An Investment Into Repeat.App, The Restaurant App Promoting Legibility
Why I'm backing its founder Ömer Gürel
A few of my readers have asked me how and why I make certain decisions when it comes to investing so I thought I might share by writing about a recent tech investment I’m making.
Explaining my thoughts, in a simple, quiet way is as much a personal thing as it is a public one. You’re welcome to join me in investing — assuming you’re an accredited investor — but there’s no pressure. I don’t really go for that. Most of my investments I won’t be discussing simply because I’m not really allowed to. I don’t seek to promote my investments beyond their capabilities.
A way I’ve come to think about investing was inspired by reading Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott.
I’ve written elsewhere about this topic so I won’t repeat myself but the key insight of Seeing Like a State is that the state wants to know all the resources in its domain (as well as the resources of other countries). You can also See Like A Market. Perhaps the logic of our times is to collect as much data as possible and figure out that business model later. I suppose that works… provided interest rates are low enough.
I like to see my investments like a benevolent king. Investment and entrepreneurship are deeply political acts. To be sure I like making money — whether it be in satellite tech, DNA, facial rec, submarines, or what have you — but more than that I want to change the world by making it so that people — my people — can have more. The only way to really do that is with technology, which means doing more with less. I am, in other words, a humane technocrat. Money doesn’t make you free; your mindset does.
A lot of tech companies are about controlling people for profit. What begins as liberation results in centralization—and exploitation. You can see this with the research around Instagram being particularly bad for young girls. My real criticism of a lot of social media is that it is neither particularly social nor particularly good media. It doesn’t get us out of the house and it makes us feel lonely. As that great sage, Macklemore put it, “Apps this good, who's got time to make friends?” I attribute the uptick in teen suicides as directly attributable to the rise of social media and the ill-advised lockdowns which even Fauci and Governor Hochul now disavow.
But shouldn’t the products you use make you better off over time? In the gambling and gaming worlds they call these big customers — whales. (Is that because they intend to harpoon them and sell their blubber?)
My view is that the better a customer you are, the more you ought to be rewarded. (The better an employee you are, the more you ought to be rewarded too, but that’s a post for another time.)
The best tech companies remain as committed to human flourishing as possible and take on some core mobbed up industry — eBay with auctioneering, Uber with taxis, Airbnb with illegal hoteliers, and FanDuel with sports betting — and make it legible to the state as a whole.
So the question that Repeat poses to answer is: How mobbed up are restaurants? What an interesting question! Does anyone really know? A few recent indictments suggest quite a bit. My favorite example is “Operation Good Fortune” where Chinatown restauranteurs in my native Boston moved millions for the Chinese mob.
For what it’s worth I’m not totally convinced that cracking down on money laundering in the restaurant industry makes for better tasting food. The son of a mobbed up restauranteur told me that there are no good restaurants in Northern Virginia because there are too many people paying attention to the books. New Orleans, by contrast, is a great place for food because it’s a lawless place.
Legibility helps crack down on excesses of these mobbed up industries. The U.S. deep state allows certain investments to happen — at least for a time — in large measure to take out the often foreign-backed mobsters. These cretins make life intolerable by forcing their externalities on the rest of us. Indeed that’s precisely their design.
The supply chain crisis taught us a few quick things. We are entering an era of increasing resource constraints. President Emmanuel Macron made just that argument earlier this year.
One solution — satellites — are already being deployed to monitor food and water resources. The world will become a lot more monitored. This information hegemony is necessary for the dominant peoples on the planet. Wherever there is misery there is centralization.
Much of the focus of privacy absolutists are wrongheaded. Besides, they never do seem to win, do they? One of the conspiracy theories I’ve come to believe is that many of the privacy advocates are either the deep state or a foreign state. By pushing a sort of autistic privacy policy, you can restrict the technological developments of your competitors.
As investors we look at three types of risk — market, founder, and technology.
What do I believe the future of restaurants will look like?
Increasingly restaurants are becoming the center of a community.
Bookstores are disappearing. Church attendance is slipping. Homes, especially near the cities, are getting smaller—and more expensive. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) was similarly arresting. Part of the reason television took off in LA — a very beautiful place when it is isn’t littered with homeless — is that it’s a place for homebodies.
For many, especially the well-to-do, restaurants are a near daily affair. I’m not particularly happy about this state of affairs but it’s true that families with two incomes don’t leave a lot of time to cook. And yes, I’d like to see more regulations about what sorts of seed oils are and aren’t used — to say nothing of a need for food quality regulations. We aren’t fat simply because we don’t exercise. We are fat because the quality of the food is so poor and filled with ingredients actively doing us harm.
Labor costs are going to go up, too, and the days where illegal aliens did all the work seem like they, too, might be at a close when we have all the trappings of modern technology fully arraigned against them. (Will facial recognition help catch all the illegals, Pokemon Go style? This is a joke, for those wondering, but maybe not too much of one.)
It seems that the only way to reduce restaurant costs is to integrate technology. In Japan (and large sections of Asian neighborhoods) you can summon a waitress with the push of a button. Some are even being replaced by robots. Why can’t you do that from inside the app?
Anglo-Turkish entrepreneur Ömer Gürel has convinced me and his choice of investing in Houston is a wise one. (I’ve been thinking a lot about which sins are predominate in which city and its easy to see that Houston is Fat and Middle Class.) San Diego is Sloth, L.A. is Vanity, Las Vegas is Lust, San Francisco is Envy, New York is Greed, and so on… I’d love one of those maps — Albion’s Seed-style — laying out a visual presentation here.
Ömer is British-Turkish and Danish-Turkish — he jokes that his grandfathers liked blondes — so he’s a bit of a mix like a lot of people. The best entrepreneurs are often bridges between cultures and he’s proved his mettle in Dubai. His family is one of the top growers for McCormick, the spice company. You’ve eaten the fruit of his family’s labor even if you didn’t realize it.
You might have noticed how America has become a lot more Turkish in recent years. I suspect that trend will continue and that Turkey will itself be a check on China. There will, I think, be a Turkish invasion of the United States, much like there was a British and Chinese one. The Brits, post Brexit, are joining the empire of the English-speaking peoples and the Chinese are dealing with their own battle between the technocracy and their domestic mob.
Turkey, then, is interesting and, I submit, about to go through a lot of very interesting changes. Countries with an imperial past are always seeking to regain it. Bet on them and their serious elites. Who can look at the Middle East today and not wish for restoration of the Ottoman Empire? It shouldn’t be the prerogative of boys from Arkansas or Alabama to die in Afghanistan or Iraq. The Turks don’t lack the cultural competence to rule over the unruly Arabs. One gets a sense that the Syrian refugees now are what the Mexicans are to America or the Turks were once in Germany — cheap labor, necessary for an expansion.
Here’s a world distribution of Turkic languages. As you can see, those areas are not at all strategically significant.
Here are all the usual interesting Turks who are now part of the conversation in America.
Dr. Oz is married to a DuPont and running for U.S. Senate. Will he win the seat? I don’t know but he’s a part of the conversation. Speaking of Dr. Oz, he served in Turkey’s military. It’s the second largest army in NATO.
Michael Flynn — our crazed would have been National Security Director — got felled in large measure over promising to return Fethullah Güllen, the wild mystic in Poconos. I’ll have a lot to say about Güllen once I’ve finished my assessment but until then watch this video.
Salt Bae is probably the most famous Turk since Attaturk.
Here’s yours truly and Ömer Gürel at Salt Bae’s restaurant, Nusr-Et, in the Park Hyatt in Istanbul.
Turkey is one of a handful of countries that is agriculturally self-sustaining. The food is pretty darn good, too, if I may say so. None of the micro plastics like in our food.
To be sure some of the trends from Erdogan are worrisome. But his son-in-law’s drone technology — Baykar — is clearly making the difference in Ukraine. They’ve pledged that they’ll never supply Russia and I hope one day to be able to invest.
And some of the admittedly bad things — inflation in Turkey is approaching 80% ! — make Turkey’s investment sector that much more interesting to outsiders. Local Turks will be that much more inclined to get their money out into more stable currencies.
Whoever will end up running Turkey I’m not competent to say but I want to be long Turkey and the Turkish people. I’m even making an attempt to learn Turkish.
Wish me iyi şanslar! And wish the same to Ömer and Repeat.app.
Good article - but did I miss what the repeat app is?