In August 2022 I joined Fishbowl as VP of Engineering. Fishbowl was a name that had meant something in restaurant marketing for two decades — and by the time I arrived, it had flatlined under private equity ownership. What I inherited, precisely: no team, no product, no infrastructure. An empty org chart and a brand people vaguely remembered.
That sounds like a horror story. It's actually the best possible starting position, if you can stomach it. Nothing to unwind, nobody defending the old way, and a name that still opened doors. The job was to earn the name back.
The first product was the team. I hired the entire engineering org from zero — eventually leading 30+ engineers across three managers. The bar never changed: people who ship. Not people with impressive architectures in their heads; people who put working software in front of restaurants and then made it better. Everything that follows happened because of that filter.
Fishbowl's product on paper was "email and SMS for restaurants." The turnaround was refusing to accept that framing. We built the messaging infrastructure properly — millions of emails and SMS with real-time analytics and deliverability tracking — and then went after the thing that actually mattered: guest identity. A diner shows up in your POS, your reservation system, your delivery orders, your Wi-Fi, your online ordering — as five different strangers. We stitched those into a single 360° profile. That's when a basic messaging tool became a guest intelligence platform: CRM, loyalty, rewards, Wi-Fi capture, feedback, segmentation.
Under the hood it was event-driven services and real-time data pipelines on a proven stack — PHP and Symfony, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, RabbitMQ. Boring tech, sharp edges. The kind of stack that lets a small team move fast without inventing problems.
The legacy estate had to go. We migrated everything to AWS — ECS, RDS, event streaming — while the platform kept serving customers, and took over $1M in costs out of the engineering budget along the way. Cloud migrations are where turnarounds usually die; the trick is that nobody outside engineering should ever notice one happened.
There's an 18-month stretch in every turnaround that nobody writes about: the product works, the team is good, and the world hasn't noticed yet. You just keep shipping. Momentum compounds slower than you want and faster than you realize.
By the end, the platform served 50M+ guest profiles across 22,000 restaurant brands, the new product line was generating several million in ARR, and in November 2024 I stepped up to CTO. In 2026, Fishbowl was acquired by GoTab — a brand that was dead in the water, rebuilt into something worth buying. It was my second exit in three years, after MHVillage's $43M acquisition by ELS.
What I'd tell anyone walking into a turnaround: hire only people who ship, build the boring things brilliantly, delete more than you add, and survive the unglamorous middle. The rest is mostly showing up.