John Collison: preference

Transcript context

…I think it starts with the idea that I believe that no restaurant should own their own reservations, ideally, technology. It starts with that. A reservations book, we won't get into super deep here. It's actually quite complicated to run a book, actually. I mentioned earlier this idea that restaurants' North Star really should be to build regulars, but that's not how every reservation system is designed. I think the most important thing is that restaurants can have reservations on any platform. That's what I believe.That's one of the main premises behind SevenRooms, too. It's that it's agnostic to who generates the demand for you. What it's trying to do is to make sure it achieves your objective function. It may be to grow profits one year, it may be to grow locations the next year, or maybe to get a certain type of customer the next year, so on and so forth. I think it starts by building what's best for the merchants. Hopefully DoorDash can make a difference, too, where we just have more customers than people that play with restaurants, and also more information that we can supply to these restaurants on, how do you make more money to achieve whatever outcome you want? If we can help achieve a restaurant's objective function better than anyone else, then hopefully we have a seat at the table. Tock in reservations carved out a successful niche in high-end reservations. I think about one of the beliefs that informed their products most strongly was that no-shows are terrible for restaurants, and a restaurant reservation should be like a flight reservation, where you don't just get to decide you're not going to go to the restaurant. You put a little deposit.…

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