The Goldman Sachs logo was on the screen. The number next to it: $10 million in annual banking-as-a-service revenue. Somebody had brought sparkling water. The Deloitte managing director was talking about next quarter's pipeline. It was, by every professional metric, a very good day.
I was sitting third from the left. Nodding at the right times. Thinking about something else entirely.
The week before, I'd had dinner with a restaurant owner in Orlando. A guy named Marco — forty-two years old, two kids, fifteen years in the business. He ran a mid-scale Italian place that had survived COVID, barely. He'd leaned across the table and said something I couldn't stop hearing: "I make more money when someone sits down and eats than when they order online. But online is forty percent of my volume now. I'm stuck."
He wasn't asking for help. He wasn't pitching me. He was stating a fact the way people state facts they've stopped trying to change — with precision and zero emotion. DoorDash took thirty percent of every delivery order. His net margin was six percent. The arithmetic wasn't ambiguous. He was paying to serve forty percent of his customers.
I sat in that Deloitte conference room, looking at a $10 million number on a Goldman Sachs slide, and I couldn't stop seeing Marco's face. Not because the situations were related. Because they represented two completely different Americas — one where financial engineering generates eight-figure revenue streams, and another where a man who wakes up at 5 AM to make pasta dough is being quietly bankrupted by an app he can't afford to leave.
That was the moment. Not the decision — the moment. The decision came later. But the crack in the foundation happened right there, in a conference room with sparkling water and a Goldman Sachs logo, while everyone else was celebrating.
The Fintech Lens
I spent five years at Robinhood. The work was P2P crypto gifting, hyperextended hours trading, iOS and Android product operations at scale. But the education was something deeper.
Robinhood's thesis was deceptively simple: brokerage commissions existed not because they added value proportional to their cost, but because incumbents had normalized extraction. E*Trade charged $7. Schwab charged $10. The entire industry had decided that this was the price of participation. Robinhood looked at that and said: the commission is the product failure. Remove it, and you unlock a market that's ten times larger than anyone serving it today.
It worked. Not because zero-commission trading was technically innovative — the mechanism was payment for order flow, which had existed for decades. It worked because the insight was correct: the middleman existed because it got there first, not because it was necessary. Once you remove a rent-seeking intermediary, the market doesn't shrink. It explodes.
I carried that insight with me for years without knowing where to point it. And then I met Marco.
What Deloitte Taught Me About Who Actually Gets Hurt
Seven years at Deloitte. Risk management. Regulatory advisory. Banking-as-a-service architecture for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. I helped build systems that generated $10 million annually in recurring revenue. I learned how the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world manage capital, risk, and margin.
And here is the uncomfortable thing that seven years at Deloitte teaches you: the most sophisticated financial engineering in the world is happening at the top. The least sophisticated operators are getting extracted from at the bottom.
Goldman Sachs has an army of quants optimizing every basis point. A restaurant owner in Orlando has a calculator app on his phone. Goldman negotiates bespoke terms on every transaction. Marco signed DoorDash's standard contract because everyone else in his neighborhood already had. Goldman has a CFO, a CLO, and a risk committee. Marco has a brother-in-law who does his taxes.
The asymmetry is not subtle. It is the defining feature of how extraction works: it targets the operators who lack the infrastructure to understand what's being taken from them. DoorDash's commission structure — 15 to 30 percent per order — wouldn't survive ten minutes of scrutiny from a Goldman Sachs analyst. But it survives fifteen years of extraction from restaurant owners because nobody on their side of the table has the financial sophistication to quantify the aggregate damage.
I had that sophistication. I had spent seven years building it. And once I saw how it applied to Marco's situation, I couldn't unsee it.
The Decision
People ask me what it was like to leave Robinhood and Deloitte. They expect a dramatic story — a blowup, a falling out, a crisis of conscience. It wasn't like that.
It was quieter. It was sitting in my apartment on a Sunday night, looking at Marco's P&L that he'd emailed me, and realizing that I could build the financial model that solves this. Not theoretically. Actually. I had the fintech lens from Robinhood — remove the rent-seeking middleman. I had the financial engineering from Deloitte — build infrastructure that scales. And I had something that most people in Silicon Valley didn't: a brother who understood enterprise revenue, and another brother who had scaled SaaS ARR from $1 billion to $4 billion at Citrix.
The conversation happened at William's apartment. William — my brother, now CRO of OPA! — had spent years at KPMG, EY, and PwC doing finance transformation for global enterprises. He understood capital markets strategy at a level that most startup founders never touch. Rohan — my other brother, now Head of Partnerships — had scaled Citrix's ARR to $4 billion and later founded an RCM company that hit $2 million in revenue at 60% EBITDA margins.
I laid out the problem. William ran the numbers. Rohan mapped the partnerships. And then William said the thing that made it real: "If someone with our backgrounds doesn't build this, who does? Because nobody who understands finance at this level is looking at restaurant economics."
He was right. That was the answer. Not us versus DoorDash. Us versus the absence of anyone qualified to fix this. The restaurant industry didn't need another tech founder who'd read a TechCrunch article about delivery. It needed people who had spent a combined twenty years inside the financial systems that restaurants were being victimized by — and who understood how to rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up.
We called Charran Harrichand the next day. Thirteen years in telecom, product strategy, and customer experience at scale. The best product mind I've ever worked with. He didn't ask about the business plan. He asked about the restaurant owner. And then he said yes.
What OPA! Actually Is
OPA! is not a delivery app. It is not a marketplace in the traditional sense. It is a financial infrastructure correction.
The same logic that powered Robinhood's democratization of investing — remove the commission, return the asset to its owner — applied to every restaurant order in America. The "commission" is DoorDash's 30%. The "asset" is the customer relationship and the revenue that flows from it. OPA! removes the first and returns the second.
Zero commission. Not reduced commission. Not "competitive" commission. Zero. The restaurant keeps 100% of order revenue. OPA! earns a flat subscription — approximately $65 per month per location — that aligns our growth with operator adoption, not per-transaction extraction.
Every order generates a first-party customer profile that the restaurant owns permanently. Loyalty is native at checkout — no separate app, no enrollment friction. POS integration with Toast, Square, Clover, Shift4, and Olo takes 48 hours. Delivery logistics run through our dlivrd network at zero commission across all 50 states.
2,400+ locations are live on the platform. $375 million in projected fees saved for restaurant partners. $1.5 billion in projected gross order volume annually. And the number that started all of this — the number that Marco showed me on a calculator app in Orlando — is now $0. That's what OPA! charges in commission. Every order. Every day. Always.
Everything I built before was preparation for this.
The Industry That Needed It Most
Silicon Valley builds for markets that can absorb ten-percent take rates. SaaS, advertising, fintech — industries with margins wide enough to sustain extraction layers. Restaurants operate on 3 to 9 percent. There is no margin to extract. Every platform that tries to take 30% is either ignorant of this math or indifferent to its consequences.
I wasn't ignorant. After Deloitte, I couldn't be. And after seeing Marco's face, I couldn't be indifferent.
The opportunity wasn't in fintech anymore. The opportunity was taking everything fintech taught me and pointing it somewhere that actually needed it. Restaurants didn't need another app. They didn't need another marketplace that charges them for the privilege of serving their own customers. They needed a financial model that treats them like business owners — not product inventory.
That's what OPA! is. Not a disruption play. A correction. Built by people who understood the financial systems well enough to know they were broken — and cared enough about the industry to fix them.
Read more from the OPA! team and see our press coverage. OPA! Blog · Press & Media
