AGARU -- the reference for hospitality

We are tackling a big problem that affects a lot of 'little people' around the world, that is the lack of recognition for skills that are considered 'soft' and 'unmeasurable' but that are crucial to the economy. Trillions of dollars and 1 in 10 jobs depend on these interactions, that have no metrics.

With this record enterprises can get better customer feedback and manage staff better; staff can have access to opportunities beyond politics, age, or gender at work; customers are rewarded and benefit for their participation.  We believe this is a win-win-win and the way of the future.   Our platform will open opportunities that were simply not possible before; by having a record of skill staff can prove their talent and have a measure of feedback that doesn't exist now. By having proof of employability (vocational ability) this can open doors to loans, credit, further training or better jobs. 

1 in 10 jobs around the world depend on hospitality, that works to ~65 million jobs in LATAM and Caribbean.  We'd be able to help them regardless of geography, age, gender. Nobody cares what happens to all these people after they leave jobs or when they need a job or a raise. But we can help. 

Contributing factors include mainly cultural biases and luggage. There are many '-isms' that determine hiring, firing, promoting or paying staff. Currently there is no way to demonstrate talent at work in hospitality in a tangible way, as the skill necessary are considered 'soft' and 'unmeasurable'. The combination of instability and lack of former credentials makes demanding higher wages, access to jobs and job security much more difficult than it needs to be. 

in addition, these jobs are considered transitory and offer little agency and respect. But respect of our peers family and society is what we all want in life. What if we could offer people everywhere a way to demonstrate they contribute and they are good (potentially great) at something?

We target Frontline Hospitality staff in particular, but the reach can be anyone involved in customer service interactions, or even within organizations.  Frontline staff of enterprises have little resources when they change careers or need verification of their talents.

We work closely within the business, having been in hospitality for over 20 years now. We understand well the challenges, frustrations, and similarities of hospitality work everywhere. Our platform has been changed and adapted with feedback from people in the trade, government institutions and other interested parties. 

The solution will open opportunities that were simply not possible before; by having a record of skill (vocational aptitude) staff can prove their talent and have a measure of feedback that doesn't exist now.  By having proof of employability this can open doors to loans, credit, further training or better jobs. Even more: it will give respect and dignity to hard working people everywhere.

Our approach is simple, based on direct customer voting.

Customers vote on any service interaction, creating a record of the quality of the customer service interaction. This vote is recorded on a database, and added or created to a record. 

We work on a web browser so that there is no need for software, nothing to download, simple to use. All we need is the place and name of the customer service / hospitality staff and the rating. 

We provide enterprises with an aggregate of the staff performance on a daily / weekly / monthly basis to create customer satisfaction metrics. With this record vocational aptitude can be spotted, and those lagging behind trained or monitored closely for improvement.  The staff owns the data and can always opt out. We provide individual scores for the staff, aggregates for the companies. 

Our consumer contributors also receive rewards for their participation. 

We are currently using a simple database, but down the road we hope to integrate with distributed ledger applications, so that the data can be easily shareable, independent and yet remain third party verifiable anytime, anywhere by anyone. 

Currently we deliver physical letters to those voted into our system, sending them a 'good job' note and encouraging them to continue their good efforts. Their management gets also a letter indicating the same, with the objective to bring the talent into the spotlight. 

Substitutes include:
+ In-house databases (silos, not transportable)
+ Certifications by institutions (rarely recognized internationally, cost $$)
+ Word of Mouth (biased, unreliable)
+ LinkedIn  (biased, hard to prove claims)
+ Government records (do not reflect vocational aptitude)
+ Resume (hard to prove claims, notoriously easy to fib)
+ Recommendations (hard to prove claims, risky)
+ Feedback from management (biased, cant see all, cannot be quantified)

LinkedIn - online resume; can be biased  www.linkedin.com
Pluggd - focused on chefs .     www.pluggd.work
marketforce -- benefits companies not employees .    www.marketforce.com

Our solution:
Transportable (the staff can take their data to other enterprises or use as a resume) 
Third party vouched -- based on customer votes (crowdsourced, better proof of claim),
Unbiased by politics - to an extent
Can offer proof-of-location (valuable on its own)
Simple to use (Appropriate technology),
Simple to implement (low technical debt for customers)
 De-risks hiring (by knowing vocational aptitude of those within the platform)
Offers feedback for staff on performance (for self-monitoring and team staff management)
  and importantly -- quantifiable customer satisfaction (metrics, non existent now). 

Our founder's background is in Anthropology. He learned about a researcher that lived with crack dealers in El Barrio to understand why would anyone do it. Its dangerous, pay is terrible, stressful. Seems that they do it for one thing: Respect. Money was fine, but the respect of their peers and society is what the dealers really wanted. Don't we all ?  Universal. 

So what if we could offer people a way to show they are someone in a more meaningful and positive way? 

Combined with 20 years experience in hospitality we came to realize that the best way to help people is to help them help themselves. 

One way is offering them a tangible record of their abilities, something that is considered 'intangible and unmeasurable'. By bringing the abstract ('soft skills') into the real (a verifiable record) we can do for staff what LinkedIn or facebook do: a sense of belong.

Within the trade in Canada the idea has had a lukewarm reception, but very well received in Mexico by staff and union officials. The major hurdle has been changing habits to participate, but users that are engaged have been very responsive. 

We have had zero dropouts to the platform, on over 500+ records. We have increased visitors (10,000) to date. With network effects this can grow on its own quite well. 

Given the novelty of the idea, and need for large sets of data for it to be a dominant player, we expect breakeven by Y5 at best. 

Currently have served over 500 staff across 9 countries 

We are aiming to serve 5,000 staff this year

We are aiming for exponential growth with a little capital influx, within 5 years we hope to have reached 100 million at least Given the nature of our product and the lack of comparables it is very hard to estimate how many people it could potentially impact.  We are focusing on grassroots growth, which would be also hard to predict, but the effect is hard to measure. 

We seek to become the reference for anyone working in hospitality and customer facing roles, wherever they may be. Ideally we would be part of everyday consumer interactions, seamlessly and with long lasting benefits for all participants. 
Over 700 million people work in hospitality, with an unknown part in the informal economy. We would love to help 'the unbankable' have a reference for work, credit worthiness and personal development all in one convenient package. 
Next year
To achieve our adoption we need change of habits of consumers, and we suspect it will be easier to introduce this broadly in developing nations, where the poor rely on traditional networks of relationships and F2F connections. Our project is not far from that, we are digitizing those interactions and processes in a way. We have to show people the advantages by championing and rewarding in some way those who are great at their job.
We think that offering those 'superstars' access and benefits above and beyond the current (nothing) and using their social media channels will help spread the use. This can transcend cultures and places, especially with the younger generation that needs to prove themselves in the workforce. 

5 years out
Our system can be replicated easily into any language, and requires minimal hardware mobile capability. Down the road we'll be able to offer access with voice or other means of ID, to simplify onbarding of the less tech savvy.

BARRIERS Financial
Currently bootstrappable nearly indefinitely, but growth will be a very slow pace, perhaps too slow. Pilot programs on offer, but no resources to execute now. 

Technical Need a more robust ledger solution, not a technical founder, so technical debt.  Need to develop a dashboard solution for clients instead of emails, workable, second step. 
Transition to a distributed ledger. technical debt there. Some aftermarket solutions out there, trying for partnerships with companies in the ecosystem. 

Legal No barriers, but IP protection would be good. Patents of budget right now. 
Will register trademark in USA and Canada, perhaps Mexico as well, given the reasonable cost. 

Cultural 
Hard to instil new habits on users, needs repetition and constant reminding. Otherwise most are onboard, contributions coming from random sources and referrals within industry. We hope the trend continues and peer pressure helps develop things.  

Market Barriers
Biggest barrier is reaching all the potential users, very broad demographic, geography and language. Having support in-market in some way, be it government or NGO's would be ideal. 

Financial Seeking aggressively Social Impact investors, grants, loans and will try a friends and Family round again Technical Try to find talent in schools and referrals, difficult and slow process. Trying for partnerships with companies in the ecosystem.  Learning as much as possible on own, online courses and asking for help. Solve community could help here. 

Legal Will publishing whitepaper and just using trade secrets to operate, given current status of IP law and amount of patent trolls. Anyone could try to copy us, but the biggest hurdle is mass adoption (and incentivizing participation). 

Cultural  Referrals within industry to increase, lean on network and 'cool kids' to make it happen. 
We have nothing to lose, so we are willing to give everything to participants (hence our generous profit sharing scheme). Nobody else will do that, and that will be our difference. 

Market Barriers 
Hiring translators and minimal staff overseas, piecemeal work and putting everything online should help minimize the need for staffing beyond 5 -10 people at the most, globally. Subcontract everything else, keep things for the locals to run as they would know the market better and faster than we ever would from outside. 

We have already started to receive votes from people in Mexico and Nicaragua. We hope that the trend continues, so that we can serve more. We have limited data of votes coming from Mexico and Nicaragua. 
We estimate that we have impacted 20 people in the region with minimal expense. 

We want it all, and we will serve all. 

Expansion plans:
Establish beachfront in Mexico City running promotions for hospitality staff with a contest to find the best in the field. Ideally we can ally with the chambers of commerce and hospitality there. From there on start contests on all estates, finding the best talent of each estate. 
Finally have a grand prize for the most voted and best of the bunch, for a national award. This can be done in any other country, for minimal cost. 
ideally this will be self propelling, with staff helping the diffusion of the platform out of self interest. 

NA

1 full time

1 ocassinoal part time 

Founder: 

Adrian Marquez, Anthropologist, Sommelier. 20+ years  in hospitality trade trade. 

My background is Mexican. I grew up in Mexico City.  I immigrated to Canada over 20 years ago. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. This gave me a appreciation of the value of work, and the sad reality of the lack of opportunity for most people in developing nations.  

Lifetime entrepreneur (4x) with international business experience in east Asia (Japan, Singapore) and travel experience in Japan, Russia, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Italy, Switzerland and Mexico.  

Mr Marquez was the creative spark behind stardust@home, a very successful crowdsourcing program that helps space exploration by training crowds to use simple tools in a semi supervised environment. It has significantly reduced the time and effort needed, by magnitudes. 

Mr Marquez is also part of the founding team of Chariles Burgers, a renegade outfit that would go to become 'one of the best food and wine experiences in the world', at par with the best in the business. Part of his contribution was the initial marketing that went viral. Charles Burgers still delivers world class experiences 10 years later. 

Mr Marquez is also a graduate of Founder Institute, based out of Silicon Valley, an accelerator with a very challenging program.

Co-Founder:

Ian Kelk, Engineering and Product Manager. Computer Scientist. 13 years developing simple solutions to complex problems.

Mr Kelk is a polymath, pilot, former rock band leader, polyglot, and currently designing virtual museums. 

No one yet, too radical for establishment in Canada, no credibility yet in Mexico 

We provide enterprises with an aggregate of the staff team performance on a daily / weekly / monthly basis so that talent can be spotted, and those lagging behind trained or monitored closely for improvement. We provide a daily email with the content. 

We charge these enterprises a recurring monthly fee depending on the size of the team. 

We are pre revenue, but we are confident in the potential. Our rates start at $20/mo for small SMEs and larger as the team number increases.  Why its needed?
There isn't currently anything comparable in the marketplace to our platfrom, but there is huge amount of money and businesses that depend on data currently not tracked or measured. 

For financial sustainability we will:

+ sell our core service to SMEs and enterprises for a recurring monthly fee + Minimize staffing as much as possible as long as possible + Applying for donations and grants to kickstart the project further + Raising Social Impact capital, in as many markets as possible 

our expenses are currently minimal and can be covered by bootstrapping nearly indefinitely 

I am applying because I think the solution we have is very unique, covers a lot of necessities and challenges easily, with an elegant solution that can benefit all of the actors participants in the ecosystem. 
I do not have the full technical or financial ability to get this project where it deserves. I have been penniless and homeless before, and I have devoted myself to make sure that never happens to hardworking people anywhere for any reason. My finances are just enough to keep me afloat now, but not enough to get the project kickstarted to get mass adoption. 
Where I need MIT expertise is in helping connect with institutions and people that understand the value of a record of vocational aptitude, and the difference that can make on people's lives around the world. If we can plug this solution into broader networks, I think it will be adopted faster and easier than me alone trying to win hearts and minds. 

Consensys -- leaders in the field of distributed ledgers, have the expertise and personnel to help make a major impact (help develop ledger)

FOAM -- they are currently building an alternative for geolocation that doesn't depend on GPS, and yet can protect privacy (this will be needed for integrations)

James Beard foundation -- leaders of culinary and professionals on the field of hospitality to develop adoption and legitimacy 

MIT -- any branch or program that deals with Social Innovation, Social Impact with aims to developing nations help and development