Blackbird, fly

Daisy Alioto in conversation with Blackbird founder Ben Leventhal.

If you’ve ever used Resy to dazzle your in-laws or scoured Eater for a dive bar the TikTok influencers haven’t found yet, you know the work of Ben Leventhal–a founder of both companies. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in American lives, but in the hospitality industry things always get good around the third act.

Leventhal’s third act is called Blackbird. It’s a loyalty program built on the blockchain to serve the existing relationship between restaurants and their most devoted customers, as well as create a better data model for new relationships. Each restaurant has a personalized, digital loyalty card. The relationship begins when you “check in” at a restaurant by tapping your phone against an NFC chip on-location. From there, you can earn rewards by accumulating $FLY tokens. (If you want to dive deeper into what that means, there is a white paper.)

Maybe we’ll miss the days of digging coffee punch cards out of the bottom of our tote bags, but probably not. Leventhal is clear-eyed about skepticism toward the blockchain, and his connections across the restaurant industry mean he has the best shot of anyone to try what seems like a pretty obvious data and loyalty model. (I already do all of my banking with Starbucks…)

Early restaurant participants include Gertie, Bananas (from the Morgenstern’s team), Principe and more. Blackbird has also teased future programs with the Jon & Vinny's, Momofuku and Souvla restaurant groups. I called Leventhal to get the scoop on his nascent ice cream rewards economy.

Daisy Alioto: I know that you have done a lot of work around what it means to be a regular at a restaurant, especially in the digital age. How have you poured that ethos, the intimacy of that relationship, into Blackbird?

Ben Leventhal: From a restaurant standpoint, regulars are people that are known and trusted and that are valued and that are beloved by the restaurant. And from the consumer standpoint, as a regular, you're somebody who's committed to the restaurant. You feel like, to some extent, a stakeholder in the restaurant. In places where I feel I’m a regular, I am invested in the success of the restaurant and I want to know that I’ve played a small part in that through my patronage.

There's this really kind of intimate, symbiotic relationship between regulars and the restaurant. I think that's never going to change. But certainly technology over the last decade, if not quite a lot longer, has eroded that connectivity and inserted lots of middlemen, third parties and handlers and chaperones and custodians of that relationship. So, our view is that one-to-one connectivity has to be restored, and we do strongly believe that there's a way to use technology to do it.

DA: How did your early experience in media, and as a founder of Eater, inform the way that you build companies and brands?

BL: I like to think of myself as a storyteller, and I think that content is fundamental to the way I approach building a business. I think content helps create a brand, it helps create storylines, it helps to create voice, it allows consumers to understand where you're coming from and where you're going as a brand. And obviously, it also allows us to communicate effectively with our audience.

The through-line between Eater, Resy and now Blackbird is probably content and our view that we want to elevate restaurants, tell their stories, celebrate them, talk about them, stress about them, and think about them not just as businesses that sell food on a plate but these really interesting dynamic, sometimes global brands that consumers can really attach to.

DA: I'm sure some of the dynamics around what restaurants need in 2023, you've probably been thinking about since lockdown—I know that you have, because I've read your writing. But when did Web3 enter the picture for you as a possible solution to these problems?

BL: I think it probably was mid 2020. Admittedly, that's pretty late for the crypto world. Some of the observations that were part of this reveal for me–you referenced the early days of the pandemic–we noticed that restaurants closed, but they kept selling stuff.

They weren't allowed to have customers in the restaurant, but somehow they found their customers and they sold those customers stuff. I thought it was interesting and important to know that restaurants had brands and they had an audience and they were able to sell to that audience things that were not just food.

The Web3 piece definitely evolved over time, and frankly continues to evolve. You’d be silly for not having an evolving view of how the blockchain should work. But from the start, the most successful NFT projects have been about community building. You’re part of a club. These projects are galvanizing in the same way that restaurants are galvanizing.

DA: What do the next three months look like for you?

BL: Well, we're an early stage startup, so the next three months are going to be exciting and chaotic. But we're focusing on our pilot restaurants. We're focusing on them building out their loyalty offerings and those really resonating with customers. And we'll slowly introduce more restaurants and different kinds of programming that our platform can power.

DA: Just to bring it back to the beginning of the conversation, the idea of being a regular. In a sense, being a regular is something you can flex, I guess if you come in with a group and say, "Oh, they know me here. We're going to get the best table." But it's also super personal and I feel like it's a lifestyle and a status symbol that has more to do with reinforcing a sense of yourself than something that you externalize.

A lot of people subscribe to The New Yorker in print and they read it online and they do it because they want to be somebody who thinks of themselves as a person who reads The New Yorker in print.

But with the loyalty cards, the design of them, the fact that they're personalized for each restaurant, do you think people are going to show these off? Do you think people are going to ask if they can get a physical copy of it?

BL: 100%. We're not necessarily hearing that feedback yet, but I think they're going to be treasured artifacts of the restaurants and the relationships.