Virtual food

Founder & CEO

A serial entrepreneur, Mike excels at inventing new technologies for the restaurant sector. Through founding Tap.in2, Ordermark, Nextbite and Team Kitchens he honed his expertise in combining high tech with experiential marketing for food, sports and entertainment brands to create new business modalities. He brings to KDS a commitment to innovation and fostering a positive company culture, accompanied by skills in product development and marketing. Mike enjoys getting in the trenches, particularly digging into KDS’ underlying data science. Indeed, his background with the FBI gives him a unique vantage point on data driven tech: as a counterintelligence analyst, he was responsible for a task force that worked with the U.S. DoD & Intelligence Community. For this service he was nominated for the Director of National Intelligence’s National Counterintelligence Award. Mike is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley.

Co-founder & COO

A classic ‘heavy hitter’ investor, Jon shares his formidable management skills and financial acumen with KDS on an international stage. With degrees from USC, London School of Economics, MIT and The Wharton School, Jon is focusing his laser brain on KDS strategy, operations and scale. Deeply connected to food tech, he is Co-Managing Partner of East West Ventures, Co-Managing Partner of Unicorn Venture Partners, Partner at Trousdale Ventures and Senior Venture Partner at Expert Dojo. Having held positions at Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Cummins, Jon has experience running U.S. and China offices, working with retailers such as Amazon. In addition, he is the Managing Member for his family investment office, J Heart Ventures, which invested in startup companies such as Boulevard, ChowNow, Daily Harvest, DocSend, Gyft, LeafLink, Miso Robotics, Solugen.

EVP Partnerships & Outreach

An entrepreneurial corporate strategist, Allison chairs the Media and Space groups for L.A. Venture Association and has had multiple exits, including as CSO of Webcasts.com (IPO as iBeam). A longtime champion of interactive media, she is CEO/Founder of ITV Alliance representing Fortune 500 tech and media brands. Allison has contributed to numerous digital media, advanced television and tech forward entertainment initiatives for companies such as Liberty Media, IBM, AOL, France Telecom, AT&T, Stan Lee Media and AEG. She advises companies in streaming, AR, content creation and crypto currency. She holds an M.A. from the University of Virginia.

EVP of Sales

Lead Software Engineer

A coder since childhood, Gareth has excelled at software engineering for 20+ years. A lead engineer in companies of every size and industry, his range of roles spanned from primarily coding the first app up to managing teams and driving long-term projects across many departments. He gravitates toward solving problems impacting the physical realm involving logistics and customers, and improving the efficiency of existing industries via technology integrations. Gareth also drives UX improvement of software and educating internal teams on how to make user experiences more intuitive and efficient. This passion makes KDS’ architecture adaptable for an evolving, rapidly growing industry.

Director of Operations

A native Angelino, Hailey Russo has joined the KDS team as the Director of Operations. Deeply rooted in strategy and logistics, Hailey’s drive to build processes that help early stage startups scale quickly, stems from her time spent in food and travel tech start-ups. While working at Roaming Hunger, Cater2.me and AvantStay, she has scaled lean markets and assembled departments and programs using data-driven metrics. Hailey enjoys empowering her team in the office as well as on the football field with her multiple co-ed flag teams. She also enjoys singing karaoke, fishing, and training to be an Olympic hopeful in Trap.

Executive Chef & Culinary
Group Manager

An experienced farm-to-table chef focused on California cuisine, Leo is an inventive food craftsman. He has created many menu items for specialty shops in East Los Angeles, and been featured in L.A. Magazine and Daily Coffee News. He is committed to using locally sourced ingredients, and has been a longtime champion of farmers’ markets, along the way developing a line of vegan Mexican sauces, sides and tortillas under the Bloom Foods Markets label. Originally from Mexico City, he holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley. Early industry forays included an internship at an organic vineyard in Baja California, Valle de Guadalupe.

Director of Quality
and Automation

A talented leader in software quality assurance, Rigo applies 18+ years’ experience, providing KDS with structure and fundamental testing principles to creating a winning product. For video game innovator Activision he led development of the popular Call of Duty franchise across all platforms. At Disney Interactive he was an in-house Product Evaluator for all titles. His team leadership skills expanded at DirecTV and SnapChat, including offshore (India, Brazil, Taiwan) multi-platform management for testing and test case development. Time at Ordermark afforded greater understanding of food service tech, including requirements for ideal systems for client/user interaction with virtual kitchens and brands.