Ben Leventhal has nothing if not good timing.
In 2004 the New York entrepreneur launched Eater at the dawn of the blogging era, when food media was still mostly legacy publications and message boards.
After selling Eater to Vox, he launched Resy in 2014 just as restaurants were beginning to bristle at the data practices of legacy online reservation systems such as OpenTable. He’d eventually go on to sell his second company to American Express.
And now Leventhal is looking to create his third founder success story with the launch of Blackbird, which he describes as “a new loyalty, membership, and payments technology company.” With Blackbird, Leventhal hopes to create consumer-friendly software that harnesses the features enabled by new platforms such as Web3 while pushing the technology into the background.
“Consumer software is consumer software,” Leventhal told me
In this episode, we discuss Ben’s journey from those early days, how the 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.
You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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