Ben Faden

Ben Faden has spent his career at the intersection of hospitality, technology, and high-stakes campaigns. As VP of Sales at KitchenSync, he leads the team responsible for KitchenSync's sales relationships, drawing on three decades of hospitality experience and a career spent inside the restaurant technology category from its earliest days. Ben's hospitality DNA goes back to a Chicago childhood, where in high school he was part of one of the first management training programs at one of Chicago's largest independent restaurant groups. He has been on and off in the industry for roughly three decades since, but the defining chapter was the nearly thirteen years he spent at Tripleseat, the hospitality event-management SaaS company. Joining in January 2011 as Tripleseat's first full-time sales hire, Ben opened the company's New York City office and spent the next decade-plus building its sales organization from the ground up. He launched Tripleseat's hotel product in 2018 and its restaurant and family-entertainment product alongside it, and in 2022 he established the company's European operation on the ground in London. Over his tenure, Tripleseat grew from a bootstrapped startup into a global platform with roughly 200 employees and 15,000 customers across 38 countries. Before Tripleseat scaled to that size, Ben had also founded a hospitality-adjacent company of his own: KettleSpace, the New York coworking concept that turned restaurants into workspaces during their off-hours. Launched in November 2016 inside Tribeca's Distilled NY, KettleSpace eventually operated out of partner venues across Manhattan and pivoted its software layer into a SaaS product that was later acquired by WorkChew. The experience gave Ben a rare operator perspective on what restaurants need from technology, and what they don't. In September 2023, Ben was named Chief Revenue Officer of Spotlio, the destination-technology platform serving ski resorts, theme parks, and ticketed attractions, where he led revenue across a global base of resort and attraction operators before joining KitchenSync. Earlier in his career, Ben spent roughly a decade in federal politics, working as a campaign manager, finance director, and consultant on state and national campaigns. He is a graduate of the University of Kansas with a dual degree in political science and management communications. At KitchenSync, Ben's focus is the operator-vendor relationship and the questions multi-unit operators wrestle with as they grow: how to evaluate a restaurant technology stack, when to build versus buy, where AI actually saves hours in the back office, and how cash-flow forecasting and product-mix analysis change the way a growing group makes decisions.