Built around the guest, not the room: Harman Singh Narula joins The Boardroom Reboot

Every property management system on the market is named after the same thing: the property. Harman Singh Narula noticed that early, and it bothered him enough to start a company on the opposite premise. If a hotel's revenue, loyalty and brand equity all flow from the guest, he reasoned, why does the database still treat the room as the center of the universe?

That question is the spine of this episode. Narula and his co-founder SJ Sidhu built Canary's earliest architecture around the guest rather than the room or the folio, a decision that put them at odds with the property-first logic baked into the rest of the industry's software stack. It also meant integrating with the very systems they were quietly arguing against, which is why Canary didn't lead with that thesis at all. The company earned its way in through something narrower and less ideological, a digital-authorizations product that solved a contained, unglamorous problem well enough that hoteliers and the wider ecosystem started taking the bigger idea seriously.

The early going was a hundred cold calls a day, Narula booking the meetings and running the demos himself while Sidhu handled onboarding. That rhythm, he says, is still inside the company: whenever Canary is stuck on something, the instinct is still to go talk to hoteliers rather than guess. It's also where the McDonald's story comes from. Narula's grandfather, an immigrant retailer who sold goods out of the trunk of his car, celebrated good sales days by buying the family McDonald's. Now the CEO of a company approaching a billion-dollar valuation does the same thing with his team after a big win, over the objections of colleagues who'd probably prefer something nicer.

Even the company name carries the guest-first argument forward. Canary refers to the canary in the coal mine, the earliest warning system for a threat nobody else in the room could see yet, which is how Narula frames the security angle behind Canary's first product and, not coincidentally, how he still frames the company's relationship to the rest of the industry.

From there the conversation turns to what he thinks is coming. Narula draws a hard line between replacement and repositioning, walks through what AI agents completing full workflows autonomously actually looks like today, and takes on the questions Floor won't let him dodge: will there still be a general manager, a director of finance, a hotel with no staff at all.

In this episode

• Why Canary's database was built around the guest instead of the room

• The unglamorous product that let Canary earn credibility before pushing its bigger thesis

• Why he made a hundred cold calls a day in the company's first years

• The coal-mine story behind the name Canary

• His take on why so few hospitality tech companies make it onto national fastest-growing lists

• His predictions for the next twelve months, five years and ten years

A few moments that stayed with us

• Narula's answer on whether hotel brands still matter once AI can handle distribution and loyalty says less about brands than it does about human trust.

• His prediction on the general manager's job doesn't kill the title. It's more unsettling than that.

• His ten-year prediction reaches past software entirely, into what robotics does to the physical shape of a hotel.