Alex Hult expected forty friends and relatives at his restaurant’s soft opening. They were coming at seven. At five, strangers were already outside. They said they had reservations. Somewhere in the office was an iPad connected to OpenTable, a service he had agreed to use without quite understanding it. The tablet contained an unwelcome discovery: 240 reservations, on top of his personal guests.
This was Hult’s Restaurant in Los Gatos in 2013. The kitchen was supposed to be trying its dishes for the first time. Hult later recalled that even at the restaurant’s peak, 150 covers represented its maximum capacity. The arithmetic had developed a rather cruel sense of humor. He remembered the evening as a lesson in preparation: once a service began to unravel, the opportunity to prevent the trouble had already passed.
Years later, Hult would co-found AIO, a restaurant software company built around the promise of bringing scattered operations into one system. His first opening supplies a useful introduction to its CEO. He had encountered the distance between buying technology and actually being in control of it, with dinner on the line.
A Swedish center, a California address
Before the reservations came the roster. Born in Sweden, Hult played center and entered the San Jose Sharks’ draft history in 2003: eighth round, 236th overall. A draft selection was a chance to pursue a career, and his took him through professional hockey well beyond California. The Sharks connection would eventually give his restaurant biography a familiar local starting point.
In 2006, the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees announced his signing from Europe. Their account described a 21-year-old who had played for HK Dmitrov in Russia, Mora in Sweden, and clubs in Sweden’s top division. He had also played in Norway. This was a working player’s itinerary, assembled one team and one season at a time.
He represented Sweden at the 2004 World Junior Championships, recording two assists in six games. Paul Fixter, the Killer Bees’ coach, described the move across the Atlantic as a difficult adjustment for a young player. Hult’s early career involved repeatedly arriving somewhere new and proving useful to a different group of teammates. The restaurant years would require another set of introductions.
Flip-flops welcome
By December 2012, Hult and his wife, Sarah, had moved to Los Gatos. The following year they were preparing to open in a former Hobee’s space. His family had operated restaurants in Sweden, so hospitality had a history in his life even before it became his business. He recruited executive chef Michael Ellis, whose previous work included Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg.
The proposed restaurant had an interesting social ambition. Hult wanted an upscale room that would still welcome people arriving casually dressed, including families. Fine dining could be inviting without requiring its guests to pass a wardrobe inspection. The food would draw on local ingredients and California cooking, with influences from elsewhere.
Hult secured the space before it was publicly advertised for lease and set about transforming it. The early picture is of someone eager to make a particular kind of gathering place. His language concerned the atmosphere, the welcome, and the people who might walk through the door. The operational education would come with those people.
Good things arrived in threes
The next idea began on a trip to Hawaii. Hult and Sarah were served drinks as a tasting flight: three variations, together. They took the format seriously enough to make a restaurant out of it. With Flights, the tasting trio became an organizing principle for food as well as drinks. A customer could try variations without committing the whole meal to one choice.
The idea was easy to explain at a table. It also offered a reason to share. A flight turns ordering into a small group negotiation, with the happy possibility that everyone gets a taste. The concept gave the couple a clear identity around which to build another business.
By July 2019, Flights had opened at the Miracle Mile Shops in Las Vegas, its fifth location after four in the Bay Area. The aviation theme extended to the room and the service. The menu carried the trio idea through cocktails, desserts, and brunch, including variations on eggs Benedict and waffles.
There were beignet and cheesecake flights, alongside drinks served three ways. Even the cocktail names participated: an Aviation belonged quite comfortably in this establishment. The playfulness had a practical benefit. A guest could grasp the restaurant’s central idea before hearing a long explanation. For an operator managing several locations, however, an easily understood concept still left a great deal of difficult work behind the scenes.
Too many places to enter one name
As Hult tells it, the accumulated irritations of restaurant software supplied the starting point for AIO. Adding an employee could mean entering information in the point-of-sale system, payroll, scheduling, training, and tip management. Changing a menu or a website brought another set of tasks. The same business existed in several places, each demanding attention.
He described customer-support calls that bounced responsibility between providers. A restaurant operator, already paying the bills, became the intermediary between software companies. The attraction of an all-in-one product was fairly concrete: fewer repetitions and fewer places for information to become stranded.
His future co-founder, Zia Hasnain, initially approached him with restaurant technology of his own. Hult recounts that their conversations developed into a broader plan, with a further meeting in 2022 and the first employee hired early in 2023. Hasnain brought a product and engineering background; Hult brought the operations he wanted to repair. The partnership gave the project its two perspectives.
A dining room at the product meeting
AIO’s public platform now groups restaurant work into Order & Pay, Marketing, Staff, Inventory, Office, and Analytics. Those headings cover the movement of a business from taking an order to understanding its results. The company presents them as parts of a native platform, with automation built into its operation.
The scope explains both the attraction and the difficulty of Hult’s proposition. A restaurant owner can recognize all six categories immediately. Making them work together requires the company to understand how decisions in one area affect another. A sale affects stock; a shift affects staffing costs; a marketing offer has to make sense in the dining room.
On Meet the Drapers, Hult described bringing fifteen restaurant owners, managers, and chefs into recurring Wednesday sessions. They reviewed products before the team wrote code. This is a particularly telling choice for someone who once discovered an active reservation book only after the customers appeared. The people expected to use the system get a place in the discussion before it arrives.
“I think I was always an entrepreneur first, not a restaurateur.”Alex Hult, Meet the Drapers
That comment helps connect the changes in his career without making them sound preordained. Hockey, dining rooms, and software ask different things of a person. Hult’s account allows for the surprise of ending up in restaurants and AI, while keeping the desire to build a business consistent.
The coach still has a practice plan
In October 2023, Stanford’s club ice hockey program announced Hult as its new head coach. He wanted to evaluate the players and create practices suited to their abilities. The starting task was observation: find out who was on the ice, then work out what they needed.
The appointment brought his earlier profession into the same period as his technology venture. Stanford’s announcement described his experience across overseas leagues and his restaurant work. Senior forward and club president Joshua Kim said the players respected him and listened when he spoke.
Asked how he would begin, Hult emphasized taking the next step and continuing. That answer is less elaborate than a startup pitch, and perhaps better suited to the first week with a team. There are players to assess before there is a season to discuss. His coaching appointment offers a concrete instance of returning to an earlier skill and finding another use for it.
The next table is the test
Hult has made ambitious public claims about AIO’s growth. In a 2025 LinkedIn post, he reported reaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue in twelve days after the Bay Area launch, with subsequent milestones following. Those figures are his account of the business. They help explain his urgency, while remaining separate from the older, documented story of restaurants opened and teams joined.
In a Particle Accelerator interview, he set out a larger aspiration: reaching 100,000 restaurants within three years. His accompanying concern was implementation. How could the company shorten the distance between a customer signing and a restaurant actually running the software? Growth, in that telling, depends on the fairly unglamorous work of getting people started.
Santa Cruz Works’ May 2026 luncheon announcement placed him in another small room with restaurant operators, this time at the Cocoanut Grove. The gathering offered direct conversation with AIO’s leadership about disconnected systems, costs, and the administrative work consuming operators’ time. It was a setting suited to questions from people who would have to live with the answers.
That is where Hult’s story keeps returning: to the people on the other side of a product decision. Forty invited guests once became a much larger lesson in reservations. Three drinks became a restaurant concept. Now the task is to make a broad software promise hold up through an ordinary restaurant shift. Dinner will provide its own review.