Giuliano Senese, 25, is an Italian Dutch entrepreneur that has worked in tech for most of his life. He started his company called “Time Table” in 2017 and he is here with us now to explain to us how to get from start to exit. Time Table was a ‘Just in Time’ reservation system for restaurants; essentially creating a secondary tier of reservations. Not even a year after launching Time Table, the team won the GW New Venture Competition. This was a rigorous competition that included more than 500 participants over the course of four months and five different participation rounds. The team edged it and won the competition by a landslide and took home one of the biggest cash prizes to date from the NVC.
After the competition, Giuliano Senese started planning for expansion. With this new traction and hype behind the product, they could now raise a serious round that would help them take a serious position in the market. Senese would go to every restaurant trying to sell Time Table and making sure they signed up: He would even go as far as to give the system for free, as long as they would sign up. He did this because “…I recognized that signing each restaurant to our service was of much better company value than making short term cash-flow… We had money in the bank and I knew that if we had a good portfolio with potential of monetization, then we could sell rather easily to one of our competitors in the future.”
Senese left NYC to be with his wife at the beginning of 2019 and would fly periodically to New York and San Francisco in order to manage his company. But he also realized that there was a significant demand for a similar system. They hired more developers, changed the system, name, and got to work. They launched a daughter product of Time Table, called Tempus (For reasons of being in Europe and Time Table “…Didn’t really roll off the tongue like it did in the states”. This system was also widely used in places like Zuma and Nobu.
They accumulated over 500 restaurants in the UK and Italy and it was a great success, but Senese was not happy: “…I felt like we reached a ceiling, there was no more improvement on the technology side of things, it was boring. I wanted to move on and do bigger things. I felt like we were playing in the minor sports league; and I really wanted to go pro.” Senese also found out his wife was pregnant around this time and decided to agree to a buyout. He was bought out for a reported $50M and has since been focusing on his family and a new start-up that he is launching, of which he doesn’t want to speak yet “When the time is right we will announce what we are doing”.