A multi-hyphenate living in Silicon Valley, Michael is a restaurant technology investor, entrepreneur and strategic advisor to brands, investors, investment banks and technology innovators worldwide. Michael is a former investment banker, restaurant operator and restaurant chain CFO. He founded FohBoh.com, inFOH.com, Resttech, and Orderscape.com, a voice technology software company that has built a voice portal and restaurant marketplace with over 50,000 restaurants, to enable food and restaurant discovery and voice ordering using digital assistants, mobile voice platforms and other voice enabled gateways. Most recently, Michael funded and co-founded StarBar.ai, a voice software and artificial intelligence company that voice-enables legacy restaurant business software beginning with VoiceINV™.

Through his investment company, Bailiwick Ventures, Michael partners with Mike Love, lead singer and co-founder of The Beach Boys. Bailiwick and Mike Love co-founded Kokomo Brands, a lifestyle branding company based on the #1 hit song Kokomo which embodies the spirit of Mike Love as an award-wining songwriter and legendary front man with The Beach Boys over the past 50 years.

Michael is a business accelerator mentor at bluestartups.com and foodandcity.org and former advisor to Creator, and Blendid, both startups are innovative food-maker autonomous robots. As a former restaurant operator and current advocate for transformative food and restaurant technologies, Michael advises restaurant brands and technology companies on matters relating to conversational commerce, automation, analytics, restaurant technology and strategy. Michael and is a frequent writer and speaker on restaurant automation, conversational commerce and data integration topics.

Personal

Michael is happily married to Kim Atkinson, is the father of two amazing and successful adult children, Sarah Higgins and Dylan Atkinson, is an amateur chef, avid skier, diver, beachcomber, backpacker and wine collector. Michael loves dining out, cooking with friends and family and visiting as many wineries as possible.

Speaking

Michael speaks about transformative technologies affecting the global restaurant industry. Specifically, restaurant automation, voice technology, restaurant delivery and takeout, and the changing nature of customer engagement using integrated data and analytics.

See Speaking gigs below.

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Personal

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