don't let headcount limit your growth. get leverage through technology – self-serve must be exceptional.

there is no learning curve for natural language ... interfaces should look a lot different in 2026 than they did in 2025 and prior

. @grok

“The definition of hell is, on the last day of your life, the person you are meets the person you could have become” A couple of years ago I carpooled with @dittycheria to an event. I asked for a few pieces of life and company building advice. I’ve thought about the above

2/ When shit hits the fan and things feel like they couldn't get worse, those shitty things might ironically be the best things that happen to you. Keep building.

1/ Be careful about vendor dependencies and building a business on top of third-parties you don't control. Their incentives could be misaligned from yours.

There are a ton of lessons learned along the way. For now, I'll name the top two:

The new company is called Open, and we grew 15x from 2024 to 2025.

Ironically, we're helping protect restaurants against many of the same risks Acelerate was exposed to.

We ended up pivoting the business in 2024 to build AI-native online ordering, loyalty, gift cards, marketing, and support for restaurants – still serving the same customers but in a very different way.

At the time, I couldn't have imagined anything worse happening to the company. Fast forward, and the restrictions and cuts feel like one of the best things to ever happen.

We tried making the virtual brand model work in some other capacities, but felt like our value proposition had diminished significantly.

Months later over ~90% of our stores were taken offline by the third-party marketplaces and much of our revenue evaporated overnight.

Many of our venture backed competitors who continued to aggressively invest were unfortunately forced to shut down or sell for parts.

I made the hard choice to scale the team down to 10, preparing for the worst and conserving cash. It was the hardest, but also most important decision we made (we wouldn't be in business today if we didn't).

While the business growth was good, I became worried about what I thought would be inevitable virtual brand restrictions by the marketplaces. More people were doing what Acelerate was doing and marketplaces were becoming flooded with new storefronts.

After fundraising, we grew insanely fast, scaled the team to 55 people within a year, and tripled the business at the same time

I decided to take money. $14.4M lead by Sequoia Capital, early investors in iconic companies like Apple, NVIDIA, DoorDash, Airbnb, Stripe, Square and more (more on that here: https://t.co/kWZkDRadx1)

However, I became drawn to the idea of having a bigger impact on more restaurants (money would help us do that faster) – we were adding $100K in sales on average per restaurant we partnered with, keeping the lights on for many.

I didn't really care about raising at first because the company was profitable and I liked running it how it was.