Waiting for the Flux Capacitor

On winding down Roux, building ahead of the curve, and what comes after letting go of the thing you believed in most.

Hitting 88 MPH
In Back to the Future II, the Black & Decker Hydrator turns a tiny pizza into a full-sized meal in seconds. Most people know I love a good futuristic food pop culture reference, but lately that movie’s been on my mind for another reason. Doc Brown’s DeLorean had to hit exactly 88 miles per hour to travel through time. Not 87. Not 89. Just 88.

Innovation works like that. It depends on perfect alignment between idea and opportunity. If you're early, it’s like showing a microwave to people still cooking over fire. If you're late, someone else has already launched Ooni and changed the way we make pizza at home.

Today I’m sharing that we’re sunsetting Roux and surprisingly... I feel at peace. There’s clarity in realizing the world might not be ready for what you’ve built, even if the concept is sound and the audience enthusiastic.

Throughout my career, I’ve had a habit of seeing around corners. I used to think being early was a flaw. Maybe I wasn’t telling the story clearly enough, or moving fast enough. But over time, I’ve come to see it differently. The value isn’t just in seeing what’s next, it’s in having the patience and timing to meet the world when it’s ready. But that balance is the hardest part.

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Test Runs and Turns
In 2019, after some time away from restaurants, I started reconnecting with operators. Everyone I spoke with agreed it was time for new tools and thinking. That led me to build Krumm, a business intelligence tool centered on an overlooked metric: repeat guest rate.

In tech, we know retention is more valuable than acquisition. In restaurants, we talk endlessly about hospitality, obsess over Yelp reviews, but rarely connect those efforts to what actually matters… getting guests to come back. In other words, retention.

Krumm launched two weeks before the pandemic shut everything down. As restaurants pivoted to survive, retention understandably took a back seat. Today, platforms like Blackbird and SevenRooms are picking up where we left off. Seeing those ideas thrive is a reminder that timing changes everything.

Around the same time, I launched a small project called Guest Collective with my friend Emily. What started as weekly calls to process the collapse of our industry became a space where people wrote love letters to their favorite restaurants. We collected nearly 500 stories—first dates, birthdays, quiet bowls of noodles. Each one a reminder of why restaurants matter.

And then, while watching the Super Bowl, I saw our "Write a Love Letter" CTA in a Jose Cuervo ad. WHAT?! Yeah. At first I was angry. Then proud. Now I just laugh. The idea clearly resonated, the emotion reached its audience, even if the messenger changed.

But seriously... they didn’t even try to improve the design.

Then came Roux. I was tired of how broken online recipes felt—endless scrolling, cluttered formats, great content buried in the comments. My co-founders and I built something better. We treated recipes not just as instructions, but as collaborative, creative cultural assets, and built a system that supported better distribution while allowing creators to retain ownership of their work.

At the heart of Roux was our belief that recipes are cultural primitives. Like language or art, they shape identity, and we imagined a future where your “culinary passport” could carry your food habits, preferences, and history across health, wellness, travel, and commerce.

Maybe you’ve already guessed this, but we aren’t the only ones seeing these connections. Wonder is experimenting with hybrid formats. Uber and OpenTable are beginning to integrate delivery and reservations. The industry is starting to catch up, finally seeing what we saw all along: our food experiences are deeply interconnected.

But markets move at their own pace. We couldn’t convert momentum into sustainability fast enough. Still, I’m certain the phrase “culinary passport” will show up again… and when it does, I’ll remember where it started.

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The Road Ahead
To everyone who believed in Roux—our team, our investors, our creators, and early users—thank you. None of this would’ve happened without you, and I’m proud of what we built together.

Roux pushed me to think at platform scale: to imagine not just better tools, but entirely new systems. Now, with the acceleration of AI, those kinds of ideas feel more possible than ever. We’re at a moment when long-standing complexity can finally be met with real capability—and I’m here for it.

I’m stepping into what’s next with clarity, momentum, and curiosity.

I’m not done building. I’m just waiting for the flux capacitor to light up again.