get our 10x10. And I said, look, the intent here was never for you to be out of pocket on a deposit to buy a booth., so send me the invoice and will reimburse that. But we won't sell you a 10x10. And so by this time, 2018, companies wanted to be part of Shoptalk. They knew they had to be there. It was a critical part of the broad retail e-commerce professional ecosystem. And so the next natural question for us was. Well, if I can't have a 10 x 10, what can I have? And then we said, well, what you're really there to do is meet with companies that you want to sell your solutions to. So we will find those people for you. And we will help you arrange the meetings, as you I'm sure you can imagine, that was met met with a great degree of skepticism as to whether we would be able to deliver the buy side of that of that experience. So on the other side of it, what we did was we knew that there were a lot of what I call change makers, as I referenced before, throughout the retail industry that would love to come to shoptalk because it represents this new home for them. This new community that they want to be part of. But because of budget limitations or other restrictions, they simply didn't have access to Shoptalk. So we said to them was that if they would agree to take 8 fifteen minute meeting. So we were asking for no more than two hours of their time during a four day period that we would give them a free ticket to the show and we would basically cover their travel expenses and hotel expenses so they could they could be at Shoptalk budget-free. And our view is to ask for the least and give the most. This is just a basic philosophy of life that I had, which is lead with generosity. And that was a big part of what was behind the creation of how we or the implementation of the program. To ask very little from people and to give to give them a lot at the same time. We wanted those meetings to be incredibly valuable to the to the hosted retailers and brands as buyers. So we didn't require them to take meetings that they didn't want to take. The meetings were entirely double opt-in. They had to agree to them as well. And that meant that we can only set up, you know, four out of eight meetings or six out of eight meetings. Then that's on us. We were willing to take that risk. I think we averaged probably about 6.5e meetings per hosted retailer and brand. But eventually, what we were able to do was bring thousands of retailers and brands and individuals from retailers & brands into this program. We were able to bring hundreds of companies selling solutions. We built a completely proprietary platform with what is today over a 30 person engineering team and a separate company that I own called PersonaTech. And and people absolutely loved the experience. It was efficient. It addressed a specific problem that people were experiencing in the exhibit hall. The other thing that it did was it changed the dynamic dynamic of our exhibit hall into a place where people were focused on transactions and transactional behavior into more of a community town hall, a place where people felt that they weren't going to get grabbed and solicited to come into someone's booth, but a place where they could spend time, be comfortable, interact with others, walk around, see what new products are being offered. Engage with whoever they want to engage with without feeling targeted. And if you talk to the retailers and brands that go to trade shows or go to exhibit halls within more of a conference type show, this will be one of their biggest complaints. They will tell you that when they go into the exhibit hall, they turn their badge around. They don't want to be targeted. So we solved a lot of problems while at the same time updating the event format. Literally overnight by 25 years, this this was this is a problem that has existed that frankly continues to exist throughout the retail, throughout the events industry, rather, and hasn't been fixed for the most part in 25 years. Given my background as a tech CEO, it seemed almost like an incredible opportunity to build something that would solve a very low hanging fruit problem and really deliver on the mission of creating community. So the way we look at the Shoptalk community is that it is a broad ecosystem. And within that broad ecosystem, there are very specific marketplaces. And if you were to facilitate the interaction of those marketplaces within that broad ecosystem, then the whole thing just hangs together better. It works better. People embrace it more. They value it more. They're telling you that in the NPS that they given you are NPs has consistently been above 60, which we're very happy with. So you're absolutely right. The hosted program was a key factor in the success of the program. About 50 percent of the retail and brand attendees that attend Shoptalk and Groceryshop come through the hosted program and the hosted program in 2019. Again, the last year we did it between Shoptalk and Groceryshop facilitated over 10,000 meaning. 

Peter

Yeah, Anil I walked into my first show of yours skeptical about my company not investing in a booth. And then after participating in the hosted meeting programs and seeing the pure lead gen successfully gen that that those meetings produced, I was overwhelmed. I said we need to double down for next show and invest much more of our finances in those hosted programs, so that was from my standpoint, just a brilliant decision on your part. And you did address some burning issues for all the different stakeholders in that ecosystem. You took Shoptalk which was more broadly omnichannel, and then you decided to focus in on one specific commerce vertical, grocery. Why did you take on that particular one? You could have gone after some of his. What was it about grocery you saw as a logical first extension? 

Anil

The reason we really focused on grocery is that it is part of the broader retail ecosystem. But when you really look at it more closely, it is a very distinct ecosystem. It consists of supermarkets, mass merchants, convenience stores, drugstores, club, warehouse stores, discount stores. You know, it's a broad range of companies that are selling products in very different formats. And so within that industry, you know, where people get their products, how they get those products has changed and evolved and people have a lot more options than they used to have. And so that industry is, I would say, very distinct segment from the rest of retail. In addition to that, it wasn't on the same historical innovation and disruption curve. So the same way that I described broad retail being, say, four to five years behind FinTech grocery retail was probably two years behind broader retail. It is not an early adopter of e-commerce, for example. And so there  was a unique community and a unique set of challenges and opportunities in many ways that ended up actually being an asset. That grocery could leapfrog the rest of retail. It didn't have to go back and fix the omnichannel things that had been done for many years. It was a blank sheet of paper in terms of being able to define a new user and customer experience specific to e-commerce and omnichannel. And so we felt that this needed to be a separate conversation, one where you could very easily spend four days digging really deep into the issues that are unique to the growth of CPG. You know, for example, supply chain, the supply chain is impacted way more immediately as you change the customer experience in grocery than say in furniture or, you know, many other areas, electronics, many other areas of retail. And so it was a sector that was at a different point in its innovation. It was a community of types of retailers that was evolving.  And so it made sense to pull it out separately as a separate community. And that's what we did. And we did that. We announced that in 2018 in the spring and we hold the first show in the fall of 2018. And that first show had over 2,000 people, which we were very, very happy with.

Peter

You vastly underestimated the response you would get to that. In fact, you basically blew out of all the available space at the hotel you chose.

Sri

So one of the things that comes to my mind is, you know, when I look back on the Money 20/20 money talk journey you started in 2011 and then 2017, you had sold it to other investors. So that was about a seven year journey. I look at these two communities Shoptalk and Groceryshop they were born in 2015. By early 2020, within, I would say four and a half years or so since the two communities started. And the attendees came to when you actually sold it to the Hyve Group, I know you're going to stay involved with both these communities. And the industry would really like you to be involved because it looks at you as the leader of these two communities making things happen. But what do you think caused this to happen within less than five years, much faster than Money 20/20 and how did liquidity for you just come by so fast this time around. 

Anil

Well, there's two ways of looking at it. I guess one way of looking at it is that the liquidity was was fast. Another way of looking at it is it was, you know, kind of a reasonable amount of time. But let me let me take you back a little bit. So, you know, if you were to talk to anyone that I had spoken to about Shoptalk since I created it, the plan was never to really sell it. The plan was actually to keep it. And so, you know, we sold Money 20/20 within two years. That was a quick exit. We ended up keeping Shoptalk for over four years. And the reality is that I'll share something personal with you here is that we had planned to keep Shoptalk. In fact, we were expanding it into doing way more local events with something called Retail Club. We had created Groceryshop and we're really focused on building that. And in September of 2019, my mother passed away unexpectedly. And it was a moment of reflection for me. It was not something that I had expected to happen. And my wife, who happens to be my co-founder in these businesses, and she was the president of both Money 20/20 and Shoptalk, said to me at the end of September: Maybe it's time to rethink how we spend our time. And I think she was saying it not only for me, but for herself as well. And so I committed to her that that I would make one phone call and that one phone call would be to Hyve, and it would be the CEO who has been a close friend of mine for  five years. He actually bought Money 20/20 when he was at a different company. And I would ask him if he was interested in buying it and if he was interested in buying it, whether we could quickly come to terms and that we would do a short transition period of one year so that we could move on and do other things in our lives. And I had that phone call with him. My conversation with my wife was on a Sunday. I had that conversation with with Mark at Hive on Monday morning, and the deal was closed 10 weeks later. So I think it was a reasonable period of time to keep a business, to grow a business and establish it. It was probably around the same amount of time that I had run the two tech companies that I was involved in, maybe a little bit less. But it was, we kept it for longer than we had kept Money 20/20. And the plan was, was to keep that long term. But with that change that happened in our lives and some of the reassessment that we did at that point in time, we decided that to have this conversation if Mark had said in that conversation that he had not been interested, that he was not interested in buying it, then our agreement was that we would keep it and continue to run it. But he was very anxious to buy it. He'd wanted to buy it for a very long time and he wanted to move quickly as well. So it was as much of a surprise, actually, frankly, I would say more of a surprise to me that we ended up selling Shoptalk and Groceryshop than it probably was to anybody else. But that was the reason we ultimately decided to do it.

Peter

So Anil, shortly into this transition period after the sale, the pandemic hits and it has an incredible adverse effect on trade shows in general. Certainly Shoptalk not immune to this. And you ended up with a mechanism where you essentially pushed it out to the slot where Groceryshop typically sits in the fall and grocery shop moving to the spring of the following year. Would love to know about what you all are doing to keep brands and retailers and service providers engaged. How are you taking advantage of obviously a digital world to do that? And I know you've recently announced a new Shoptalk, Meetup solution. We'd love to hear more about how you think that's going to keep engagement alive.

 Anil

Sure. But let me let me just start off by saying a few words about. The Shoptalk in person this year, which is not happening, we, as you mentioned, had originally pushed it from March to September. But then recently we announced two weeks ago that we're actually canceling it altogether this year and starting it back up in March of 2021 with Shoptalk and then having grocery shop back in September of 2021. We hope that those events will happen. We expect them to happen. But right now we're living in a period of incredible uncertainty around Covid 19 and whether its policies and guidelines that come from governments and agencies or state, federal or from venues or cities. But I would say most importantly from companies, ultimately, whether individuals attend professional B2B events is going to be a decision that rests primarily with individuals themselves and the companies that they work for, no matter what else is going on. I think ultimately the decision is one around safety. And I think that's something that people take very seriously about themselves. And I think it's something that companies take very seriously about that teams. And we certainly don't want to be putting companies and individuals in a position to have to pick between coming to a show and their concern for their safety. So I think we've acted quickly and decisively in terms of canceling or postponing our shows for that reason. We think we've acted responsibly. It's become obvious, you know, later on that you probably couldn't have had the shows.

But I can tell you this that had a conversation with Hyve in the beginning of March. And they said, Anil, if you still owned the show, what would you do? And I said, I would not have the show if I still owned it, that I would cancel it. They said, well, then we're going to cancel it. And at that time, it felt like it wasn't an option to cancel. It did not feel like it was the only possible or it was inevitable that it was going to get canceled within a week or two, within a week or so of that, it became obvious that the show can happen. But the point at the point in time when we made the decision, it was a choice to not move forward with the show. I think that as we look forward, what what what the B2B events industry, much like other industries on what I call the front line of impact, like airlines,  cruise lines, hotels, restaurants. Ultimately, these businesses that are impacted on the front lines need a greater degree of certainty around Covid 19. Its impact. It's how it's being addressed with therapeutics and a vaccine before those businesses can really ramp back up. And so the way I look at it is that we are living in this period of uncertainty. It is unclear how long that is going to last. But one thing I do believe is that we are not at the beginning of the end. We are at the end of the beginning here. There is still a lot that needs to unfold. So we have we have shifted our attention to creating what I refer to as omnichannel events. Barring the word from the retail industry and using a word that all communities understand very well, and that is a combination of online and offline as representing what the future of the event industry will be. So I think of  integrating technology into offline events as the digitization of events. And I think of creating digitally native virtual events as the virtualization of events. So there's a distinction there between digitization, virtualization that I think is important. The way that we're approaching it is, I think, different from how everybody else has approached it. If I were to describe how everybody else has approached it, I would say that that that it is being focused on content, mostly webinars. And it has been largely how do you take what you do offline and put it online. But going back to how I described we created Shoptalk to begin with, which was sit down with a blank sheet of paper and address the challenges and opportunities and build the product from there, whether it's something that your customers and clients know that they need or not, that should be the starting point. And that's what we did for our virtual events. So our virtual strategy has really been two pronged. The first has been that instead of simply having speakers talk to what is going on in the industry and trends and the types of things that we might even come on site, we think enough other people are doing that well enough that we don't add a whole lot of value there. Getting back to needing to be, you know, 10x to 100x better for us to really be excited about doing anything. And so what we focused on in terms of content was creating a framework that presents the path forward for retail in various stages as the pandemic continues and as we come out of the pandemic. We created that framework as a Google doc, as a Google sheet. We shared that on our Web site. It's something that we update every single day. Our entire content team looks at news of everything from the pandemic to announcements from retailers about specific initiatives they're implementing. And we build that into the Google sheet so that it is always up to date on how things are going to unfold through the various stages. We also included Tab's recently to represent various scenarios of when therapeutics and a vaccine, for example, might become available. And so our focus on content has been a focus on what I call original content that we think provides a tool to the industry that helps them manage through all of the different things they have to manage through all of the different considerations they have when it comes to evolving their businesses throughout the pandemic. The second area where we are focused is one we announced about two weeks ago. We announced that at the same time that we announced that we were going to cancel Shoptalk in September, and that is the creation of this concept of a Meetup. A Shoptalk Meetup. And the basic premise of the meetup program, which is scheduled to be held October 20th to the 22nd during three half-days. So the meet up begins at 12:30 Eastern and at 445 Eastern on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, October 20th, 21st and 22nd. The goal is to bring thousands of people together, not for content, not for speakers and not for original content we've created, but instead so that those thousands of people can interact with each other and that they and we're designing it in a way so that they can interact with each other across all of the use cases, all of the reasons for which people interact with each other all the time in the retail and e-commerce industry and certainly at our events. And so so it is you know, maybe one way of describing it is it's the hosting program on steroids. It's not simply an evolution of the hosted program. This, again, was a sit down with a blank sheet of paper, as I mentioned, and it is a ground up technology build. Obviously, you know, there's a lot we know about how to build these thing that comes from our experience with hosted. But the reality is that that we took a look at the retail industry from scratch. We looked at what kind of data model is needed to represent all of the key people beyond hosted, which represents, as I mentioned before, a very specific marketplace within retail. Here with Meetup, we're looking at all of the different stakeholders, all of the different things they might do. So, for example, in the meetup in corporate incorporates, the notion of being able to make an announcement as part of this where companies can make announcements to reach the media. And then some of the meetings that happened during that meetup are companies that are making announcements and media. We already have over 100 representatives of the media and cell phone analysts signed up for the show for the meet up. So the way we're looking at it is that if the future is truly omnichannel, it's going to exist both with offline events and online events. Then the online events should represent the greatest utility, the greatest degree of productivity. And that means ensuring that they address all of the use cases that are already out there and that people are already engaged. And so that's the whole concept of meetup. We're actually very, very excited about it. Since we launched it two weeks ago, over 2,000 people have signed up. It's really incredible. You know, it is it is something we are charging for. So there are tickets and the tickets have to be purchased. Ultimately, what we believe is that people will be will be very glad, very happy that they participated because they will measure it in terms of productivity. And ultimately, what we're trying to do is the easy way that we refer to it as we're trying to deliver about three months worth of meetings in three 1/2 days. Even that, even the approach of using half days means that people can can commit those half days without losing anything relating to their ongoing work. They can spend the rest of that  day doing doing their other work, having their other meetings and not have to completely go away for three days while they're doing this. So we think we've designed it in a way that makes sense, that will work, we think is going to be a lot that we learned. And as we do, iterations going forward will incorporate that learning. You know, we very much have a culture of learning and iterations. So this is definitely going to be version one of the program. But as a former entrepreneur, focus specifically on technology and now integrating technology into these live experiences, that is a very natural way for me and our team to operate. So we're very excited about not only the launch, but actually getting this first one under our belts, delivering what we think is value that that people haven't experienced. In fact, a big part of what we've been doing over the last two weeks is really just explaining to people what it is we're doing. Those conversations don't take long for people to get it. But what we're finding is that it does in many cases require a conversation because it is so unlike anything else that people have experienced, and it is certainly unlike all of the other virtual events that that people have come to expect, as  a very frequent thing now.

Sri

Anil it's no surprise that you're getting 2,000 attendees signing up, I mean, you've been quite the industry disrupter kind of filling in gaps in the industry, which was sorely needed with these communities that you have graciously given us an hour to speak to as we close it up today, I'd be shortchanging our listeners in industry if I didn't ask you this two part question. Part one, as an incredibly successful entrepreneur who has been able to find these gaps in industries and kind of bring significant value to the industry, what is your advice to other entrepreneurs out there? And Part two is the all important question that people are really waiting to get an answer on. What's next for Anil? Are you getting into other verticals? 

Anil

Two really good questions. So the advice that I like to share with entrepreneurs, especially entrepreneurs that are just getting started, is something that my dad shared with me when I was first getting started. And that is the most important thing, is to just start and trust that opportunity finds you. And I think that really dovetails with this whole notion of you build great things through iteration. You don't need to have a fully baked, fully articulated idea on day one. You need to have some sense that there is a problem or a new opportunity given how the world is changing. That provides an opportunity for you to build something. But the key is to start building. And then that process of building is something that that the universe engages with you on. You're not going to be doing it alone. You're going to be doing it in the context of something far bigger than you. And that's how you create exceptional products and experiences. So my advice is always get started and let the universe help you. In terms of what's next for me, I think I would probably have a clear idea of what was next for me if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic. I think that that the effect of that pandemic has had on me and the business that I've been in for the last 10 years, which is the events industry, is really to focus on how do we virtualize Shoptalk. So even though I've sold Shoptalk and I'm in a transition period with Shoptalk, the virtual build we're doing is through this other company that I mentioned, PersonaTech, that set up two years ago to digitize Shoptalk and Groceryshop. And now its focus is on virtualizing Shoptalk and Groceryshop. And so for the foreseeable future, that is my focus. It's not what I expected to be doing. Frankly, I didn't know what I would be doing given the circumstances I shared relative to why we ended up selling Shoptalk and Groceryshop to begin with. You know, I have lots of other interests that I've been pursuing. I'd be happy to do a podcast with you guys on some of those. I'll share very quickly an area where I've been spending a lot of my time. I watched a movie about four years ago in 2016 called "The Man Who Knew Infinity." And and it was about the life of a mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was one of the 20th century's most important mathematicians. Unfortunately, one of the least known and the story that if you haven't seen the movie, I actually think knowing a little bit about the background of  Ramanujan helps to appreciate the movie. So I don't think there's any spoilers in what I'm about to say. But the story of a Ramanujan is the story of an individual who wrote down mathematical equations and formulas that have been the premise of a significant amount of mathematics for the last 100 years. He actually died 100 years ago. And when he was asked how he was able to come up with these formulas, he said that he had visions from God. It took me four years, but I wanted to develop a thesis of how was he able to come up with these formulas? This took me down, you know, many, many different rabbit holes and different areas of research and inquiry. And, you know, very, very wide range of things that I had to learn about well beyond mathematics into areas as diverse as cognitive neuroscience, fractal geometry, quantum biology, religion, astrophysics. And I'm actually working on a paper that I would like to when I say paper, you know, it's probably going to be a LinkedIn post, but I'm working on something that that I believe squares what Ramanujan said in terms of how he was able to come up with the formulas with a lot of thinking in these other areas and disciplines. That's entirely consistent with with how he would have been able to do that. You know, the short of it is that our brains engage in complex calculations that are native to the universe and we have little to no conscious awareness of those unconscious processes. Ramanujan had a particular kind of brain that's at the intersection of synesthesia and Savant syndrome that gave him conscious access to this unconscious ability to process mathematics. And in fact, I have found someone who is alive today who had a traumatic brain injury that has given him a very similar ability. His name is Jason Padgett. And Jason, I've been in touch on very frequent phone calls. And he and I've talked extensively about work that I could do with his interviews that I can do with him to help him. He's already written one book, but write another book that focuses on what we can learn from from his thinking. So, you know, I have lots of very broad interests. There's probably a much longer answer. And I'm going in different directions than you expected. But right now, my my focus is on, you know, on virtualizing events, but staying true to some of those other things that that I wanted to do that represented the reason for selling Shoptalk and Groceryshop in the first place. And I think I'm very fortunate in being able to do both of those. 

Peter

Anil, thank you for joining us today, you overdelivered, Sri and I are looking forward to our next conversation with you. We're really grateful to have you. And on a personal note, you're a very gracious person and I'm very happy to call you my friend. So thank you. And to our audience, thank you for joining us today. And we look forward to you joining us on our next episode of Consumer Engagement in an Omni Channel World. Thank you.

Sri

Thank you Anil. 

Anil

Thanks so much, guys, I appreciate it. Take care.