Thibault Le Conte and the case of the crowded counter

A delivery order can travel across a city and still get stuck on the last few inches of a restaurant counter. It arrives on a tablet. The register has no idea it exists. A member of staff becomes the connection, reading one screen and typing into another. The food has yet to move, but the information has already required a small relay team.

Thibault Le Conte noticed the accumulating screens. Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub: each service offered another route to a customer, and each could bring another device into the restaurant. More ways to sell dinner also meant more things to watch while making it. The counter was acquiring the air of an electronics shop with an unusually ambitious lunch menu.

For Le Conte, the arrangement suggested a software business. OrderOut would connect delivery platforms to the point-of-sale system, letting orders enter the restaurant’s existing workflow. Before that could happen neatly, however, his team had to persuade some decidedly uncooperative information to cross the gap.

The order hiding in the inbox

Early on, delivery platforms did not offer the open connections OrderOut needed. Le Conte’s team worked with what was available: order emails. Information intended for a person to read had to become structured information that another system could use.

“They didn’t have any open API, so we had to literally scrape emails.”Thibault Le Conte, February 2025

Even the length of an order mattered. Le Conte recalled the trouble caused when a PDF spilled onto a second page. A large order sounds like good news for a restaurant. To a parser expecting information in a particular arrangement, it can be an unwelcome surprise.

There is something instructive about that detail. An integration diagram would show a clean arrow between the delivery service and the register. Inside that arrow were messages, documents, changing layouts and somebody trying to keep the result dependable. The customer needed the order to arrive correctly, however inelegant the journey behind it.

A suitcase, a lamp, a restaurant register

Le Conte had already worked through several kinds of product before concentrating on restaurant operations. His professional education listings include EPITECH in France and the University of California, Berkeley. His early career includes a founder and CTO role at Mobee, followed by technical leadership at Cannonball and Knozen.

The sequence took him through consumer software and into connected hardware. He served as CTO at Raden, the smart-luggage company. Dusk Motion, another venture he founded, announced its Dusk One lamp in June 2018. A suitcase and a lamp make an unusual pair of predecessors for delivery software, but both belong to the part of technology where software has to cooperate with a physical object.

The lamp announcement put design alongside the electronics. It described a product combining European materials with connected-home functions. In a career full of systems and interfaces, here was something meant to sit in a room and be looked at. The eventual restaurant work would have a different measure of usefulness: whether an order got where it belonged.

On his Wellfound profile, Le Conte lists eight iOS applications he conceived, released and marketed, along with their supporting systems. He also describes overseeing Android development and an ecommerce platform. That record helps explain the breadth of his working vocabulary. He had experience with the application people touched and the machinery supporting it.

Miami, and a market that kept splitting

Le Conte moved from New York to Miami in 2018 to join OrderOut. The company emerged from the LAB Ventures studio. His arrival placed an experienced technical founder inside a business addressing a distinctly practical restaurant problem.

His account of the opportunity begins with people he knew. Two former colleagues had gone to Uber and told him about Uber Eats. Later, watching restaurants manage several delivery services, he saw a market that would require businesses to support multiple platforms at once.

“I realized early on that the market was going to be fragmented.”Thibault Le Conte, July 2025

That observation determined where OrderOut would sit. Restaurants could keep using the marketplaces that brought them customers. The connecting software would handle the journey into the register. A founder did not have to persuade everyone to choose the same delivery app before he could make the restaurant’s day easier.

A delivery marketplace and a restaurant register have different responsibilities. One brings in the sale; the other helps the business account for it and get it prepared. Both can be doing their own job while leaving a person to bridge the distance. That is what made the crowded counter such a revealing place to look. The inconvenience was visible without an explanation of the underlying technology.

It also created a demanding business boundary. Every additional platform and every additional register system could require another relationship and another integration. The opportunity came from variety; the work multiplied for precisely the same reason. Deciding what to connect became as consequential as deciding how to build it.

The sale, and the CEO who stayed

By December 2020, OrderOut had grown from a handful of restaurant customers a year earlier to more than 400. It had also established partnerships with Clover, Aptito and Tabit. Those were concrete signs that the connections were finding users beyond an initial experiment.

At the end of that year, LAB Ventures announced that it had sold OrderOut’s business and assets to private investors led by Vlad Sadovskiy, then president of payments company Net Element. Le Conte would continue leading the business. For the studio, the transaction was an exit; for the operating company, it opened another phase.

The detail matters when reading his later descriptions of running lean. In February 2025, Le Conte described a business partner’s $250,000 investment several years earlier and subsequent organic growth. That later operating account sits alongside a documented ownership transaction. His story contains partners and changing ownership as well as the discipline of limited resources.

Opening the connection to other builders

In October 2023, OrderOut announced a public API aimed at small and mid-sized point-of-sale providers. Its earlier focus had been Clover. The new offer let other software businesses connect their systems with delivery services through OrderOut.

This changed who could carry the product into a restaurant. A POS provider could build on the connection rather than creating every delivery integration itself. The restaurant could encounter the result through software it already used. For Le Conte, reaching another builder became another way of reaching the eventual operator.

For the smaller software provider, the choice is practical too. Every connection takes time to build and attention to maintain. Buying access to an existing integration can leave more room for the work specific to its own customers. The value of the arrangement depends on whether the shared connection holds up in everyday use. Nobody at the restaurant gets much comfort from knowing which company was responsible for an order that failed to appear.

There is an appealing economy to that arrangement. A restaurant owner has purchased a register to run a restaurant. Asking the owner to become a part-time systems integrator is a rather elaborate interpretation of customer participation. An API moves some of that joining work back to the software companies.

After the order comes the money

The next problem sat further along the transaction. A restaurant can prepare a meal today and receive its delivery-platform earnings later. In January 2024, OrderOut announced same-day payouts for Uber Eats earnings, with a daily 7 p.m. schedule.

The announcement addressed a particular delay: the company described circumstances in which restaurants could wait up to nine days for payment. That was the context for the offer, rather than a universal timetable for every restaurant. Faster access to proceeds extended OrderOut’s work from the movement of order information into the timing of cash.

In a December 2023 interview, Le Conte also described an API-led delivery future in which businesses could compare courier quotes. He used a flower shop as one example. The ambition was to let businesses choose delivery according to needs such as speed or price, with the connection available inside their own tools.

The last decision stays at the counter

OrderOut’s current product reaches into menus, operating hours and channel availability. Its AI Mode takes an instruction, prepares a proposed change and waits for merchant review. Someone can ask to mark a dish unavailable or pause a channel, then inspect what will happen before approving it.

Consider a dish that sells out during a shift. Its name might appear in more than one online menu. Keeping those listings consistent is a small task with consequences for the next customer and the people preparing the food. That makes it a useful test for automation: can a routine instruction become the intended change, in the intended places, with the operator able to check it?

The pause is an interesting design choice. Restaurant software touches things that become public immediately: a price, an opening time, an item somebody expects to buy. An operator needs a chance to check the proposed action. The interface makes that review part of the work.

Le Conte now also leads Miami-based Striking Point Consulting, whose work includes product strategy and operational improvement. The subjects are familiar from his software career: how a business chooses technology, how it builds, and how the resulting system fits the people using it.

Back at the restaurant counter, the test remains refreshingly plain. An order needs to reach the kitchen. A menu needs to reflect what can be cooked. The person running the shift needs to know what the software is doing. After the suitcase, the lamp and the stubborn receipt, Le Conte is still working on the connection.