From Michelin pass to product launch — the year we built ROA
A founder note from Yago and Arnav on what the kitchen actually taught us about software.
A year ago we were standing in different kitchens, looking at the same problem. Yago was running services at a Michelin-recommended kitchen in Madrid. Arnav was building tools for restaurants who couldn’t afford to think about software.
We kept noticing the same thing: every kitchen runs on tribal knowledge. The head chef holds it in their head. The sous chef inherits a fraction of it. When someone leaves, the kitchen forgets.
What we got wrong at first
We started by building a recipe database. Nobody cared. Chefs don’t want another place to type recipes — they want their existing ones to do more work.
So we threw that out and started again from a different premise: the chef shouldn’t have to type anything. The system should learn from what the kitchen already does.
What the kitchen taught us
Three things, in order of importance:
- Latency is everything. A tool that’s right but slow is dead. We measure UI response in milliseconds because we have to.
- Density matters. Marketing-tool design — big buttons, lots of whitespace — is poison in a kitchen. We pack information.
- The agent should be quiet. ROA only speaks when asked, or when something’s about to go wrong. The kitchen has enough noise.
Where we are now
ROA is in private beta in restaurants across Spain, France, and the UK. The team is two engineers and a chef. We’re hiring slowly — only people who’ve worked in a kitchen.
If you’ve felt the same friction we’ve felt, talk to us.