Why does Nick Kokonas think dynamic pricing for restaurants is a huge opportunity?

Nick Kokonas says a table at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday in Chicago is worth far less than one at 7 p.m. on a Saturday, yet most restaurants charge the same. Tock grew from his wish to know his customers and price those slots differently. He predicts that localized, dynamic pricing for any business that sells time slots will make someone hundreds of billions of dollars, and says AI may finally give owners a simple button to do it.

• Kokonas says everything is already dynamically priced, only slowly, and disputes Elizabeth Warren's call to ban dynamic pricing.
• He says Uber chose the wrong word in surge pricing for the right idea.
• Kokonas describes OpenTable software in 2005 as dismal.

▸In their words

“localized, dynamic and variable pricing for time-slotted businesses is something that someone's going to make hundreds of billions of dollars with.” Nick Kokonas · at 47:45 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on My First Million (2026-10-26). Read the whole episode summary →

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