Hospitality 0→1 & Venue Systems — 2025–
Socceria.
An independent soccer bar and 30-table restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn — a physical 0→1 product, and the software that runs the room: wall, lights, cameras, books, and an agent the owners text.
- Role
- Co-founder & Operator
- Folio
Co-founded and opened 46 Norman Ave in May 2026 — 3,400 square feet, thirty tables, 181-person occupancy. Concept, buildout, service model, and the operating stack — Toast, Resy, 7shifts, MarginEdge — wired into one working system, built in-house.
socceria.nyc is that system. Before opening it was TopStar, the pre-opening platform where investors read the deck, model, and cap table while the operators worked the checklist, floor plan, labor model, and menu builder. After opening the same codebase became the admin: service performance by table and server, an owners-only payback timeline, match forecasts, events, staff, and an investor room — each number traced back to the POS record it came from.
The room is a display. A custom LED wall and the window are driven by two Apple TVs running SocceriaTV, a Swift tvOS app that keeps the wall alive between matches with programmed content from the backend. The operating rule is that the wall is never blank. Lighting runs on Spectrol — Lutron, WiZ, LED strips, and DMX pars on a schedule — and the whole AV system is documented as a staff iPad app with a guided triage tree.
The room is also measured. Cameras on an always-on box at the venue count guests by zone, seat, and door every few seconds and push the samples to the web app, where a floor report replays any night: seats taken, minutes seated, spend velocity per table against a seven-day baseline, covers expected in the next hour, guests per server on the clock. The measurement contract refuses to overclaim — timestamps carry brackets, missing endpoints are censored rather than zeroed, and there is no face recognition; camera data never grades staff.
Erling is the bar's own agent. It answers the owners over WhatsApp through an MCP server on the same room state — how the room is now, tonight's reservations, who is on, sales today — and triages the inbox. The bar doubles as a field lab for brick-and-mortar AI revenue operations: observe real workflows directly, automate only what earns it. What earns it is being packaged as Roomtone, the venue that reacts to its room.
