YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Leventhal

lines on the record: 71
first: 2025-01-20
most recent: 2025-01-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think luck in 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's 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. 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this is a massive opportunity. I mean, we want to create a global currency for restaurants. You know, 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 arcade credits and then you go spend them in video game machines. That's the idea here”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We backstop all of the points with USD. So restaurants know at any time they can sell us their points for USD. 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 of 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wish I had taken more time off completely, but being that 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. You know, 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 paint the strokes of Blackbird.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Amex.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, I mean, better to be lucky than good, as they say. I think in hindsight time 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 were going to 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had its own customer database. It was essentially a customer database on a local server. And from the start, we said if you had four restaurants sell 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. It mattered a ton to restaurants. It's so obvious now that that was the right, that's the right way to think about the guest database, but that's not how the systems had been architected before us.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, 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 Rezi came along, every individual restaurant unit.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, yes. You know, in the first 12 months, we went from being Rezi the paid reservation service to Resi, the reservations and table management service.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 flat fee, use the software as much as you want it.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the same price. It wouldn't matter.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Restaurants were asking for it, and it made sense. It's part of our core thesis. Restaurants 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And we went really fast to the widget. So now we had Rezi 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. That was the first really big unlock for us. That was where we started to see traction.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 cross the chasm into what would become Rezi is we heard from restaurants. Look, this is cool, but this is not what we really need.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were also distinguishing tables. We said not all restaurant tables are created equal. There's bar seats and there's outdoor seats and there's dining room seats. And when you go on open table and you make a reservation, you don't know what you're booking. And we had brought Rezi 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that's true. I mean, 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 sort of 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can convince yourself of anything. 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. 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. You were really squinting there. One of the superpowers of entrepreneurs is...”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and even in those days when we were starting Rezi, a lot of people were saying to us, oh, this is an open table competitor. You know, you guys are going after reservations. But we still sort of said no, no, this is different. This is not for us. We don't want to be open table. This is an Uber for restaurants. This is different.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 is sort of raw as resi 1.0. Is not the right. Just not the right product for it. And so a lot of places told us there's no way we're doing this. This is crazy.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Is the founder of Rezi? 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Our first come, first serve Democratic places. 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”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really hard. We got restaurants to say yes. I remember the restaurants that said yes to us first because, you know, 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 $730 on Friday night? It's only $50. If you want it, it chores.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I brought to Resi the credibility and the role of X that I had developed at Eater. And I think it's fair to say that as Rezi grew, I used my product instincts and my content experience and started to round the thing out. But really, I went door to door to restaurants and I started with the restaurants that I knew and Really ask them to take a leap of faith and try this out.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had at the time it was me, Gary, and Mike Montero who would become the CTO of Rezi. 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but it's $150 either way. And we were saying, how is it possible? That restaurants haven't figured this out. If 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 the first version of Rezi was just paid reservations, $10, $20, $50, $100 for reservations.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we thought that the choke point was that there was no variable pricing in restaurants. We were just talking generally why is the price of the seat the same every day, no matter what the demand is.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 go in, you sit down for two or three hours, you have a meal. You get one shot at it. And I think as we started talking about Rezi, it started to come into focus that this is just impossible what these guys are doing. And let's understand why and see where the opportunities are.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're running at 10% as an independent restaurant, you're crushing it. 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 Delivery of food is to the table. And you can 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shouldn't be so hard that 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 We were both at a point in our careers in the 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 this is supposed to 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. He was just talking about how hard the restaurant was, how it really wasn't working very well and wasn't very profitable. And that was a real provocation for me to say, you know, there's something that's off here, like these restaurants.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely, that was a period of time where I learned a lot about startups and sort of a formal way. 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 other is 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you could book, 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. didn't work that well”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. The publicists especially just couldn't wrap their heads around what we were doing. 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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. 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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-01-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Resy and Eater: Ben Leventhal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT