- Hey guys, really big news today
for a company I'm super excited about.
Standard Cognition is one of the best companies
I've had the chance to work with over the past few years.
Today, they're opening three new micro-convenience stores
that are completely cashier-less,
and completely camera driven.
This is the first few stores of thousands
that are on deck to be deployed.
Here's footage directly from their store
at the University of Houston that just opened today.
And this is a big deal.
Even companies like Amazon can't do
what Standard Cognition is doing today.
Camera-only means that it's ready
for rollout to the whole world,
for an order of magnitude cheaper than everyone else.
As you can see, the experience is really simple.
Download the Standard app, tap to check in,
pick up anything you want and walk out.
I got to sit down with the co-founder and CEO Jordan Fisher
to celebrate this big moment, and get his take
on what all this means for the future of grocery.
(upbeat music)
Jordan, congrats on today.
This is a really big day for Standard Cognition.
- Yeah, yeah, we're super excited.
We've been working, really, for the last couple of years
to deliver the future of shopping.
And our belief is you should be able to walk into any store
in the world, grab what you want, walk out,
skip the line and just get your receipt.
And to achieve that, you really
have to be able to do two things.
Number one, you have to be able
to take existing stores and transform them.
We call that a retrofit.
So can we deliver this new, amazing experience,
autonomous checkout, skipping the line, in existing stores?
That's step one.
And step two is, can you do this at scale?
Can you really show this as a repeatable process
that you can take many stores and transform them?
And we're really demonstrating both of those things today.
We're launching three stores where we're retrofitting them.
Shoppers can now shop, grab what they want,
leave the store and get their receipt
automatically in all three locations.
So we're incredibly excited to show that
this is a repeatable process that we can take stores
and transform them to give that amazing, new experience.
- In my mind, the two really remarkable things that
you were able to put together here.
One is actually being able to track people.
Two is actually being able to track the item.
And then I know I said two,
but it feels like there's a third,
which is actually being able to integrate
with a third-party inventory system,
and all of the difficulties
of dealing with other people's data.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, we thought we knew what most of the challenges were
when we were working to get our own store launched,
a Standard Store here in SF.
And yeah, a lot of amazing computer vision challenges,
tracking being one of the biggest ones.
How do you anonymously track people through multiple cameras
as they go through their entire shopping trip?
It's really something that's a state-of-the-art system
that didn't really exist before we even started.
So that was an incredible challenge,
and lots of other interesting computer challenges as well.
But what we've learned over the last couple of years
is even once you've got those basic building blocks
in place, integrating with that retail store,
there are operations, there's SKUS,
the way that they do stocking,
the way that their planograms work.
It's much more chaotic and much more challenging
to meet the retailer where they are
when you can't actually reach across and say,
hey, let's maybe change how this works,
or change how this looks,
or change how the shelf is going to be displayed.
You don't have those abilities anymore.
And you really just have to say, okay,
completely hands off,
let's meet the retailer where they are,
and just make this work.
So it was really interesting to cross that final chasm.
- So today at University of Houston,
what people are going to be able to do is download the app,
install it, walk up to basically a micro-kitchen.
- Yeah, it's a mini-convenient store.
You know, all the sort of fresh food sandwiches,
CPG's brands of snacks and drinks, et cetera.
Yeah, they'll just be able to walk up like they have before.
This is the same store that they know and love,
the same products that they know and love.
And we're just going to get them
into that store and out faster.
We've actually seen some shopping trips
that have been as fast as three, four seconds.
You can literally run in if you're late to class,
grab something, tap your phone,
and you're out literally a couple of seconds later.
So it's just a drastically faster way to get what you want.
I like to think of these stores
as really becoming your personal pantry.
That's how I think all stores should feel,
grab what you want and get out.
You shouldn't have to fumble around with
a self-checkout machine or wait in line.
It should just be getting the things you want,
and that's the end of it.
- It's three stores initially, and really sort of
the first of really thousands in the next few years.
- From day one, really, we were thinking about scale,
and how do you build this in a way
that is not just going to be low-friction for the shopper,
that's obviously incredibly important,
that's the obvious part of autonomous checkout,
but how do we also make this low-friction for the retailer?
So that once we've delivered this,
we can deliver it over and over again,
and make it really easy for them
to scale this out into their massive fleet.
So Compass, who's the partner that
we're deploying stores with today,
they have over 15,000 locations.
And just thinking about that incredible scale
was something we knew we had to do from day one.
So you know, it's the cost of the system.
It's the simplicity of the installation.
It's the ability to merge with
the existing operations of that retailer.
You know, Compass has hundreds of thousands of employees
that man these stores, stock these stores.
And if you're going to change the way that they do that,
it's really going to be a nonstarter.
So it's really just about how do you make this
low friction for the retailer,
as well as the shopper,
so that it's going to be easy to scale out.
So really it's been from day one
that we've been thinking about this.
And we're just really excited that now that
we've done a demonstration in multiple locations,
we can start focusing on that actual scaling process.
- Big day, Jordan, just getting started, I guess.
Thanks for joining me.
- Absolutely, thanks so much.
- Congrats again.
(upbeat music)