This is the full transcript for Episode #298 of the Wild Business Growth podcast featuring Ahmed Beshry – Smart Shopping Cart, Caper Co-Founder. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
Ahmed Beshry 0:00
What’s really unique about life is that you get to build the future that you want to see.
Max Branstetter 0:18
Olá! Bom dia. Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth podcast. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, Founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting. You can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is episode 298, and Dana and I are back from our Spain and Portugal trip, obviously, because you’re hearing me right now, which was awesome. Hit me up for any Spain and Portugal recos. And today’s guest is Ahmed Beshry, Co-Founder of Caper. Caper is one of the most innovative companies I’ve ever come across. They are the smart shopping cart and beyond technology, retail tech company that I ran into, well, not actually ran into, but discovered at our own, Hoboken ShopRite. In this episode, we talk everything from where the idea for caper came from, a little Y Combinator how they got acquired by Instacart and, of course, some chemistry. Why not? It is Mr. Beshry. Enjoyyyyyyy the shooooooow!
Aaaaalrightyyyyyyy we’re here with Ahmed Beshry, Co-Founder of Caper, one of the most cool to stick with the letter C. That’s probably the best alliteration that’s ever happened. Smart Cart and beyond companies that ever come across. And we’ll get to all of that story. But Ahmed, so excited to talk to you today. Thanks so much for doing how you doing
Ahmed Beshry 2:01
today? I’m doing great. Thanks
for having me. Yeah, yeah. Of course, of course.
Max Branstetter 2:06
And it’s kind of funny, this is, like, it’s evolved over time, like, I find guests for this podcast in, like, a wide variety of ways, but it’s been, I think this is the second time this year shout out our local Hoboken ShopRite, just going into that, ShopRite doing our weekly Sunday shopping. My wife, Dana and I, has inspired connections that have led to podcast guests. So the one that we’re talking about today is, of course, caper and the caper carts are awesome and have, like, totally changed our shopping experience. So, so we will get to that. But Well, first I just wanted, I want to thank you for having the Hoboken ShopRite be like an early mover for caper, because it’s very convenient for us.
Ahmed Beshry 2:46
Yeah, hey, you and me, both being based here in New York City and having a bunch of shoprites that have our carts for me and my team has been just magical. And yeah, we get to use caper just as regular customers. And yeah, it’s pretty awesome.
Max Branstetter 3:00
It is, it is pretty awesome, indeed. So before we get to the caper journey, you have, like, a startup background yourself. Even before that, can you share a bit about Q hop and what was involved in
Ahmed Beshry 3:13
that? I think I was, like, pretty fresh out of college, jumped right into the startup journey. My co founders and I, you know, we had a very aggressive entrepreneurial itch where we were just always focused on, you know, what exists in the market, what’s a bad experience, and what can we solve, given all the technology at our fingertips? And pretty early on, we we came around the idea of retail in our in our mind, was like something that just was definitely ripe for innovation. And our whole thesis was that, like, there’s tech evolving all around us, and, you know, cars are driving themselves now, and I have a super computer in my pocket that I could use to do whatever I want. And the the retail experience, or the brick and mortar experience was in our eyes, just like, completely unchanged. So we started off, you know, something pretty similar to caper, but in the apparel space. So, yeah, fresh out of college, I think it was, like a year out, I’d worked a little bit as a software engineer, and then shifted into the retail space. And what Q hop was, was we’d re engineered the security tag that you typically see on apparel at a store where you could kind of tap your phone against it, product would show up on your phone, and you’d hit pay, and all the security tags would kind of unlock themselves right then and there. They got us into Y Combinator it really started that like very serious entrepreneurial journey for us. And yeah, there was a lot of learnings from there. We inevitably pivoted, but that’s where we all started.
Max Branstetter 4:42
Full of ideas. You are, as Yoda would say, I guess I didn’t even plan that. But
Ahmed Beshry 4:47
we try, we try. Not all of them are good. But you know, some of them stick and we build cool things. How
Max Branstetter 4:54
was the Y Combinator experience compared to, like, the reputation and hype there is about it publicly, I
Ahmed Beshry 4:59
think. I think it holds. I mean, the the reputation exists for a reason. They’ve created so such, like juggernauts in the technology space. I think it’s, you know, by far the most unicorns when, when compared to other, any, anybody adventure. And the reason is, I mean, they have such a good eye for great talent. But more importantly, and like, what we got out of the experience, more than anything, for me, it wasn’t, you know, capital, it wasn’t, like, extremely deep connections. I think the big thing that that really stuck with us was the obsession over building a product for a select group of individuals or select cohort that desperately need it, and focusing on that small group until you build something that that is really, you know, magical for them, or solves an immediate pain point, the speed of iteration, the learning, etc, like that. That was all extremely valuable coming out of yc. And yeah, I think for us, it was like something that that just stuck. And even today, when I give advice to founders, a lot of it, what I’m realizing is like what I learned from YC, which is, just obsess over your product. Launch, Quick Learn, quick iterate, quick, but make sure you’re building something that people want more
Max Branstetter 6:11
unicorns than the national animal of Scotland. That’s the YC slogan. So coined it here first.
Ahmed Beshry 6:19
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. It’s honestly special that they could keep doing it.
Max Branstetter 6:23
It’s majestic. So speaking of relentlessly focusing on a product and building it for a specific group of people, very specific segue here, let’s get to caper. So super cool, game changing. Like, I mean, you know better than me, like, I am sure, for decades on decades, people have tried to reinvent the shopping cart and failed miserably. But there’s something pretty, pretty cool about caper. How did you start to get involved with, you know, what would become caper in the first place? Yeah,
Ahmed Beshry 7:00
so I think the the big thing that we learned when we started and, you know, we talked about Q hop briefly, was, like, brick and mortar is completely unchanged, and there hasn’t been any advancement in technology that that’s good. I mean, there’s, like, self checkout, there’s a couple other things that you see in grocery and as far as the customer experience, or, like the checkout experience goes, there wasn’t really that much advancement. So for us, the big focus was, you know, how do you create something in this experience, or in this this environment? How do you create something in in brick and mortar that that is helpful? So when we started off with with apparel, we weren’t really that focused on the folks that are actually buying the technology the retailers, and we’re only focused on like the end customer. And while we created a really good experience for the end customer, it was a B2B2C product, and so the B2B angle of it was actually pretty arduous, and it required a lot of operational overhaul, and it was a pretty difficult product to launch. So we thought, okay, let’s reset. Let’s think about a broader market. Let’s think about a place where it is still ripe for innovation, and there’s massive innovation budgets, and that was grocery. So we landed on grocery, and we knew we wanted to do something that follows the customer around. It could be something in your pocket. It could be a phone, it could be something handheld, but ultimately something that that is beneficial for the customer. And as we started to think about it, more and more, we had, like, a general idea, and so in like, again, the YC framework, what we ended up doing was talking to a bunch of grocers. And here in New York City. We literally would just my co founder, Linden, and I would take the subway, you know, drop ourselves off in a random neighborhood in New York. And in, you know, we’d go to Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island. We all over the tri state, tri state area. And we’d literally just talk to grocery store owners. And we’d be like, yeah, what are your problems? What are your pain points? Where are you struggling? And we really, really, like, took a crash course and understood the market really quickly. And it was, it was immediate for us to understand that, like they were struggling with customer experience, people were struggling to, you know, find things in the store. People would abandon their carts. They couldn’t hire people. They couldn’t find cashiers quick enough. So it was, you know, rife with issues. And so what we ended up doing was, you know, going back, learning everything that we learned from Q hop, learning everything that we learned from from our customer surveys, thinking, and we’re like, okay, you know, if you, if you take all of this really unique technology and you just pack it into the conventional form factor that is the shopping cart, you could create something pretty magical there. And you could create not only the something that solves their checkout problems, but a myriad of different issues that they experience in grocery So, solving a lot of the customer pain points, finding items checking out quickly, providing delight and an enjoyable experience in the grocery store. And then for the retailer, it’s like you. You could aggregate some unique data points. You could help with Iota stock detection. You could, you know, just do a lot more than, than, than what you typically could with, with customers walking around with the smart IoT shopping cart. So that was it. Really talking to customers, talking to our grocery partners, and thinking, you know, from the ground up, like blank slate, what do we do here?
Max Branstetter 10:22
We’re fortunate to have, have used caper before, but for, for everybody else hearing about it, like it’s, it’s something that, when you read about, it sounds pretty cool, but it’s, you know, you really have to have the first hand experience to have that, like, glowing moment of, oh my god, that saved us so much time. Or, like, that was so cool and, you know, fun and efficient. And I think about the grocery store overall. Like, we pretty much always go on Sundays, I have like, an underlying stress when it’s tied to the grocery store, because I think of NFL Sunday and trying to get grocery shopping done before the one o’clock games start. And so there’s always that time pressure there. And I just found historically that, like, it takes so long to get grocery shopping done for like, a week or two people especially, and ever since we started with caper, it’s such like a magical thing to be, you know, be done getting all your food, and then realize, oh my god, like, we’re basically checked out already. Like we have to stand and pay, but we don’t have to, like, bag everything and go, like, it’s all together. So it’s just absolutely brilliant. What was involved in, like, figuring out the actual attributes of a caper cart that would be time saving and beneficial, like all those benefits.
Ahmed Beshry 11:27
So the funny thing is, is that when we started the main thing that you’re hitting on like you’re one of our Democrats, it’s very clear talking to you like you are of this bucket and that bucket is the like demographic one. Yeah, demographic one, yeah, that’s me. The very clear thing is that there’s like, Yeah, a couple different demographics. And when we went into this, it was very much like the efficiency strategy of, like, how do we build a product that’s better than what exists in self checkout today lets people go in and out of the store, you know, have full control over their shop. And so we created the first, like initial experience around that, and that was creating something that allows for you to check out and has the most innovative technology to immediately recognize what’s going in and out of your cart instantaneously. So there’s those computer vision cameras that leverage AI to detect your product as it’s going in. The produce scale, the security scale, all of these mechanisms to allow for a really easy checkout experience. So that’s what we like. Catered everything around. Was like, how do you create a really quick and awesome experience and add and remove as easily as possible, as people are shopping? What was really quick for what we really what we learned really quickly, rather, was that grocery is a interesting business, and that everybody grocery shops. It’s kids, it’s grandparents, it’s, you know, all sorts of age demographics and older, younger audiences, etc. So what we found extremely quickly was like, when we deployed our products, expecting like, millennials and Gen Z to, like, throw in their headphones and, like, have a quick shop. Was no, this is like, Mom shopping for her family. And this is like, grandma and grandpa picking up this cart because they want to be up to date with, you know, the new technology in the grocery store and and experience something cool and unique. Or this is anyone who’s used self checkout, which is everyone, right? And so it was very quick for us to realize, like, Oh, this isn’t actually just for the convenience shopper. This is a very broad range of customers that are going to use this. And so very quickly, we actually evolved our product to be adaptable and actually cover the type of use case that the different demographics are going to want. So you actually have folks that are going in there, and they’re using the caper cart for discoverability. Hey, I’m in this particular aisle. What items are on sale in this aisle? Or, hey, you know, there’s the flyer on the cart, or a lot of folks are using it for affordability, and that if you use our cart, it’s probably going to be net cheaper than the traditional shopping cart, and that will surface coupons as you’re shopping. If you throw a product in the cart that has a coupon, you could clip it right then and there. Or if you walk into an aisle that has a coupon, you could navigate and go through a carousel and select items that are on sales as you shopping. So for us, the big thing was like expanding that that horizon and trying to find a value proposition for everyone, and just making it, you know, work for for every grocery shopper,
Max Branstetter 14:22
you’re spot on. You hit on the generations there. And like I’ve seen, first of all, we’re full brand ambassadors for you now, and full research people. So I love it. Expect full time salary anytime soon, not to, not to brag, but no, we’ve noticed that, like little kids are like, excited to use the carts too, because they’re like, oh, it has a screen. Or it’s like, oh, it’s like, Brighton has cameras. Like, what is this? So there’s like, that novelty factor as well.
Ahmed Beshry 14:47
They’ll like, drag mom and, you know, be like, I want to use this. And they’re our best brand ambassadors, because, you know, they’ll take over the experience fully. It’s actually a really, like, unique moment and wholesome in that. Yeah, the family shop isn’t like mom shopping and dragging three kids around. It’s it’s people, you know, helping or little kids helping mom with the shop and throwing items in the cart, trying to make it as fun as possible. And it’s a huge aspect of the cart itself, and that, like gamification and delight, are so critical to the way we build our product from the ground up, and that everything that we do, every way that we design a product or a new feature. You know, we’re thinking about like, how can you make this more delightful? How can you take this again, this chore, and turn it into a fun little family moment or a fun experience for anyone using
Max Branstetter 15:33
it? So obviously, you’re in ShopRite and Aaron, some more stores as well. How did you get to the point of all right, this thing is good enough that we can start pitching retailer. We can start pitching stores to actually feature this. Because I’m sure grocery stores get pitched with products and innovations like all the time.
Ahmed Beshry 15:51
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. We were pitching it well before it was as good as it is now. So we’ve been capers, yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, that’s part of that. Like YC philosophy is, if you wait, if you wait to launch a product till, you know, it’s ready for Showtime and ready for scale. For us, it would have taken like seven, eight years before we launched our first version of our product, because that’s the moment where we were like, you know, this is a really scalable, solid product, and we started mass producing it. So we we actually pitched it, like I was saying in customer discovery, before we even built it, we were talking to retailers, showing them an industrial design on our phone, and saying, like, if we were to build this product, we could buy it. And we did. So we actually created, you know, prototypes of those units. We would deploy them in stores, and they were riddled with with issues, you know, six, seven years back. And all of those were really exceptional learning moments, where you learn how to create more stable, you know, chip sets and more stable connections in the cart. And the shopping cart, as you probably know, endures a lot of abuse. It’s banged up, it’s thrown in, you know, it’s left outside, it’s kept in the rain.
Max Branstetter 17:05
You’re dropping watermelons in it. Yeah, exactly. So
Ahmed Beshry 17:08
you learn really quickly, when you’re in a live environment like that, how the next batch of cards has to be more resilient and stronger. And so we actually, I would say that in startup fashion, like our benefit of being a startup was that we were able to deploy and, you know, sure you’d have a little bit of backlash here and there, but you just deploy a stronger and better version afterwards. So we’re at a point now where we could scale with our retailers with extreme confidence, because we’ve iterated so aggressively to get to the, you know, the solid, stable version that you’re using today.
Max Branstetter 17:42
It’s so good getting that that feedback, like, quickly and like, pitching stuff along the way. Because I think, if it, you know, even if it’s a the quote, unquote MVP or, like, a not so developed product yet, if the idea and, like, the potential for execution is so strong and so game changing, like that, like, it’s, it’s awesome to get partners in from the ground. And it can feel like they’re, I mean, they are part of, like, the feedback, iterative, iterative process as well 100%
Ahmed Beshry 18:11
and for every like, for all the startups out there that are listening. Or the big thing for me and our team was identifying, like, who would be a really patient partner for us to partner with early on, and kudos to a couple of key partners of ours that were able to take the risk and we learned together and yeah, just iterated very quickly on a product, and by them being patient, by us working extremely fast and hard to solve the problems, we got to pretty Solid spot.
Max Branstetter 18:39
Speaking of solid spot, how in the world did Instacart come about for caper?
Ahmed Beshry 18:45
It’s, you know, it’s a great story in that early on, you know, broke founders all living together, eating together, just we had, you know, almost died a handful of times. Grocery is, not the sexiest of spaces where investors are just throwing capital hardware too. So started off just a lot slower, but again, building a really unique product and getting a lot of customers that wanted to try cap route. Or as we were starting to iterate on the hardware side, we were seeing a lot more successful deployments and launches, and we were iterating quickly and building features that were awesome. And so we started to grow the business quite aggressively. And, you know, raised our seed, raised our Series A, grew the team, deployed more carts, started to sign much, much larger contracts with, you know, national names were ramping up for pretty aggressive scale. And and with that, we went out to raise our series B, and yeah, we signed a couple term sheets. We were ready to grow the business aggressively ourselves. And at that moment, Fiji, who’s our CEO, Instacart CEO, was just starting her role as the Instacart CEO, and heard about our fundraiser, our fundraising and reached. Out to us, and at that moment, she just wanted a conversation, and we had a conversation with her, and it was very clear that she had a very aligned vision and strategy that we did, and the relationship between us and Instacart at that moment was already quite strong. We had, we had some connections. We knew what they were building, and she just painted a really rosy picture of what the next five to 10 years would look like together. And the whole idea here is that Instacart is a technology platform. Instacart builds technology for grocers. Grocers themselves don’t have teams of 1000s of engineers focused on building the best grocery technology, leveraging AI for grocery they don’t have a myriad of suite, a suite of products that they could deploy, you know, locally, in house, and we provide that. And so for us, the whole idea is that Instacart is creating what is the grocery enablement platform, and we would build the tools to deploy with our retail partners to just help them innovate and make that grocery experience better. And and Instacart provided us just a fantastic opportunity to scale really quickly. And what was awesome for us, more importantly, was that Instacart has been building this technology for a decade, and so they’ve mastered e commerce, and they’ve, they’ve created the best e commerce experience by far, and they have, you know, a lot of AI algorithms that we’d be able to tap into, a lot of the best suite of E commerce technology that we’d be able to tap into, and we could take the best of what was deployed and created online and take that into the store. And so for us, that was just like, a fantastic idea of, like, you know, mass scale, with the idea to deploy the best technology in store and and give people in store, which is the vast majority of the market, that experience that that you have online. So for us, it was just, you know, a no brainer opportunity to partner with the best. Their culture is fantastic, their team is great. And, yeah, it’s a no brainer. It made sense to us.
Max Branstetter 21:56
Yeah, yeah, the synergy makes a ton of sense there. And you, I mean, Instacart, obviously itself is like a rocket ship, but caper as well, absolute rocket ship or rocket cart that you’ve created, just what an awesome, wild ride. If looking back now, I know, I know it’s still like grand scheme pretty early in the journey, but looking back like, what’s the, what is the one main thing that you would attribute the like growth and investment success, we’ll say funding success of caper so far,
Ahmed Beshry 22:32
there’s a few things. I mean, it’s all gonna come down to the core product and focusing on, like, what customers actually want in grocery so we’re hyper focused on creating a great actual hardware. We want the experience to be as smooth and nimble as possible. We focus a lot on the experience. That’s when we’re creating a product. Isn’t just like, you know, the two dimensional screen interface, it’s it’s like the human computer interaction elements of it. How are people interacting and adding their groceries to the cart? And how does the experience of the cart, you know, light up? And how, what are the sounds? What’s the experience on the screen look like, etc. So on the hardware side, it was like, creating something that’s stable, durable, works for retail partners, provides them an immense amount of value. While I was like in the overall experience was, how do you create something that when a customer walks into the grocery store, they go, Oh my god, like, it’s a no brainer. Of course, I’m using the caper cart. That’s really like, I’d say we’re still early. You know, people love us. We have a ton of users that are habitual and will continue to use us. But every Sunday, you know, we want it. We exactly. We got you Max. That’s all that matters. Thank you. We want, we want millions of users, and we want to ensure that we’re providing value for all of the America that’s using the caper card. And so it’s still early, but I’d say that the success has been just like obsessing over what our customers want, iterating weekly on any, you know, small data point that we have that would show that we’re creating something that’d be net good for our user base. So yeah, by dropping like one piece of hardware into the grocery store, we’ve provided value for our retail partners, and it’s continuing to churn and ensure that you’re providing more and more value for the retailer, but also just focusing hyper, focusing on the customer, and seeing, like, how we could crank up utilization rates. How could, we could ensure that there’s, you know, high stability, no abandonment, and that everybody after using the caper cart goes like, yeah, of course, I’m gonna use this when I come back.
Max Branstetter 24:37
Well, of course, we’re gonna take a hard right here with our caper cart, and wrap up with a couple quick more segments, just more focused on you, your personality. The first one is called the unusual so pet peeves, quirks, weird talents. This totally like does not have to tie to taper, to caper as well or taper. I don’t know what taper is, but it’s about you personally. What’s a quirk you have? Something a little bit quirky about your personality that maybe friend, co founder, team, family, somebody calls you out for, but it’s who you are. That’s
Ahmed Beshry 25:07
a great question. I think that’s a that’s a really good one. I think I that there’s, like, this level of energy that I’ll bring to the team that is borderline annoying. I
Max Branstetter 25:19
didn’t know where that was going.
Ahmed Beshry 25:22
I yeah, I think, like, one of those things is, as a founders, you want to have this, like, you know, crazy energy. And I just bring that to the team, I think, all the time, to the point where they’re annoyed of me more often than not. So that’s probably it, where I can kind of turn that on and off. But yeah, in general, I think spend more time with me. Maxwell, we’ll go Sunday shopping together. And,
Max Branstetter 25:42
yeah, exactly, If only you were passionate about your your creation. Yeah, right. Really missed the ball on that one. What’s a pet peeve? Something that just ticks you off a little bit, but it’s like, really just a tiny thing in the grand scheme of
Ahmed Beshry 25:55
life, if you waste a minute of my time with anything like and time, I think, at this point, has become the thing that I value most in life. And so, you know, my poor co workers, if they are in a meeting that’s running inefficiently, I will throw a grenade into that meeting, blow it up, and then, and then, you know, try to try to restructure it or end it completely, yeah, or in life, I mean, Instacart. I’m an Instacart user, because I value time. I think that that’s one of those things pet peeves. If you waste my time, I’m I’m going to be mean to you in
Max Branstetter 26:29
the nicest way possible. You’re going to hate the next half hour of this recording where you, yeah, watch me and hear me play the harmonica for half an
Ahmed Beshry 26:36
hour. So, no, no, that sounds nice. That doesn’t sound like a waste of time at all. No, that’s, I
Max Branstetter 26:40
couldn’t think of it better used to time, actually, all right? And then weird talents. I call them weird talents, but it’s really like party tricks. Like, what’s something that, like, you’re just, like, really good at, but it really doesn’t have much
Ahmed Beshry 26:50
impact. It’s, I not good at anything. I don’t know. I things I’m really good at. I can solve a Rubik’s Cube really quickly. That’s my party check.
Max Branstetter 27:05
Perfect. All your answers go back to not wasting time, which
Ahmed Beshry 27:09
is trying to be faster at the Rubik’s Cube. That’s my thing.
Max Branstetter 27:14
Perfect. Have you ever timed yourself? Yeah, but I’m
Ahmed Beshry 27:18
not gonna say it on this podcast, because it’ll just be embarrassing, because there’s gonna be, like, some actual pro cubers out there that are gonna just laugh at me. You
Max Branstetter 27:25
never know. All right. Ahmed takes 10 minutes. Peru cube, so, yeah, hey, that’s
Ahmed Beshry 27:33
pretty fast with me. All right,
Max Branstetter 27:39
let’s wrap up with some rapid fire. Q, A, you ready for it? Yeah, hit me. All right, let’s get wild. You went to University of Alberta. Am I saying it right? Alberta? I feel like anything Canadian, I just butcher for no reason.
Ahmed Beshry 27:54
No, no, that’s That’s it. You nailed it perfect. So
Max Branstetter 27:57
I turned myself in for nothing anyway, just from, like, conversations with, like, you know, friends, family, anybody who went to a university in the US, what? What’s something that you think is like, the biggest difference between a Canadian university and the US university, I
Ahmed Beshry 28:14
think the unit, the US universities know how to have a lot more fun, core, core in the in the US, the identity of the US university, we are pretty studious. And just, you know, getting in the books is and then I came here and I’m like, Are you kidding me? I could have been doing this instead, you know, like, they’re, they’re pretty similar, but yeah, it seems a little bit more fun down here.
Max Branstetter 28:38
And do you call it uni, or is that just Europe, in the UK? I
Ahmed Beshry 28:41
think that it’s a, it’s we don’t call it College, call it uni. I think it’s more, more often uni than not. Yeah,
Max Branstetter 28:46
college can be more, more specific to, uh,
Ahmed Beshry 28:49
yeah,
Max Branstetter 28:50
a subject matter on that note, actually, I know one of the things you studied was, was chemistry, what? What’s this like, an an element, pun intended. What? I don’t mean a periodic table, but what’s an element of chemistry that you’re like, you really geek out about
Ahmed Beshry 29:04
the bits that I loved were on the inorganic chemistry side, that you see a lot of applications in technology today biochemistry, just like I nerd out on my own reading, which is like, you know, when I’m thinking about, like, health and nutrition and trying to understand why a specific thing is healthy or interacts with my body the way it does. I think everything that I learned in the biochem world was helpful there. But for technology, inorganic chemistry is just like it’s super fascinating, and you see it pop up here and there to date.
Max Branstetter 29:33
And for those this is definitely not me, but for anybody who might be currently blanking on what inorganic chemistry is, explain what it is
Ahmed Beshry 29:43
the chemistry of all things that are not carbon based. So you think about like, your all things that are in organic, huh? In organic? Exactly, yeah. When you think about like, I don’t know, the creation of, like, a solar panel or your OLED. Or, you know, some of these more technical applications of chemistry, or technology related applications of chemistry. That’s where we’re Etsy. Yeah, perfect.
Max Branstetter 30:08
And thanks. That definitely wasn’t for me. So thanks again. And then last one, I just thought the name caper is really cool, and I’m sure this is what you had in mind. But have you ever thought about a brand partnership with, like, the top brand of capers, you know, those little like salty green things
Ahmed Beshry 30:24
for the executive of the caper brand out there that is listening, we want to partner with you. I have been trying to get in touch with you for years, and so please, please answer my emails. Please respond to my letters.
Max Branstetter 30:38
You heard it here first, the Caper Capers. Ahmed. Thank you so much. This has been awesome, as if it’s not obvious enough, absolutely love your product and like everything with the company, it sounds awesome, and it’s just blast meeting you and learning from you. No, I appreciate you. Yeah, of course, of course. So where’s if somebody wants to try caper capers now, if somebody wants to learn more about caper or just connect with you personally online, what’s the best way for them to do so,
Ahmed Beshry 31:08
they could email me. They could slide into my whatever apps are out there.
Max Branstetter 31:14
Slide into his whatever.
Ahmed Beshry 31:17
and I will respond to you. But more importantly, you can learn Caper.Ai has a bunch of details. There’s an Instacart website out there, or you can just google Caper carts and you’ll find out as many details as possible. Would love for more people to use it and share their feedback. That’s another thing that I love, is when people just directly email us and tell us how their experience was good or bad, things they’d like to see. And again, as the whole theme of this podcast was, we will iterate obsessively and make your dreams come true. Perfect.
Max Branstetter 31:49
Well, if it helps, we’ll start going every day. We’ll just split our shopping into two items per day, and then you go exactly seven times a week. Users, awesome. Last thing, final thought, Sage is yours. It could be a quote or just like words to live by, or a personal model, whatever you want send us home here.
Ahmed Beshry 32:05
I mean, I what I love about this, this podcast, it’s, it focuses on something that I for the last however long I’ve been doing, this has just been it consumed my life, which is the entrepreneurial journey. The the folks that I think listen to this are, are entrepreneurial in nature. Want to build something, or want to see a future that that’s different than the one that they live in, and ideally a better one. So, you know, for folks out there that are about to take the leap, it’s like, what’s really unique about life is that you get to build the future that you want to see. And for the folks that are doing it, and it’s hard and it’s a struggle, there’s a quote out there, and I think it’s that, you know, still water has never made the best sailor, something along those lines. And it’s extremely difficult. And I think it was extremely difficult for us for the first five, six years. There’s still, you know, very difficult days today, but you become exceptionally good at handling and resolving the problems that that you would not be able to to handle, you know, five years back and so, yeah, whoever’s like floating on the edge, jump in. Start a startup. Work at a startup, you get to create some some pretty magical things and create the future that you want to live in.
Max Branstetter 33:14
And eat some capers while you’re at it. Thank you so much. Ahmed for coming on the podcast, sharing your incredibly cool caper story. And thank you, Wild listeners, for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more Wild stories like this one, make sure to sub-follow, almost said sub-follow, to Subscribe or Follow the Wild Business Growth podcast on your favorite podcast app, and make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well. On YouTube that is @MaxBranstetter. You can also find us on Goodpods where there are good podcasts and podcast recommendations, and for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. That is where podcasting meets entrepreneurship and terrible puns you won’t find anywhere else, even in the Iberian Peninsula. And you can sign up at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter. Until next time, let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!
