An evening conversation that moved from the Alchemist's dining rooms in Copenhagen to a bar stool at Fogo de Chão, from Disney's MagicBand to a Plano tackle box full of lead D&D figures. What follows is a cleaned record of the ideas, stories, and instincts that surfaced — preserved in the language they arrived in.
The original recording auto-identified two speakers by name — Quyen Phan (0:03) and Drew Chentow (0:44). The auto-transcription mislabeled Mark Hadland's voice as Drew Chentow throughout. Sections previously attributed to Drew Chentow have been corrected to Mark Hadland. Brian Baldridge's Xbox contribution has been attributed from context. The remainder of the conversation is drawn from unlabeled cross-talk across all five participants.
There's a construct I keep coming back to. Think of it like a sphere. You've got food. You've got the service experience. You've got the environment, the atmosphere. And then you've got the narrative — the culture, the history, the heritage. These are the dimensions that define a dining experience. Not just what you eat, but the entire arc of how it makes you feel.
Dynery is the tome from which to craft and curate stories. The restaurant sets the tone. The storyteller takes that tone and builds the narrative. That's the opportunity — not just presenting facts about a meal, but helping people resonate with the things that are of genuine value to that brand.
I keep making the same point in my audio brand work — I'm going back to ancient math, science, geometry, cosmology. I've been writing what amounts to a manifesto on the backstory of my brand, and it leverages all these ancient things that matter: culture, heritage, the idea that you're tapping into something that has always been true about what humans need. That frame applies directly here.
The Alchemist does this better than anyone. Their menu is a digital iPad experience that looks like you're reading the Codex Leicester — the da Vinci manuscript. Real-time animated. And even the menu is about discovery. It's a genuinely cool hierarchy, one of the best UI experiences I've ever seen.
But the menu is just the beginning. You walk through these gigantic Gothic doors and there's almost a four-minute entry experience — a huge screen cycling through history from ancient Greeks to astronauts. You're being inducted into something. Then they take you to the bar where you watch the alchemy of bartending. You get three impressions and there's a two-story atrium — very modern steel — and a wine cellar, and eventually they take you up into the domed theater.
You sit in that dome for about three hours. It's all projected — think IMAX, but theatrical. Six different cinematic scenes, all with different themes and different story arcs. They're narrating a journey while feeding you. The whole evening spans six hours. Thirty of the courses are edible. The rest are impressions — sensory, spatial, experiential.
He's a master storyteller. The whole thing is built around the Voyage of Discovery as a framework. And what that leads to — what I'm building into my own brand narrative — is an enlightened path to revelation. The Voyage of Discovery and the Destination of Revelation. That is the arc.
Here's the contrast. Booking somewhere on OpenTable. At the end, it asks you to rate the restaurant — one to five on every checkbox. That data is completely meaningless. It's all noise. You can't do anything with it. There's no story in it. There's no truth in it.
The best you get from the current platforms is: oh, I ate here. Like my post. Yay. Right? Who cares — unless you've got ten million of those likes. The social layer as it exists in dining right now is all table stakes, and it's all transactional. The Spotify Wrapped model, the gamification, the badge — those are table stakes. They move the needle on engagement. But they don't present an experience. They present facts.
I haven't found the complete answer to what that looks like, but I know that statement is the right frame. Present experiences. And be part of the journey of figuring out what that means.
Here's my biggest issue with restaurants, and I'll use a real example. I live across the street from Shuckers. I've been going there for twenty years. I have a favorite server — Darla. She's like my sister. She knows my kids. She asks about my mom. I walk in and I get a hug.
One night they tell me they can't seat me in Darla's section. And I look at them and I say — that's an unacceptable answer. I understand you have to manage staff, table revenue allocation, all of that. But I'm a regular. You should know me. You should make this work. The technology should enable that. That's the whole goal.
It's always two things operating in tension: reducing friction and increasing hyper-personalization. Those are not just brand tenets — they're human truths. When you add friction to someone's experience, especially an experience they've built a relationship with, you're not just failing operationally. You're breaking trust.
I always call these apex experiences. How do you enable every customer to have an apex experience? And then recognize that the level of the apex may be different across your customer base — because you have to manage things operationally. The art is making sure nobody can see the difference.
The Chick-fil-A versus Popeyes story makes this viscerally clear. Two people in line at Popeyes, twenty-minute wait. Twenty people in line at Chick-fil-A, two-minute wait. Popeyes might have the better chicken sandwich — but it all boils down to how they make you feel. That's it. That's the whole thing.
Disney taught me something that I keep coming back to. One of their core tenets is that there should never be any observable difference in experience level between tiers of guests. People are categorized in tiers — they get different treatment — but Disney works extraordinarily hard to make sure nobody on the outside can see it. Nobody goes home saying, why did he get an extra shot in his gin and tonic? Why did she get to skip the line?
That's the design challenge. You're managing the experience unevenly — because you have to, because some guests have earned a different level of relationship — but the surface presentation of that inequality should be invisible to everyone except the person receiving the benefit.
And more importantly: there are parts of that equation that humans simply cannot execute consistently at scale. That's the point about AI as an equalizer. It's a democratization of things that are important but not easily doable. You care about getting your favorite server. The person next to you doesn't care at all. The AI that knows both of you can solve both of those problems simultaneously without either person noticing the other's solution.
One of the things I keep making the point about in the AI age is that it's an equalizer. It's a democratization of things that are important but not easily doable without it. A restaurant can't have one human being who knows everything about every regular. But an AI can hold all of that, surface it at the right moment, and guide the service team through the experience in real time.
The customer-facing and operator-facing language should have almost nothing to do with technology. I want it rooted in emotional experience. Because we're all humans — we're motivated by fear, by success, by love, by a dozen other things — and the platform should tie into those motivations and either maximize the positive ones or minimize the negative ones.
I'm not aware of any tool or product that genuinely ties into the emotional needs and wants of a person relative to what they're trying to seek. At the base level, meals are nourishment — you have to eat. But a lot of this is celebratory: human family experience, business experience. Those are the constructs we should play into heavily. That's the real product.
In terms of competition, here's how we're different. Where others have built a system that extracts margin at every touch point, we bring it into a holistic experience. We bring it into a connection, a relationship. It's no longer just transactional — it's about alignment, experience, and human touch points. And the margin is now much more reduced and favorable to the restaurants.
The strategy comes down to three things: control, data, and margin. Control on the end-to-end user journey. Data — because as we accumulate more data, we put daylight between us and any competition coming behind us. We don't just know a guest's next likely move, we can anticipate it and fulfill it to the highest satisfaction level. And then margin — once we have control and data, we start taking back what's currently being lost to fragmented platforms.
What we're raising capital for right now is three things: Seattle market dominance — which is about creating a replicable template for other cities — the full product extension through Dynery Pay and the cross-restaurant reward loop, and the restaurant onboarding system. Once we close that loop, we have the full unified experience from entice through enter, engage, exit, and extend.
The path to Series A is not going to be based on vision. It's going to be based on revenue traction. By the end of this year: 100 paying restaurants, 25,000 users in Seattle, provable repeatable city expansion. That's the milestone.
The problem with loyalty programs is that they focus on customer acquisition instead of the loyal customers who are already there. I just learned that in my building, they're giving new tenants months of free rent — and I've been paying rent on two apartments for ten years. That's the backwards model.
The more loyal customer is the target of the loyalty program. You already have their wallet. If I had to prioritize my energy, focus, and spend as a business, it has to be on the people who are my best customers. So many brands don't do that.
When you combine that principle with gamification — like a streak in a game, like training a behavior — you're building something powerful. Pop a notification to a loyal customer: hey, congratulations, you've earned 4X dining mileage because it's your fourth visit this year. That's the kind of engagement that changes behavior. But the key is immediacy. The notion of immediate reward versus some potential future value that never gets consumed is everything.
If someone sits down at Anchovies & Salt for their fourth time and they get a round on the house, triggered by the app — totally unexpected, not part of any announced program — that kind of surprise and delight wins people for life.
Disney did this extraordinarily well with the MagicBand. Because they had location intelligence, Cinderella knew that your daughter was in the park. They knew a surprise and delight moment was coming. But it wasn't a clumsy exchange — it was instant name recognition. Boom. There was a surprise and there was a delight. The data on surprise and delight is definitive: you win people for life when you do that.
We almost did it at Xbox. We had telemetry on the controllers that were about to fail. Still working, but we could see it coming in the data. Somebody suggested: what if we ship a new controller before they even know there's a problem? "Thank you for being a valued customer — your data shows your controller may be reaching end of life. Please accept this replacement." We were this close. Legal killed it. But the instinct was completely right.
The lesson from that: just have them opt in. Give them a menu of benefits. People like the option of choice. And then when you have their consent, do the thing that would have seemed like surveillance and instead turns into the moment they tell everyone about.
One of the things I am so passionate about — and I've tested this — is that people love just seeing their journey at the end of the year. Show me my dining journey. That's the ask. And it resonates every time.
Look at Flighty. I've got almost three million miles tracked — well, about a third of my actual history since they only go back to 2014. But they make me a Flighty Passport: every country, every route, by year. You can see your whole aerial life mapped. That's what dining needs.
Spotify Wrapped does this right because it makes it about you. That's the guiding principle — always make Dynery about you. Your experiences. Your journey. Not the restaurant's marketing, not the platform's metrics. Yours.
Dynery Oscars. Who's dined in the most countries? Who's had the most cuisines? Who's the most loyal to a single neighborhood spot? Who's traveled furthest for dinner? These are the earning proof points. These are the story arcs. They become the stories we tell about ourselves.
Here's the detail from the Alchemist that floored me. They have five rooms. Every diner progresses through physical space and through the dimensions of dishes, wine preferences, allergies, everything. And in the middle of all of this — this immaculate, world-class experience — they manage it all through a 70-inch screen running Trello.
A Kanban board. In real time. I'm a tech person. I sit there and I look at this and I think: you're using Trello. You're using the thing I use to manage my projects to manage the most celebrated dining experience in the world. And it works. But it shouldn't have to be that. That's our opportunity.
As a customer in that room, I am a Kanban item. I'm progressing through six stages of physical space. I'm progressing through another dimension of dishes and wine and preferences and allergies. What if one platform managed all of that? What if the operator had an experience coach — a real-time intelligence layer that told the service team exactly who was at each table, what they love, what they've had before, what the next gesture should be?
Think of it like an executive briefing. If you're going into a Microsoft account review, you get a brief. This is who they are, here's their history, here's what they care about, here's what's sensitive. That brief is what the service team at every Dynery restaurant should have before every service. Whether it's a three-Michelin-star kitchen or a neighborhood spot that just wants to make their regulars feel seen.
I've been doing a lot of work in Beli. My kids got me into it. I've rated about a hundred restaurants. The social aspect is good — I can see where people I follow have been. There's a leaderboard. There are photos. There are top spots lists.
But here's what's missing: there's no generative AI creating curated content from either the restaurant's lens or the diner's lens. The whole thing is still transactional. They're doing an okay job socially. But okay social is table stakes. Spotify does it. Xbox did it. Badges and recaps and history — that's all table stakes.
The difference is that none of them have the generative layer. None of them take all that behavioral data and turn it into something that feels alive. And I haven't gotten through all of Beli's features yet — I'll do a full AI-assisted deep-dive comparison — but my initial read is that their social graph is real, their community is active, and they are 100% competitive intelligence that we should be taking seriously.
There's a branch of this that I find genuinely interesting — the idea of an extended brand network. Say I'm at a restaurant and I love the gin they're serving. The app knows that. Monkey 47 is what I love — sometimes I get Hendricks when I can't justify the price. What if the app surfaced: "Here's a 20% off coupon for Monkey 47, because you've ordered it four times in the last six months"?
Or if I'm eating Wagyu — American Kobe — and I've been enjoying it tonight, what if the platform offered me a relationship with the producer? "You're enjoying this beef tonight. Would you like to know more about where it comes from?" That producer now has a customer acquisition channel that is perfectly targeted and contextually appropriate. And they pay for it. It's a multi-tiered customer acquisition vehicle.
The same logic extends to travel. I'm in a new city. I go somewhere for dinner and I love it. The platform knows I'm a visitor. The restaurant knows I'm a first-time customer from out of town. That's a completely different engagement than my neighborhood regular experience. The outreach, the personalization, the follow-up — all of it should be calibrated to that context.
The best investors are not the ones who are only focused on the numbers. You want someone with an elevated vision — someone who believes in creating something that is genuinely differentiated. This platform does something that everybody else does, but it does it in a nuanced way. It's elevated. It's somewhere that hasn't been before.
The portfolio spans Disney, Carnival, Starbucks, Philips Medical Devices, Intellectual Ventures. Not all of it was hospitality — but the thread through all of it is building platforms that become iconic. The Disney MagicBand. The Carnival Ocean Medallion. The Starbucks app. Things my kids see in Japan and say: "See, Dad — they built on what you made." That's the legacy. That's the kind of work this is.
We're not looking for just any investor. We need someone who sees the vision and has the network to open the right doors. YPO is one channel — it's one of the most powerful private business networks in the world. Members own ten percent of global GDP. The right introduction there could be transformative.
What we're asking for isn't capital today. It's introductions to the people who can see what this is — and have seen this kind of thing before.
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