Hospitality in the Era of Web3 with Ben Leventhal
Ben Leventhal has nothing if not good timing. In 2004 the New York entrepreneur launched Eater at the dawn of the blogging era, back when food media was still mostly legacy publications and message boards. After selling Eater to Vox, he went on to launch Resy in 2014 just as restaurants were beginning to bristle at the data practices of legacy online reservations systems such as OpenTable. He'd eventually sell his second company to American Express. And now Leventhal is looking to create his third founder success story with the launch of Blackbird, a company which he describes as “a new loyalty, membership, and payments technology company.” In this episode, we discuss Ben's journey from those early days, how evolution of food media, the changes to reservation and other restaurant tech platforms, and how he envisions Web3 and other new technologies could change the game for small and independent restaurants. You can find out more about Ben's new company at Blackbird.xyz.