Mews PMS from Startup to $2.5B valuation. Matthijs Welle | Ep. 006

Alright, so today I'm joined with uh Mathis Velv, uh the CEO of Muse. He ran actually started his career with uh with Hilton and uh he moved to the to the tech side um and a long journey from uh from um from nothing to a valuation of uh 2.5 billion dollars and running an amazing company to today with Muse and a property management system of the future. And they move as well, they have this concept of moving from uh from Revpar to RevPag, the revenue prevable guest, uh which I'm very curious to to hear today.

Uh but Matt, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you. So my name is Thibaut Catala, I'm the founder of Catala Consulting, and this is HXT212. HXT212.

So, Matt, welcome to HXT212. Thanks so much for joining me. This is fun. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you started as uh as um you did the elevator program by and you went through your your way up with uh with Hilton.

Um so you you wanted to become a G. I was never supposed to be an entrepreneur of tech, like this is never my plan. I I just wanted to run a hotel. Yeah, and the elevator program was like a great fast track program to become a general manager in a hotel, and then just you know, nine years into that journey, I thought I'm just really unhappy.

And I feel like I've learned everything I can learn inside the hotel, but I have opinions about what I would do differently if I had control of the systems, and that's really when I ran into Richard and we we started this venture. But I was never supposed to be an entrepreneur in tech. No, you so I'm just very passionate about tech, but that didn't mean I have to build it. Okay, and you wanted to become a GM?

100% always from the age of four or five. I think my dad remembers that the first time we went to a hotel in Austria, and I walked in and I thought, this is what is this wonderful place where there's great food and people are friendly to me, and you you sleep in like this really comfortable bed, and then you get a chocolate on your pillow every night, and it just felt like such a magical place, and then everything in my life then led towards me first wanting to be a chef, and then I realized actually I want to be front of house, and then I started hotel management, but it was always channel manager that was the goal.

Which was it was in Austria or Australia? In Austria, so like mountains, like the Dutch people. We we migrate in the wintertime towards Austria, and the in the summertime we we migrate to France. Um, so I'm I I I've led a very typical Dutch life.

There you go. Yeah, same as me. Like uh I always I I remember like when I was a kid, I went to uh was it in um Monaco, and I saw the the the Grand Hotel de Paris. Yeah, uh, and I was like uh dad, one day I will be GM of this hotel.

And then I went my way up into the the industry, hospitality industry, and I realized what was the job of a GM. I was like, I'm not doing this, really hard work. Like, no, I'm not doing this. So I started to switch gears.

But you did work in hotels, right? I did work in hotels, yeah. Yeah, I did something similar. I did the graduate program of uh of IEG in Rush Management.

So I did the same, like uh for you as Hilton as IEG, and then I went up into Rush Management with Fentacontinental and then four season in Asia, and then I was like, yeah, no more of the corporate world, let's do something else. Yeah. What was the moment when you realized that no switching gears? No, he's sorry.

But there must have been a moment when you said this is not for me. Do you remember that moment? I do. I felt like I was a clog in the system.

I felt like um people were telling me, like, um, just take your paycheck, just do what we are told to do, and um sit down and uh relax. That's it. And don't have too many opinions. That's the thing I didn't want to have any opinion, yeah.

And that's what that was very frustrating for me because I felt like uh millions of people would have dreamed of this kind of position because you're well paid, you're okay, you're quite um comfortable. Yeah, but I felt there was something missing, and I think that's something similar to you. Yeah, yeah. There you go.

But I did I was not as successful as you yet, maybe. Yeah, but yeah, still time. You're you're very young. Thank you.

And um, no, so okay, that's that's that's also the early of your career. And I did some uh some research on you, so that's now I'm I'm getting into it. You or Chat GPT did research for me. I did, yeah, and ChatGPT deep and code and a lot of different systems, but I did.

Can you tell me more about Beyonce, the superstar, or my dog? The both. I I guess your dog is also a super. I just I'm obsessed with Beyoncé the superstar just because of the marketing genius that she is, the way that she is creative and that she pushes the boundaries of an industry.

And I think that's really fascinating to just look at like the way that she and Taylor Swift navigate that. But also, I just thought it was really funny to just name my dog Beyoncé. So when I'm in a park screaming after my dog, people are like, Is did he just scream Beyoncé at the top of his lungs? Um, and and it is really funny because everywhere I walk into, they're like, Oh, what's her name?

And like Beyoncé, and you just get an instant conversation going, so it's a really good like icebreaker. Do you think like they said, like, uh no, tell me the real name of your dog? Yeah, like I guess not the nickname, but like or like very some sometimes you meet old people and they don't know who Beyonce is, so they're like, Ah, Beyonce. I'm like, no, not Beyoncé, Beyoncé, the superstar.

And that's a Jack Russell, right? She's a Jack Russell, yeah. There you go. Okay, no, that's uh that's a good one.

Uh very fast. At least you can open a story on it, you can uh open conversation. That's pretty cool. Excellent.

So you train on uh on Fidelio, right? Fidelio 6, was it the blue screen? I think it was Fidelio 6. Okay, and uh it was kind of the gold standard uh at the time, and uh and yeah, you you you you describe it in past uh podcasts and recording that you it was one of the uh of the greatest hotel system ever built at the time.

Yeah, and uh but you you felt as well it was unchanged since the 80s? Like I still is it still you have some hotels on Fidelio still today? Don't think so. Yeah, I hope not.

Yeah, and uh and yeah, so when you were standing at the front desk at the time with uh Vilton, um, did you find any um any gap that you were missing at the time? Like you were realizing, like um uh okay, here I'm using Fidelio, but there's something missing. What was this kind of element that you found? So, not at the front desk.

At the front desk, you learn all the fast cuts, and like the front desk agents were all about data entry, and I could enter data faster than anyone else. It was really when I became the front office manager, and you were like, right, let me analyze, let me find some reports that are interesting. And I went through the 300 reports that come with the system, yeah, and they were bad, and the data was polluted because you know you look at your nationalities and where your customers are from, and they were all from what was the first country?

Afghanistan, I think, was the first one in the list because that's the one you enter through to get through the profile. Okay, it picked up the first country, so all your data just was polluted. So you I couldn't tell you what the total guest value was of my customers, I could only tell you, you know, how many nights a person had stayed with us from an IBM, for example. So it wasn't that's where I really got stuck at a management level.

Okay, so you you you saw like there was uh quite a few things that uh were needed to be changed as well at this time, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I had nothing talked to each other, so you had interfaces, so your point of sale could post some revenue against it, but none of it was innovative, it was just all the bare, absolute bare minimum, and we were already living this is in 2012. We were still running on DOS, yeah. We were all on iPhones back then already, like so you know, we think of 2012 that was like 14 years ago, yeah.

But we already had iPhones, yeah, and we were still in DOS, and that just pictures what our industry was at at that moment. Like we just have so much to catch up on. I see no, yeah. So it's uh it's a long way to go for since then.

And um, if I understand correctly, um so Richard Walter had the original idea for for Muse, and the idea started when uh when he was uh walking in uh in his hotel in in Prague, I understand and uh how did he go? Like um, how did he pitch you uh uh Muse? Do you remember this moment? Like, what was the thing that clicked saying, like, actually that makes sense?

Let me join this crazy guy uh in the middle of Prague. So I don't know the moments because it is in hindsight. I I I don't know what I was thinking joining Richard. Okay, like I love Richard deeply, like, but he's also you know someone you want to work with or work for, but he's also got mad ideas.

And you know, when we met, he was designing this hotel, and he was, you know, I'm just not gonna buy a reception desk. And I was like, so what are you gonna do? And he's like, No, you tell me what you do at Hilton. And I was like, You have no idea the technology I have to deal with every day.

And I think that conversation led to like there must be another brand that's doing something really interesting, or there must be a system out there that has an open API, so we can just build a really cool mobile app. And I said, I don't think so, but go and have a look around. And he he looked around, he got a few quotes, and there were there wasn't anything with an open API at that time, and that's really where he got stuck. And at some point he said, Why don't you just you don't seem happy in your job?

And I wasn't happy at this time of my career. It's like just join me, like you know, and and in my back of my mind, I had never taken a risk in my life. Everything was planned, right? From the moment I was four to go to hotel school, and every job I took was to build my resume.

And I thought, I'm 30, I'm miserable in my life, I have no mortgage, I have no kids, I can take a risk. And if this all fails, I can always go back to a hotel, and then I quit. And I think that the first few weeks I realized, oh, we have no idea how to build technology, like literally, we have no idea. We're just two hotel guys, and luckily we had a really fantastic set of um students that were studying at technical university who did know how to write code, but it was you know a complete new journey for us, and and we really thought it was much easier than it actually ended up being.

I think it's even better for you not being uh from the tech in a way that uh you were quite naive, so you just wanted to build something for the hotel, like hoteliers built by hoteliers for hoteliers. Exactly. Without the tech in mind, saying, like, okay, can you make it happen? And the tech guy would be no.

But at least it's well, like I remember vividly the day, like I think it was the day before we went live, uh, because they built everything within like a month and a half, so they've been they've been writing like the architecture of the system for months. Like, we had about six months from the moment we we started coding the PMS to the opening of the hotel. And I remember the night before the opening, and I said, But where is the night audit? Because I had you know learned night audits is a thing you do, you like you solve the no-shows, you do some reporting, and then you switch the day.

Um and I remember that conversation with the developer, and I said, You didn't build the night audits, we can't open with this hotel. And he said, Okay, explain me one more time what this bloody night audit is. And I explained it, and it's like we've solved for those things in a modern way because we they they weren't polluted with you know what we used to do in the past, and I think that is sometimes that fresh mind is really helpful. That's a big thing, actually, that you didn't think about it because hotels that are switching to Muse now, they're asking like, Oh, do I do the night audit?

Yeah, and like actually, you don't need anymore. We had massive resistance from customers until today, because they're we've been doing night audit for 30 years, and even in modern systems, they still do this thing with night audits, and we get real resistance in in when we run an RFP, and people are like, sorry, it's impossible. Like the accountant will not go with a system that doesn't have a night audit, and and and it's a real hurdle that still today we battle. Yeah, okay.

So it's more like a change of mindset. You have to show them actually maybe you don't need you, so you need to to have to accept that uh this is easier now because now I can say 15,000 of hotels run without night audit. So I think it can be done, but in the beginning they were doubting us, fair fairly so, because we really hadn't shown that we could actually do it well. Yeah, definitely.

And um I but I believe as well the the early the early stage of of Muse, the story of Muse at the beginning was uh actually remarkable. Um, was it was it tough to sell uh a new PMS to the market at the very very beginning because uh as you mentioned, you you you were not from the tech, yeah, and uh hard or easy it was to pitch a new tech and a new PMS actually. So we were just two guys with a laptop. Um so we were building in a basement in Prague, we had sold the solution to read the two hotels that his family was running.

So we hadn't sold it, we just built something for ourselves that we then marked to market, and we would take our laptop and we walk into lobbies of hotels and say, Can we meet with your hotel manager? And they're like, No. And then sometimes we we got through to them and they're like, Yeah, this is nice, come back when it when you have other customers. Because the first question with the PMS is who else is using it?

And we're like, We are using it in our own hotel. Yeah, so it it took a long time before we got to the first 10 customers. Those first 10 mostly ended up being friends of friends who had kind of bought into the vision that we had, but were taking some risk, but they were small hotels. But it really was like from 11 onwards when we're like, okay, so now we've got customers we can point to, this is working.

Um, but you definitely need a few risk takers that take a risk on you as a person because the system isn't great, but they trust in the vision that we had. Actually, for the small story before I move on, um, actually, I met you guys uh eight years ago uh when you were pitching at the Eccleston Square Hotel in London. Really? With Olivia.

Yeah, and you guys were pitching it. Yeah. I met you guys. We didn't win that pitch.

Not at the beginning? At the time we didn't win it. Okay. The second time we came back in there, we won it, but the first time they weren't ready for it.

And you know, in London, London was a tough market to get into anyway. Um, and and we really struggled in the the UK market in the beginning. Because they were not the mindset was still um yeah, I understand. But looking back at this time of of the early stage of Muse, do you remember it as a good experience, a tough one, or what was your feeling towards it?

If you should just look back, it was the best experience and it was the worst experience all in one because you have no cash. Yeah, so we weren't funded, no one wanted to fund us because we're just these two idiots with a laptop that couldn't sell anything, so no one would give us money. Yeah, and you're always figuring out how do I pay people the salary at the end of the month, and we never could, and we were always late with it, and it was just this complete hell of like how do we pay people salaries to the fun part, which is you're building at such high pace because there's no legacy code, you can just build feature on feature, and it was it was you're doing the support, you're doing the onboarding, you're doing you're doing the product management and the design work, and it's you really, as a person, have to cover so much ground, and it's as an entrepreneur, yeah.

That really is the fun part. Now I'm just the boss of a boss of a boss, yeah. And all I do is I sit in meetings and podcasts, and that's all I do in life. Which is good as well, yeah.

Now it's a different situation. I love I I love it. Yeah, but if this if this doesn't change, I won't love this long term. But luckily, Muse grows at such a high pace that there's always some new challenge for me.

But I do get bored very quickly. There we go. I think we are sharing a lot of uh of trade here, uh Matisse. But um I'm going to go a bit deeper on this because I know that uh you have been very mysterious about it, about the name Muse.

Yeah, because he referred to uh to a series of houses. I know in the English words, like uh it's a lot of different uh houses. But uh what's it what's behind the name? Can you tell me a bit more about it?

If you go to London, because I never noticed the word muse, but when you go to London and you look at the street names, there's a lot of Muse streets, yeah, and often you've got these beautiful um stately homes, like if you go to Reach and Streets, you've got the beautiful homes and hotels, yeah, and then the road behind it are the Muse streets, which is what originally used to be the stables, okay, and then once we stopped using horses, then it became where the servants were based.

So it was if you think about it, was the original back office basically that was running the front of a house, and that's really where Muse came from as a word that kind of stuck. There, Richard has also has another angle to it, which is like the the Muse houses, like with Monopoly, the different houses make up a street and that makes up a hotel. Yeah, so there's there's different explanations to it, but underneath it all was a word with four letters, and we're like, we love it, we will take it.

And just before someone was telling me, like, um, you you the name was before muse.ly was it uh was it a uh was a joke behind you or yeah, it was like everything was a word, so we're like in the morning you have Muse for breakfast, and you know it's healthy, so Musea because it made sense, and you know, museter instead of newsletter, or there's muse out news out. So everything had to be analogy to like to the word muse. Like every week we have an all-hands meeting where our entire company dials in, and it's called the amuse bush.

Right before the weekend, you have this small starter before you can start your weekend, and these wordplays just somehow stuck, which is fun. You should maybe you should have you should have called it muse. Well, no one no one understood what we meant with muse.ly.

Um so if you have to explain a joke, it's probably not a great joke. No, it's true actually. But um, if you were to make the the the problem actually concrete for for people listening to us, uh who actually never run a hotel. So when a guest walks up to a to a front desk today, what's the system that reception receptionists are using?

And uh and oh many hotels is still something built in the 80s or 90s. Like, do you feel that it's still like a hotel which are run like uh which are very old school, or do you think it's being better? Even hotels that have moved since so if you think about what happens at a reception desk, you walk up and and then you get in a queue, and then you get ignored for a while until they look up from their screen, and then they ask you for a passport and a credit card, and then you they print out a form that you have to fill in.

They take your credit card and they take payment against it, and then they have to give you a plastic key to get you into the room, and then they tell you where the elevator is and where the breakfast is. That hasn't changed. And and we often see even hotels that buy a system like Muse, they will just deploy Muse like that. And we can do that if that's the vision that you have.

But I think what I'd like to challenge hoteliers to do is think you that desk doesn't need to be there. You've bought a cloud solution that works entirely in the cloud. You could completely digitize the experience, you could go on tablets, you can have kiosks. What would you do with your hotels if there was no barrier of reception desks?

And very few hoteliers have actually really gone above and beyond and just rethought that. And I love it when I see it. Like when I really see a hotel diversifying the way that they're approaching that experience, yeah, but very few do it. And and it's it it hurts me because we built it for that purpose.

Yeah, sure, we can run on a big old Dell computer that you that you hide behind a reception desk, but it wasn't the purpose of news. Yeah, and I I still feel as well, like if every day, or not every day, but every two weeks, I I got some new leads. And when when I asked them to show me the PMS, and sometimes I said, Okay, I'm going to send you the Excel spreadsheet that we're using, or like someone show me like the Google calendar they were using to block the room and check in and check out.

So some hotels are stuck. Yeah, it does the job, yeah, right. They can put their bookings in there, they can check you in, they can check you out, they can print a bill, but it doesn't change the guest experience, and and you still have to have humans to run that process, and it's really, really painful and it doesn't scale. Yeah, and if you have to build a profitable business that iteratively makes more profit over time, you've gotta lean into the technology, and it's it's so smart today.

So, for the small um anecdote, actually, I uh I went to a hotel and during a meeting I asked them to show me the on the book, and the guy stood up and he was like, Okay, just a moment I'm going back. He left and he came back. He came back with a massive book of the on the book, and they were like all the revenue and everything on the book, and now that's that's not possible. It's still happening today, and that's where I believe like okay, we're talking about AI, about tech, about a lot of things, but you have so many hotels that have no clue what's going on, yeah.

And that's the beauty of it. I do believe there's a lot of opportunities for people who are looking to embrace and uh and uh and evolve to become more efficient. But the world is uh in our bubble, it's still quite advanced, but the reality is that the rest of the market there's still a lot of education to be done. Yeah, that's uh that's a big thing, and um yeah, like um can you tell us a bit more about because like today you have um um Oracle, they have like um close to if my research are right, they have 30,000 uh hotel customers, and you have been caught.

So I'm not saying it myself, you have been saying that um Muse is odd there to take them out because they're not doing a good job. So I think that was the system we reached out to at the time to get access to an open API, and they basically quoted us some insane amount of money that we didn't have. And sure they've moved customers into the cloud, but I don't think they've done the innovation. And and if you're a genuine hospitality system, we need to make it really easy for the hoteliers to innovate, and that's what we want to do with Muse.

Like, you you know, the way I show up, I am a hotelier, and if I can't use it, if I can't demo it to you, then our product is broken or it's not built in the right way. And I I have this genuine passion for hospitality. I've always wanted to be in hospitality, and I want to change it. And the best way to change it is by becoming the biggest, the fastest growing company.

But I I only want to grow by delivering the best product out there, and and and I think we're getting there, but we're not perfect, and we have to iterate and we have to keep building for enterprise. The enterprise serving an enterprise customer is very hard because they have so many requirements and integrations and and legacy that you have to integrate with legacy central reservation systems. So I think we still have a few more years ahead before we all take over the number one.

This part where you you you you let me if uh let me know if you want to keep it or not in a podcast. But if um Oracle comes to you and uh wants to buy you, you you will say yes or not. Uh we will always look at every opportunity that comes our way. I don't imagine that they will.

Um, I think it it makes sense for them to buy something more innovative, but that's my personal opinion. But I think you will never just walk away from an opportunity without listening to the opportunity in the first place, and I think that we have an open mind to everything. Very political answer to everything, actually. You're very good.

But um, yeah, so you you mentioned about a lot of friction about the the the cust the customer journey on the on the front desk and so on, and uh and today you uh correct me if I'm wrong, but the culture of the development of Muse is today to make the experience smoother and uh and uh and faster and and more efficient. So, can you work us a bit more on on this uh on this improvement and what you're trying to achieve here on the customer guest journey? So, if you take that check-in experience, for example, right?

There's so many friction points there that we can just automate the heck out of. Like, why? Why do you have to do all of these things while you stand around at a desk when you all have a smartphone? So we deployed an online check-in, for example, so customers can fill in their own profile and they can submit that credit card with their smartphone, as in when they're sitting in a taxi driving to the hotel, um, and you can download your key on your smartphone.

And it's we really think through what are the steps that are blocking this innovation, and then what would we do with modern technology to solve for that? And then what are the friction points that happen from the front desk to the housekeeping? So, why, when you walk into a hotel, why do they tell you your room is ready at three o'clock where you can store your luggage and then come back at three? And it's because housekeeping has never been enabled with technology.

They still have pen and paper, and then when the room is clean, they wait until three when they go home to give that piece of paper to the front desk. And it's like you've got to think through every department and how do you connect the technology into the ecosystem in the right way so that when I arrive at 10 o'clock in the morning, maybe they do have a room available, and maybe that's a great upsell opportunity to say, we do have a room available, it's you know, 20 euros for an early check-in.

Would you want to take that? And we actually find that a lot of hot a lot of guests take it. Take it, yeah. Like we have this great hotel in London, the Zwell, and they have a thousand pods, and they upsell so many early arrivals, but it does require you to enable your housekeepers to give those rooms back in the first place.

No, that's um, yeah. Uh I I I get your point, uh, and um and historically speaking, as well, a lot of of uh of hotels they bought that tech from uh a single vendor with everything in uh yeah all in one. Yeah, and I believe as well the the open API and uh marketplace, actually from for me the the one of the of the key things that makes uh made Muse successful was uh the marketplace. Correct.

For me, that's that's correct, yeah. Originally, originally, okay, yeah. Originally, yes, yeah. Because we had no money to build at all, yeah.

So the best thing we could do is build a really strong core, which was the PMS, and then open up the API and just say to the industry thing, you know, you've all struggled to integrate with the PMS before because no one wanted to do that. And we just said, well, here's our API, it's on our website, yeah. You don't need any help. We've written out use cases and just build it.

And we found so many startups that just started building towards our API, and then suddenly this whole ecosystem of startups started building around it, which is really exciting. But more and more, you know, we do see that customers want to buy all solutions from one vendor. Yeah, so we're we're always navigating this like how do we keep a really vibrant marketplace? Because the more tech-savvy hotels and the larger brands they want to buy best of breed and integrate that, but the small independent hotels, they just want to buy everything from one vendor and be done with it because they don't want to negotiate with 10 different parties to get everything that they need to be done.

So we're straddling both sides of that. I understand. And uh for me, the community around the muse is one of its kind. Like I really I felt like the community were actually it was fun, it was like a lot of uh conferences, the podcast, colors, podcast.

Like, I know it was really cool. Yeah, it's still cool. Don't don't don't get less sorry, though. Don't get me wrong, but I felt that made your your strengths uh uh at the beginning and the brand culture that you guys developed.

I think it was uh compared to the um boring or the legacy systems, yeah. That was a very differentiator than uh than uh but it was purposely done. We like one is me and Richard, we're just we have fun, we actually really enjoy the work that we do. We surround ourselves with people that we want to work with.

Like for me to want to spend 70 hours at work every week, I'd like to work with people that I actually really enjoy working with who are smarter than me, who are fun, and one of our values is really humor. Like, we we really seek out people that have a sense of humor. So that culture is is is is really critical that taking us where we are. But what the thing is that surprised me is that it scales really well.

We're what 1400 people today, and somehow, whenever you go to a trade show and you go hang out at the muse booth, there's just I don't know, there's some magic there, and even though we're not there anymore, somehow it it's worked really well for us, and it's just like fish things from that from the head, we always say like so. If if we don't live the values and it trickles down into the into the uh the bones of our system, uh our teams, it won't scale. And for us, it's done well.

And you look at our brand as well. We try to keep it really playful, but also professional because you're buying an enterprise solution for your hotel that is the most critical core infrastructure system for your hotel. So you do want to rely that someone's gonna pick up the phone in the middle of the night if something goes wrong in your hotel, but you can have fun with branding, you can push the boundaries, you don't have to go for red or blue or boring corporate colors from your brand, but you have to back it up with the the goods behind it as well.

No, you have the pink now, it's like it's clashing with I think it'll over the background. I didn't know it was gonna be all dark red, but like I love pink. I yeah, that's uh but still we can see you. That's still okay.

That's still okay. But uh no, for me, the community, the open API that's uh that makes a difference, and uh as well at the beginning, I have to tell you something the support, the bang bang support. Uh, that was something which people were saying, like you have to go with the system because they have an incredible support, yeah. Which got a bit worse after that, and now it's getting a bit better.

COVID was really hard, yeah. Like for many businesses, COVID was really rough on us because all the hotels opened and they're all closed, and they opened and they closed, and and you can't support that because when all of the hotels open, all the support tickets start to pick up, and we really struggled to come back from that at some point. And then about two years ago, we really invested in AI support, building our knowledge base that AI can actually serve well, and it's got a lot better.

I don't think it's got back to when we were small because I would pick up the phone, and yes, I know more about the system than anyone, yeah, but I can't pick up the phone for thousands of tickets that get opened. But it's the core tenet of who we are, like that really personal connection. It's it is hard because I do get personal reach outs by hoteliers, and they're like, you know, we used to be able to speak to a person. It's like, yeah, but what was the question you asking?

And then I see the question, I'm like, yeah, but AI could have answered that better than the person. And there's this graduation that our hoteliers have to go through saying, actually, it's okay to talk to AI because it's really helpful and it's instant. You don't have to wait for four hours to get a response on this question that could have been answered before, but it's hard because hoteliers are like, Yeah, but I want to speak to a person. I'm like, but with Apple you don't call the help desk.

With Apple, you go and you know, read online what you know, you go on YouTube to figure out how to do things. And we definitely, as an industry, you have to mature into the AI era now. I've I've I agree with what you're saying, and uh, disagree as well because I believe you're right. People even sometimes, like um, even with some of my hotels, um, they they go on Chat GPT and they found the strategy, and they word by word they found something, they're like, Yeah, doesn't make sense.

And then we we go on a call and I repeat word for word uh what GPT was saying, they're like, Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, because it's a human connection, it's uh it's uh they want to talk to human. And I've heard as well this concept of saying like um AI will develop and in the future everything will be automated by AI, and if you want to talk to someone, that would be a premium, you have to pay extra to talk to someone. Yeah, you see this model going through uh for some businesses.

Like I hope that's not the business that we'll get to. But if you want the luxury of handheld, like a human, because basically our humans are going in AI to find the answer for you, yeah. There's a benefit to that because you could either go into AI yourself and find the answer to most questions. Sometimes there's a genuine bug or something you uh definitely need to support.

Yeah, but our humans are gonna go to AI first to get you the answer. And if you want a hu another human to Google things for you, yeah, there's a premium to that service. But if it's a genuine problem, absolutely, you need to be able to reach the Muse team. Okay, yeah, I I got this one.

And uh and actually, you you so you mentioned that um uh Muse is also enabling for moving from a RevPAR, revenue previous rooms, to something you call Rev Pag, the revenue previous guest. Can you tell us a bit more about this, your concept here? So when I was working at Hilton at the time, you know, our biggest account was like an IBM or a McDonald's, one of these big corporate accounts, and we would run statistics report, and I would know exactly how many guests stayed and how many nights they stayed and what they spend on the room.

But I didn't know whether they actually stayed in the hotel to have dinner at the restaurant or whether they went to the spa. And it's this holy grail because that data was never connected, right? If I go to the restaurant and if I sign it to my room, yes, that might hit my room number. But if I pay by credit card or by cash, that would never hit my guest account.

But now because we have this full ecosystem and we know we're the credit card processor as well, so we recognize credit card tokens. So if I go and pay with my Apple Pay in the restaurant, that credit card token gets matched up to the profile in the PMS. And now we can match and merge these profiles, and then you start to really track lifetime value. And you might find that IBM or McDonald's are not your biggest accounts, that you know, they might be big accounts, but they're not the biggest because there's accounts that actually ended up spending a lot more money in the restaurant and the spa, and they're much more valuable guests to you because they do buy the upgrade and those big corporates don't.

And I think you want to know who are the most valuable customers from a total lifetime kind of value perspective. And we've never been able to unlock this as an industry, and we can now unlock it, and we're starting to see we have we've added on the guest profile this lifetime value metric where we just you know we consolidate all the data and you can actually see how much they've spent on a total perspective instead of just room revenue, and that's also why you're you're you're getting into um uh answered revenue with a parking spot or everything.

Like every inch of square meterage is real estate. And if your meeting rooms are sitting empty, and then you know that you might sell a meeting once every so often, but maybe it would do better as a co-working space. Maybe a karaoke bar is a better use of that space or a hair salon. And we're trying to get hoteles to think really about you know, you've got so many square meters, and we're now doing all of an analysis of our hotels to figure out how big are our hotels because if you ask a hotel like how many square meters is your hotel, they probably wouldn't know the answer.

But ChatGPT can have a good guess at it. So we're building out these benchmark reports so that I can show to hotel saying, for someone with your real estate in this in a location like yours that is a business hotel, you're not performing particularly well. Like a comp set of comp a hundred comparable hotels, they are doing much more, much better. Yeah, and then we want to give them suggestions of what they could do, and it's really just making sure that the best businesses run on muse, that's the goal.

We want to make businesses better ultimately, yeah. And then cooperating because uh with that's a concept which uh we have we have been trying to push in Rush Magic for a while, from RefPAR to T RefPAR, yeah, to the to the total uh uh revenue previous rooms, slowly getting there, like step by step. Um, but I believe as well the ref pack revenue previous guest is uh is also uh a similar dimension, yeah, more at the with the guest at the center, which makes sense because hotel is a very simple thing.

If they spend money, yeah, or even we can go even further on this. But yeah, that's uh that's uh that's uh that's a good one. I agree. Like the ref refpag should uh should have uh should have um should have some change.

But you think as well, it's uh it should be as well um I don't think it's just a metric change, it's also a mindset challenge, like a philosophical change as such. Well, like if you think about a revenue manager in hotels, right? So people have the title revenue manager, they really mean room revenue manager, so they only are targeted on room revenue and optimizing that. But I actually think it should be total revenue manager, and there's a shift in role because where previously revenue manager was sitting with Excel sheets trying to figure out what price to put on a room, suddenly there's computers that can do that infinitely better than a traditional revenue manager, but they should be revenue strategists, so they should be doing A-B tests saying, right, let me look at my upsell products, and maybe if I swap out this product for this product and I change the ranking, and let's see if that works.

And and they should get creative with kind of how do we drive revenue and maybe that room in the basement, maybe I should turn that into a karaoke room. There's this great hotel in Paris that turned this room into a karaoke room, and it makes fantastic revenue, and and it they should constantly be thinking about how do I optimize, how do I keep guests from leaving the hotels to go somewhere else. So maybe you need to integrate a restaurant booking app so that the moment someone books a room, yeah, you target them with booking a table at the restaurant for that first night.

And I think that is really where the revenue manager role will move towards. I have a concept, and you can steal it for me uh next time. I've uh I've I've created a concept about uh moving from revenue management to something I call euro, experimental revenue optimization, yeah. Where I believe revenue manager they move from descriptive to prescriptive, and I believe the next wave of revenue management will be about experimentation, uh similar to what you mentioned.

Yeah, about uh kind of I call them the revenue alchemist, where they are kind of a scientist in hotel, and because AI can do better at pricing, reporting, forecasts, and so on, and they should automate uh this as much as possible. And Revenue Manager should be here to experiment, like a scientist. Yeah, I test this, I see what's working, what is not. If it's working, I continue.

It's not, I double up, I do, I do something else. But Revenue Manager, as a scientist, as an alchemist, an experimenter. I think that's what is coming up. I and I think it's this comfort with constant testing.

Yeah, because what we do in hotels is like we build it and then we put a concept in, and then we walk away and we don't look at it for 10 years. Yeah, and we should just constantly do these tests. And but you have to create a culture where it's okay to fail, where it's okay to sometimes do a test and you admit that it didn't work. But you're like when you do a performance review with an employee, it's like how many tests that you run, how many tests that you run, and how many were successful and how many weren't.

And what have you learned from that? That should be the conversation rather than how much room revenue that you drive by you know uh increasing the price again. Yeah, no, it's uh I think that's uh that's where it's it's hitting right now. And um, if you had um a pushback from a traditional hotelier, I guess you'll you have it every day.

So let's say like I'm the the one uh pushing back, and I said, like uh Matt, uh, I I get it, uh RevPag uh sounds great, but I'm running a 200-room property in a mid-market city, my investor track a RevPAR and LGI and uh all the traditional ones, my bank tracks a ref power, my com set tracks ref par. So, how do I actually make the shift without losing losing the conversation with everyone who can control my capital? So they will look at RevPAR, but they also look at your beta at the bottom line.

And if you want to drive a beta and that increases every single year, because that is the expectation that we make more money, yeah, the product will deteriorate, right? The hotel that you build needs to get renovated, and every year it will get progressively worse, whereas you're trying to charge more for it than the inflation is. And that's really, really hard. If you want to constantly make those improvements on your bitta line that the bank really cares about, you've got to find it in other corners of the hotel.

And it it spoiler alert, it won't come from your roommate. Part of it will come from the roommate, but the rest of it has to come from like partnerships or ancillary services or bicycle rental or just getting really creative with your menu engineering in the restaurant to entice people to stay. But ultimately, it's really, really hard to progressively improve the results on a hotel. I'm fascinated because you have answered to everything.

You can you're very agile and you're you're well trained. And uh uh, so I've seen that you you Muse acquired DataChat in uh 2025, 24, 25, 25. What was last year? 2025?

Yeah, yeah, because yeah, so which is an AI company, and uh and you are you are you're talking about building towards this kind of uh agenc um uh hospitality uh systems. Yeah, can you tell us a bit more? What does it mean? Like, or does it look like in practice?

Yeah, so the the first goal was really to build the semantic layer, which means a level of understanding of how your hotel operates. Like, tell me about your hotel. What time does the restaurant open? Do you have room service?

Does it run 24-7? So all of the logic of the hotel we're trying to replicate into the semantic layer that AI can then use because we do all operate very differently as a hotel. So one layer is the semantic layer, but also is all the systems that we have in the hotel, they have to be deeply integrated so that we can actually leverage the AI across those systems. So if you would get a message, for example, from the guests, you're staying in a room here.

Let's assume this is room 101. You message the reception, that's because I WhatsApp nowadays. I've I stopped using those old-style phones in the rooms. I WhatsApp the reception and I say, Can I have shampoo?

And instantly that number gets recognized in your PMS profile. It can dig into the housekeeping app to find shampoo, which floor I'm on, which housekeeper to allocate that task to. Um, it will make allocate the task, but then it will ping you back saying, We've actually allocated it to the housekeeper, they will be there in the next 10 minutes. And it's it's it's all the pieces that it the semantic layer tells you who the housekeeper on the floor is in that particular moment, the interconnectivity between the systems.

And that's really where the agents come in. So we're now getting to a point where we we've released AI tooltips recently where we absorb everything we know about a customer. What did they spend last time they stay with you? Um, what are the reservation notes?

You know, and and and we give a tooltip to the front desk agent saying, beware the customer likes mojitos and um you know he's lactose intolerant. Yeah, and it was a static note, and now that's being turned into an active note because now our agents are like, Well, the most likely action to take from this note is that we should get the housekeeper to replace the milk in the fridge to a lactose-free milk because he's lactose intolerant. And we're now embedding like that's the next thing we're we're testing.

This morning I was testing that in a system where it turned the AI notes into saying, Would you like to create a task out of this? Because it's copilot, because no one trusts that the system should do this. And fair, we need to earn the trust. Yeah, so right now the copilot will be like there's a button that we're adding there saying create a task for this, and it's really saying this is actionable data that makes you run more smoothly.

Okay, so can we can can we expect to see more and more AI within uh Muse? Like we're doing multiple tests at the moment um of the most painful processes. Like we go through our hotels and we interview a lot, like our product team interview a lot, and we find you know, things like the Tetris, right? The the the big the room uh location where you move things, and this is like people love it because if you're a front desk agent, you love the Tetris because you're like, right, I need to find the best room, and they love, but actually, it makes no sense that humans do this today.

The complexity of reading all the notes and figuring out what room to allocate and who to upgrade at which time, and yes, can I give them a lay checkout or not? That is a great AI use case that we're currently looking at, for example. And and like that, there's multiple back office processes that we're looking at, and like this makes no sense that humans still do this today. And we're just data chats, they are AI first.

These are this is a team of people that are all so young and they understand how to do this with AI today, and it's so exciting to spend time with those kind of people that can just make it happen. Um, yeah, I'm excited about this year. Okay, looking forward to I'm curious now because you yeah, I've heard like from uh different sources that um yeah, AI is coming big in uh in Muse. Yeah, and uh I know that will be the next wave of uh of Igentic, which is cool.

Very curious to see what he got. And as well as there's uh in any trend, there's also a counter-trend. What do you think about this kind of movement about okay, take uh AI, automation, and so on? Do you think it's uh it's uh it's also a bit of a threat to um what make what makes hotel so special about the human element, the warmth, the connection, and so on?

What's your take on this? I think there's a threat. So I do believe that we need humans because the reason I travel is not to live in an anonymous kind of building without staff in there, but there are hotel brands that will go that way because they're like we need to optimize for for the biggest cost is labor. So I gotta remove labor from it.

And I think there will be brands that could fully embrace the staffless hotel, and I think the great hoteliers will be like, no, no, I'm gonna take away the stuff that the staff doesn't want to do, and I'm gonna leverage them to do really fun things, like that revenue manager. They should not be sitting with an Excel sheet, nobody should sit with an Excel sheet today. The strategizing is, but it it takes a general manager to say there's still a role for revenue manager, I'm not just gonna replace them with a revenue management system that automates everything.

There's a new role that you have to create and you have to really experiment with. So I believe that the best hotel brands will still have humans because a lot of the really deep engagement with guests can only be done by humans in a in a real way. But a lot of the work we do, we shouldn't be doing that. I was reading an article about um this kind of threat because people are saying, like, okay, AI is coming to take my job and uh we are all going to lose our job and so on.

Um but I don't believe so. Um I I I and there were some cases where they show that um uh with any kind of wave, like computer, internet, a lot of people lost a job. Yes, the job market changed a lot, but there was as well a lot of creation of new jobs. Yeah, and with the internet, the number of jobs that was that were created were like 300 times more than what was lost.

And they're saying now that with AI, the number of jobs that are going to be created, we don't have enough humans on the planet to handle what AI needs today. Yeah. Well, I'm reading uh this weekend I read this really interesting long blog post of you know, these economists that look at like the destruction that's happening to the world, and there is many doomsday scenarios where yes, we will you know people will lose their job, they have less disposable income, they'll spend less on travel, and there's this like scenario.

Yeah, but we are human, we know how to adopt to these situations, and we always find a way because that's what we do as humans, and and I'm not that worried because I know that we're really agile as humans and we'll figure out another way to do to do these things, yeah. But right now, you know, the the economists they're not paid to think of what the solutions are, they're paid to to kind of draw out scenarios based on the facts that they have, and the facts that they have are pretty difficult to you know add up, but I just know that there's going to be humans that come up with better solutions.

Plus, hotels, it's all about human connection, emotion, experience, and so on. And more and more people are trying for this. So, yes, we can automate the boring tasks that uh people don't they don't want to do, yeah, but not to replace. Place them, but as an extension of the team, for them to do something better to take out the guest.

I think that's a use case that we should uh focus on. Like the idea that most of our humans are standing behind a desk to wait for someone to come up there and then to do the same process over and over. Or could you have them think about how can I? I know this really interesting fact about this guest.

What could I do with that fact to make their stay more interesting? You'll enjoy your job more if every guest you try and surprise and delight in some way, then having to type their passport details. Nobody gets joy out of typing someone's passport details into a system, but it does require a certain culture where you can embrace that. Yeah, definitely.

And um, so dining pricing as well is is well understood for rooms, and you're you're starting to apply it as well for parking, to event space, wellness, co-working, and so on. FNB as well, which I believe FNB is the next big thing. Um, but what do you believe are the limits uh in the hospital industry of dining pricing? And uh is there a guest experience cost when you price everything dynamically?

So the limit is the hotelier, unfortunately, who is afraid to touch it, yeah. And I think we should explore it. Um if your hotel's busy, people are gonna come with a car, so your occupants in the parking lot will be busy, so you should increase the price there. But the not everything is elastic, right?

In terms of pricing, there are certain products that don't have that elasticity, and when you increase the price, people will just stop buying it or be upset, and you have to test it. And like with everything, are people willing to pay an early arrival fee? If I can get access to my room at nine in the morning instead of that dread at three o'clock, how much are you willing to pay for it? And you can put up a rate against it, and you might never sell it.

And then hotels like it didn't work for us. I'm like, okay, how many price points did you try? And like, oh, one. I'm like, well, was the price too high?

Yeah, and iterative testing is really critical with all of it, and just do more than one price point, and maybe you'll figure out that it will work. And maybe you end up saying, Yeah, early arrival for our hotel doesn't work, but if you just tested one price point and it was crazy expensive, then that's not a great test. Yeah, like to be willing to take risk and uh and experiment. Yeah, I agree.

And uh for me, the limitation of dike pricing, it's also the um I I love demand-based pricing, as you mentioned, with demand and supply and so on, that makes totally sense. What my limitation here will be on uh price discrimination in a way that, for example, if you are a woman or if you're a man or if you're coming from France or from Germany, you will have different prices. I I a lot of people are doing it. I disagree with this approach because I I find it not fair.

You see what I mean? For example, in uh we can have a big polemic on this, but uh recently at the Louvre in Paris, uh, they have introduced two prices one price for the tourist and one price for the French. And I disagree with this, it's not uh dying pricing, it's just uh purely price discrimination. Yeah, and uh that's where I believe the limitation of dang pricing can be.

So don't go this way, please. Okay, great. Thank you. And yeah, you have integrated at Atomize as well for for remarkement uh recently, and you have acquired 12 companies.

Uh is it 12? I think we're 15 now. 15? Yeah, I didn't know about the last three.

Here we go. Here we go. So you are trying to integrate and to create like a one-stop uh shop uh with Muse. Yeah, that's kind of and the idea is we're not just acquiring solutions and then letting them sit outside of the ecosystem as an integration.

I think we want to move really from integration to embedding them inside the solution so that it's a native experience. So the way that right now in Muse, you can go straight into um our new BI product that we launched, and it's a native screen inside the system. Okay, you don't have to go to another system with a different login again. And we're building we're integrating very hard at this point, but that's really difficult.

How do you take Atomizes great back end and their algorithm and then rebuild the whole user interface in the front end? But ultimately that's what we're trying to do. I see. Yeah.

When people ask me like uh what Muse is doing, because everyone thinks that you're a PMS company, but you're not a PMS company. Or I mean not anymore. For me, I believe your main business model, you're a fintech company, and I believe you're you're going to be more and more a fintech company. I think when you look at American examples of other industries, so you got Service Titan, Procore, Toasts, they've already explored what else you could do once you do the fintech for these businesses as well.

So, you know, if if you're running a plumbing business, for example, and maybe you need to give a quick loan to a customer because they don't have money to replace their plumbing, they have a loan facility there. And I think those scenarios are in hospitality the same. We are cash poor, we've got all kinds of challenges with cash and invoices, and maybe we should have an accounts receivable product where we help collect money because we struggle as hotels to collect money from customers.

So we initially started out with credit card payments, but now we last year we launched multi-currency, that's been picked up really well. We introduced a lending product so that if you want a loan, you can get a loan immediately. And this is not a we don't want a business plan, and then you go to the bank and then you get the clients. It's we're running this on the model where we're like, we know your business, we've been with working with you for the last decade, yeah, and we can give you this loan, and tomorrow you'll have it in your bank.

And I think that's what we can do once we become the operating system, but also the fintech solution for the hotel. For the small story, I bet with a friend of mine that you're going to launch a credit card anytime soon. Ha! I like that bet.

I can't I can't say anything. You see, I was going, uh I was right, yes. Um, but yeah, it was I it was um the what you mentioned about the loan and so on. I think it was uh surprising, but uh when you started to talk about fintech, uh you you you you you believe it was uh the right move at the time.

Oh, yeah. So I remember the day when Richard started talking about fintech, and I thought that has nothing to do with the PMS. This is like a place we don't want to touch. But you're in the cloud, and and every hotel system was storing credit cards, right?

That's why hackers went after our industry so many times because we sit on these beautiful databases with credit cards unencrypted, and we didn't want to store them in the cloud, but everyone wanted to send us credit cards. Every travel agent that we work with were like, here's a 16-digit number, and like absolutely not. So you had to find a solution, and we found tokenized credit cards, and then at some point we required every hotel that went live with us to onboard with this bank that we were working with.

And so we had signed the contract, and then they had to wait for months for this bank to approve their account and get live. And we thought this is awful. And and I'm so glad I listened to Richard at this moment, who's like, we should be the payment processor, so that you know, when we sign a contract, we've also signed the payments, we will do the onboarding for them so we can control that end-to-end journey. And the adoptions really come because we were able to automate so much, like the payment flows in hotels are genuinely really complex.

Virtual credit cards. We make a booking today, and then you come in May, but we take the payments today. And for some bookings, we take the payments in May, and sometimes we have to take a pre-authorization on top of that. So those payment flows are way more way more difficult than like an Uber.

An Uber is very straightforward. So by building out all these integrations, we recognize it's a virtual card, and that virtual card gets activated on the day of arrival, and we can set up a payment rule against that. We enjoy the complexity of it because this is why we employ humans, because they remember those rules. And luckily, now our system remembers those rules and we can automate the heck out of it, so that one big chunk of your check-in, if you think about a check-in four or five minutes, two minutes is payments, and nobody enjoys that part of their journey.

I love the part in Muse that you have automated uh reconciliation, and that makes the job of uh of a content much easier. And uh people don't okay, they see some cost behind and so on, but this kind of automatic reconciliation it's a big win. That's uh keep it and um and the on on the scaling journey because you move from uh from zero to now your the company is worth 2.5 billion.

Yeah, that's a dollars. Dollars, that's a good precision. And uh and what was um what was the hardest inflection point in the in this journey? Because moving from zero to two point five billion dollars, is it I don't think it was that straightforward.

What was the toughest what was the toughest point here? I think the hardest was the early years when we just we couldn't raise money. Yeah, no one for three years we we were very poor and we just didn't have money, and we had ideas that we want to build, but you couldn't because you didn't have money. Once we actually raised the first million, we're like, oh, we can pay people, this is so nice.

And then you start to hire a specialist and it starts to accelerate. There's always been inflection points, but I think it was that first million that gave us time to breathe and actually take our weekends off after three years. Like that that was really hard, and that was a real change. When we then did our series A, when we raised a couple million, suddenly that was an inflection point of oh, we need to hire a real specialist that understands how to sell software.

Um, so there's every time we bring in money, you bring in different expertise that scales us up. And you know, for example, 2019 was when the first time we did an acquisition and we knew we had to acquire companies to if we wanted to make a change, our industry is so fragmented, we had to buy up companies to accelerate the journey because we are you know we're young, but we don't have infinite life in us, and if we could either wait for a very, very long time for the the industry to move or we could we could create movement.

So that first acquisition was real pivotal because now we've done 15. But if the first one had been a bad one, we would not have been allowed to do a second one. So it's all these inflection moments that that push us forward. Um excellent.

Let's do an exercise together. Let's picture if you picture a hotel in uh 2035, how do you see this kind of experience? What's your what's uh the experience look like? The idea should be that there is no screens, right?

Technology is invisible. So if you think in 3035, we're now talking about meta glasses, for example. So your hosts will have embedded technology and they know everything about you without it being creepy, hopefully. Here we go.

Um but you just walk in and you you get a real personal experience because that's what you crave. When I go for hotels, I want the really personal experience, the excellence. I want them to know me and I want them to anticipate what I want. Yeah, and I'm a difficult guest because I travel every week, I know what I want, and at this point, my life is so hectic that I don't take shortcuts on that anymore.

Yeah, so I'm a very difficult customer and I have opinions, and I want the hotel to know that so that they can anticipate it. And I think when you go into 3035, technology is invisible, but the humans is the thing that still make it come to life in some way. So you arrive in a in a hotel, you don't do a chicken, they do everything, they know already everything about you, and they welcome and so on. They they should be waiting for me at the door because they know that I'm in a in a car uh arriving.

Yeah, so they should be waiting at the door. And you know, I think the hotels that I struggle with the most are luxury hotels today. I stayed in a beautiful hotel. I was in Asia in in Thailand the other day, and I I stay in nice hotels.

Don't say it's a brand. And they think that the experience is you arrive and then you get put in a golf buggy and you go to the room, and then they whip out that credit card machine inside the room. And I was like, this is awful. And the best hotels, the best luxury hotels today have the worst technology still today.

And the most innovative brands are actually the ones that are on the budget side because they are forced to innovate. They can't afford to hire huge amounts of stuff, so they're forced to innovate. And I think in 3035, maybe the luxury hotels will pick up on this because they're the ones that should really prove when that really personal experience can be done with the help of technology, not despite the technology. So, do you think today, if you're not embracing automation, AI, tech, and so on, you're losing market share?

Oh, 100%. Like you might still survive, but there will be more successful businesses out there that will outcompete you. Yeah, and at some point, the owner of the real estate will realize that they're not increasing the value of their real estate at the pace that everyone around them is. So it may take a while, but yes, 100%.

The winners will come from the ones that embrace that technology. I love it, yeah. Yeah, yes, I would love to. You have to go to the Muse event, which I wasn't even aware of.

Yeah, I have to go to your events that you didn't know. But um one last big question that I I had as well, because Muse processed nearly 20 billion dollars in payment and serve 15,000 customers, and you just raise a now total valuation of 2.5 billion uh dollars. What is the version of Muse 10 years from now?

And are you building a company that stays independent, goes public, or becomes the infrastructure layer that every hotel in the world runs on? I would love to stay private. I don't think that's an eternal option. So the most likely solution for us would be to go public if we become that size, because you have to be a certain size, which is not the size we are today.

So we have to continue growing. My dream is to be the core piece of software that a hotel runs on. But we talk about hotels today, and there's so many more services that we can serve outside the hotel world, right? So real estate is such so much larger than what hotels are today.

And we've already started to dabble into student living, elderly living. We now do as well. We do campsite, so the diversification, but a connected network of hotels is really, really powerful, and we don't do much with that today. So today we are selling the solution to individual hotels, but they are in a connected network, and there is economies of scale that you start to have at some point when all of that is interconnected into one single solution that you could do really exciting B2C things, but for today, that is not the mission.

But I think if you fast forward 10 years, I think you'll definitely see pockets of um B2C options. So, how do we drive more business for hotels? How do we diversify into different industries? But ultimately, how how do we innovate, out-innovate everyone around us?

Funny enough that you said like uh you you may go public at some point because you're a Dutch CEO, uh running a company founded in Prague, is correct. And you have the headquarters in Amsterdam and you have major office everywhere. But you also said that um if Muse goes public, um, you are likely to list in the US rather than in Europe. Correct.

Why is that? So in Europe, there aren't great examples of software companies, vertical software, so we're in the vertical hospitality, vertical software and payments companies. So we would have to be the first to do that. So we would have to educate an entire market on how this software works and why they should be investing in us.

Whereas if I go to the US, there's probably six, seven examples of companies who have done that in different verticals and different industries. So there's just a much better awareness in the US of the kind of software that we are, but there's also significantly more liquidity. Unfortunately, Europe has not the most liquid markets, they're not really built for software. We are not the most innovative kind of in terms of that.

And I think Europe has to wake up. And I hope that Europe wakes up and we're moving in the right direction. I think we've had a wake-up call, obviously, with what we're seeing on the US side, that we are on our own and we're seeing some movement, but the movement is far too slow for Muse at this point, and we'll be fine. I think for the next generation of companies, I wish that they had more optionality than having to do these things in the US.

That's uh funny because I uh on a podcast um uh last week I recorded with someone from um from the Austrian government in uh in Austrian startups, and uh we discussed about uh OpenClo. And uh OpenClo was this uh AI company built in Austria, yeah that started to get some speed and attraction, and actually Europe couldn't keep them, and they went to they got acquired by OpenAI, and Peter is now living in the US in San Francisco, because Europe were not able to keep him, like because of liquidity and uh and uh uh bureaucracy and everything.

So I get you when you're saying like the US is a different speed here. And I and there's definitely pockets of good goodness happening in Europe, but it is too little too slow, and you know the the legislation we put in place, it comes from good intent, yeah, but it's not helping, uh, and it's holding companies back. And unfortunately, sometimes the only option is to go after the US, and it hurts as a European. We want thriving European companies, yeah.

Yeah, and um a few um questions you answer quickly on this. Um, the last hotel stay that genuinely impressed you, what made it memorable? It's actually uh a while ago, the Amanpuri. Oh, am I to call brands out?

Yeah, good, good, yeah. The Amanpuri, which is this Aman hotel in Thailand, and they went all the way like on service to the point where you're lying by the beach and the sun had moved, and they changed the umbrella every half an hour to just make sure that I had shade. And I was like, I've never experienced service like that. That's okay.

That's uh to to change to just to change the the the shade. Okay, that's fine. So Revpack becomes the industry standard metric. What year does that happen?

Today we're in 2026. I I think within the next year this can happen. I think as an industry standard, probably another five years, knowing how slowly our industry moves. Okay, that's soon, okay.

And the thing you were most wrong about when you joined Muse in 2013, how bloody slow software development is. I remember that first year we was like the first year we built the PMS, and then the second year we built a point of sale, and then we build events. And we thought in three years we would have built the end solution. And I thought I was worried about the jobs of the developers because I thought we're gonna have to fire the developers.

Yeah, that never happened. We now have more developers than ever before, and and you know, you it it's really hard to develop software. I definitely didn't know that. Okay, and um, if Muse didn't exist, what would you be doing today?

I would probably be in a hotel today. Jim. I would hope I'd gone into the regional vice president role or something, or even further than that, but yeah, definitely the hotel world. Okay, finish the sentence.

Hospitality will have nothing to do with rooms, the day that hospitality will have nothing to do with rooms. The day that oh, you got me on one question. There we go. Now I got you on this one.

I have no idea what to say with that. Hospitality will have nothing to do with rooms, the day that it could be like uh hospitality will have nothing to do with room the day that we realize the the service is the thing that matters more than anything, and you can replicate service in other parts of a hotel or service industry. Um and we we still think that hospitality is room selling rooms and selling selling the space, but actually, if you can create a service that people love, they will buy that.

Excellent. My last question if you have if you had a big billboard in the middle of um of Prague or in the middle of uh Amsterdam because you're in Amsterdam, and everyone could read it, what would you put on it? So we've now got I I don't know if it's a slogan or a mission, but the best businesses run on Muse and it it comes from a genuine place. Like I don't want to just deploy software in hotels, I want to make the hotel a better a better hotel.

And we really believe in this mission of making businesses better businesses, and we have to show them a lot of hotels, they don't know or they don't have exposure to the stuff that I have exposure to. So I try and use my platform to whatever I learn, I've only learned because other people told me, and I want to just make sure that I share that with people as well. So, what do you put on the on the billboard? The best businesses run on Muse.

There we go. So it's it's a it's an you put an ad okay, excellent. But let's wrap things up. And uh, but thanks so much for joining me today.

Much appreciated. And uh, as I mentioned, you are very agile. Uh you have an answer to all the questions. Uh, but for everyone listening, thank you so much for for being here.

Um, very inspired with the the conversation. I'm very curious to see uh the future of hotel tech and what Muse uh will be about in a few years. Looking forward to this uh um the the silent tech and invisible tech. I've heard it, and uh I do believe that's uh that's a big wave that is coming.

And uh, but all about because even if you're a big tech company or AI and so on, and we we talk about it today, the human element is still at the center of everything, and that's something that we should never forget, even if we are worth 2.5 billion dollars. We should be uh focusing on the on the connection, on the human element, on the emotion, because that's what makes the hospitality industry so so great and uh and so important as well. So, yeah, very very very inspired with with the conversation.

Thanks, thank you so much. Thank you. For everyone listening, thank you, and I see you next time.