Supy Talks

The episode contains useful practitioner insights about tech adoption barriers, change management, and the importance of operational engagement, but is weighted down by lengthy personal anecdotes, food preferences, and tangential storytelling that dilute the substance-to-minutes ratio. The core insights about building trust with ops teams and failing fast are valuable but not densely packed.

“From a very early start, I identified this kind of, like, this gap between the operational world and the tech world in a lot of companies.”

“Build trust with the operational teams is key to landing something successfully. If they don't trust you and they don't trust what you're doing and the vision you're painting, they won't follow it.”

The guest rehashes familiar ideas about change management, the importance of ops engagement, and fail-fast culture without introducing particularly fresh frameworks or counterintuitive takes. The specific examples (handhelds at Pretzel, trying Chinese-made devices) are concrete but the underlying lessons are conventional wisdom in tech implementation.

“if you're going to fail fast, fail fast, learn and then recover very quickly.”

“You get what you pay for. And it was interesting and it was a learning curve.”

Mitz Patel is genuinely credible - Global Head of IT Delivery at Soho House with 5+ years at David Lloyd Leisure and 7 years at Pretzel Italian (where he built tech from ground up). He has hands-on operational experience, not just theory. However, he is still relatively early-career for a show claiming to focus on B2B operators, and the relevance is primarily to hospitality tech, limiting broader applicability.

“global head of IT Delivery at, uh, Soho House. MITS has a large history of working at operationally complex hospitality businesses from Preso Italian to David Lloyd Leisure.”

“I knew the tech very well. I knew the stack very well. Um, and we were very hands on in deciding how that was, which direction you went in and who you picked as your suppliers.”

The episode includes specific company names (David Lloyd, Pretzel Italian, Soho House, Barclaycard, Dojo, Leon, Pizza Express), concrete initiatives (handheld rollout, QR code ordering, intelligent fridges), and real timelines (5-6 years ago on Amazon Fresh-like tech, four-five weeks on handheld rollout at Soho House). However, it lacks hard metrics - no data on adoption rates, ROI, cost figures, or quantified impact. The "Box" concept is vague even in retrospect.

“We worked with Barclaycard, uh, on a really cool idea of Kind of like a totem that you tap on when you sit down, then you order food and as you walk out it detects that you walked out.”

“we started to roll them out here at Soho House, and funnily enough, we kind of had them in houses for the last, I'd say in real earnest, probably in the last, like four or five weeks.”

The host asks reasonable setup questions and allows the guest space to tell stories, but rarely pushes back, challenges claims, or demands specifics. Questions are often soft and narrative-driven (e.g., lengthy personal stories about restaurants and food preferences). The host doesn't interrogate why certain initiatives failed, what the actual ROI was, or press on vague statements like the 'Box' concept. The final 10+ minutes shift entirely to restaurant reviews and guilty pleasures, which are pure filler.

“Yeah, totally test it. And the nice thing is with the number of houses and locations you have there probably types of places and venues where you can test something or an opportunity comes out”

“And sometimes, uh, I think I'm biased. But some of the tech behind the scenes that enables the stuff, uh, in Front of customers to get that full experience.”