# Blackbird: Decentralizing Restaurant Payments and Loyalty

**Podcast:** web3 with a16z crypto
**Published:** 2026-02-11

## Transcript

Most restaurants just want to understand, how are you going to lower my costs and how are you going to put butts in seats?
The idea that we have in restaurants, a trillion dollars of sales in 2025 flowing through payments rails across the country.
And restaurants don't control those rails at all.
That's problematic.
And so changing the notion of who owns the network and who benefits is a really important way that I think we're going to wind up using blockchain.
Ben, so you've built a number of companies in the restaurant industry.
You've built Eater, you've built Rezzy, and now you're working on Blackbird.
Where did your love of restaurants begin?
I can't really pinpoint it for you.
I mean, I think we all love restaurants.
We all love going to a great local spot and having a delicious meal and being with friends and just that feeling of being there and feeling that you're in the right place with the right people at the right time.
It's intoxicating for all of us.
And so I think somehow I'm just lucky enough to have turned that into a career.
I mean, it just really started with an obsession about where the next meal was going to be and who with.
And somehow it's snowballed into this.
There was no like...
Proustian moment of like having a Madeline cookie and like all of a sudden you were like, you had this epiphany, I have to work in restaurants?
The thing is, to be clear, I've never worked in restaurants.
I've never actually worked on a line in a kitchen or done a shift of service.
And frankly, it's mostly because I'd be no good at it.
But no, I think there's no one moment other than in my whole life, all of my happy memories, I think, you know, 90% of them are in restaurants.
They just are this happy place for me.
And somehow I've reverse engineered that into a career.
Have you watched The Bear?
Of course.
Although I haven't watched the most recent season.
OK, no spoilers then.
But I will say my wife was watching it and I was sort of working adjacent to her and they're like yelling on TV.
I was like, they work in a kitchen.
How stressful could it be?
But then like, you know, I try to cook dinner and it's a total mess.
So I'm like, OK, actually, you know what?
Eat my words.
It's a kitchen.
A professional kitchen is a zillion moving parts.
And you're on stage.
That's the thing that people, I think, don't appreciate about a kitchen.
If you're not a chef, you're on stage.
You know, the plate of food is coming out.
You may not be standing there next to the plate as somebody eats it, although sometimes you are if it's like a counter kind of place.
But it's a performance like anything else.
Yeah, there's an element of theater to it, for sure.
Let me ask you this.
So the business you're building now, Blackbird, uses crypto.
Why?
we are using crypto because we believe in cutting-edge technology and we believe that in order to build a technology company in the modern day, you ought to be using cutting edge technology.
We'll use crypto, we'll use AI where we can, we'll use things that we haven't even thought of yet or that haven't been invented yet to be cutting edge.
But I think specifically the answer around crypto is I think it does a couple of things for us.
Some of them are long term, some of them are short term.
In the short term, it allows us to transfer the ownership of identity to the consumer.
The difference between Blackbird and a lot of...
more traditional or legacy software companies for restaurants is that the ownership of the consumer information sits traditionally with a big company, with a POS company or a reservations company or an analytics company.
With Blackbird, we're putting consumers' data anonymized on-chain and giving them control of where that data goes.
So that's a really important immediate reason why crypto.
In the long run, There is a very compelling path to some notion of decentralization of this payments network that we're building.
Now, what exactly that looks like and on what timeline, I think, frankly, we're still trying to figure that out.
But the idea that we have in restaurants, a trillion dollars of sales in 2025 flowing through payments rails across the world, across the country, and restaurants don't really control those rails at all.
To Blackbird, that's problematic.
And so the idea of changing the notion of who owns the network and who benefits from ownership of the network is a really important way that I think we're going to wind up using blockchain.
It's early, though.
And, you know, you don't want to decentralize before there's a reason to.
So are the things that we're talking about useful at a thousand restaurants?
Some of the economics concepts are.
But in terms of a fully decentralized payments network.
I think we're not going to really see the benefits until we get to 100,000 restaurants.
So some of this is sort of a question of order of operations and timing.
How many do you have now in network?
We're just at 1,000 now.
Okay, so a long ways to go.
Yeah, we have a long way until it is very obvious that we need a fully decentralized network.
And blockchains aren't necessary to this vision, is that right?
Can you do it with existing tech like outside of blockchains?
I think in a very practical way, the answer is we could.
Visa.
is in many ways an early decentralized payments network.
It started as an open sort of semi-permissioned open consortium.
Precisely.
So we have essentially a decentralized network in the mid-50s.
Right.
So we obviously don't need crypto to do it.
We don't need blockchain to do it.
But it sure might be a lot easier.
What is the pitch like when you're trying to get restaurants on board?
I imagine you go in and you don't say like, hey, I think you should, you know, use crypto tokens.
And they're like, sounds great.
Let's do it.
You know, you probably don't lead with that unless you do.
When we talk to restaurants, we talk about loyalty and payments and the need for that platform to exist for restaurants.
We don't really talk about the crypto at all.
From time to time, you encounter a restaurant owner who is savvy and is interested in the crypto, and then we nerd out together.
But most restaurants just want to understand, how are you going to lower my costs and how are you going to put butts in seats?
And you want to go to them with answers to those questions and not tell me about why you're on chain.
Who are the savviest restaurateurs when it comes to tech?
They tend to be younger.
They tend to be, you know, I would say in cities like New York and L.A.
and San Francisco, as you might expect.
They tend to be running concepts that are a little bit more avant-garde or cutting edge.
But every restaurateur is a little bit different.
Every restaurateur is sort of in their own spot on the adoption curve, if you will.
And the bleeding edge ones come to us.
They're easy to spot because they're generally inbound inquiries.
Most restaurateurs are kind of waiting to see how things evolve and waiting for some technology or some idea or some new company to feel stable and safe enough for it to be an important part of their business.
It's easy to say something is going to be better, but how do you actually get people to specifically understand what is going to be better?
What is the true value add that you get?
Yeah, I mean, look, I think if it's Blackbird or if it's any other company, I think it fundamentally has to do things that are...
Solving problems seamlessly with low friction, ideally that feel magical for end users.
We go in with the sort of fundamental observations.
We say, look, loyalty is something that you don't have in a good way today.
You're competing against large-scale technology companies and also large-scale restaurant companies.
I mean, Papa John's is a top 20 app in the App Store last time I checked.
McDonald's, Starbucks.
It's a mom-and-pop shop, though.
As they would have you believe.
We go in and simply say, look, this is the group of companies that you're competing with for your customers.
Do you feel like you have the tools to do it?
By and large, the answer is no.
And so that's sort of how we start the conversation.
Do you have a local joint, a local hangout that you love?
I mean, for me, I love all of our restaurants the same.
But I mean, in our neighborhood, Barbuda, we come back to all the time because we live a couple blocks away.
Via Corotta, probably if you've looked at my history, those are probably top two.
What lessons have you learned from building previous companies that you're applying now at Blackbird?
I think as a founder, one thing you just have to keep in your head at all times is you got to keep going forward.
You got to keep moving forward, getting the ball down the field.
If it's an inch at a time or a yard at a time, there has to be forward motion on the business.
And you have to believe that that is possible at all moments of the day.
And so I think that's an important one.
just the relentless pursuit of some progress day in and day out, even if it's two steps forward, one step back.
And, you know, those days are the good days when it's two steps forward, one step back.
But you just got to have in your mind that you have to keep going forward.
I just realized we went to Barbudo for one of our last offsites.
The A-16Z team went there.
And I was talking to my colleague and he was like, I love it here.
You got to get the chicken Caesar salad.
And I was like, what?
Like, that's the thing you're going to tell me to get here?
And then I had it, and I was like, this is the greatest thing I've ever eaten.
When you pay with Blackbird at Barbuda, there's an off-menu carbonara.
Is there?
Just so you know.
Okay.
I'm sold.
I'll be going back.
Are there any types of...
areas within the restaurant industry that you're targeting first, like in your go-to-market strategy.
So we think about go-to-market as having to be across all meal periods, right?
Go-to-market for Blackbird is across all meal periods, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
And everything in between.
And everything in between.
And really, the core of our strategy is about neighborhoods and...
you know, in essence, zip codes.
And so we don't discriminate between a super high end fine dining restaurant and a local coffee shop.
If you're using Blackbird across all of those, we think that's the maximum amount of value we can provide to you.
And so we really think about more, where are our customers?
What are they doing from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed in, around restaurants and hospitality businesses?
And we'd like to have a product that addresses all those use cases.
There are other companies out there that work on loyalty programs for places like this, coffee shops and such.
You get stars and points back.
What is your pitch for displacing those other options?
Competition's good.
And certainly in restaurant tech, there's a ton of competition.
Look, we say to restaurants, we're always going to be behind you.
We're always going to be restaurant first.
That's a fundamental part of this business.
We're building this company in partnership with the restaurant industry.
We know that for Blackbird to be successful, restaurants have to pick us.
So we're talking about...
collaboration.
We're talking about real engagement on the product development side.
We're talking about delivering economics that work for them in the long run.
Next to that, a magical consumer experience.
So we say to them, look, we know you have options.
We want to earn your business, and here's how we think about the world.
And we're restaurants first, and we hope that resonates.
So you're focusing on the big networks, the urban centers first, you know, big cities, New York, LA, you recently launched in.
When are you going to tackle the long tail?
Specifically, when are you going to come out to my suburb on Long Island?
I'm waiting for you to take over my local coffee shop.
Well, I think the answer is we'll be there sooner than you think.
Okay.
But we do have to move from places of, you know, restaurant density one to the next.
There's 20 or 30 very obvious cities.
You want to do, you know, D.C., Philly, Chicago, Miami, Dallas in that order, or if you want to do Dallas, Miami, D.C., Chicago, you got to get to all of them.
Which city has the best food?
Well, I'm from New York.
Okay.
So I might have to say New York, but every market, I mean, this is a bit of a tangent, but since you asked, I think one of the reasons why restaurants are so magical and feel so important in the United States and feel like with every year that passes, they grow in terms of standing is because we are living in the golden age of restaurants.
I mean, in any city, there's great food.
Not good food, great food.
In every city, you can have a burger that is a world-class burger.
You can have a roast chicken that's perfectly cooked.
You know, you can have a four-star, you know, super high-end tasting menu experience that's incredible, that sends you to a different place.
Sushi, whatever.
go down the list.
We're living in the golden age of restaurants.
So in some ways, it doesn't matter where we go next in terms of the cities because there's great restaurants in all of them.
I mean, we have to think about which ones are the most table stakes.
And so I do think there's some obvious ones.
So LA, San Francisco, New York, the globally recognized restaurant markets in the United States.
So we certainly have to have those.
And then we want to look at where we have adjacencies, where we think we have a competitive leg up, where we have relationships.
um you know which cities when we sort of get into the micro details of it you know the sort of specific demographics whether there's college-age kids there whether it's an older market where people live in the city in suburbs we get into some of that stuff but um we'll be everywhere before you know it do you have to be a foodie to work at blackbird you have to love restaurants You don't have to be a foodie.
I don't consider myself a foodie.
I love restaurants.
I love sitting in a restaurant having a great meal.
I don't geek out over ingredients, to be honest with you.
I don't geek out over whether something was sous vide or sauteed or anything else.
But you really do have to love restaurants, and you have to have passion for what we're trying to do.
How do you suss out the people who truly are restaurants?
In an interview, I often start with, tell me about your favorite restaurant.
You can tell how somebody talks about it, whether or not they love it.
You have time for a lightning round?
Sure.
What is the worst piece of advice you've ever gotten as a founder?
Slow down.
Slow down.
People have told you to slow down.
Yeah, people have told me to slow down, you know, get your bearings, you know, build for scale.
Those things are important, but you've got to move fast.
As a startup, one of the reasons why you might win is because you're a speedboat when everyone else is a cruise ship.
So people who say slow down, we've got to take a beat on this, sometimes it drives my team crazy.
I do feel the need for speed.
All right.
What is your biggest productivity hack?
I have a custom to-do list template that I print out every morning and fill out.
So I start my day with a fresh piece of paper, and it's got a couple of different sections on it depending on.
how long something's going to take and the importance of it.
It's like the Eisenhower matrix.
I don't know what the Eisenhower matrix is.
It's like a quadrant of like, yeah, how quickly it'll take to get done, how important it is.
No, I just sort of try to reset every day and figure out what's most important on that day.
And I keep every to-do list in a binder.
So it's sort of a record of activity.
And it's got a couple like key phrases that I think are important for me to bring to the job every day.
Some days it works better than others, but there you go.
What book would you recommend people read?
I think The Originals by Adam Grant is a great read for anyone who's trying to build anything and understand creativity.
And I think it's like a quick, easy one, but also Shoe Dog.
Shoe Dog is so good.
You know, people recommended that book to me for so many years as a business journalist.
And I was like, if everybody's recommending it, it can't be good.
No, no, it's so good.
And then I read it and I was like, holy crap, this is incredible.
Well, I mean, it's Nike, like getting to read about how the logo was created.
You know, it's just fun.
Really good book.
Okay, and finally, what is the smallest hill that you will die on?
The smallest hill that I will die on is I am vehemently opposed to shoestring french fries.
Shoestring french fries.
The chunkier the better?
Well, these silly little crispy things that are hard to eat and they're neither potato chips nor...
French fries are a hard no for me.
Wow.
Okay.
You said small hill.
That's a small hill.
That is a small hill.
If you're vending shoestring French fries, you can not expect to be on the Blackbird Network.
Not for me.
Thanks so much for your time, Ben.
Anytime.