Tock

Adding an additional restaurant was only going to magnify the  problem they faced at Alenia and wanted to negate at Next: a no-show rate hovering around 20%.  

The economics of managing a restaurant get tough when a fifth of the expected covers disappear every night, especially when preparation for a single dish could start days before the dinner is plated, and existing reservation systems did not leave many options other than simply increasing prices to offset the loss. In Kokonas’ mind, this same issue plagued restaurants at every level, from the hole-in-the-wall taco joint all the way through fine dining establishments like Alenia & Next. 

So Kokonas built a system from scratch. 

Innovation was core to their operating DNA. Achatz worked with designers to create custom dishware for new menus and commissioned tools like the antigriddle to execute dishes that did not yet exist. Reinvention was not a branding exercise—it was their operating model. 

Next pushed that ethos even further. The restaurant changed its menu, décor, uniforms, and dish and stemware three times a year, essentially becoming a new concept every four months.  

Instead of reservations, Next sold tickets through a homegrown platform that used dynamic pricing, as a 7 p.m. Saturday seat has greater demand than a seat at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday. To Kokonas, Next was not a restaurant taking reservations; it was a business selling perishable time slots and managing that inventory. His system would both manage and promote turnover of tables. 

The results were immediate. 

On the first day the system went live, it processed $500,000 in prepaid sales, delivering an instant working capital tailwind to the Alinea Restaurant Group. When deployed at Alinea, no-show rates fell from 20% to 2%, and profits rose 38%. 

Kokonas’ story shows that if you build something genuinely better than existing options that also drives growth on the bottom line, the industry bangs down your door to get it. Word spread, and other high-end operators asked to license the system. Inbound interest—not outbound selling—gave Kokonas the conviction to formalize the effort. 

In 2014, he formally co-founded Tock with ex-Google engineering leader Brian Fitzpatrick. They rebuilt the prototype into a scalable, API-first platform designed around hospitality rather than around the constraints of legacy reservation software. Restaurants owned their guest data, prepaid experiences drove favorable working capital dynamics, and the system handled dynamic, event, and per-cover pricing, which unlocked a far broader market than traditional reservation tools. 

For Kokonas, this “scratch your own itch” approach paid off again in 2020. When COVID shut down dining rooms, Kokonas and Achatz were among the first fine dining operators in the country to pivot to takeout. Tock was not built for to-go orders, so they adapted it. Within days, they launched Tock To-Go, and a restaurant with three Michelin stars began selling individual Beef Wellingtons and curated wine packages for pickup. 

Tock-to-Go was another example of Kokonas’s instinct to go the opposite direction when the facts demanded it, a skill he cultivated as a commodities trader in his twenties. Once again, solving his own operational problem expanded Tock’s market. The platform became not just a reservation system, but a broader commerce engine for hospitality. 

By 2021, the logic of the business was unambiguous. A system centered on restaurant ownership of the guest, flexible enough to serve both high-volume casual and high-touch fine dining, and engineered to improve working capital, was exactly where the industry needed to go. Squarespace agreed and bought Tock for $400 million. The acquisition proved Kokonas right: the future of restaurant reservations was always going to look like Tock. He just had to build it first.