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I love building new things, whether it’s new teams, tools, processes, products, or communities.
I love spinning up new products or ideas quickly, building teams to help them scale, and finding early customers or community members. I particularly love building feedback loops between early customers and internal teams to hone in on product-market fit. And if the project supports young businesses and/or makes education accessible to more people, even better.
Some of my favorite things I’ve built:
- a nationwide delivery network for restaurants at Table22, where incentives are actually aligned such that drivers and restaurants both feel treated with respect
- a Virginia-wide startup competition with Village Capital that highlighted and funded 25 entrepreneurs from Roanoke to Virginia Beach to Charlottesville
- a national conference on innovation with the Tom Tom Foundation that connected small-city leaders from across the country to share best practices
- a $1mm tech talent placement program with Forge that trained thousands of students and placed them in hundreds of impact-driven startups
My favorite thing I’ve built
I co-founded a tech skills school called Forge in Charlottesville, Virginia. At Forge, we taught engineering, data science, marketing, rapid prototyping, and entrepreneurship to thousands of students. We built our programs with a unique business model where students didn’t pay for their tuition unless we were successful in placing them in a job. This also reduced our reliance on donations almost completely, enabling us to survive the pandemic and better control our own destiny.
I learned about all the crazy-hard things that go into starting a business: how to create something people really want, how to recruit and train a team, how to change directions on a dime, how to ask for help, and how to fail with grace.
Key projects of mine included: leading a complete rebrand of the organization involving 100+ stakeholders; overhauling our company partnership sales pitch and process; and growing the Board of Directors to improve its gender, racial, and age diversity.
More than anything, I’m particularly proud of the community we built at Forge. Thousands of makers and creators went through our programs, and hundreds stay in touch to this day as friends, colleagues, and co-founders.
I left Forge in 2021, though I remain an informal advisor to the current team.
What I built at Table22
Table22 empowers beloved restaurants to build subscription businesses. The aim is to enable restaurants to build predictable, recurring revenue that can provide financial stability for a challenging industry, all while providing new and unique experiences for restaurants’ best customers.
I most recently served as Director of Operations + Strategy. This was a particularly fun and challenging role that’s somewhere between a product-prototyper and business operations lead. Projects included:
- building a better database and reporting infrastructure for the email marketing we do for our partner restaurants
- creating a new hiring pipeline and process, both to increase the diversity of our applicant pool and to ensure a more equitable selection system
- designing and writing articles for a new Help Center to enable our restaurant’s members to get quicker answers to their questions
- prototyping automated food delivery communications with chatGPT
Prior to this broader business operations role, I was focused on building everything needed to start-up, operate, and grow our nationwide delivery operation for our partner restaurants. This included:
- sourcing, training, managing, and retaining 100+ drivers across 18 cities
- creating no- and low-code systems and automations, often in collaboration with our product team, to scale and automate our driver scheduling, route planning & optimization, payment, and customer service operations
- co-creating our customer service playbook for dispatchers with our account management team
- hiring, training, and managing our dispatch and customer service team
- collaborating with early Table22 merchant partners to understand needs and challenges, and building in these learnings into our logistics and software product
My current side projects
I’m a foodie and wanna-be wine guy. I’ve been lucky enough to visit 42/50 states, and along the way I’ve collected a list of some truly incredible places to eat and drink. Check out my Guides for my favorite places, and let me know if there’s somewhere you think I can’t miss on my next trip.
I love to teach. At Forge, I used to teach web design, intro to coding, professional development skills, and more. I find it incredibly rewarding to help people realize what they’re capable of. I still come back to UVA for a day or two each semester to teach rapid prototyping to entrepreneurship students.
I realized this year that I miss teaching more, and I want to keep up that skill and practice. So, I now occasionally run workshops on mastering credit card points. Learning how to use credit cards to travel for free was my gateway drug to learning about personal finance. I think it’s a fun way to learn about what can often be a scary topic and make it feel much more approachable. Join me on my next one!
I was in a jazz band on high school that (unfortunately?) you can still find on Spotify.
Here’s a fun clip of me jamming to Isn’t She Lovely with some buds. Get in touch if you want to jam!
I occasionally consult with companies who are looking for help/guidance on testing out a new idea, building out a recruiting pipeline, or improving an existing process/system. If that’s of interest to you…
Get in touch!
- Learn more about me and my approach to building things and leading teams.
- Email me at daniel [at] willsonetc [dot] com. (Yep, 2 L’s in Willson.)
- Here’s my LinkedIn.