I got my first job at McDonald's when I was 15 years old.
By 17, I was a manager. I was still a kid myself, learning how to lead people, solve problems, take care of customers, and keep a restaurant moving when everything seemed to be happening at once.
Restaurants became the place where I grew up.
Over the years, I worked my way through hospitality and eventually became a General Manager. I've spent thousands of shifts on restaurant floors. I've opened. I've closed. I've been short-staffed. I've dealt with broken equipment, call-outs, guest complaints, training, schedules, incidents, inspections, endless group texts, binders nobody can find, and those nights where somehow the team pulls it together and gives people an incredible experience anyway.
I love this industry.
But I've also watched the people who run restaurants get asked to do more and more with tools that were never really built for the way we work.
Then I started building software.
My first company, Chema, began as an attempt to understand something I've been chasing for most of my life: how can technology make people's work better instead of simply giving them more work to manage?
Building Chema taught me AI. Restaurants taught me everything else.
Kueso is where those two parts of my life finally met.
We're building an AI that can actually know your restaurant: your recipes, handbooks, policies, people, tasks, incidents, vendors, standards and the thousand little details that make your operation yours.
Not because restaurants need more technology.
Because restaurant people deserve better tools.
I know what it's like to be standing on the floor with twelve things happening at once and still be responsible for making the right decision.
I know what it's like to care deeply about a restaurant that will never appear on a Silicon Valley spreadsheet.
And I know the people doing this work don't need technology telling them how to provide hospitality.
They already know how.
My mission is to give them extraordinary tools so they can spend more of their time doing what technology never will:
taking care of people.
From a 15-year-old kid at McDonald's to building Kueso all these years later, the mission really hasn't changed much.
Take care of people.
That's what we're here to do.
Brian Daniel
Founder, Kueso
