Lady Business: OpenTable’s CEO hits the glass cliff; Man Discovers Gloria Steinem, Is Inspired
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the forty-seventh issue, published October 25, 2018.
Restaurant Economics
Welcome back to Lady Business, and if you’re new here, hello! Thanks to all of you who have joined in the past two weeks!
I’ve been traveling, hosting visitors, and helping to organize a lot of events in the past couple of weeks (happy 40th anniversary, Mom and Dad!) so I’ve spent a lot of digital time on OpenTable. And Kayak. And Booking.com. All of which, it turns out, are part of the same conglomerate: Booking Holdings, formerly known as Priceline Group. (Because yup, Priceline’s there, too.)
The company got on my Lady Business radar this spring when I was invited to a media dinner with OpenTable CEO Christa Quarles. I was out of town at the time, but mentally marked her as Someone to Watch: A woman leading a huge restaurant-tech business, and working to meaningfully increase diversity in both of the industries her company touches? Yes, please!
Oh, well:
Christa Quarles will step down as OpenTable CEO, effective at the end of the year. Quarles notified OpenTable staff via email this morning.
Kayak CEO Steve Hafner will take the lead at OpenTable with no plans to name a new CEO. … In June parent company Booking Holdings made big executive changes at OpenTable, removing some of Quarles’ authority and resources and placing her under Hafner. As part of the restructuring, which Hafner characterized as a directional change in a memo to OpenTable staff, other high-level positions at OpenTable were eliminated, including its chief financial officer role and senior marketing and product positions.
It reads like a little bit of a glass cliff situation for Quarles, who became CEO in 2015, a year after Priceline bought OpenTable for $2.6 billion--and a year before the parent company admitted that oops, it might have spent about $1 billion more than it had to.
OpenTable, while still the dominant online service for online restaurant reservations, now faces competitors including Resy, Reserve, and even Yelp. It’s a case of the big, expensive, boring incumbent against younger, tech-savvier upstarts: OpenTable charges restaurants up to $1 per online reservation, pissing off margin-strapped chefs and owners, whereas Resy’s just cheaper. There’s also a coolness factor to the newer competitors: Sure, you can use OpenTable, which was founded in 1998, to make reservations at more than 45,000 restaurants. But the buzzy new place in your big city of choice? They’re probably on Resy or Reserve. (Not to mention that whole thing when an OpenTable employee tried to sabotage Reserve by creating and canceling fake reservations.)
So OpenTable has problems, and Quarles was its CEO when some of them surfaced-- and when its owner realized just how pervasive they would be. But I’ve been surprised at how little coverage I’ve seen in the past week about her stepping down.
True, the writing was probably on the wall for her since June, when she lost autonomy in her role. And unlike Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi or some of the other recently-departed female CEOs we’ve discussed here, Quarles didn’t run an independent company. Her leaving doesn’t affect the (tiny!) percentage of women overseeing S&P 500 companies.
But her departure still seems part of a depressing recent trend for women CEOs at those companies--especially since, according to Skift, she walked the diversity walk as well as talking the talk (emphasis mine):
Quarles has spoken publicly about the importance of diversity in the workplace. Last year, she published a call out to the market to increase female representation at the corporate level to a 50/50 ratio. “The reason we said it was important is because not just that it’s the right thing to do from a moral objective. It’s actually better for business,” she said. “The data has proven over and over again, that when people they feel like if you come into work and actually do their job or feel like they belong, they perform better. So I look at it as more of a fiduciary obligation that we have.”
In the first quarter after implementing a new process for engineering hires, the company hired an equal number of male and female engineers, a stark contrast from many large tech companies. (Recode reported last year that just 27 percent of technical roles at major companies are held by women.)
Looking to you now, Kayak.
Lady Bits:
--If you’re attending Fast Company’s Innovation Festival in New York City this week, come see me interview Drybar founder (and recent Inc. cover subject) Alli Webb at 2 pm today. More details here.
--“You’re very inspiring. I’m going to have to do some research when I get home.”—A gentleman in my audience of Gloria: A Life, a well-done if rather Feminism 101 new Off-Broadway play … to Gloria Steinem, subject and special guest of that performance of Gloria: A Life. On the one hand: Props for being one of about ten men in the audience on this particular evening, and for being duly inspired. On the other hand: Sir, how did you wind up at this play without knowing who Gloria Steinem (!?) is? … Were you expecting a Van Morrison jukebox musical?
--“When did we decide that ‘birthday cake’ had a distinct flavor somehow different from ‘graduation cake’ or ‘bat mitzvah cake’?”
--If you’ve emailed me by hitting “reply” in the past month or so and I ignored you, my apologies--I discovered this week that TinyLetter was hiding some replies from me. You can always email me directly at maria.aspan@gmail.com.
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