Ep. 256 Heini Zachariassen (VIVINO) on wine apps and online marketplaces

Italian wine podcast. Chinching with Italian wine people. This podcast is brought to you by Native Grape Odyssey. Native Grape Odyssey is an educational project financed by the European Union to promote European wine in Canada. Japan and Russia. Enjoy. It's from Europe. Hello. Thanks for tuning in to the Italian wine podcast. Our channels are SoundCloud, iTunes, Spotify and Himalaya, FM are also widely available on other podcast apps. Our official website is italian wine podcast dot com and that's all one word. If you're using iTunes, feel free to rate the podcast or write a review. Thanks. Hello. This is the Italian wine podcast with me, Montewood, and my guest today is Haina Zakariasen. I didn't say that right now. No. That's fine. Is it alright? Go and you say you say your Hina Sakarasen. Yeah. Where are you from? Well, I'm from, small place the faroe Islands, which is in the middle of North Atlantic, not far far from the UK, actually. Okay. And what is your job title? So I'm the founder of Vivino, we're the world's largest wine app. You're the founder? Yes. Yeah. Really? Yay. I didn't read that. I didn't read the I know. No. You gotta you gotta really read the carpet. You're like, well famous. Just taking all your clothes off. Yeah. Don't be that friendly. I think I'm wrong. I think I'm wrong. I just warm in the studio, but I got warm in the studio, but yeah. It's all good. So you founded it. Yes. I found around ten years ago, computer geeky, love wine, more, more a software, guys. I walk into a supermarket and see this wall of wine, and I start thinking, so what is good, what is bad, and I don't know what to buy. So that was my fundamental problem. I thought, I can't be the only one that this doesn't know little about wine as I do. So I thought there's gotta be a solution to this problem just like there is with with books and movies and whatever. So, that's why I started the company. And so more of a software guy than a wine guy, and then I go to a wine conference like this. Right? Just to remind us, the first Aero Islands belongs to which country. It's Danish. Okay. It's a self governing part of Denmark. Okay. So you've got that independent spirit. Definitely. Yes. And it's probably fairly harsh surroundings where you gotta be you gotta be a little bit savvy. You gotta be, because it is in a few years, every, listeners get a chance to go. They should definitely go. It's a beautiful, beautiful place. And, very, very green, but you pay for all the green with all the rain. So it rains quite a bit up there, but, it's windy and rainy, but amazing place. You had this idea, and one thing is having an idea, how did you scale it and finance it and get it up and running? Sure. Yeah. So so we've been doing this for for quite a long time now. We've raised, sixty six million dollars by now. We have forty million users. So it really came to the forty million years. Forty a million, twenty thousand people install Latino every single day. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's a really, really big community. And and usually, like with other big communities, it doesn't happen. It happens by ten people installing a day, then twenty people, fifty people, then hundreds of people Yeah. Dominate. Yeah. Exactly. Right? So so, we built the product better and better. And at some point, it got really, really good and started dominating the space. Okay. So I I get the app. Presume it's a free one. Sure. And when I buy wine, it's, I somebody's getting a commission, and that's getting a commission, just explain the mechanics from Sure. I'm a wine retailer. I've heard of VVino, my sales are going down. What am I gonna get involved with you? Yeah. First of all, let's let's just go through one of the core features here. You know, you you can be in a supermarket, take a picture any bottle of wine will give you ratings, interviews, anything you need to know about the wine. So that's been the driver, and people people look up a wine two million times every day. Well, literally, you were in the supermarket. Sure. And you can I don't know what it is? Just take a picture of it and you get all the information. Do you do it? Who developed the technology? Was that you? No. We we licensed a couple of different technologies and combined it. Really, the the tech part wasn't the hard part. The hardware was the data. So actually building the data has taken us many, many years. And that's the quality of the product is that we know every single wine in the world, which is around ten million wines from two hundred thousand producers. So the biggest database of wine ever built. Alright. So when you say that, basically, the, basically, the, basically, from, like, the great variety where it's from I I should definitely show you. Well, this isn't This is a podcast after all, but but still, yeah, so I I just took a random, amarona. We see we use a five star scale. It's a four point five. It's very highly rated. So you who's who's rating is that, though? So this is our community ratings. Okay. So No. Exactly. And we can go down here. We get some highlights. This is a new thing we just launched, and we we have computers reading through all the the reviews and determine what it actually tastes like. So we were the first ones to ever sort of scale taste characteristics of a wine. So it says here, this is very bold. It's an arona. It's smooth. It's semi dry and more on the softer side. And then you actually get actual tasting notes, you know, exactly what it tastes like. It's quite nice. It's just like one. Pretty easy to understand that. You really do get a picture away. I've never seen this before to to my shame. I know Mary on the the the wine is very nice, but you're right. I mean, it is bold, and it's it is pretty smooth. It's not tanning. It's smooth. I mean, it's not tannies, but it's not tannies, but it's not tannies, but it's not tannies, but it's not tannies, between soft and acidic. It's kind of to the soft side, which, again, most people would say, yeah. Yeah. It's like you. And so so you you get this instead of having to read all these reviews, right? Which can be time consuming. You get a quick overview. And repetitive. Yeah. And then you have all the, yeah, exactly. And then you have all, you know, you can dig into the grapes, the other ones they do, the vintages, all kinds of stuff. Obviously, you can buy it too. So that's kinda cool. Fifty four euros in Italy for this particular one. Do you have a photo every single bottle or not. Yeah. So we just, we just, announced, last week. We just hit one billion scans in the air. So One minute. Literally have one billion pictures of wine bottles. Well, that's one for every seven people on the planet. Yeah. Exactly. Right. So, it's quite a lot of photos. Yes. It is. It is. So, I mean, it just seems so I mean, you've literally described on it. It sounds so simple. Like, it's like giving a a kid a Lego toy and giving him five minutes to say, alright, done that. What's the next one? Yeah. But obviously, it's a huge slog. We kept it simple. How did you not just get overloaded with stuff? Yeah. That that is a good question. Some piping might argue there is a lot of stuff there, but we've always focused on who the target audience is. And if you you had a conference like, like, this one, they're actually not the target audience. Archie's a trade a trade conference. Trade conference. Yeah. Exactly. So our target audience is really the the casual wine drinker. The people that love wine, but don't necessarily wanna make it a hobby. So so casual wine drinkers just say, Hey, I need a quick decision, help him pick an amazing wine for tonight. And and also we'll focus on that. And when the it actually works in front of them in the store, as we said. Yeah. Yeah. And so so we've built some amazing features now to actually wine too. So you can now sort of dig into wine and determine even based on taste. So I like a specific kind of merlot. Then you can dig into the data and actually say, Hey, I want a whatever bold merlot or something special. You actually do that with the Avenue. So how much feedback do you get directly. I mean, if I get this app and I walk into a shop and I go to wine, that actually really is exactly what you described very simply soft, whatever. That was a great one. How do I write you to that? That was really good. So you you rate the wine inside Yeah. And and people do that quite a lot. I I sometimes compare it with with Spectator and Parker and those guys, maybe they would rate twenty thousand wines a year. We get a hundred thousand ratings every day. So the volume and so on is just massively big. So so we have a lot of ratings a lot of reviews that we get thousands and thousands every single day. I mean, what do you do? I mean, how do you switch off? What do you mean switch off as a person? Or Yeah. It's a person. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. Because you got employees as well as all of this stuff. No. No. We're one hundred and thirty people. Yeah. Worked pretty hard those last few the last few years. So, all I've done basically is the family and doing work. So, so that's mostly what it would. I have about two. I go sailing once in a while, and and actually have spent a little bit of time on YouTube too doing some startup videos we just been really fun. So, yeah, a little bit. So, basically, you know, you did you just work all the time. I do work most of the time when I'm up with my family. Yeah. Tell me about the boat. So, it's, it's a thirty five foot Ericsson. It's, I live in California. So, it's, it's in the Bay Area. Yeah. Exactly in the Bay Area. So it's super easy. I can drive my car down to the Susalito Harbor and and take a quick, quick ride on the sailboat there. So you're you're a US citizen now? No. I'm not. I've been there for seven years. No. I'm still a danish citizen. Okay. Will you become an emeraldism? That's a good question. And I think it depends on the next election, though. You pay you pay you pay tax there, I guess. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As soon as you, you work there, obviously, pay tax. You it's, Was that not a big hit for you to do that? Or was you just have to move there just because of just to that's where the technology was sort of converted to to get this stuff done. Yeah. I moved there for work with the full family because we always felt like if you wanna win in the consumer space, you probably wanna be in the US, you probably wouldn't be in in Silicon Valley. If you look the big apps in the consumer space, you probably wanna wanna be there. How are you how are your family about going over there? I mean, did you have kids at the time? Yeah. I had I have I have three kids and they were one of them was teen and so, like, it was very, very difficult. But, you know, it's cool to move to California. Two of them are in college in the US now. So, and the youngest is still down. Do you see ever see yourself returning back to your homeland? So, retiring? Yes. That's a good question. I think there's a really good chance we'd be living in Europe at some point. Yes. I probably wouldn't wanna live in the Fair Islands. It's a little bit too small for me. But, you know, I love Copenhagen. We have we spent twenty years in Copenhagen, so I like that city very, very much. Okay. Just just say someone has said, we've got this great model of an app. Yeah. And you're gonna be really successful and you're actually gonna enjoy a little stressful, but and I'm gonna give you three choices of of of subjects for the app, and you're not allowed to have wine. Yeah. What would you what would you choose if you had to it could be any kind of app, not just a consumer app. Sure. I think it would be some so I love data, right? That's when this I didn't. Yeah. Yeah. You did. I know that doesn't come through. So, I it would definitely be something within that. I think I I still think that the restaurant space, the data really isn't good enough, even though we have massively big player to do their best, I still don't think it's good enough. So so that I think, you know, could've been fun. So, I mean, would you do that, though, to disrupt? Right. No. I probably wouldn't. You do you've done the yeah. I think I've done my bit now. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, it's you've been doing this for for for nine almost ten years is massive undertaking, you know, I had full hair of head before I started out. No. It's it's just a lot of work. It's pretty stressful, and and it's been amazing, you meet amazing people. It's an amazing journey. It's just fantastic to, you know, people come to you and, and, and, and appreciate what you've built. I love building stuff. So, so it's been a fantastic journey, but it's also hard work. Yeah. For sure. So you're, you know, you're gonna be locked away for a couple of weeks, and but you got all your favorite foods with you in in your family, and you can take three Italian wines with you. Yeah. So you can take a red, the one white and a speciality like a Fiz or a Vincanta or something like that. Okay. You know, you're asking me a question within a subject. I don't have a lot of knowledge, but I love drinking wine. I'm not definitely not an expert. That is a good. That's probably why you've been so successful. Yeah. You haven't got into the minutiae that we all get tied up with that. Yeah. It's so close to it. We can't see the trees or the vines. I I do remember though that, that the best, I think actually still might be the highest rate of wine or database is an Italian wine. Do you wanna guess before I say it? Not a brunello or something. It's, let's Sasekaya in nineteen eighty five. Oh, okay. Well, yeah. So I would have brought that one, definitely. Okay. And then I will find some sparkling, maybe if it's Italian, you know, you can drink a lot of champagne. They love champagne. So I would find some some sparkling with a similar style champagne and then about the wide armor. So traditional method then? Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Okay. So financial quarter. Probably. Could be, yes. And then with the wide, I'm not sure what I would go for. Honestly, I'll probably ask for some advice. Something from Aetna? Something from Aetna or something from the Venetos waving? Yeah. So did you see the guy that presented the island? Was the Vermentino grape? Yeah. Exactly. The that grape is actually quite nice depending on how it's done. It can be very buttery, but this this was pretty good, actually. Okay. That was from the, from Okay. Alrighty. Incredible story. Thank you. You know, if you walk, if I sat next to you on the vaps, I'd be like, oh, this guy is, you know, he's an accountant or something. Yeah. He probably is. He's gotta check. You know, he's he's obviously got a very interesting job. But you've, I think you're of secrets, you've you've you've made this impenetrably vast and complex and contradictory industry that we are in. With a couple of swipes on the screen, you're already feeling confident about buying what's in front of you. And that's so that's that's a really big achievement. Thank you. And obviously, there's there's a lot you've been successful by La Balap. You had a great idea. So the simple ideas are the best, but you scaled it. Yeah. Thank you. I'll see that. So, Hi. No, I wanna say thank you very much to you very much to you. I do hope you go to the Ferros at some stage and and just don't lose contact with your No. I definitely won. My parents are there, so it's tough. Yeah. But you're in over the great place, San Fran. I mean, did you do, I mean, outside of wine? Do you have any sort of you just come across as a very sociable, caring kind of guy? And obviously San Francisco is wealthy, but also very poor. Yeah. Do you do you do anything in in terms of, trying to stuff that helps people that maybe have been a little bit less fortunate in life? I I think, better citizen. I think I have not done enough of that honestly yet, but I definitely wanna do it. At some point, I think the closest I've gotten to it is is really doing something which I really enjoy, and and that's helping younger startups and companies. I speak to a lot of those people. I mean, that that's usually people that are pretty fortunate in themselves, but, but no something I wanna do more of in the future for sure. Cool. Alrighty. Thank you very much for having me on. It's been a pleasure. No worries. It's been a real pleasure for me. I'm I'm the world's technophobe. I can just about work on iPhone. Yeah. I can just about find the settings to turn the ringer off, you know. So, yeah, might look so simple on your phone, but it is, the design as well, it's kind of a friendly design. It's not like really flashing lights, all that kind of stuff. Just easy, peasy. Nice one. Really pleasure. Thank you very much. Pleasure. This podcast has been brought to you by Native Grape Odyssey, discovering the true essence of high quality wine from Europe. 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