The meez Podcast
Josh Sharkey (Entrepreneur, professional chef, and founder/CEO of meez, the culinaryOS for food professionals) interviews world class entrepreneurs in the food space that are shifting the paradigm of how we innovate and operate in our industry.
The meez Podcast
Actuals beats averages, Open beats closed, and questions beat answers. With David Corts, CEO of Fresh KDS.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
#148
Josh sits down with David Corts, CEO of Fresh Technology, the company behind Fresh KDS, now running in roughly 11,000 restaurant locations. David started his career in New York in the mid-90s as the first employee at @plan, met his wife of 25 years on a Metro North reverse commute while she was one of the first 20 employees at Priceline, and later sold a business to AOL, landing there as a VP of product under Tim Armstrong. He was also an English major, which he took to abbreviating as "ENG" once the Google transplants at AOL started asking what he studied, and now argues was his real advantage all along. He got to Fresh six years ago, a software division spun out of a restaurant holding company, walked away from online ordering in the middle of the pandemic, and bet the whole business on the kitchen display system instead.
The conversation keeps circling one idea: the number most operators measure is not the thing that actually happened. David argues that the middle layer of management, the part that exists to collect what happened and report it upward, is being abstracted away, and that the new bottleneck is coordination rather than execution. He explains why he blew up his own process ceremony, why he now hires only for people who unblock themselves, and how his personal knowledge vault became a company brain running on two repos, one PR-gated and one wide open. Josh tees up the 1950 Air Force study where Gilbert Daniels measured 4,063 pilots and found zero who were average on all ten dimensions the cockpit was built around, which sets off his case against average ticket time. The guest never experiences your average. They experience their order. They also get into whether sous vide counts as cheating, the rent-free SoHo apartment David's brother occupied for seven years, and why open beats closed in the long run.
Links and resources 📌
Visit meez: https://www.getmeez.com
Follow meez on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getmeez
Follow Josh on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshlsharkey/?hl=en
Follow Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-sharkey-406965b/
Visit Fresh KDS: https://www.fresh.technology
Follow Fresh KDS on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fresh.kds/
Follow David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcorts/
Timestamps
08:40 Building A Team Of "We'll Figure It Out" People
11:11 AI, Management, And The New Coordination Bottleneck
19:08 Lessons From The Dot-Com Era: AI Is Just A Utility
23:13 Services As Software And Customization At Scale
33:09 Why A Liberal Arts Background Is An Advantage In The AI Age
39:11 Spinning Out Fresh KDS And Betting On The Kitchen
47:06 Why Averages Are Dumb
53:12 Turning Kitchen Data Into Meaning With AI
58:59 Building A Personal Second Brain And A Company AI Operating System
01:13:50 The SaaSpocalypse, Headless Software, And Why Open Beats Closed