OpenTable CEO Debby Soo On What It Really Means To Serve A Service Industry
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OpenTable CEO Debby Soo OpenTable When Debby Soo became CEO of OpenTable in 2020, the idea of booking a table felt about as relevant as dial-up internet. Restaurants were closed, staff were furloughed, and the broad outlook on the hospitality industry’s future was, in a word, bleak. But for Soo—who joined the restaurant tech platform after a decade at Kayak, where she rose from intern to Chief Commercial Officer—the pandemic offered one unexpected gift: time to listen. “I didn’t grow up in restaurants,” she says. “I had to learn the business as a CEO. On top of that, I couldn’t travel, couldn’t walk the floors, couldn’t shake hands, so I sat in my basement, opened up Zoom, and started listening. And writing. Writing everything.” She took copious notes in those early days—pages of observations, questions, and red flags. “Especially the things that made my spidey sense go off,” she says. “Because once you’re in the system long enough, all the weird things start to feel normal.” OpenTable connects restaurants with customers via multiple tech tools OpenTable Three themes emerged early. First: pricing. “We were expensive. We had a one-size-fits-all model, and that didn’t make sense,” she says. “A 20-seat omakase isn’t the same as a 400-cover brasserie.” So OpenTable restructured its pricing into something more flexible. Remarkably, the company managed to grow while reducing costs for many of its partners. “It had implications for the P&L,” she admits. “But we did it.” The second issue: product stagnation. “We pioneered the category 27 years ago,” she says, “but our competitors had started iterating faster, and when restaurants asked us for features, we weren’t getting it done.” That’s changed. While Soo admits her first three years were primarily focused on product and engineering, the company has rolled out more than 80 product…
