Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal

Summary

How I Built This with Guy Raz: Resy and Eater - Ben Leventhal

Released on January 20, 2025

In this compelling episode of How I Built This, host Guy Raz delves into the entrepreneurial journey of Ben Leventhal, the visionary behind Eater, Resy, and his latest venture, Blackbird Labs. Ben's passion for the restaurant industry and his innovative approaches have transformed how diners interact with restaurants, navigating through challenges and seizing opportunities to build iconic brands. This summary captures the essence of Ben’s story, highlighting key discussions, insights, and pivotal moments from the episode.

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I. Early Career and the Birth of Eater

Ben Leventhal's journey began after studying finance at George Washington University and working at VH1 in New York City. Reflecting on his early career, Ben shares:

“The first thing I did there was I worked on the big shows, sort of things like Storytellers and VH1 used to have a show called Divas, which was a big concert…”
— Ben Leventhal [05:44]

Feeling stagnant and lacking progress in his role, Ben started exploring his passion for restaurants. This led to the creation of a newsletter initially titled "She Loves New York", which evolved into the renowned Eater blog.

“The first thing I did there was I worked on the big shows... Whatever, yeah."
— Ben Leventhal [05:44]

Ben recounts how Eater began as a simple newsletter, garnering a cult following with around 10,000 subscribers at its peak.

“It was really just commentary and color and observations... It developed a kind of cult following.”
— Ben Leventhal [08:50]

II. Partnership with Lockhart Steele and Growth of Eater

Ben's collaboration with Lockhart Steele, the then-managing editor of Gawker, was instrumental in scaling Eater. Their partnership began when Gawker linked to Eater, significantly boosting its traffic.

“Gawker was very, very snarky. Yeah, yeah."
— Ben Leventhal [11:27]

Together, Ben and Lockhart expanded Eater beyond New York, maintaining a unique voice that resonated with readers. Despite not being traditional food critics, their energetic and sometimes snarky reviews, especially the infamous "Death Watch" section, attracted both praise and criticism.

“We were just so...all energy and that often showed up as snark.”
— Ben Leventhal [16:22]

III. Transition to Resy and Initial Challenges

After stepping away from Eater, Ben sought to solve a recurring problem: securing reservations at sought-after restaurants. In 2014, he partnered with Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Montero to launch Resy, a restaurant reservation platform aiming to optimize table bookings through a surge pricing model.

“We thought that was our wedge surge pricing.”
— Ben Leventhal [32:01]

Resy's original model allowed diners to pay a premium for high-demand reservation slots, similar to Uber's surge pricing. However, the concept faced significant resistance from both consumers and restaurant owners.

“You can generate revenue, you can make customers happy, and all you have to do is you have to charge for your primetime inventory.”
— Ben Leventhal [35:09]

IV. Pivoting Resy and Achieving Success

Acknowledging the shortcomings of the initial model, by late 2014, Resy pivoted from paid reservations to a comprehensive reservation and table management service, focusing on providing restaurants with better control over their bookings without per-cover fees.

“It became clear that this was not going to be as big as we thought.”
— Ben Leventhal [44:12]

This strategic shift led to the introduction of features like reservation widgets for restaurant websites and a universal guest database, which significantly enhanced Resy's value proposition.

“If you have four restaurants, it's all one database... Now you can start to track them across your group.”
— Ben Leventhal [53:46]

V. Acquisition by American Express and Crisis Management

In May 2019, American Express acquired Resy for approximately $200 million. Although Resy was not yet profitable, the acquisition provided stability and resources, especially crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We were inside of it when we sold it to Amex. We were not profitable.”
— Ben Leventhal [53:46]

During the pandemic, Ben remained as CEO and took decisive actions to support restaurants, including cutting fees to zero and advancing funds to help them manage payroll during closures. These measures solidified Resy's reputation as a supportive partner in the industry.

“We cut fees to zero... We thought it was really important, symbolically, to say we are not in a position to be collecting money from restaurants right now.”
— Ben Leventhal [54:40]

VI. Launching Blackbird Labs: Revolutionizing Restaurant Loyalty

After stepping down from Resy in November 2020, Ben conceived the idea of a restaurant currency. This vision culminated in Blackbird Labs, launched in 2023, a loyalty program designed to unify restaurant rewards into a single, cohesive system.

“Blackbird is a loyalty company for restaurants... It takes all the restaurants in the world and turns them into one big giant coalition loyalty program.”
— Ben Leventhal [57:05]

Blackbird operates by allowing diners to earn points at any participating restaurant and redeem them across the entire network. This system benefits both customers and restaurants by facilitating seamless rewards and fostering customer loyalty.

“We backstop all of the points with USD... And over time, what we hope is that they will hold it as points and use those Points for future rewards.”
— Ben Leventhal [57:50]

As of the podcast, Blackbird Labs has 500 participating restaurants and aims to create a global currency for the restaurant industry, enhancing both customer experience and restaurant profitability.

VII. Reflections on Success: Luck, Timing, and Execution

Throughout his journey, Ben emphasizes the interplay of timing, luck, and execution in achieving success. While his unique insights and strategic decisions have been pivotal, he acknowledges the importance of external factors in the growth of his ventures.

“I think luck and timing matter a ton... But, I mean, these businesses are really tough.”
— Ben Leventhal [60:25]

Ben’s story underscores the resilience and adaptability required to navigate the dynamic landscape of the restaurant industry, highlighting how innovative thinking and strategic pivots can lead to enduring success.

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Conclusion

Ben Leventhal's entrepreneurial saga, as detailed in this episode, offers invaluable lessons on passion-driven innovation, the importance of flexibility in business models, and the significance of supporting industries through challenging times. From founding Eater to revolutionizing restaurant reservations with Resy and pioneering loyalty programs with Blackbird Labs, Ben's contributions have left an indelible mark on the culinary and tech landscapes.

For entrepreneurs and enthusiasts alike, Ben's journey exemplifies how deep industry appreciation combined with strategic vision can build iconic brands that not only thrive but also uplift the communities they serve.

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This summary is based on the transcript provided and aims to encapsulate the key discussions and insights shared by Ben Leventhal and Guy Raz during the episode.

Transcript

[Guy Raz]

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[Ben Leventhal]

I don't think people understand quite how hard restaurants are. If you think about the moving parts at the average independent restaurant and how complicated the production and assembly and delivery of food is to the table, and you compare that to any other small business, it's orders of magnitude more difficult. I mean, you don't walk into a store and say, I need a pair of socks and sneakers and somebody down in the basement makes you the shoes and socks. Yeah, but that's what happens when you walk into a restaurant.

[Guy Raz]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today how Ben Leventhal's appreciation of restaurants helped him build Eater and then Resi, a booking service that over the past year has seated 350 million diners. If you ask me to name my favorite restaurant, it's pretty easy. It's a place where they know me. Now, the food happens to be spectacular, but even if it wasn't, the fact that I'm a regular means my experience there is always great. And that's the thing about eating out. Even if the food's just average, but the overall experience is great. You'll probably have a pretty good memory of the place. And that's what mattered and still matters most to Ben Leventhal. All three of the businesses he founded or co founded are ostensibly about food, but really they're not just about about food, but about the experience of enjoying the place where the food is served. Back in the early days of blogging, Ben started writing about New York City restaurants, and the blog eventually became Eater, which is now owned by Vox. Eater would report on the rise and fall of restaurants, much in the same snarky voice that Gawker used for celebrities. When Ben stepped away from Eater, he wanted to figure out a way to solve a problem he'd often run into how to snag a table at a hard to book restaurant. So in 2014, he partnered with Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Montero to launch Resi. Today, Resi is one of the big restaurant reservation apps, along with others like OpenTable and Talk. The original model for Resy was a little like Uber and surge pricing. If you were willing to pay a premium for, say, a Friday night, you could reserve a table at an in demand restaurant. Now, eventually that model didn't work out and Ben and the team had to make a hard pivot, which you will hear about. Resi was eventually acquired by American Express for around $200 million, and today it lists around 16,000 restaurants on the app. Ben has also launched a third company. It's called Blackbird, and it's tapping into the world of restaurants, rewards, and virtual currency. But we'll get there a little later. For now, what you need to know about Ben is that he grew up, studied finance at George Washington University, and out of college, his first job was working at VH1 in New York City.

[Ben Leventhal]

The first thing I did there was I worked on the big shows, sort of things like storytellers and VH1 used to have a show called Divas, which was a big Concert. And I got to meet all kinds of people. I was once, for all of five minutes, Madonna's security for one shoot, had to escort her, get her safely from her car to her dressing room and back.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

Did you see yourself kind of climbing up the ranks and maybe one day being an executive, or did you always kind of see it as a temporary thing?

[Ben Leventhal]

You know, what happened is I didn't see myself making any progress. Yeah, I held the executives there in extremely high regard. Those were the days where MTV executives were just, you know, epic heroes of, I guess, the sort of early media, cable media environment. I mean, Tom Fruston and Judy McGrath and John Sykes, I mean, these guys were huge figures, and I held them in very high regard, and I did want to be one of them. And I spent a bunch of time at MVH1 and MTV, and I didn't really make any progress.

[Guy Raz]

Isn't it amazing just to think about it for a moment? There was a time in the early 2000s, even into the 2010s, where New York media executives were considered to be such a big deal. They were so highly paid, they had drivers that would drive them to the office. You know, it's just so crazy to think about it today because that whole business is just gone. And in part because they spent all that money in the 2000s and the 2000s.

[Ben Leventhal]

They were spending it on private cars.

[Guy Raz]

It's just nuts.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

So you saw that. You felt like you were not going anywhere. So what did you do when you left?

[Ben Leventhal]

Well, one of the things that happened towards the end of my time at VH1 is I sort of didn't have very much to do. And the job that I was doing was pretty easy. So I had some time on my hands. And that's when I sort of initially started doing things on the side and started writing about restaurants and writing about the city and those projects just on a blog. On a blog. It was initially a newsletter called she Loves New York, and that turned into Eater.

[Guy Raz]

Who was she?

[Ben Leventhal]

She was the theoretical she. Just a woman in New York who loves the city.

[Guy Raz]

All right.

[Ben Leventhal]

It was a weekly newsletter, and every week I wrote about 10 or 20 restaurants somewhere in that range, places of interest. And I categorized them around pop culture themes and moments. So if it was baseball season and you wanted to go watch the Yankee game, it would be, you know, four places with screens. But it developed a kind of cult following.

[Guy Raz]

And, like, how many people were subscribed to this newsletter?

[Ben Leventhal]

I think at its height, it was 10,000.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Ben Leventhal]

It was really just commentary and color and observations. She Loves New York initially was anonymous, and I thought that was an interesting kind of hook for it. And there was a sort of curiosity as to who's writing this and what is this, what's really going on here?

[Guy Raz]

And was it, like, snarky?

[Ben Leventhal]

It wasn't snarky. The tone of she Loves New York was really. It was insidery. It was awestruck in a way, really sort of a fascination with the city, but it wasn't really snarky as such. It was just kind of quippy and insidery.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you're writing this, but, I mean, you're not making any money off of it, right?

[Ben Leventhal]

No, not at all. No.

[Guy Raz]

You're just sending it out. This is just like a thing to do.

[Ben Leventhal]

It was a thing to do, and it had no commercial value or potential at any point. Although I did think in the broadest possible sense, I said, well, maybe there could be something here. But I had no idea what that might be, and I was simply motivated by the fun of writing it.

[Guy Raz]

Meantime, you meet this guy in New York named Lockhart Steele. Who's Lockhart? How did you meet him?

[Ben Leventhal]

Lockhart Steele was at the time doing two things that were interesting and relevant to me. One was he was the managing editor of Gawker, and two is that he was writing a blog called below 14th Street. And below 14th street was a very early blog. I mean, he was blogging when I was still sending out this newsletter, but I used it as a source a lot. One of the hooks of she Loves New York was that it was extremely up to date in terms of intelligence, what was opening and where. And so it was below 14th street was one of my sources, and we had been introduced through a mutual friend, and we hit it off.

[Guy Raz]

So he was basically kind of doing a parallel thing, and he's also managing editor of Gawker. Was Gawker in 2005 already a thing, or was it really just kind of a New York insider thing?

[Ben Leventhal]

Gawker was an insider thing, but Gawker was pretty well read at the time. I mean, anecdotally, I remember that when Gawker would link to one of my she loves New York newsletters, it would really spike traffic.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Ben Leventhal]

It would really be a big win for me.

[Guy Raz]

And Gawker was snarky.

[Ben Leventhal]

Gawker was very, very snarky. Yeah, yeah.

[Guy Raz]

And so how did that. Like, what do you remember about conversations that led one or both of you to say, why don't we join forces and do something together.

[Ben Leventhal]

I remember us having two seminal conversations about this. We met at a bar and I said, I think we should do something and it should be about restaurants and it should be called Eater. And I said, we should call it Eater because one is, it sounds a little bit like Gawker. And two is Eater is the most dressed down way of thinking about people who go to restaurants. They're not foodies, they're not gourmets, they're not connoisseurs, they're just eaters. And I said, we should do this blog and we'll post about restaurants and we'll both do it. And Locke was much farther along in terms of his understanding of digital media than I was at the time. And in part because he was already at Gawker and he just generally was way more in the scene and already had a feel for it. And he also was writing at that time a newsletter called Curbed about street level, neighborhood level real estate in the city. And he took to this idea of restaurants and he said, well, the easiest thing to do is to launch it off of Curbed and we'll make it eater.curbed.com and that's how that was. The first place that ITER launched was a subdomain of Curbed. And we sort of mapped, sketched it out and essentially drew up a wireframe for it. And we both contributed some ideas as to how it would function.

[Guy Raz]

And Eater was going to be much more closer to a restaurant review site.

[Ben Leventhal]

Well, Eater was. The idea was let's put up a couple of posts a day, and then it turned into six, and then it turned into 12 posts, and it was a regular feed of content about restaurants. Now, we did say we're not gonna write reviews, and we also said we're not gonna post photos of food. And we said, we're really not interested in adding to the noise with more photos of food, and we're really not interested in writing reviews because we're actually not going to be any good at that. Because, as I still do at that time, we held the big time food critics in extremely high regard and had a ton of respect for what they do. And we just said, we can't compete against those guys. But what we did have was we had the cadence of blogging, which was certainly a competitive advantage. We could post things whenever we wanted to. And we had, you know, our take on restaurants. We had our take, which was that these places are these incredible, wonderful, magical places. And the chefs and the operators of restaurants were heroes and villains to be talked about.

[Guy Raz]

So what was. Presumably you had to get a. You have to get paid. So how was it going to work? Were you going to become an employee of Curb to get a paycheck?

[Ben Leventhal]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

And I mean, we're 2005. Were advertisers spending a bunch of money on these sites? Was it possible? Because hosting a web page was very expensive at the time. Was the business model. I don't know. Was it sustainable?

[Ben Leventhal]

Well, we had a couple of advertisers and credit to Locke, he had attracted several advertisers through Curbed. And so there were companies like. My recollection is the New York Times was a company that advertised with curbed. And when I left, what we decided to do was we decided to raise some money and we raised an angel round of funding for the enterprise, the Curb Eater enterprise, and that's how we funded it. And we grew into it being a sustainable advertiser supported content business.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you now and you became sort of the editor of Eater.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, that's right.

[Guy Raz]

And you were the main writer. You were posting two or three pieces a day or you had one or two people working with you.

[Ben Leventhal]

We started by both contributing, Lak and I. My recollection is three or four posts a day. We didn't have any other contributors for the first year or two, but we just sort of went about posting. I mean, that's the thing about those days in digital media. The key to getting one of these things stood up is in some ways you just have to start posting, you have to start producing content.

[Guy Raz]

From what I've read, there was definitely an edge of snark to some of the reporting. Yeah, you guys had like a section called Death Watch where you would like count the days before you felt like a restaurant would die.

[Ben Leventhal]

We did. You know, it was a lot of our energy and our just unbridled enthusiasm for restaurants that was coming out. And it often showed up as snark. The idea of Eater was that we loved restaurants. We were obsessed with restaurants. I think about my career as a hype man for restaurants and Eater was the start of that. And we were just so. We were just so. It was just all energy and that often showed up as snark. And knowing what I know now, I wouldn't do things like Death Watch, which in hindsight were harsh and cruel to the restaurants that became its subjects. But we were outsiders and we didn't know any better. And we didn't know what we didn't know. We just knew how much we loved the scene and how fun and fascinating and exhilarating it all was.

[Guy Raz]

Let me ask you about just the business side for a second, because I would imagine you're in your sort of mid to late twenties when you and Lockhart start talking about this idea, and then it became part of curbed. You probably didn't think of yourself as an entrepreneur. You probably didn't think like, I'm starting a business, did you?

[Ben Leventhal]

No, no. It didn't even occur to me. We had a joint venture on Iter, and Locke did more of the work of building the business, and I did more of the work of. Of building the editorial. But I was close to it and sort of understood more or less what was going on. You know, it wasn't just sort of a naive creative writing content. Yeah. But the passion for me was around the content. No question about it.

[Guy Raz]

And. All right, so you. So this becomes your thing. And Eaters growing. It's mainly in New York at the time.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, we had San Francisco, we had la. But the gravity of the company was, you know, New York was the center of gravity of the company.

[Guy Raz]

And was it profitable or at least sustainable, or was it, you know, did it require, like, constant fundraising? Like, how was it keeping the lights on?

[Ben Leventhal]

It was more or less sustainable. We didn't raise more money for quite a while after the initial angel round. It was a lean, small, lean company. You know, we ran it modestly, and we didn't have that many employees, and a lot of the writers were freelancers. And it was lean. We ran it lean.

[Guy Raz]

From what I've read, publicists hated Eater because people said, well, they're not professional food critics, and they can really have a huge negative impact on a restaurant, but they don't know what they're doing. So when you would see stuff like that, did you just think that was funny? Did you laugh? Did it bother you? What do you remember about that?

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, we loved it. I think one of the important things about being an entrepreneur is that you have to be willing to break the rules. And sometimes you don't realize the rules you're breaking until after the fact. And sometimes you don't realize that it matters until after the fact. But at the time that we started Eater, there were rules about food content and there were rules about embargoes. And there was an unspoken understanding that if, as a publicist, you gave Florence Fabricant a story, she continues to be a writer at the Times, writes the.

[Guy Raz]

Sort of news columns, and she got the exclusive.

[Ben Leventhal]

If she had the exclusive, she had the exclusive. And so we often ran into these things where we had the story because we walked down the street and we saw a construction project and we poked our head in and it turned out that we got to see a restaurant before it was officially photographed and before it was officially announced and we put those things on the website.

[Guy Raz]

Were you guys ever sued? You must have been. Or threatened with lawsuits?

[Ben Leventhal]

I think we got some letters over the years. Nothing that ever brought us down or became existential. We always corrected posts when we needed to. A lot of the current, I think, style and conventions around online media, I think it's fair to say the rules were being developed in that time. And there was not the same journalistic standard that exists for old school legacy media. The priority was pace and speed. And certainly that took precedence over, I would say, accuracy in some cases. But, you know, if we posted a story about a restaurant and we said, this is opening next week, and the chef wrote us and said, you're wrong, it's opening in two weeks, we would update the story and say, it's opening in two weeks.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Ben Leventhal]

And sometimes publicists, because they were playing by the old rules, would send us a press release and it would say on the top, on embargo until. But we didn't ask for the press release, and we got these things unsolicited. And so we kind of said, these are not our rules and we're going to post it now. And we drove people crazy with that stuff. We just, the publicists especially, just couldn't wrap their heads around what we were doing. And certainly that changed. And they started to figure it all out, and we started to figure out how to play nicely with them. But, yeah, we just started by saying, these are not our rules, so screw it.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back in just a moment, how Ben moves on from ITER to start Resi and why its first business model falls flat. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built this. While you're away, your home could be an Airbnb, just like the incredible home I stayed in in Mexico City just a couple weeks ago. It was absolutely beautiful and the perfect base for exploring the city. Maybe you're planning a trip for a long holiday weekend, and while you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra income toward the trip. Maybe you want to go somewhere warm over the winter. While you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money to spend on souvenirs. Whether you could use a little extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home or spare room might be worth more than you think. Find out how [e-mail] host. You know, every year I think to myself about the new goals I'm going to set for myself. But did you know that only 8% of us will stick with the resolutions we make? Today's episode is sponsored by Acorns. Acorns is a simple tool that makes it easy to lock in years and years of healthy money habits in just five minutes. Head to acorns.combilt or download the Acorns app to start saving and investing for your future today. Paid non client endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns Tier 5 compensation provided investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor. View important [e-mail] I imagine getting a message from your favorite brand that feels like it was created just for you. Chances are they're using Attentive, the SMS and email marketing platform designed to help brands build and connect with their ideal audience. Attentive helps marketers create unique messages for every subscriber, transforming the consumer shopping experience and maximizing marketing performance. But how does it work? Attentive's AI learns what subscribers actually want based on their real time interactions with your brand. That means it customizes the content, tone and timing of every message so they always resonate. Ready to take customers on a journey created just for them? Visit attentive.combilt to learn more. Hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2009 and Ben decides to step away from the website. He co founded Eater and move on to new things. He works for a while at NBC doing digital food content and then he leaves that job for a startup. You worked for a startup called Kitchen Surfing. It was like a private chef company and like you could book.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, you could kind of book a chef like you could an Uber. If you had a dinner party on Friday and you need a chef, you could go on Kitchen Surfing and make a request and get a chef. Yeah, didn't work that well.

[Guy Raz]

It didn't work that well. And meantime Curbed gets acquired by Vox, I think they reportedly for between 20 and 30 million dollars. It gets sold, I'm assuming out of that you get, you know, a check too. Probably not enough to finance, you know, the rest of your life. Or you could just sit on a beach and drink, you know, pina coladas. But you know, probably enough to may help you start something.

[Ben Leventhal]

Absolutely, yeah.

[Guy Raz]

So you had briefly worked at this startup, kitchen surfing. I have to imagine that that experience gave you some ideas or kind of got the gears and your head turning about food and a business.

[Ben Leventhal]

Definitely that was a period of time where I learned a lot about startups in sort of a formal way. Like I learned about how kitchen surfing went about raising venture money and how venture backed companies have board meetings and think about roadmaps and growth and things like that. And out of kitchen surfing, I really didn't know what was going to come next and I didn't have any strong ideas about what that might be. And there's two ways for me that ideas mature. One is when I write about them and the others when I talk about them. So I like to talk about things that I'm thinking about with people that I trust and that I think have good, strong opinions on things because it helps me figure things out. And so somebody I had gotten to know over the years was Gary Vaynerchuk.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, so Gary Vaynerchuk, we had him on the show several years ago. He's kind of a social media entrepreneur and he's done a bunch of different things. You guys are just batting ideas back and forth at the time. This is 2013. Uber's starting out, or it's starting to gain traction. IPhone apps are exploding. What were you thinking about in terms of what opportunities there were around restaurants and smartphones?

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, Gary, in the years that I got to know him, I was doing Eater, he was developing Wine Library, which is the thing in many ways that started to put him on the map. And we were both at a point in our careers in late 2013 where we had the headspace to think about doing something together. And we were sitting down at a restaurant on the Upper east side and the chef comes over and he says, you know, I've got some amount of notoriety in the restaurant industry because it's. This is post Eater, of course. And the chef comes over and is happy to say hello and is excited to meet Gary. And we've had a great meal and we chatted for a bit. And he was just talking about how hard the restaurant was, how it really wasn't working very well and wasn't very profitable. And we. That was a real provocation for me to say, there's something that's off here. These restaurants shouldn't be so hard. They're making people so happy. But if none of these restaurants are working, what's that about? Why is that the case. And that's how we sort of started to dig into it.

[Guy Raz]

And I think. I guess at the time, Gary had mentioned that he was starting a fund, like he had raised some money to make investments.

[Ben Leventhal]

That's right. And so Gary had some money to play around with and was looking for ideas. And so that's how these sort of two things came together.

[Guy Raz]

It's interesting, in 2013, you're hearing chefs talk about how hard the industry is. I can't imagine a good, even a very successful restaurant that's doing more than 10% in profit.

[Ben Leventhal]

No, that's. You're. If you're running at 10% as an independent restaurant, you're crushing it.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Ben Leventhal]

I don't think people understand quite how hard restaurants are. And that's always been something that, to me, is part of the fascination and part of the reason to fight for them and to partner with them is these businesses are 10 out of 10 difficulty. If you think about the moving parts at the average independent restaurant and how complicated the production and assembly and delivery of food is to the table, and you compare that to any other small business, it's orders of magnitude more difficult. I mean, you don't walk into a store and say, I need a pair of socks and sneakers, and somebody down in the basement makes you the shoes and socks. Yeah, but that's what happens when you walk into a restaurant. You say that you're hungry, and they go down and they put a bunch of stuff together and they make you dinner. And, you know, you also can't go from storefront to storefront, browsing for things that you like. You know, you go in, you sit down for two or three hours, you have a meal. That's. You get one shot at it. Yeah. And I think as we started talking about Resi, it started to come into focus that this is just. This is impossible, what these guys are doing. And let's understand why and see where the opportunities are.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. I mean, restaurants, I think it's like a third. A third. A third. Right. A third for rent, a third for food, and then a third for your employees. And hopefully you can squeeze those down a little bit. So then whatever's left as the owner, you can pay yourself.

[Ben Leventhal]

But the reality is it winds up being more like. Well, you know, it's like you want it to be 30%. 30%. 30% and then 10% profit, but it's sort of. The reality is it winds up being more like 33. 33. 33.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. I mean, every day I read articles about really great restaurants in San Francisco that close down because the owners cannot. It's not sustainable. They're literally not making a salary and they're busting their butts.

[Ben Leventhal]

That's right.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you start to think, well, what's the opportunity here? How can I maybe build something that will benefit restaurants and then that we can turn to a business? So what was the. What was the kind of the choke point, you know, the bottleneck that you discovered that could be exploited?

[Ben Leventhal]

Well, we thought that the choke point was that there was no variable pricing in restaurants. And we were just talking generally, why is the price of the seat the same every day no matter what the demand is?

[Guy Raz]

Right. Because a Friday night at. At 7:30 is going to be a higher demand than Tuesday night at five.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, but it's 150 bucks either way. And we were saying, how is it possible that restaurants haven't figured this out? The margins are so thin and it's so hard to generate revenue. How is it possible that restaurants haven't figured this out? And so we thought that was our wedge surge pricing. And what we did was we. The first version of Resy was just paid reservations. $10, $20, $50, $100 for reservation.

[Guy Raz]

So when Gary agreed, the two of you agreed to work together. Did he have an office? Did you sort of, you know, set up shop in his office and start to just dig into this stuff?

[Ben Leventhal]

He did. He gave us a little group of 10 desks out in the middle of the floor and. And we started banging away.

[Guy Raz]

And who was we?

[Ben Leventhal]

We had. At the time it was me, Gary and Mike Montero who would become the CTO of resi. Gary had known Mike and had talked to him about a couple of different projects because Mike's a really talented engineer and was looking for his next chapter.

[Guy Raz]

So the idea you started to develop was, hey, why don't we sell seats at restaurants? Like, you know, you pay a premium for a certain time of the day.

[Ben Leventhal]

Exactly, exactly.

[Guy Raz]

And how is that gonna work? I mean, just to get it off the ground, you had to get restaurants, presumably to agree to give you an allocation of seats, Right?

[Ben Leventhal]

Precisely what we did. We went to restaurants. I went around the city, went to restaurants where I knew the chefs and.

[Guy Raz]

And presumably you had some credibility from your time at eder.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yes, I brought to Resi the credibility and the Rolodex that I developed at iter. And I think it's fair to say that as Rezi grew, you know, I used my product instincts and my content experience and Started to sort of round the thing out. But really I went door to door with the restaurants and I started with the restaurants that I knew and really ask them to take a leap of faith and try this out.

[Guy Raz]

And what was your pitch to them? Like, you come into a restaurant, you'd say, hey, we're gonna do this thing. And I would say, well, what's in it for us? Like, I mean, we're just gonna give you our seats. I mean, we're already selling these out.

[Ben Leventhal]

The pitch was airlines have first class and business class and premium economy and economy. And when you go to a concert, there's front row and floor seats and second deck and third deck. But for restaurants, you have nothing. You have one price. It's one size fits all. Everyone gets the same seat at the same price. And what if you could charge more for 7:30 on Friday night? It's only 50 bucks. If you want it, it's yours.

[Guy Raz]

50 bucks for the right to have the seat. But then obviously you'd have to pay for the meal.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah. And that was the pitch. You can generate revenue, you can make customers happy, and all you have to do is you have to charge for your primetime inventory.

[Guy Raz]

So maybe like Tuesday night you could book it for 10 bucks for the reservation, but on a Friday night it might be 50 or more if it's a hot restaurant.

[Ben Leventhal]

That's right.

[Guy Raz]

And the restaurant will get a cut of that.

[Ben Leventhal]

The restaurant got most of that revenue.

[Guy Raz]

Most of it.

[Ben Leventhal]

Most of it.

[Guy Raz]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Ben Leventhal]

My recollection is that we took 20% as a vague, and the restaurant kept the rest.

[Guy Raz]

And were you getting traction? Were you getting restaurants saying, I'm in, I'm up for trying this out?

[Ben Leventhal]

It was really hard. We got restaurants to say yes. I remember the restaurants that said yes to us first. Because when you're starting a business, the first five yeses are the ones that matter the most and are the ones that require a tremendous amount of leap of faith. But there were lots of no's too.

[Guy Raz]

So it would be a mobile app and people could basically buy this. I mean, it's a great idea. And I know there are people listening and I know that you guys got knocked for it because people are like, oh, they're like ticket scalpers. But at the end of the day, that is for better or worse, how capitalism works, right, Is that there's an opportunity and if you can make money off of it, it's reasonable and legal and ethical, then it's going to happen. I just went and saw Taylor Swift. Most of those people in that arena probably bought from the secondary markets, for better or worse.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, but there's something about hospitality that forces consumers into a different mental model than they are using for other entertainment categories. And I think it's the intimacy of it. I think it's the legacy in the history of hospitality. Restaurants, in people's minds are first come, first serve, democratic places. When you start pricing them, everyone gets a little uncomfortable when you say to a customer, you can have this table, but you have to pay $100 more for it than the person sitting next to you. That really, really bothers people, even though.

[Guy Raz]

That might be the case at an NBA game or any concert they go to.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

For some reason, when it's at a restaurant, people just, psychologically, they just. They cannot accept it.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah. I think it's about how bespoke it all is. I think it's about how intimate restaurants really are at the end of the day. I also think as time's gone on, I mean, this is the number one question that people ask me as the founder of Resi, like, why isn't there more variable pricing in restaurants? And I think one answer is, because hospitality is not capitalism in a pure sense. The other is that it's actually happening, but it's a little bit behind the scenes. You know, when you have credit cards, who get paid, allocations of tables, and you have VIPs and you have concierges, all those are entities that are benefiting the restaurant economically. And all those are entities that essentially help make sure that higher spending people are going to be in more valuable seats. So it's happening. It just turns out that something as sort of raw as resi1o is not the right. It's just not the right product for it. And so a lot of places told us, there's no way we're doing this.

[Guy Raz]

This is crazy, because they thought people would hate them. People worried about that. Yeah. But you got Minetta Tavern. You got Balthazar. I mean, you got some very hot restaurants. Still a hot restaurant, still a hot table to this day.

[Ben Leventhal]

One thing we did to make it more palatable is we said, well, look, even if you don't want to take the money, on the consumer side, this is beneficial. So charge for the table and we'll take your cut of it and we'll donate it to a charity of your choice.

[Guy Raz]

I see. So you could advertise that.

[Ben Leventhal]

That's right. It sort of was a way. It was a landing zone for restaurants.

[Guy Raz]

To be able to do it without worrying that they Looked like they were greedy.

[Ben Leventhal]

That's right. So I think Balthazar was donating to Food bank. And it was easier for restaurants to say yes if they could wrap their head around the fact that, okay, well, if it's going to charity, it can't be that bad.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. All right. To get this off the ground, you had some financing from Gary's fund. Did that finance the whole thing? I know you guys raised $2 million. Did it come entirely from the venture fund that Gary was starting?

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, that's right.

[Guy Raz]

So you have this money and you've got to build an app, develop a team, and get the restaurants on board. So, first of all, just from the technology perspective, building out a good piece of software, that must have eaten up a lot of your cash.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah. Well, we had Mike, who, as I said, is a world class engineer, and he coded the first couple of versions of it. But we had raised this $2 million seed round. So our first two hires were engineers, one for iOS, one for web, and Mike was doing back end work, and that was the team.

[Guy Raz]

And at the time, I mean, this was not a restaurant reservation site. The Open Table had been around since 1998 already. I think even Yelp, you could by that point reserve a table at a restaurant. So you were definitively not in the business of competing with those brands.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah. And even in those days, when we were starting Resi, a lot of people were saying to us, oh, this is an Open Table competitor. You know, you guys are going after reservations.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Ben Leventhal]

But we still sort of said, no, no, this is different. This is not. We don't want to be Open Table. This is an Uber for restaurants. This is different.

[Guy Raz]

So, but like, how big did you see the opportunity for what you were doing? I mean, did you think, oh, this could be, you know, a billion dollar business?

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah. Well, the thing is, when you're starting something out and you need to see it through to it being a big business, you can often kind of squint and see it. I mean, that's one of the superpowers of entrepreneurs.

[Guy Raz]

You were really squinting there.

[Ben Leventhal]

One of the superpowers of entrepreneurs is you can convince yourself of anything.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Ben Leventhal]

And so we had to squint a little bit, but we could see this being a big business. And the idea was, basically, we're going to roll this out and there's going to be this idea of variable price tables all over the world. And sometimes it might be a dollar, and sometimes it might be 200, but there's always going to be a clearing price for reservation and we were going to be that service that determined that price and made it happen.

[Guy Raz]

Except a big, bad, 800 pound gorilla. I shouldn't say big and bad, but just a big player open table could have easily replicated that if it took off.

[Ben Leventhal]

I think that's true. I think the idea that your competitors can just rip off your products when they get big, I think that's true. But also it's just not the nature of how big companies work. I think you often find that they're focusing on other things and they're too busy to worry about a little fruit fly buzzing in their ear. But you're right. If OpenTable had seen what we were doing and said, oh, this is interesting, they easily could have stood it up themselves. The fact of the matter is opentable saw that we were doing a couple things and entirely passed on doing them. They saw that we were pricing tables and we were also distinguishing tables. We said, you know, not all restaurant tables are created equal. There's bar seats and there's outdoor seats and there's dining room seats and. And when you go on OpenTable and you make a reservation, you don't know what you're booking.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Ben Leventhal]

And we had brought Resy to market in the summer of 2014. And so we as really a hack to get the thing going. One of the things we did was we said to restaurants, well, look, we'll take care of your outdoor seats when they're available and people will know they're booking outside. And in the middle of the summer in New York City, the idea that you could have a guaranteed table outside certainly was something that you could sell for a premium, which a lot of places did. But we did a bunch of things like that. But at the end of the day, all of that didn't amount to a real business. We couldn't. Other than spreadsheets that had no basis in reality. We couldn't see it through to the other side and build a big business around that.

[Guy Raz]

How long did it take you before you realized, you know, making 10 bucks here and 5 bucks there is not.

[Ben Leventhal]

I would say by the end of 2014.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, so that was the only model for the first, like five months.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, that was the model. That was the model.

[Guy Raz]

And it became clear that this was not gonna work.

[Ben Leventhal]

It became clear that this was not going to be as big as we thought. And yet we had the attention of the restaurant industry and we had their engagement and we had their urgings. For us to build something else.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back in just a moment, how Ben and his business partners ditch their first business model and come up with a better one. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built this. Welcome to Athletic Jam where you can do dry your way with great tasting NA brews. So here's one way I love to reset in January after a long hike or a bike ride. I don't really want to crack open a beer because I've got the rest of the day ahead of me and so I usually reach for a can of Upside down golden from Athletic Brewing Company. It tastes so good you'd be hard pressed to think that this was a non alcoholic brew. No matter what you're looking for in a great non alcoholic brew, the answer is always athletic. Great flavor, it's athletic. Huge variety. It's athletic. Fit for all times. Enjoy them anytime, anywhere. There's nothing dry about Athletic Brewing Co. Non alcoholic brews. Give it a try and head to athleticbrewing.com built to find it near you. That's athleticbrewing.com B U I L T to grab some fun and flavorful brews near you. Athletic Brewing Co. Fit for all times Near Beer Peloton has what you need to stay on track to hit your goals no matter what season of life you're in. I, like so many people probably like you have a really busy schedule and so when I can find time to exercise, which is pretty much every day, that's a win. But. But whether you're a new parent or traveling for the holidays or training for something big or you're just busy, Peloton has all kinds of challenging classes that can fit into any schedule. There are literally 10 minute hikes, 15 minute cycling rides, 45 minute strength classes and everything in between. And with Peloton's All Access membership, you can challenge yourself anywhere. You can work out at home on your bike tread and row, or you can take your favorite classes on the go and at the gym with the Peloton app. Find your push Find your power with [e-mail] hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's late 2014 and Ben and his partners have realized that their initial business model for RESI is not going to fly. Meanwhile, the restaurants they're working with start to give them some well meaning advice.

[Ben Leventhal]

We got over and over again this same feedback in different ways, but the feedback was always you just should build out reservations like this is cool but we want table management and we want booking widgets and if you can do those things, then we don't have to pay open table a dollar per seat. And then you'd really help us. And that's how we crossed the chasm into what would become Resi is we heard from restaurants, look, this is cool, but this is not what we really need.

[Guy Raz]

Right. So I guess at this point you respond to this feedback that you're getting from restaurants and you start to build out your reservation system, right?

[Ben Leventhal]

That's right. And we went really fast to the widget. So now we had Resi with a widget deployed to restaurants native website. Meaning when you click reserve on a restaurant's website, that popped up a RESI powered interface.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Ben Leventhal]

That was the first really big unlock for us. That was where we started to see traction.

[Guy Raz]

And that was because the restaurants were asking for that.

[Ben Leventhal]

The restaurants were asking for it and it made sense. It's part of our core thesis. Restaurant should be in more control and should be able to book their own customers without having to pay a dollar per cover. And so if you're on a restaurant's website and you want to visit the restaurant, of course you should be able to make a reservation. And for the restaurant, of course that reservation should be free.

[Guy Raz]

You weren't going to charge a per booking fee, it was just going to be a flat fee to use the Resi backend software.

[Ben Leventhal]

That's right. We said we're not going to charge per cover. We're going to charge you either 99 or $399 a month. I think there was another tier in the early days that was sort of the enterprise tier where we would do some custom stuff for you and that's it. You could do one cover or you could do 10,000 covers. It's the same price. Wouldn't matter, doesn't matter. You're not going to be metered for demand. The idea that more successful restaurants pay more is insane. You pay us a flat fee, use the software as much as you want it.

[Guy Raz]

But the success of that model depends on getting a lot of restaurants to sign up. You need to convert a lot of restaurants from OpenTable or whatever else they're using to you guys. Because if you got fewer restaurants but you're getting a per cover charge, you don't actually need as many. But if it's just a monthly flat fee, the business depends on having a good sales force out there.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

And so, I mean, we were mainly in New York initially. Right. But to really make this work, you had to be, you had to expand Out. Where was the next place you went to?

[Ben Leventhal]

We went to la. We had restaurants coming to us because the offering was attractive, whether or not there was resi marketing behind it. So we had restaurants starting to pop up around the country. But the next market that we went into from a sort of go to market perspective was la.

[Guy Raz]

And I know obviously in the first few months with the original business model, you could see that it wasn't going to work. Did you start to see it turn around?

[Ben Leventhal]

I did, yes. You know, in the first 12 months, we went from being resy the paid reservation service to resy the reservations and table management service.

[Guy Raz]

And one of the things that you guys did pretty early on was you partnered. You decided to partner with Airbnb. You get them to, you approach them and you say, hey, let's see if we can integrate this app into Airbnb to four restaurants.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah. So Airbnb was thinking about how do we incorporate restaurants into our offering? Because Airbnb at the time was really focusing on going deep in every market from an experiences perspective, wanting to be, you know, sort of a one stop shop when you visit New York, for example. And so they were looking for a partner here and they came to us and said, what would you guys be able to do for us from an integration standpoint? They went to some of our competitors too. They had a pretty considered approach and we won that business. Basically, we convinced them that we were the right partner for them. At some point in that conversation, we said, you know, we'd like this to be both an investment and a commercial partnership. And they agreed.

[Guy Raz]

One of the things that presumably, you know, I know this was happening at the time is like a CRM for restaurants, right, where they could know a lot about a customer. Because there are a lot of restaurants that I go to. Maybe you go to where you go a lot and then you'll go the six or seventh time and then you have a bad experience and then you don't go back and you're like, I've been there seven times. They don't even. I've seen the same people there or the same food and they don't recognize me, which is fine. But if that happens and you have a bad experience, that's a big loss for a restaurant. But if they know that you're there in your fifth or sixth time, that could be a huge advantage. This was something that, I guess that restaurants wanted, that they wanted something like that.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, for sure. Again, if you look at the history of this, it really comes down to us Shipping features that our competitors didn't have, and on that basis, convincing larger and larger restaurant groups to sign up with us. And one of those features was the universal guest database. Before Resi came along, every individual restaurant unit had its own customer database. It was essentially a customer database on a local server. And from the start, we said, if you have four restaurants, it's all one database. It's one customer profile against four restaurants. So now you can start to track them across your group. And you don't have to worry about missing a vip. If they're always going to your uptown location and then they come visit downtown, you don't have to worry about missing them. That was a big unlock for us. That was a big unlock. And restaurant, really, it mattered a ton to restaurants. It's so obvious now that's the right way to think about the guest database. But that's not how the systems had been architected before us.

[Guy Raz]

So did you, at a certain point, hit profitability?

[Ben Leventhal]

We were inside of it when we sold it to Amex. We were not profitable.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. May 2019, American Express announces that it's acquiring Resi, reportedly for $200 million. The timing couldn't have been in some ways better because it was a little less than a year before the whole industry would collapse temporarily. But obviously with COVID you stayed on as CEO after the acquisition, and now it's part of American Express's portfolio of companies.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yep, I stayed on for a year and a half.

[Guy Raz]

And you were there for the first six months of COVID for sure. So what did that do to the. I mean, I have to imagine part of you is relieved that you were part of a bigger company.

[Ben Leventhal]

Oh, yeah. I mean, better to be lucky than good, as they say. I think we, in hindsight, timed the exit perfectly. It meant that we could do some things for the restaurant industry that we would not have been able to do as an independent company. We did two things, and we did them very fast, and then the industry followed. One is we cut fees to zero. We thought it was really important, symbolically, to say we are not in a position to be collecting money from restaurants right now. And a lot of the industry, other tech companies, followed that, and I think it was important that we did that. And the other thing we did is that we said to restaurants where we had relationships, ones where we had marketing relationships, or we had signed up to maybe later in the year sponsor something, we said, well, we'll just advance you the money. We're going to do this event with you all anyway. If we can advance you those funds and that can help you with payroll while the restaurant's closed. Great. So let us know what you need. And I'm certainly proud of having been able to do those things and getting them done while I was still at Amex.

[Guy Raz]

When you stepped down In November of 2020, what did you do? I mean, did you just take some time off for a while?

[Ben Leventhal]

I wish I had taken more time off completely. But being that I, you know, I'm a curious, ideas driven person, I started talking to people about what to do next. And one of the things that I started talking about was the idea of a restaurant currency. The thing that's happening in this 2020, 2021 is obviously there's a lot of interest and excitement around blockchain tech and NFTs and cryptocurrency. And I started to talk about just this idea of what about a currency for restaurants? There's a lot of restaurants. It's a trillion dollar industry. They pay a lot of money in fees to move money from point A to point B from consumers to the restaurant units and back and forth. Maybe there's a currency here. Maybe this should exist. And that's how we started to slowly.

[Guy Raz]

Paint the strokes of Blackbird and Blackbird. Blackbird Labs, which is your newest venture, which you launched in 2023. It's basically like a reward program for diners from a consumer's perspective. How does it work?

[Ben Leventhal]

Blackbird is a loyalty company for restaurants. So you go into a restaurant, you earn points by using Blackbird, and then you can take those points and you can spend them like currency at any of the restaurants on our platform, it takes all the restaurants in the world and turns them into one big giant coalition loyalty program. That sort of feels like something you get in the airlines.

[Guy Raz]

And so when you go to the restaurant, you basically pay through the app.

[Ben Leventhal]

Correct.

[Guy Raz]

And so if I go and I spend money at a restaurant in San Francisco and I gain points, and then I'm in New York and I'm like, oh, I've got enough points for a free meal at this restaurant. How is that restaurant benefiting from that?

[Ben Leventhal]

We backstop all of the points with USD. So restaurants know at any time they can sell us their points for USD.

[Guy Raz]

Got it.

[Ben Leventhal]

And it's priced essentially as a really cheap transaction. It's cheaper than the price that they pay for a credit card swipe. And so what they know is it's good as cash. And over time, what we hope is that they will hold it as points and use those Points for future rewards. So, effectively, we're giving the restaurant industry a currency they can use to acquire and retain new customers.

[Guy Raz]

And a currency is a. It's a cryptocurrency.

[Ben Leventhal]

It's really just points. When I say currency, I mean, you know, in the way that you go to an arcade and you buy points, arcade credits, and then you go spend them in video game machines. That's the idea here.

[Guy Raz]

So it's like a bunch of airlines are part of whatever United's called. Mileage plus. I can't remember what it's called.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yeah, the Star Alliance.

[Guy Raz]

Star Alliance. Forgive me. Yeah, it's kind of like that.

[Ben Leventhal]

Yep, exactly. And so the idea here is that there is a spread, and we make money on points going in and out of the system. Every time a consumer is rewarded points, some of those are funded by Blackbird, some of those are funded by restaurants. We take a veg on that outbound flow of points, and when they come back to the restaurants and come out of the system, we charge restaurants a processing fee for those points as well.

[Guy Raz]

And so how many restaurants are participating?

[Ben Leventhal]

We have about 500 signed up across the platform.

[Guy Raz]

Well, how big of an opportunity do you see here?

[Ben Leventhal]

Oh, I think this is a massive opportunity. I mean, we want to create a global currency for restaurants. I come at this from the perspective that restaurants are magic. Restaurants are places that make people happy, that create memorable hospitality experiences. So we want with Blackbird, we want consumers to feel our enthusiasm for restaurants, and we want to harness that magic, and we want to make the app as thrilling as the restaurants themselves. So we want every restaurant on the planet to be wired with Blackbird and to, in that way, create a whole new restaurant economy.

[Guy Raz]

When you think about what happened with the two brands that you started and now you've got a third, how much of their success do you attribute to the work you put in? How much do you think it had to do with the luck and the timing and environment, et cetera?

[Ben Leventhal]

I think luck and timing matter a ton. I mean, I think what you have to believe when you're starting these things out is that you have unique insights and that you have superpowers. And so I do think that there are some things that I've brought to each of these businesses and will continue to bring to the things that I do that create market opportunities and advantages. But, I mean, these businesses are really tough. It's so hard to bring something like this to market. So with each of these businesses, we got a combination of timing and brand and strategy and execution, right? And those things have led to success.

[Guy Raz]

That's Ben Leventhal, founder of Blackbird Labs and co founder of ITER and Resy. And according to Resi's website, in the 10 years since it was founded, it's made a total of 600 million restaurant reservations. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the Follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my [e-mail] or on substack. This episode was researched and produced by Sam Paulson, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our engineers were Robert Rodriguez and James Willits. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, JC Howard, Carla Estevez, Devin Schwartz, Katherine Cipher, Chris Masini, Kerry Thompson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built this. If you like How I Built this, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short [e-mail] survey so you want to be a marketer?

[Ben Leventhal]

It's easy.

[Guy Raz]

You just have to score a ton.

[Ben Leventhal]

Of leads and figure out a way.

[Guy Raz]

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[Ben Leventhal]

Million blogs, and launch a hundred campaigns all at once. When that's done, simply make your socials go viral and bring in record profits.

[Guy Raz]

No sweat.

[Ben Leventhal]

Okay, fine, it's a lot of Sweat.

[Guy Raz]

But with HubSpot's AI powered marketing tools.

[Ben Leventhal]

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[Guy Raz]

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