RestTech Venture Studio

For those unfamiliar with the venture studio framework, it’s a new model for entrepreneurship, combining company building with venture funding. By design, venture studios play the role of matchmaker, linking business ideas to their talented counterparts to execute those ideas. Venture studios help entrepreneurs grapple with the unknowns of building a new company by providing them with an initial capital amount and operational support. A venture studio’s main goal is to found as many successful startups as possible — all from the ground up.

We are experts in foodservice and RestTech, so naturally, we are hyper-focused on our bailiwick, restaurant technology startups.

Our leadership team has broad reach to industry affiliates, business colleagues, restaurant leadership, and influencers, affiliates, dealers and media relationships. We bring decades of relevant experience to our investing partners and portfolio companies. We bring operations, culinary, development and corporate finance expertise. We have held BOH and FOH unit-level and C-level positions at regional and national chains. We are food and restaurant tech entrepreneurs, social media pioneers and digital transformation consultants.

We are practitioners and thought-leaders and with an operators' perspective. We are passionate about the restaurant industry and excited about how enabling technologies are transforming our industry every day. Technology helps create operational efficiencies leading to profitability and that make operators more competitive and relevant.

We have unique access to opportunities because we have been actively engaged as operators, digital media and Internet entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, financiers, food and restaurant technology sales and social media marketers for decades. We think automation is the new key to success in the broader foodservice industry. We have transaction experience as investment banker and entrepreneur. We live and work at the intersection of restaurant and technology working with clients and partners around the globe.

We are experienced entrepreneurs in food and beverage, restaurants, retail and Internet technology. We have an operator's perspective with vision and access to key resources required to execute on our plans. We invest, create, launch and support.

We invest in our own portfolio and secure additional growth capital from industry insiders, operators and venture funds.

We created the first restaurant social media community and network in 2007. The purpose was to connect and engage operators and no-operators and inform the industry about new emerging technologies that are transforming the industry. FOHBOH.com, and the ResTech [infoh.com] Newsletter deliver news and information to over 80,000 industry professionals multiple times each week.

The global restaurant industry has been ravaged by a pandemic of near biblical proportions. Coronavirus (COVID-19) is changing the industry in ways we can't yet full understand. Off-premise sales were already over 60% of sales in the U.S., via catering, delivery and drive thru, suggesting a new industry taking shape. Now, it's nearly 100%, because dining rooms are closed. Re-opening an economy has never been tested before, so there is no data on what works and what doesn't, sector by sector. What's clear, is there will be carnage. Tens of thousands of restaurants will close permanently, under their current ownership. What percentage of these will reopen is a guess. It's unknown in part because investors are on the sidelines for now. Because restaurants operate on slim margins, angel investors generally invest based on personal relationships, ego and emotion, not ROI. Now, with a decimated market and unpredictable future, emotional investment gives way to pragmatism. Banks have never been an option, really, unless the enterprise is of sufficient size, and even then, it's a hard to find and fully secured. Private Equity is taking a pause, assessing how discounted the market will become before pouncing on bankruptcies and closures to expand their current portfolio under economically desirably metrics. It's a hot mess!

Prior to COVID-19 -Over the last 100 years, the restaurant industry has grown to become the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer with more than 15 million workers serving more than 170 million customers every day. Early projections indicate that restaurant and foodservice sales in 2019 will exceed $863 billion generated by one million restaurants, of which, 70% which are independent operators. However, 2020 saw a reduction of perhaps 100,000 restaurants and $210 billion in revenue. We all look to the second half of 2021 as the beginning of full recovery, tech innovation being adopted and deployed and new intelligent business models.

The $3 trillion global restaurant industry is massively relevant and vital to all economies. In the U.S. alone, over 1 million restaurants will generate more than $863 billion in sales and employ 14+ million employees in 2020. Restaurants are on the hunt for fresh ideas and new channels to improve sales and maintain margins. They must discover new sales channels and leverage new technologies.

Restaurant operators already suffer from a wide array of business challenges, not to mention any major business interruption (like a global pandemic). Operators must seek technical solutions that address business challenges and change legacy business practices. Operators know that technology is transforming the global restaurant industry and many operators have increased the average annual investment from less than 1% historically, to nearly 3% of sales today. Because of this, they and we, seek solutions that address (a) demand generation (b) labor cost reduction (c) CRM and transaction data and insights; and (d) automation/AI for value creation and efficiency.

Even more impressive is the transformative effects restaurant tech is having on the industry globally, both B2C and B2B. Investors have sunk over $20 billion in restaurant technology startups in the last 10 years and ecosystem of cloud solutions can be confusing.