restaurant-operations
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Taylor Andersen and the Business Behind the Plate
His career runs from the dining room to the production floor. In Utah's food-business corridor, Taylor Andersen has made an operating life out of the details customers are never supposed to notice.
Henry Nneji Built a Restaurant With 16 Menus. Then Came the Hard Part.
A failed marketplace, a family restaurant lesson and a stubborn Lagos kitchen led Henry Nneji to rethink food delivery. FoodCourt's 2026 pause now puts his operating philosophy to its sharpest test.
Shannon McNiel Is Building a Sports Bar for the $200,000 Friday
At Tom's Watch Bar, a quiet Wednesday can become a six-figure Friday. Shannon McNiel's answer is part forecasting, part choreography, and a stubborn belief that people come before concrete.
Justin Holmes Learned to Build Systems Where Shifts Get Messy
Before Justin Holmes sold restaurant operators on better scheduling, he had already lived the problem - at tables, in gyms, and inside a fast-growing ecommerce company. His career is a study in turning coordination headaches into systems people can actually use.
Kelly Esten Keeps Toast Close to the Table
A sales-floor education, a four-and-a-half-year detour through Europe, and years beside restaurant operators shaped an executive who treats marketing and operations as two views of the same customer.
Thibault Le Conte
Thibault Le Conte is the founder, CEO and CTO of OrderOut, a Miami-based software company that funnels orders from UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub and other delivery apps straight into a restaurant's existing point-of-sale system, killing the tablet pileup that clutters kitchen counters. A computer-science engineer trained at EPITECH and UC Berkeley, he built roughly eight or nine companies before OrderOut, reusing the same core technology each time. OrderOut is deliberately bootstrapped, grown on a single $250,000 partner investment made during COVID and organic revenue since, and now runs a lean distributed team across Miami, Brazil, India, China, Ecuador and Mexico. His latest push moves OrderOut beyond integrations into restaurant finance, with same-day UberEats payouts and a delivery API that lets any business shop for the cheapest or fastest courier.
Will Pacio
Will Pacio is the co-founder and CEO of Expo, a Dallas-based AI platform that pulls a restaurant's scattered data - POS, inventory, labor, guest feedback - into one dashboard operators can talk to. A Stanford psychology grad who walked away from a planned medical career to cook on the opening team at Thomas Keller's Per Se, he ran IT for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, founded the fast-casual chain Spice Kit, then built the restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared before spinning it into Expo. His pitch: bring the 'Moneyball' approach to multi-unit restaurants so non-technical owners can make decisions with data instead of gut feel.