Q&A: SevenRooms' Joel Montaniel
Updates from the co-founder and CEO of SevenRooms one year after that big acquisition
I am confident that at the time of its debut, the co-founders of SevenRooms did not expect to one day be acquired by a delivery app. SevenRooms launched in 2011, a couple years before its eventual acquirer, DoorDash, started taking orders for delivery. The restaurant technology industry’s evolution has surprised a lot of us. It worked out well for SevenRooms.
In the nearly decade-and-a-half between its launch and last year’s acquisition announcement, SevenRooms grew into a reservations and customer relationship management powerhouse. It grew fast inside restaurants but also inside hotels and casinos and in strategic international locations like London and Dubai and Australia.
By the time DoorDash showed up with a $1.2 billion offer, SevenRooms was working with 13,000 venues around the world. “It’s about adding to our platform business,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said of the deal at the time, which, according to my recent interview with SevenRooms’ top exec, has proven true.
Joel Montaniel, a SevenRooms co-founder and its founding CEO, still leads the company from within its parent org. Until this conversation, we hadn’t spoken since the acquisition announcement. He couldn’t say much about the future then; the deal wasn’t closed, the companies couldn’t strategize yet. (He was also still trying to return the barrage of text messages one receives after announcing a billion-dollar exit.)
This week, I finally got to host Joel on my podcast, The Simmer. It was an overdue conversation, but I’m glad we waited. Nearly a year since the DoorDash acquisition closed, he’s able to talk about it and the products and initiatives that the once-unlikely partnership has spawned. (I know at least one that has the competition a little rattled, more on that below.)
This episode of The Simmer is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Paid subscribers can keep reading for highlights from my interview with Montaniel. Quotes have been edited for length and clarity, but I captured the last line — my favorite — exactly as he said it.
On SevenRooms’ decision to go after hotels and casinos as early clients:
“We didn't think that the world needed another reservation system. What we thought was missing was customer data and a system to help the restaurant manage their customers, understand their customers, and then make that data available at their fingertips. So when Kristen walks in, it's not that she has a reservation, it’s that she's a regular of ours. She's friends with the owner, and she happens to have a reservation.