Thibault
Le Conte

The man who looked at a counter full of tablets and saw a software problem

Walk into a busy restaurant kitchen and you will often find a little altar of glowing tablets - one for UberEats, one for DoorDash, one for Grubhub, each with its own printer, its own beeps, its own way of being wrong. A staffer reads an order off one screen and retypes it into the register. Multiply that across a dinner rush and you get the thing Thibault Le Conte set out to delete: chaos, by design, baked into the way delivery apps were bolted onto restaurants.

OrderOut, the Miami company he founded, leads with a deceptively dull promise. Plug the delivery apps straight into the point-of-sale system the restaurant already runs. No retyping. No second tablet. The order from UberEats arrives in the same place as the order from the dining room. "We are the only one right now that, if you have Clover and Uber Eats, you can be live in minutes," he says - and the flatness of that sentence is the whole pitch. Boring is the feature.

What makes him interesting is not that he spotted the problem. Plenty of people stared at those tablets. It is that he had spent more than a decade building exactly the kind of machinery needed to fix it - and had built it, by his own count, eight or nine times before.

A decade of dress rehearsals

Le Conte is an engineer first. He trained in computer-science engineering at France's EPITECH and then at UC Berkeley, picking up a pair of master's degrees on the way. Before OrderOut he was the technical co-founder type who keeps showing up: CTO at Mobee, the mobile-data startup he founded in 2011 that later folded into Wiser Solutions; co-founder and CTO at Cannonball Corporation in 2013; the same role at Knozen the year after; CTO at the smart-luggage company Raden by 2016. Different industries, different logos, one quietly portable engine underneath.

That habit - build the core once, carry it forward - is the unglamorous secret of OrderOut. When the company started, the delivery giants had not bothered to offer outsiders a way in. So OrderOut went in the side door.

"They didn't have any open API, so we had to literally scrape emails," he recalls. Every order confirmation got captured, every PDF parsed. And PDFs, it turns out, fight back. "When the order is big, the PDF file is in two pages, so going from one page to a second page and analyzing the content was always creating issues." It is the kind of war story that never makes a keynote slide - a founder and his team wrestling a two-page receipt into clean data, one stubborn order at a time.

The company that refused the money

In an industry addicted to raising, OrderOut is almost defiant about how little it took. "We are completely bootstrapped," Le Conte says. The whole outside investment is a single $250,000 check from a business partner, written during COVID. Everything after that is organic growth - no follow-on round, no board to answer to, no quarterly theater.

That frugality shows up in the org chart, which is small and spread thin on purpose. Seven people in Miami; eighteen more scattered across Brazil, India, China, Ecuador and Mexico. The glue is not process - it is a chat window. "We use Slack a lot, we don't send emails internally," he says. A delivery-software company that barely emails itself has a certain poetry to it.

His hiring rule matches the budget. He does not chase pedigree. "I hire for commitment and alignment with our mission," he says, and then the line he keeps coming back to: "Technology alone doesn't create change. People do." For an engineer who reuses the same code across a dozen companies, it is a revealing admission - the code was never the hard part.

From plumbing to money

The newest chapter moves OrderOut from logistics into something closer to a bank teller. Delivery platforms are slow to pay - restaurants can wait roughly nine days to see their money, which is brutal when rent is due and the fryer needs parts. So OrderOut started paying them itself, on a daily clock. Restaurants on the program can pull their UberEats earnings every evening at 7 PM instead of waiting out the cycle.

Why does a restaurant need the help that badly? Because the math is unforgiving. "Delivery fees started at 30% and are now more around 25%, but they still pose a significant cost to businesses," Le Conte says. When a quarter of every delivery dollar evaporates before it reaches the kitchen, cash flow stops being an accounting term and starts being survival.

His larger bet is that delivery should stop being a walled garden and become a utility - something any business can call up on demand, the way you call an API. "Imagine if I wanted to start a flower shop or a restaurant, one of the most important pieces would be delivery," he says. With OrderOut's API, "businesses can get quotes from various delivery services like DoorDash Drive or Uber Direct and choose from either the fastest or most affordable." A florist shopping for the cheapest courier the same way a restaurant does. Delivery as a faucet you turn on.

A crowded, regional, fiddly market

The category Le Conte chose is messier than it looks from the outside. Delivery integration is not one global market - it is a patchwork that changes the moment you cross a border. "In America you have Uber Eats and DoorDash. If you go to Canada, you only have Uber Eats and Skip the Dishes," he points out. Every country is a different set of apps, a different set of quirks, a different set of edge cases to absorb. The work does not generalize cleanly, which is exactly why so few do it well.

It is also getting more crowded. "Maybe when we started there were four or five competitors in America. We are around 10 now," he says - a sign that the pain he spotted early is now obvious to everyone. His response was not to sprint after every feature and every platform at once. The discipline was the opposite. "We didn't try to support every platform out there right away," he says. Pick the integrations that matter most, make them flawless, and let depth be the moat. In a field where the temptation is to claim you connect to everything, OrderOut bet that connecting to a few things perfectly was worth more.

He does not romanticize the old way, either. The pre-OrderOut status quo of stacked tablets and hand-keyed orders gets a blunt verdict from him: "It was chaotic, inefficient, and error-prone." Three words that double as the company's reason to exist.

The philosophy, in plain clothes

Ask him how to build in this space and the advice is almost aggressively unsexy. Watch before you build - he spent months observing how restaurants actually work before writing solutions for them. "Talk to your customers early and often." Resist the urge to do everything: OrderOut did not try to support every platform on day one, it picked the heavy hitters and went deep. And the line that should be tattooed on every founder's wrist: "Speed doesn't mean cutting corners."

There is a management style hiding inside that advice, too. Le Conte describes leadership as staying close to the ground - "Leading an early-stage company in this space means staying grounded in what restaurant owners actually need" - and then getting out of the way. He sets the direction, he says, and then "I empower the team to take ownership." For a founder who is also the CEO and the CTO, three hats on one head, learning to let go is its own discipline. A distributed team across five time zones does not run on a single person's heroics. It runs on trust, and on Slack.

It adds up to a portrait of a particular kind of builder - the one who finds the least glamorous problem in the room, the retyped order, the nine-day wait, the two-page PDF, and decides that is exactly the thing worth a decade. Thibault Le Conte is not trying to disrupt the restaurant. He is trying to make the wiring behind it disappear. And the highest compliment for plumbing is that nobody notices it is there.