Maya Lombardi on the Vendor-Side View

Show notes

Maya Lombardi spent three years as employee number two at a reservations-AI startup that was acquired by a major POS. She joined TableTransfers last year as our restaurant-tech reporter. In this episode she gives the vendor-side view of operator skepticism: why founders ignore feedback they shouldn’t, why the Series A pitch always overpromises, and the three red flags she watches for in a vendor pitch deck.

Timestamps

• 03:30 — Why most vendor founders have never worked a Friday service
• 10:00 — The Series A pitch and the inevitable overpromise
• 17:00 — Three red flags in a vendor pitch deck
• 24:00 — The operators who are good at filtering noise
• 32:00 — What she got wrong when she was a founder, in retrospect
• 39:00 — How she sources scoops now (the answer is “the vendor directory”)