[00:00:00]
John Yang: It takes on average about two hours for a retailer to ingest that invoice in order to get that product ready to be sold on the shelf.
Intro: Welcome to the Kaya Cast, the podcast for cannabis businesses looking to launch, grow, and scale their operations
Tommy Truong: John, thanks so much for joining me today.
John Yang: Thanks for having me, Tommy
Tommy Truong: You know, it's not very often that I can talk to another tech CEO.
John Yang: Not often, really? Why is that?
Tommy Truong: Well, not on camera. You know, you're probably-- It's been a while since I've had somebody in tech on the pod
John Yang: What do you usually have on the pod?
Tommy Truong: Oh, that's a good question. We have all sorts of interesting people from, operations all the way through to compliance consult- you know, the whole facet of what a dispensary owner kind of needs to know in their business. So it's been a while. Happy to have you on.
John Yang: [00:01:00] Yeah, I'm honored
Tommy Truong: But, you know, guess what?
I talk to the team a lot. I feel blessed that I'm living in today's kind of time. I feel as though there's so much uncertainty, there's so much change, particularly in SaaS, B2B SaaS. You know what I mean? But I'm grateful for that because the change of the internet.
Internet took years for adoption because of people just didn't have the bandwidth. Computers weren't there. Internet, if, you know, if you're my age, you have to call in. It just took a while before adoption. But with AI, we already have the devices for adoption, so it's going light years, and the technology, it just improves week over week
John Yang: Oh it's, it's immense. I mean, every single morning I wake up and try to-- feel like I need to catch up to the latest. Well, What is, what is Claude releasing today, you know? Uh, and they just released CoWork and I'm not-- Like, I'm jealous. I can't use it yet. I have a PC and I have a Mac. They haven't [00:02:00] released it for PCs yet, so like I'm behind.
I feel like I'm behind half my team
Tommy Truong: Wait, you're not on a Mac?
John Yang: And on a Mac Treez is a retail operating system. It's point of sale, right? There's more than that, but point of sale requires touch screen. You wanna touch stuff. So early on when we were testing, releasing, demoing, I needed a laptop that's a touch screen so I could travel and show people and click.
And, you know, Mac today still, you still can't touch it. So for the longest time, and PC
Tommy Truong: That's so true 'cause the Surface is, for me, if I was... It's the best for travel too. You have something that's super powerful. You pretty much have a laptop tablet type of thing going on, right?
John Yang: Funny enough, the Surface Pro is our top recommended point-of-sale hardware. If you're o- opening up a new retail and you don't have anything yet, go buy a Surface Pro, right? And if you go to like Nordstrom's or big malls and like just high traffic retail, a lot of times Like I just try and notice what devices [00:03:00] are they using.
And more often than not, at least in yesteryears, you're seeing PCs, like Surfaces and stuff like that
Tommy Truong: It's like the most powerful and you get the full stack, the full Windows stack, right?
John Yang: Yeah, that's right
Tommy Truong: Yeah. I am, I'm an Android person, and I've, I got converted to a Mac a few years ago. And I don't like the, the Apple ecosystem. I'm not an Apple guy. But the one thing that they have right is their hardware.
I can work now without a mouse. It's just... You know what I mean? So I'm fully Mac, but I'm an Android guy
John Yang: They're fully matched. Do you have a iPhone or
Tommy Truong: I'm on Mac on my computer, but on Android on my
John Yang: You're still Android phone. Wow. You're, so you're still the green guy when we text you on
Tommy Truong: Yeah.
John Yang: You're the reason it's a green bubble
Tommy Truong: Yeah. So
John Yang: you guys finding... You mentioned AI. How are you guys using AI over at KayaPush?
Tommy Truong: Good question. Well, internally now [00:04:00] it's identifying the processes that make sense for AI. So for me there's always a grid, and you look at how complex is the task versus how simple is the task, and then how precise do you need to be versus how non-precise you need to be. And so we're now revamping or re-looking at all of our processes from nuts to bolts and then assessing, okay, where-- what, what, what makes sense for us to plug in an agentic workflow?
How about you guys?
John Yang: Yeah. I feel like we need to graduate every year differently. So like last year we said, "Hey, everybody needs to use some form of chatbot tool," whether it's ChatGPT, whether it's Claude, whether it's Gemini. Like you can't write an email without going through it. You can't do anything without at least interfacing with it.
And I think as tech companies, our employees do that pretty well. Like they wanna help themselves in a given day. They only have so much time, and there's a, a, an unlimited amount of work. What we [00:05:00] realized is connecting these tools to what we have internally was a big headache, right? Like we use Salesforce, we use, this for billing, QuickBooks for billing.
We use X, Y, and Z. A lot of that information is needed. So like the example I give is the, the most time suck is when I have to go ping my team about a customer status. Like what is the account overview for customer A? And it's taxing. Like I'm actually wasting hours of time when I ask just on Slack one question, right?
Because CSMs have to go pull up all their tickets and all the, like the big pain points or maybe the happiness, whatever it is. I have to ask finance and billing, are they up to date? I have to tap into Salesforce to understand like what product lines are they using, right? And where could we improve?
What could we upsell them? All the above takes a lot of time. And so if we had an agent and we had these tools connect to all of our source of records, [00:06:00] that now becomes one message, one prompt, and an answer within five seconds, right? So that's what we did last year, and I feel like that's an example of what we did last year.
I feel like this year we just have to go deeper into use cases like that example. I'm sure that exists not from me going to my team team, but like team leads going to their team members. There's gotta be a version of this where it's just laborious, unnecessary. How do we go address it?
Tommy Truong: Yeah. You know, you hit the nail on the head too. That's actually a project that we're working on right now because we have half the information on one platform and the other half on another platform. So you wanna marry your Zendesk tickets, conversations with customers, QBRs with, um, platform utilization, and then your customer health score.
Well, that's-- those are three things, and where do they live, and how do you make sure that it's in one database and that you have [00:07:00] some analysis on what's happening?
John Yang: Yeah. So like That's exactly right. That's on the internal side. We're thinking about it for our customers too, our retailers. As a refresher, Treez retail operating system, we have point of sale, we have payments, we have e-commerce. We launched loyalty last year. So it really, it's really encompassing from a data standpoint.
I mean, we're talking about a complete consumer journey that happens within our system, right? Like a, a consumer walks into a dispensary or a retailer starting from identifying themselves, searching on their site for what they carry as a dispensary, going to the shop, looking at it, touching it, buying it, paying for it, and then getting some points for it.
Like we serve all of that capability, but that's a lot of different data points, right? And, and imagine that's the consumer side, but there's also the product side, like the product has to exist. The goods have to exist before a consumer can purchase it. So we also track that journey too. So the data fidelity is [00:08:00] pretty complete.
And it's actually what we realize it's very suitable for all these LLMs. And so we're, from an external standpoint, looking and investing into things that cut down labor for our retailers. That's easy to say. That's not as easy to just put a chatbot on top of the data and then hope for the best.
Because if you think about it, customers go from a bunch of visuals, dashboards and whatnot, and they need to then go make some decision on. Now they have a chat widget to do it, but they still have to do it, right? The core problem is they still have to internalize all that, whether it's in visual form or text form, and they have to do something.
And so the one area we're starting to work on that's been that we're hearing a lot of success in is an invoice that a retailer intakes. It takes on average about two hours for a retailer to ingest that invoice in order to get that product ready to be sold on the shelf.
Tommy Truong: Oh, okay.
John Yang: Right? And w- and let me explain, like, [00:09:00] why the two hours?
I mean, it's a damn invoice. Like, how hard is it to enter an invoice? Well, it's actually pretty encompassing. The invoice could be pretty long, it could be pretty detailed. It is very detailed. When you just enter the invoice, these products that gets created in the system, they're just shell of a product, right?
What- whatever your favorite edible is, when you enter it in the invoice form, it's the bare minimum product name. There's no images, there's no descriptions, there's no attributes. So all that have to be entered in parallel or sequentially after you enter the invoice before it gets put on the shelf.
And so we're working on something right now that automates all of that so that a retailer is just part of the review flow. So like I then take that invoice you, I just read from your email. It's now a draft invoice that's in the system. I've created product shells, complete product shells for you with complete descriptions, images, attributes, names.
Now review it, and when you review it, tell me if this is right or wrong because every correction you provide [00:10:00] allows agents to be a little bit better. But even in just going through this example with some of our retailers, they're saying like, "Wow, like that could cut down my two hours to maybe 10, 15 minutes."
Right? And if each iteration gets better, like it'll cut down that time even more.
Tommy Truong: It's so interesting 'cause I-- That's so true. So that's the ongoing investment that a retailer needs to do. It's kinda like scheduling your employees. You have to do on a weekly basis
John Yang: That's right. They do it multiple times, a week.
Tommy Truong: Yeah.
John Yang: Yeah
Tommy Truong: primed for that too. Do you think that Agents will get... I guess it can get so... Would you be able in the future to pull in product descriptions, I'm guessing from the vendor directly, where the vendor just now supplies everything that, you know, at the-- ultimately at the end of the day, they're the brand and they know how to market their product
John Yang: What's more nuanced than that then [00:11:00] first of all, yes, if I'm intaking a Wowed gummy or a Kiva edible, I'm going to their site. I've sourced it. I have a repository. I could reference it. But s- not all vendors keep that up to date. Sometimes vendors just send you one sentence, right? And so you want to, you want to make that a little bit more verbose because I want to show it on my e-com.
I want to show it on my menu. I want some SEO optimizations around my product content. So there's there's examples like this where it's not so simple. But yes, ultimately it's to link them to the supply chain so that's more, you know, conducive for when they receive an invoice.
Tommy Truong: It's funny that you mentioned that retailers have to enter it in too, and that's a problem that we have right now with our technology, is it's really easy to create a product that's 90% there, but the last 10% for production is where the hard part is. And what we find is that it's really... We're not-- It's just not there [00:12:00] yet to expose the endpoints to an LLM from a security perspective. That's one. But from a consistency perspective can you recreate the same action 100% of the time? If you can't do that, then it's not ready for production
John Yang: Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. That's why I still am a little apprehensive of just releasing a chat agent or chatbot on top of data, right? Because it could go all sorts of directions and get the wrong recommendations. But if I could just cut off workflow, cut off hours that you have to do anyways, and you're, you as the human are part of that feedback loop, then you're getting smarter.
You're actually accepting the results, and you're part of that flow, so that's important, right? And then, so the other thing w- initially when we were thinking about this approach, it's, well, will we offend the doer, right? Like, is that cutting their job away? Do they think their job's at risk? But that's, in our industry in, in, in cannabis, that's not the case.
There's just, there's a lot of things you need to do. There's not enough people, [00:13:00] right? We're showing this for someone that's wearing four different hats, and if we could take off one of those hats, they're still employed, right? They could-- They need to do the other three jobs.
Now, this is the portion that we can alleviate. They're happy with it. They're the hero. You know, we wanna find that hero.
Tommy Truong: But, and I'm sure that there's more value-added work that they can deploy for sure with their time, and this is the, the bottom of the pyramid and, you work your way up, I guess
John Yang: Yeah, absolutely.
Tommy Truong: That's awesome. What other areas are we ready for on your platform? Some of the things that you guys either have in, even in concept that you're thinking, "Hey, this is probably worth exploring because it's gonna save our retailers a lot of time."
John Yang: So this is coming at what I just described there as an example, we'll call it invoice automation. That's coming out this first half. But if you cascade from that, there's a lot more because you have products coming in, now you have inventory, right? But that inventory, you have data visibility [00:14:00] into who's the demand for this inventory?
How do I segment my customers out that has purchased this before or will likely purchase this, and how do I outreach to them? And because we also have an e-commerce engine and a loyalty engine, we can kind of help touch that customer along the way. So for example, if you have Kiva edibles, you had it before, tell me you've bought it before, now you may get an automated notification that it's in stock, right?
That's the easiest example. But when you land on the e-com, it's very targeted. We know exactly who you are, right? And we may surface as a tile, as a product tile, the Kiva edibles top of the list dynamically for you as you're viewing through. 'Cause a lot of times you look at a menu, especially within a dispensary, people that are really proud that they carry five, six, 700 SKUs, it's actually a pain for the consumer.
I'm looking at a Chinese menu of like, wow, I don't f- I want to talk to somebody because I don't know what I'm looking for, right? So making these tiles personalized tiles that resonate with you, hopefully we get to the point faster, [00:15:00] right? So those are different areas where we have inventory coming in, we can help predict that demand or attract that demand and help con- make more conversions happen.
Tommy Truong: The data you guys have is so rich because you really have complete picture of the customer and the customer buying journey, and that's invaluable. Coupled with, obviously, you guys have really good data on inventory and sell-throughs and s- things that, that you started with, that's powerful
John Yang: And what they're searching for. So a lot of what point-of-sale has is just a complete sale. So they've made that purchasing decision, they left the shop, right? But we also have e-comm, so when people land on your site before they come into the shop, what are they searching for? And if they search for stuff and they leave before converting, that's invaluable data too
Tommy Truong: Yeah. Huge. That is-- That's actually more valuable
John Yang: There's more value because you might keep searching for Wild and they only carry Kiva. It's like, all right hey, you guys have [00:16:00] 100 you know, occurrences of people searching for Wild in this one given day. You probably should carry some Wild
Tommy Truong: Yeah. It's invaluable, for sure. Kind of like being able to peer into your customer's brain when they're in shop and pull that data out of their head. You actually have that online
John Yang: That's right. None of that gets captured. The actual physical interaction is not captured whatsoever
Tommy Truong: No. You know, you would prefer customers shopping online in that regard 'cause it's just, you got so much more data
John Yang: Exactly
Tommy Truong: Where do you think-- what are some of the things that you wish you could do and that you want to do but it's like, okay, it's just not there yet from where the LLMs are?
John Yang: Um, Wow. Uh, I want to create some purchase orders for them, right? I wanna like not just recommend it, but create some purchase orders for them. I don't think the LLMs are ready to make consumer recommendations just yet, or I don't think it's very effective. [00:17:00] And like I was at the National Retail Conference earlier this month.
Google was showing all their good jazz out there, right? Like you have this agent, you put, pl- put it on your e-com. I think the example I saw was I'm a party supply store, so I sell party supplies, right? And so I have a lot of stuff to pick from, but instead of going through a menu and picking stuff, I have this widget that pops right in front of you.
I'm an agent. It's like, "Hey, like, just upload a picture of your backyard, and given what we have, I'll create an image of your backyard with all the different party supplies there," right? To, for your, whatever your daughter's birthday party. And that was pretty cool. I don't see how it works for our dis- our industry just yet, but it, that's pretty cool.
But the thing is, in, even in that demo, once you went off script, it started to hallucinate a bit. It started to go towards just making sure you make the purchase. And so like I don't think some of that just that virtual assistant for commerce is ready for [00:18:00] primetime just yet. I think it'll get there.
And I'm also not sure that, again, going back to the you have 600, 700 SKUs, like how effective is it for that recommendation through that chat interface? Like maybe you're still looking for the image of it. Maybe you're still looking for some of the filters and some dials because you want to get to the point.
Maybe you're just looking for things that's in stock and you know what you're looking for, right? Like I don't think everything has to be forced through that chat interface. But I think it'll get there. It won't... Probably this time next year it'll get there.
Tommy Truong: I wonder if, and, good data in, good data out, shitty data in, it's never gonna work. But I would love, and I don't know I've actually never-- I go online and I don't see this, is the ability for you to chat, like just talk about what is it that you're looking for as a consumer, like an educated consumer.
I'm looking for this profile, I'm looking for X, Y, and Z terpenes, and then have a, an interface with an LLM where I can talk about what I'm trying to achieve, right? [00:19:00] And it can recommend me based on, "Hey, based on what you're looking for, these are the products." But they would have to have a pretty good robust profile and terpene profiles and all these things, and it's not there
John Yang: There, there's that and there's the what if it, like what you wanted wasn't the effect? So how do you follow through? How do you follow up there? You have a b- bunch of pissed off consumers that took your recommendations and they came back and said, "Well, I need a refund. This wasn't effective."
look at this screenshot of the recommendation thread.
Tommy Truong: Yeah, it's just not there. I know
John Yang: Yeah. So I'd much rather right now I think where they're at is helping back-of-house flows, helping like day-to-day labor flows. Like that's where we're focused on. Like I think we could chomp at the bit and we could get quick validations 'cause we're talking about in a dispensary maybe 20, 40, up to 40 people that would touch the product that'd give you that feedback as opposed to like thousands or tens of thousands of consumers they may sell to and try to make that more pinpointed.
We're not there yet
Tommy Truong: And I think your approach here is smart because it's less risky if [00:20:00] it's in-house with trained people, and it's a wild, wild west when you expose it to the public, like, 'cause customers, for example, you can't really train them, you know?
John Yang: That's right.
Tommy Truong: Right?
John Yang: That's right. That is right. Um, Even like the uh, you know, we started this as what we're doing in AI. I think the journey for us like the start of all those external-facing tools starts internal first. Because when we onboard a new retailer, and then let's say they're active and they are converting from a different point-of-sale provider, there's that data migration piece, right?
That's very taxing. And so before this journey, before all these AI tools, we did it manually. We had some-- we wrote some tools, but most of it's CSV, most of it's manual images. You still gotta get a point-of-sale provider to go export all those pictures and whatnot. So that was very labor-intensive.
And so even our own use case started with how do we speed that up first? Because we're spending tens of hours trying to do a data migration. If we could cut that [00:21:00] down, now in that journey, we saw, wait, we could do this while they intake an invoice. Why not? So like that's how we've we always wanna eat our own dog food first and solve our own problems first, and our PMs do a great job of identifying when that can actually resonate with a external-facing feature.
Tommy Truong: And it's so true too because the data migration is insane for a POS, 'cause you're capturing over... I think of the, like at a restaurant you're really recreating the menu and doing all these things, and that's just, that's a lot of work. That's where the work's at, right?
John Yang: Yeah, it's complete data fidelity, right? Like you got the customer, you have every product, you have inventory you have the payment methods, you have discounts. You have all this because you also need to report it to the different states that we operate in. So the accuracy has to be there too. And then you have to store that for future auditability.
So yeah, so it's tends to be more accurate than not in the space we play in.
Tommy Truong: You know, the last time we spoke, and this was maybe two [00:22:00] years ago, two or three years ago, I know Treez was coming out with a product or features to help operators reconcile with Metrc or with BioTrack back then. You know, given where technology is today, a few years after our conversation, where can you take this, I guess, where can you-- Is there an opportunity to help retailers even more in this area?
John Yang: To reconcile and to make sure that
Tommy Truong: save time on the back end of the reconciliation with the government
John Yang: Yeah. So we're not there yet in helping them count. You still have to count your inventory. We have tools to help them with the counting, but we can't automate that just yet. But in terms of reconciling and communicating with the traceability systems, now it's Metrc. Metrc just bought Biotrax, it's predominantly Metrc.
We've always developed what we call internally trace trees, but really it's just a reconciliation flow to make sure that every inventory and batch is, up to speed between the [00:23:00] point of sale and Metrc in this case. So we've done a good job at that. I don't see anything that jumps out at me that we can improve further because ultimately it's still a manual exercise of I gotta count it and then make sure that count matches what I submitted to the state
Tommy Truong: Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. That's true. I'm very unfamiliar with that process, so I had to ask you 'cause I remember our conversation. I'm like, "Oh, is there something there?" But you probably would be on top of it if there was
John Yang: But, you know, having said that, if our customer's telling us, like, there's things I spend 10 hours a week doing, and here's how I'm doing it. Help me figure out how we reduce that down to one or two like we did with the invoice," then we're all ears
Tommy Truong: You know, John, how much of your product development and product roadmap is internal on, "Hey, this is where we wanna take the product," or external with talking to customers and figuring out, okay, these are the pain points, or this is what customers are asking for, feature requests, [00:24:00] and incorporating that into future builds?
John Yang: I think a majority stems from talking to customers. It always surfaces from pain points. I'll give you one easy example. When we started, we didn't have e-commerce, right? Like, there was e-commerce providers. We just wanted to be a good point-of-sale and then, and offer good integrated payment solutions.
That's the bread and butter of a good point-of-sale company. In talking to our customers, especially in the last two, three years, every support ticket, every m- um, topic in, in person was about, like, "I have pain points with my e-com provider. They're pointing fingers at you. There's tickets unresolved.
Like, when I create a discount in the point of sale, it doesn't automatically appear on the e-commerce. That sucks up a lot of time, right? Can you help us with that?" And when we didn't get the responses from these e-com providers, because some of which are our point-of-sale competitors, we decided, all right we need to make the investment to make our own e-commerce engine, 'cause it's just, at the end of the day, hurting our retailers' businesses.
So a majority of what we [00:25:00] allocate in our product roadmap stems from customer feedback. Even like on this AI front, right? Like, they didn't ask for, "How do you automate my invoice?" Or, "How do you, like, go help me fetch the right images and descriptions?" But "I spend two hours per invoice. What do I do with...
Like, I need some help there. What could you do?" So mostly from customer feedback.
Tommy Truong: Wow. You, you guys decide, hey, we're gonna-- we need to add e-commerce onto our suite of products. Do you guys typically think, okay, is it an acquisition with strong APIs or is it build? How do you choose? Or there's a fork in the road always
John Yang: Yeah. I'm glad you asked. In, in this case, we did make an acquisition, right? So, build versus buying most of the time you wanna build it because any kind of M&A or integration's tough. Like, that's-- most of the execution risk f- comes from trying to tuck someone else in. It's different products, different cultures, a lot of different things that you [00:26:00] didn't start with.
We were very successful at this e-commerce tuck-in because we actually found the company through our customers. So one, one of our larger customers was using this e-commerce engine, it's called Gap Commerce. And they were using it, they were loving it they were raving about it, and they showed us areas where it actually addressed some of our point-of-sale functionality gaps.
And so the more we learned from our customers, the more we interacted with this partner at the time the more we really just made them part of our day-to-day, right? Because we, again, at the end of the day, are trying to solve for our retailers. And when they're instructing us with the needs, requirements, and whatnot, working on a team gave us a lot of visibility into is this gonna be the right fit culturally and, you know, everything that's, that's necessary.
And so in that exercise, we decided, hey, making the acquisition makes a lot of sense, and it's proven well. Like today, about a year, just a little over a year of, uh, since the acquisition our own e-commerce engine is the top provider f- across our retail [00:27:00] base for
Tommy Truong: Oh, wow. Wow, that's huge. Congrats
John Yang: Thank you.
Yeah, that's, you know, that's a success story, but it's not often when you can tuck a company in and make it a success
Tommy Truong: Well, there's just, like you said, it's just so much work, not even from the people. The people perspective is a lot, but there's a lot there, right?
John Yang: That's right. Yeah, most of the time I think I would recommend building, right? Because you also don't wanna carry the technical debt from at times when you make an acquisition
Tommy Truong: Yeah. But you guys found, and either through luck or through serendipity, the right company, the right- with the right tech stack, and they're probably the right size, and it all fit
John Yang: It all fit because it worked for our customer, and it was a large customer, so right, right? There's a luck component, but, you know, we have a lot of customers that have pain points that tell us, like, their needs and desires every single day, so
Tommy Truong: Where... Is there an aspect of the customer journey, and not necessarily Treez's customer's customers, but of the retail [00:28:00] buyer, right? I go into retail, I buy.
John Yang: The concern, yeah
Tommy Truong: Yeah. Is there parts in their journey, their buying journey that you're looking, "Hey, we should actually own that we don't own today"?
John Yang: Um, I don't think we own much of the consumer journey. L-like our bread and butter is B2B software tool for the retailer, right? And so any feature that helps a retailer indirectly helps a consumer decision. So we don't look to own anything as part of the consumer journey, but we would love to build things that help with any friction points of that consumer journey
Tommy Truong: So is there any points of friction during that--
John Yang: payments is a big friction,
Tommy Truong: payments? Yeah. Payments is
John Yang: You're in Vancouver, right? So like you don't face that friction. You go to the shop and you're pulling out your credit cards to make that purchase
Tommy Truong: No, n- but you know who I was talking to? Gosh, let me just... I was talking to hold on. Have [00:29:00] you heard of pay real
John Yang: Yeah, I've heard of PayReal
Tommy Truong: It's-- I-- So I had their CEO on, and she was talking about how they've figured out a way to accept credit card, but it's like a barter system that you do. So it's, it's not like fully solved, right? You still need to go through a K- KYC the first time and all the, all these things. So I appreciate the stuff that you guys go through in the US
John Yang: It's not easy, no. I mean, like I think ACH is the most kosher if you're talking about an online transaction through e-commerce, but the ceiling is limited. Like even the best adoption for ACH solutions, like at 15% of total payments, but the median's around 3%, 4%. So it's-- the utilization's fairly low for ACH.
We're actually really proud of our payments product line. Early on it was just, "Hey, make the point-of-sale integrated with an in-store payment solution. How hard could that be?" Well, it's actually [00:30:00] pretty damn hard 'cause there's no real good solutions. Or there's a lot of different solutions, you all have to integrate it.
So we took the approach of decoupling our payments product line, making it almost like a little mini Stripe but for our own internal consumption. And we took that product line and integrated it with all the viable processors out there. The ones that PayReel's talking about, we probably are integrated.
I know PayReel's a, a reseller of many different solutions, but at the back end, there's all these integration points that we've made the investment into. So when a Trees customer signs up for payments, they can sign up for all sorts of payments modalities. Interface is still the same, reconciliation is still the same because that's the main pain point of an accountant or a CFO figure, right?
Like if I have all these different deposits, different reconciliations, different X, Y, and Z, I gotta make sure at the end of the day my dollars and cents match. So we took that effort early on, and so today, the Trees Pay product line's integrated with 13 different processors. Some ACH, maybe that barter [00:31:00] system, I'm not quite sure.
But we always look forward to anybody listening on this podcast, if you have a new solution to, come to us and we can talk and see if we can integrate it. Because this industry, especially in the States, need more payment solutions.
Tommy Truong: Yeah. Where do you think that's headed now with rescheduling?
John Yang: Hopefully so that more normalized solutions come out, right? More pin debit solutions, one-day credit card solutions. But more important than the rescheduling helps to normalize this space. We're looking forward to things like the Safer Banking Act passing, giving some safe harbors to the fintechs and to the banks, 'cause ultimately all these rails have to touch these players, and if they feel comfortable with the space, then we'll see more solutions become available
Tommy Truong: When that happens, would you go through the merchant route too and add that on?
John Yang: to the merchant routes
Tommy Truong: Yeah, would you do what like Toast does and, just I guess Treez Payments, obviously.
John Yang: Yeah. No, I think we'll [00:32:00] always stay as an integration layer. We'll help them sign up, we'll help them, get through what they need to get through to get the processing integrated. But we'll always be a, a layer removed. Like, we won't offer our own processing, for example.
Tommy Truong: No? Okay. Why not?
John Yang: It's complicated, man.
There's a lot we have to tackle for our,
Tommy Truong: the compliance is crazy, right? I'm, I'm
John Yang: is crazy. Like, yeah, it's a lot of work
Tommy Truong: Yeah, no, it's true. The clients is crazy. That's, 'cause I'm a part of the, the restaurant industry too, so I'm very much a part of the restaurant industry and the cannabis industry. So what I see in the restaurant industry from a POS perspective I'm like, it's gotta come over to cannabis.
They're so much further ahead in terms of the maturity of the market. So I always think about, okay what are they doing on that side that we'll eventually see on our side when regulations ease up?
John Yang: How many restaurant point of sales are there now?
Tommy Truong: A lot.
John Yang: Still a lot, right? Like hundreds
Tommy Truong: got like 1,000
John Yang: [00:33:00] thousands? Wow.
Tommy Truong: I-- You know, there's a handful of really successful ones. There are ones that are... 'Cause there's a million restaurants in the US, right? So there are ones that are spe- they specialize in quick serve, for example, and they're the biggest quick serve that you've never heard of before. So there's niches within niches, and there's a lot of restaurants that have maybe a thous- uh, sorry, POSs that maybe have 1,000 restaurants
John Yang: And that's enough for the booger business, yeah
Tommy Truong: Yeah, it's enough for the business, right? So there's a lot of that. It's a massive, uh, massive industry
John Yang: How uh, do, do you like... Which space do you like more? The restaurant space or the cannabis space?
Tommy Truong: It's a tough question. I like them both. Like the reason why I say that is for different reasons. In the cannabis space, what I find is that You're part of a community where your backs are against the [00:34:00] wall, and it's more of tribal because it's really, it's us against in my view, against the world.
Like, nobody wants us to succeed, right? So you get connected to people a lot faster, if that makes sense, 'cause we're on the same team. We just want the industry to thrive, right? And so that's what I get from the cannabis industry. On the restaurant industry, I really like just how big it is in a sense where you'll see opportunities or you'll see people do things that you've, you can't, you don't, you won't see in the restaurant industry 'cause it's such a bigger t- market and there's just so much more money that there's just crazier ideas, if that makes sense
John Yang: Makes sense. I see the grind in both industries, right? They're all in it for the grind. They all roll up their sleeves and do all the dirty work, right? I do also get the cannabis space has more of the freedom fighting element to it that, that bands us together. When it's really difficult, when it's-- I remember like early years, it's like 2016, 2017, I was in these shops doing a migration, doing an activation.[00:35:00]
It's like 1 or 2 AM, right? It's really late into the night. But all the dispensary staff are all there. They're still laughing or getting pizza, and they're just like looking forward to the transition, looking forward to opening. They're all, all about it, even though it's the toughest of times. And like fast-forward a decade later, 10 years later it's still a grind.
It's still more of a grind, arguably
Tommy Truong: Yeah, it is. It's- it truly is. I've never met people more passionate than I have in the cannabis industry because they're not just passionate, it's not just about money. It's-- Cannabis is a medicine. It is if you consume it right, you know?
John Yang: No doubt.
Tommy Truong: Right. 'Cause that's a caveat, you know?
Huge caveat, but yeah, it's a medicine. And so there's a lot of passion in different fronts. You know what I've always wondered? Where do you think the health industry in cannabis is going? So you have rec, you have medical, but you also have health, and health for me is what I'm [00:36:00] into. I'm into productivity.
So you have THCV, you have CBD, you have CBG, you have CBN, and you have all these cava- cannabinoids that enhance your life, not necessarily alter your reality. I think that there's a huge opportunity in this industry, in this space, but what are your thoughts?
John Yang: I think there just needs to be more education, right? There's a huge movement in general onto alternatives. You see the whole Gen Z and younger generations stay away from alcohol. They're going into more alternatives, and they see cannabis as one of those. But if you want that health element to it, not just medical, just the health element to it, people needs to be educated, right?
There's not enough research, there's just not enough study, there's not enough anything to give them that confidence. So they'll try a lot but I think that's what's lacking. And that's what I look forward to with rescheduling. At least normalize it a little bit more, put some money, open up some money and funding into these research so that we can look at it and make more informed decisions
Tommy Truong: Yeah, I'm w- I'm with you. That's [00:37:00] the one thing for me is if... you know, rescheduling for me opens more questions than answers, and one of the big... Money's gonna come in, right? What happens? The industry's gonna change, right? There will be opportunities, but there's gonna be some casualties as well.
John Yang: If the, I like to say positive, like if the pie gets bigger, then everyone will be healthier, and that's what I look forward to, right? Especially for our retailers. Like we're only focused on our retailers. If there's more cash in their pockets because of the tax implications with rescheduling, they're gonna grow, they're gonna spend, they're gonna expand, they're gonna be healthier.
And I just look forward to that pie growing overall
Tommy Truong: John, is there anything that's happening, like what keeps you up at night that are maybe not within Trees' walls, but globally or nationally in general? What are some of the things that you think about that will impact business [00:38:00] and, that you're assessing how to navigate forward?
John Yang: Yeah. There's just a lot of uncertainty in the world today in all sorts of facets. Feels like every weekend I wake up to something drastic or new and unstable, right? That keeps me up at night because I'm 41 now, and so I have two kids and, like, the world that they're about to enter is drastically different.
I feel like I had it good growing up in the '90s and the early 2000s, and I don't think it's the same for my kids growing up when they reach my age. Um, so parts of that keep me up. As, as far as the business is concerned, I do think it's lucky to be in tech, in vertical SaaS and vertical tech with this niche.
Uh, today with... AI with a lot of uncertainty too, right? If you read the CNBC or Bloomberg today, there's a lot of talk about AI cratering the valuations of general software companies. Because if you could recreate things on the fly and it's more unique to your use cases, that's a lot better than using all these horizontal softwares.
[00:39:00] So you have to keep up with the wave. You have to figure out your niche. You have to protect it, protect that. And I'm... So I'm glad that we're in this vertical niche because there's a lot of edge cases we've been solving over the last decade, and that's hard for something like cloud or general AI to get into right away.
But we always need to stay on top of it
Tommy Truong: Yeah, I agree. And the competitive advantage now for software companies is data. You have um, that's your IP, you know?
John Yang: And the data lies-- Within that data are the edge cases of the, of all the, uh, workflows. Yeah.
Tommy Truong: It's true. Software is more cheaper and generalist software, like I, I look at an ADP. They're... you know, our, our industry's a little bit different. Payroll is kind of a different, a, a different problem to solve. But scheduling, for example, scheduling is a, a very easy problem to solve now, you know?
You can probably spin up a scheduling software, overnight and s- and solve problems. So [00:40:00] unless you're niche, unless you specialize in a particular industry and you're solving real problems in that industry, it's gonna be tough
John Yang: I read this article of a new startup that's like, "I have AI agent that's your executive scheduler," right? Finding times to block because you get on these threads with four different companies. You wanna get them all at the same time, find a s- a calendar slot. You know how long that takes, the back and forth, right?
But I see a company starting with the agents to solve that and yeah, it's that I could see why it's eating some of these scheduling companies' lunch.
Tommy Truong: Yeah, it is, right? Gosh, we live in such amazing times. Never
John Yang: time though. You know? Like I, I feel like I missed that I missed the dot com boom, right, when I was too young, right? So I'm not gonna miss the AI boom. And so I feel fortunate to live, to be doing this and to have the knowledge in, in some capacity as we go through this AI age
Tommy Truong: So where do you think-- how do you think robotics is [00:41:00] gonna change the g- everybody's into LLMs, but they don't know what's coming around the corner. And around the corner is you're gonna be able to buy a physical personal assistant for 30, 40,000
John Yang: Yeah. You know what I find funny about robotics? I, I think they're gonna do wonders, right? They're gonna do my laundry, they're gonna pick up my stuff, my kid, hopefully. But, uh, they'll do wonders. The funny thing is it's humanoid, like the robot has to look like a human. Like, I don't think that's the mo- that's not the most efficient thing to do as a robot, right?
You don't need these five, uh, fingers on a hand to be effective, right? But that's what I find funny. I, I'm not sure if I look forward to it, but I know that it's gonna happen. Uh, it's gonna be... It's gonna change our lives. A decade from now, you'll have a lot more robots. They may not be in the form we're thinking about today or what we're seeing being developed today, but they're gonna be, uh, in, in our lives
Tommy Truong: It's funny you say that because I was, uh, watching Elon talk about Optimus and he was [00:42:00] detailing how hard the engineering is for a hand.
John Yang: Is it really?
Tommy Truong: Yeah. He's like, "The hand is really hard to engineer because if you just think about how
John Yang: The dexterity required? Yeah
Tommy Truong: touch and how precise you have to be, it's really hard engineering."
It's funny.
John Yang: Iya.
Tommy Truong: It's gonna impact our industry and not necessarily the cannabis industry to begin with, but the
John Yang: I would pay more for a more efficient robot if, that meant it didn't come with hands. Like, it came with some other attachments, I'm fine with it. Just gotta solve my problems
Tommy Truong: I know, right? Maybe just a bunch of instruments that you can just
John Yang: It's a magnet or whatever, right? Just be creative
Tommy Truong: Yeah, it's crazy. It's interesting. Do you follow what's happening right now in terms of the debt market and the currency? What's happening with currencies and
John Yang: I know the money printer's going off nonstop. I know like silver is like all-time high, gold's all-time high, crypto's now part of the wave. So I've been following that. I, I think what's growing even faster than that is [00:43:00] memory, like SanDisk and Micron, if you're invested into that, like it's, year to date it's grown like 2, 300%.
Tommy Truong: Wow
John Yang: Um, so yeah, as I've been following just from a general trend. what thoughts do you have on that?
Tommy Truong: It's weird because I don't see the US coming out of this unless productivity increases dramatically. Like, it's really hard if your debt increases by a couple trillion dollars a year. Eventually you're not gonna be able to pay the interest on that. When you're not gonna be able to pay the interest on that, now the Fed has to s- buy the debt, and when the Fed buys the debt, it's gone.
It's over. And we're closer, we're closer to that happening than a lot of what a lot of people realize, right? So we're not-
John Yang: does that keep you up at night as a Canadian? Or do you worry about your,
Tommy Truong: that keeps me up. All countries are in the same boat.
John Yang: Yeah
Tommy Truong: Like, I follow the US a lot more because I think [00:44:00] where the US goes is where the world goes. Like you- if the US goes down, come on, consumer capital of the world. You don't-- Like the entire world is gone, you know? 25% of the world GDP.
John Yang: Yeah. It's worrisome for sure
Tommy Truong: Yeah. But I-- We're closer to that than what a lot of people realize. And, we're not 10 years away. We're shorter than 10 years away. And when that happens What happens?
John Yang: People are buying a lot more weed.
Tommy Truong: Yeah.
John Yang: Yeah, no,
Tommy Truong: might have a point
John Yang: it's a good thought. I haven't been thinking about that. I've been following it, but I've been thinking about that because I just try not to think too much about things I can't control that much. But I hear you
Tommy Truong: So we-- for me, I was thinking, okay what do you do in a... If you look at the, the previous crashes like in '08 or, or even like it's more, we're more akin to like 1970 than we are in '08. [00:45:00] And how do companies position themselves to win in that environment? So there's gonna be winners and losers.
In any, in any, uh, event, there's gonna be people that make a ton of money, and there's gonna be people that'll lose a lot of money. So it's like, it's just what ledger do you wanna be in, and how do you position yourselves accordingly before that happens? And that's... Yeah, that's tough.
John Yang: It's tough, yeah. You see, like, pr- probably more, more unemployment, yeah? Like less payroll running and less scheduling. So that's gonna be impactful
Tommy Truong: Well, you're, you're, you're starting to see that right now with AI. And, you know, we're at kind of the weird infancy right now where I don't know if you're... If you're like 45, 50 years old and you're getting replaced, I don't... you may not have the skill set to learn a new profession.
You know? Somebody that's 55. I don't know. You gotta be very rare to be able to adapt at that [00:46:00] age, right? So what happens? What happens when 20% of the population, for example, gets replaced and we're in this weird transition phase now where it takes a generation maybe or 10 years maybe for the workforce to adapt?
I'm sure that the workforce will adapt, like humans are very resilient, but there will be a lot that are left to slaughter, for example. And it's gonna be a, a rough transition, I think
John Yang: Yeah. Hopefully some of this AI advancement helps them learn much faster too. But you're right, like in this current period where we don't know what that advancement's going to be like, you're in-- stuck in this limbo. Like, especially I think if you're in a managerial position, you're mid-40s, 50s, like you hear this Amazon and Microsoft going through tens of thousands of li-- of, uh, layoffs.
A lot of it ha- is happening in that manager, uh,
Tommy Truong: Yeah.
John Yang: So I think there's enough other companies right now to absorb some of these management positions. But [00:47:00] you're right, like two years from now, what's gonna happen?
Tommy Truong: Yeah it's all of this is happening at once, and that's why, you know, the only thing that's missing then is aliens visiting us, and we have the freaking, the trifecta, you know? Right? What a time to be alive. We got robots that we're
John Yang: someday we get to check all boxes. I thought we're not gonna, we're, we're not gonna live long enough to check all these boxes. Maybe we
Tommy Truong: I know. But can you imagine if, if all of that happened within our lifetime? Jesus. This is it right here, guys. The epitome of human civilization
John Yang: Look forward to it actually
Tommy Truong: John, I, uh, first I wanna thank you so much for coming on. I've... I don't get this opportunity a lot just to talk with, another CEO in our space. Uh, it's, yeah, thank you so
John Yang: Thanks for having me. And then I, now that I know you're in Vancouver, like I said earlier, that's my favorite city in the world, so I'll find a reason to stop by and visit you in person
Tommy Truong: Y- definitely. Please do. Before you [00:48:00] go, were, is there anything that we didn't cover in terms of what's ahead for trees in 2026?
John Yang: Um, just want the listeners to know what differentiates Treez from some of our competitors or, you know, when they pick an option for a point-of-sale provider. Our sole focus is to make them more profitable, to make retailers more profitable, right? That focus starts with just focusing on retailers.
We don't focus on being an ads company. We don't focus on cultivation. There's other companies that do that well. If you need those integrations, we'll help support that. Every product, every feature, everything we do is to help them grow their business, right? We really pride ourselves in the service and support.
Nobody f- on our staff that's in support, in customer service, uh, is overseas. They're all in North America. They're all going to be in their time zones. They're gonna pick up the phone when they need to, to answer your questions. I think that's paramount, um, in their operations. Uh, and, you know, we really pride ourselves in, in doing that for our [00:49:00] customers.
Tommy Truong: I've never heard one negative comment about trees
John Yang: Oh, I appreciate that. Yeah, that's a reflection of our team. Yeah. Thank
Tommy Truong: Yeah. So you guys h- uh, have a really high spot in, in, um, the retailer's mind
John Yang: Appreciate that, Tommy
Tommy Truong: So how can our listeners find you?
John Yang: You can just go to Treez, T-R-E-E-Z.io, um, and you could just click on the Contact Us there
Tommy Truong: John, thanks. Thank you so much for joining me today
John Yang: Thank you, John. Thank you, Tommy
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