From Eater to Blackbird: Ben Leventhal on Restaurants, Loyalty, and Rebuilding Payments

**Ben Leventhal** (0:00)
Most restaurants just want to understand, how are you going to lower my costs, and how are you going to put butts in seats? The idea that we have in restaurants, a trillion dollars of sales in 2025, flowing through payments rails across the country, and restaurants don't control those rails at all, that's problematic. And so, changing the notion of who owns the network, and who benefits is a really important way that I think we're going to wind up using blockchain.

**Robert Hackett** (0:29)
Ben, so you've built a number of companies in the restaurant industry. You've built Eater, you've built Resy, and now you're working on Blackbird. Where did your love of restaurants begin?

**Ben Leventhal** (0:40)
I can't really pinpoint it for you. I mean, I think we all love restaurants. We all love going to a great local spot, and having a delicious meal, and being with friends, and just that feeling of being there, and feeling that you're in the right place with the right people at the right time. It's intoxicating for all of us, and so I think somehow I'm just lucky enough to have turned that into a career. I mean, it just really started with an obsession about where the next meal was going to be, and who with, and somehow it's snowballed into this.

**Robert Hackett** (1:07)
There was no prustian moment of having a Madeline cookie, and all of a sudden you were like, you had this epiphany, I have to work in restaurants.

**Ben Leventhal** (1:15)
The thing is, to be clear, I've never worked in restaurants. I've never actually worked on a line in a kitchen or done a shift of service. And frankly, it's mostly because I've been no good at it. But no, I think there's no one moment other than in my whole life, all of my happy memories, I think, you know, 90% of them are in restaurants. They just are this happy place for me, and somehow I've reverse engineered that into a career.

**Robert Hackett** (1:42)
Have you watched The Bear?

**Ben Leventhal** (1:43)
Of course, although I haven't watched the most recent season.

**Robert Hackett** (1:46)
Okay, no spoilers then. But I will say, my wife was watching it, and I was sort of working adjacent to her, and they're like yelling on TV. I was like, they work in a kitchen. How stressful could it be? But then, like, you know, I try to cook dinner, and it's a total mess. So I'm like, okay, actually, you know what? They eat my words.

**Ben Leventhal** (2:01)
It's a kitchen, a professional kitchen is a zillion moving parts, and you're on stage. That's the thing that people, I think, don't appreciate about a kitchen. If you're not a chef, you're on stage. You know, the plate of food is coming out. You may not be standing there next to the plate if somebody eats it, although sometimes you are, if it's like a counter kind of place. But it's a performance like anything else.

**Robert Hackett** (2:23)
Yeah, there's an element of theater to it for sure. Let me ask you this. So the business you're building now, Blackbird, uses crypto.

**Ben Leventhal** (2:30)
Why? Well, we are using crypto because we believe in cutting edge technology. And we believe that in order to build a technology company in the modern day, you ought to be using cutting edge technology. We'll use crypto, we'll use AI where we can, we'll use things that we haven't even thought of yet, or that haven't been invented yet to be cutting edge. But I think specifically the answer around crypto is, I think it does a couple of things for us. Some of them are long term, some of them are short term. In the short term, it allows us to transfer the ownership of identity to the consumer. The difference between Blackbird and a lot of more traditional or legacy software companies for restaurants is that the ownership of the consumer information sits traditionally with a big company, with a POS company, or a reservations company, or an analytics company.
With Blackbird, we're putting consumer's data anonymized on chain and giving them control of where that data goes. So that's a really important immediate reason why crypto. In the long run, there is a very compelling path to some notion of decentralization of this payments network that we're building. Now, what exactly that looks like and on what timeline, I think frankly, we're still trying to figure that out. But the idea that we have in restaurants, a trillion dollars of sales in 2025 flowing through payments rails across the world, across the country. And restaurants don't really control those rails at all. To Blackbird, that's problematic. And so the idea of changing the notion of who owns the network and who benefits from ownership of the network is a really important way that I think we're going to wind up using blockchain. It's early though, and you don't want to decentralize before there's a reason to. So are the things that we're talking about useful at 1000 restaurants? Some of the economics concepts are, but in terms of a fully decentralized payments network, I think we're not going to really see the benefits until we get to 100,000 restaurants. So some of this is sort of a question of order of operations and timing.