Most restaurants just want to understand,

how are you going to lower my costs

and how are you going to put butts and 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 Rezi, 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

a sudden you were like, you had this epiphany. I have to, 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

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