The Exchanges

Q And so how did, how did that, like, what, what do you remember about conversations that led one or both of you to say, why don't we join forces and do something together?

A I remember us having two seminal conversations about this. We met at a bar, and I said, I think we should do something, and it should be about restaurants, and it should be called Eater. And I said we should call it Eater because, one is, it sounds a little bit like Gawker, and two is, Eater is the most dressed-down way of thinking about people who go to restaurants. They're not foodies, they're not gourmets, they're not connoisseurs, they're just eaters. And I said, we should do this, this blog and, you know, we'll post about restaurants and, um, we'll both do it. And Locke was much farther along in terms of his understanding of digital media than I was at the time. And of course, in part because he was already at Gawker and he just generally was way more in the scene and already had a feel for it. And he also was writing at that time a newsletter called Curbed about street level, neighborhood level real estate in the city. And he took to this idea of, of restaurants and he said, well, let's, we can, the easiest thing to do is to launch it off of Curbed and we'll make it eater.curbed.com. And that's how, that was the first place that Eater launched was a sub, a sub domain of Curbed. And we sort of mapped, sketched it out and, Essentially drew up a wireframe for it, and we both contributed some ideas as to how it would function.

AI assessment note: “I remember us having two seminal conversations about this. We met at a bar”

Q Meantime, you meet this guy in New York named Lockhart Steele. Who's Lockhart? How did you meet him?

A Lockhart Steele was at the time doing two things that were interesting and relevant to me. One is that he was the managing editor of Gawker, and two is that he was writing a blog called Below 14th Street, and Below 14th Street was A very early blog. I mean, he was blogging when I was still sending out this newsletter, but I used it as a source a lot. You know, one of the hooks of She Loves New York was that it was extremely up to date in terms of intelligence, what was opening and where, and so it was, Below 14 Street was one of my sources, and we had been introduced through a mutual friend, and we hit it off.

AI assessment note: “we had been introduced through a mutual friend, and we hit it off.”

Q the same food and they don't, Recognize me, which is fine, but, but if that happens and you have a bad experience, that's a big loss for a restaurant. But if they know that you're there in your fifth or sixth time, uh, that could be a huge advantage, right? And this was something that I guess you, you, you were, that restaurants wanted, that they wanted something like that.

A Yeah, for sure. I mean, and again, if you look at the history of this, it really comes down to us shipping features that our competitors didn't have, and on that basis, convincing larger and larger restaurant groups to sign up with us. And one of those features was the universal guest database. Before Resi came along, every individual restaurant unit had its own customer database. It was essentially a customer database on a local server, and from the start, we said, you're, you know, if you have four restaurants, it's all one database. It's one customer profile against four restaurants, so now you can start to track them across your group, and you don't have to worry about missing a VIP if they're Always going to your uptown location, and then they, some, they come visit downtown. You don't have to worry about missing them. Um, that was a big unlock for us. That was a big unlock. And restaurant, it really, it mattered a ton to restaurants. It's so obvious now that that was the right, that's the right way to think about the guest database, but that's not how the systems had been architected before us.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, for sure. I mean, and again... one of those features was the universal guest database.”

Q Were you guys ever sued? I mean, you must have been or threatened with lawsuits.

A I think we got some letters over the years, nothing that ever brought us down or became existential. We always corrected the posts when we needed to. Um, a lot of the current, I think, style and conventions around online media, I think it's fair to say were, the rules were being developed in that time, and there was not the same journalistic standard that exists for Old school legacy media. The priority was pace and speed, and certainly that took precedence over, I would say, accuracy in some cases. Yeah. You know, if we posted a story about a restaurant and we said, this is opening next week, and the chef wrote us and said, you're wrong, it's opening in two weeks, we would update the story and say, it's opening in two weeks.

AI assessment note: “I think we got some letters over the years, nothing that ever brought us down”