18 months ago PAR brought in a new CEO. Out went the CEO placed by the patriarchal founder and current board member, John Sammon, and in came Savneet Singh, a younger, software-focused tech executive who saw the opportunity in Brink and was willing to roll up his sleeves to turn it around. Remember, PAR had long been a government contracting business, and in 2015 they stumbled into Brink, a restaurant cloud POS, which candidly became the saving grace of the company.
And over the past 18 months we’ve watched Savneet labor furiously to implement good software hygiene and transition PAR from a government contracting and hardware business into the software (and hopefully data) company it needed to become to survive. As of this writing there is still more to do, but it does very much look like Brink and PAR are on the right trajectory. (Note: NCR should have hired someone like Savneet to evolve their hardware culture but their rubber stamp board is useless).
Brink sits in an enviable spot in that it’s the only cloud POS company to have truly “crossed the chasm” in enterprise. The way that enterprise sales work is a bit backward, but it goes like this:
Customer: I have 1,000 locations and need a new POS because staying with my current POS (almost always Aloha) is worse than putting ghost pepper extract on my toilet paper. Who’s your biggest customer?
Cloud POS company: We have a 500-unit chain, and…
Customer: Not interested. We are a special unicorn. I can only use your system once you have a 2,000-unit customer. Come back later when you have one [generously applies ghost pepper extract to his role of TP while he hurries off to the bathroom]
Part of this irrational behavior could explain why Toast POS got out of the enterprise market: it’s really hard to crack. But once you’re there, you’re there. And that’s where Brink is: the only cloud POS company to have gathered logos from 1,000+ unit operators.
It’s no secret that POS companies want to monopolize the stack; the same companies that can’t even build a functioning online ordering tool are somehow going to build marketing and analytics and loyalty and reservations and, and, and. You get the idea.
Which is why Savneet’s latest shareholder letter stood in stark contrast to other POS companies. You can read Savneet’s letter in its entirety below:
But here’s the part that we feel is most important:
Today, we at PAR believe we are moving towards the next evolution– software as a platform. A world where the best software products enable customers to innovate by leveraging the building blocks developed by others (i.e., tools or collections of tools from different providers). The best products will be modular, allowing users to use collections of existing protocols or APIs to build a customized service for their business. Every building block added to the platform, makes the platform inherently more valuable. This model moves another step away from the perpetual license model – it’s the difference between extracting value vs. adding value. Platforms encourage data sharing, movement of protocols, and leveraging the building blocks of the modern-day software supply chain. They are definitionally not closed. I believe PAR will be the software platform for the restaurant of tomorrow. The idea of being a point of sale application will become a vestige of the past.
Savneet Singh, PAR CEO
Let’s digest this for a second. Savneet founded Tera Holdings, a holding company that mimics the Berkshire Hathaway model with a software flair. On top of that, Savneet has served and continues to serve on the boards of numerous software and technology companies, including coventure and Osprey Acquisition Corp (NYSE:SFTW). Suffice it to say Savneet is one of the most well-versed (if not THE most well-versed) software executive in the POS space. Now remember, too many “executives” in the POS industries are either former merchants, hardware slingers, or payments bros – i.e. they wouldn’t know how to build, run, and scale a software business if they were handed the keys to Google.
So what does it say when someone this experienced in software publicly states something to the effect of,
Um, yea, we can’t do everything because software is really f*cking hard. But we’ll make sure to support our customers who want to integrate into best-in-class solutions because POS is going to change, and if we try to build all this crazy, non-core shit we’ll lose sight of what a POS is transforming into.
And it’s not as if PAR is a private company either: Savneet knows they need to grow, and as an experienced software leader he’s surveyed the landscape and come to the conclusion that the best way to achieve such growth will be to turn the POS into a node. How do you expect to stay on top of the POS business as the market transitions to ghost kitchens and hardware-less setups if you’re also having to keep on top of all the other solutions you intend to offer? Look at what happened to NCR if you want a very recent example.
Shouldn’t this make other POS companies rethink their crap strategies?
We bet not. So we expect PAR to be the beneficiary of dumbass “strategy” employed by their competitors.
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