Ahmass Fakahany walked away from the top of Merrill Lynch to open a seafood restaurant across from Central Park. Two decades later, Altamarea Group runs more than 25 dining rooms on three continents.
OpenTable is the online restaurant-reservation marketplace that connects diners with tables and gives restaurants the software to manage them. Founded in San Francisco in 1998, it pairs a consumer booking app and website with a back-of-house table-management and CRM platform, helping more than 60,000 restaurants worldwide seat roughly 1.9 billion diners a year. It is owned by Booking Holdings, which acquired it in 2014 for $2.6 billion.