INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Tock, a six-year-old, Chicago-based culinary reservation service, has never had the kind of brand-recognition that other companies in the
space have enjoyed, from publicly traded OpenTable to Resy, the New York-based company that was founded in 2014 and acquired last year for
Late last month, in an interview with this editor, founder Nick Kokonas said the platform has been processing $2 million a day in these
He insists that by rethinking the reservations process for higher-end spots, Tock has drastically reduced both wasted food and no shows
such that Chase Sapphire, Freedom and link cardholders will now have access to a dining page within the Chase mobile app that, driven by
Tock, enables cardholders to browse, book and pay ahead for dining experiences at restaurants, bars, pop-ups and wineries
route and itself become part of a credit card giant
to keep building the business for now
He has too many ideas of where to take it, including turning Tock into a kind of Spotify that recommends and customizes booking experiences
for diners around the world.More from our sit-down, at the Upfront Summit last month, follows, lightly edited for length and clarity
It was an interesting conversation, particularly for anyone fascinated with the evolution of the restaurant industry over the last 15 years
My family had restaurants
college because I was a philosophy major
I did that for 11 years, built that through about 100 employees
But I met him when he was very young and he was the same kind of person who I would want to hire in my trading firm
It was more about backing a great person.Grant was doing what I think we all try to do anytime we build anything
I started investing in the internet 1996
It was kind of like a film production, where you produce the film, and then people can watch it
And what I learned when I actually started running the restaurant when Grant got sick was that no one else knew anything about running a
held from me [by OpenTable], and whenever I see opaque information, I see an arbitrage [opportunity].[I wanted a way to] look up every
[That information was] siloed on purpose because of the business model of OpenTable and Booking.com
thought of it 20 years ago
It was a very rudimentary system, and we sold $562,000 of tickets in the first day.TC: What is a ticket?NK: There are three kinds of
reservations that you make in the world
There are free reservations, like ordinary reservations
There are times when you have to put a deposit down, and there are times that you pre-pay
opportunity to charge, like a movie or concert or some other form of entertainment
needed to solve my own problem
Pricing will be differentiated in real time.TC: What is that sales process like [when it comes to your software and this ticket idea?] Do
The crossing-the-chasm thing is real
had high demand, or they were failing and willing to try anything
So we have 400 API endpoints
We can integrate with Salesforce
But we can also do specialty integrations with, you know, Vail Resorts, which is now a client of ours.So all of that now is going laterally
We spend very little on marketing to businesses
We spend an awful lot of money now [on] building out that consumer network, [which the Chase deal should help with meaningfully]
The cool part about that news is that every single one of those people in the largest rewards program in the country is going to get an
Those are for better hospitality
Now, for the next step we want you to give us that information
restaurant industry is brutally competitive
when I turn on bookings from March, I hope we have customers
available, we get to show the restaurant the elasticity of their demand before they actually put those bookings on
