5. The Chicken or the Egg

When OpenTable was founded in 1998, it promised to revolutionize the excruciating process of making restaurant reservations. Founder Chuck Templeton first had the idea for this product after his wife spent “three and a half hours calling restaurant after restaurant” trying to make reservations for an upcoming visit from her parents. After this grueling experience, he decided enough was enough, thus creating OpenTable. Thanks to OpenTable, you can book a table at some of the hottest restaurants in the country with the click of a button. It makes life much easier for the restaurants as well—they no longer have to manually juggle tables in an archaic reservation book, as OpenTable does it for them. OpenTable successfully created a marketplace to connect millions of hungry customers with thousands of restaurants. In 2014, the company was acquired by the Priceline Group (now Booking Holdings) for a whopping $2.6 billion, and as of now, the platform boasts over 123 million monthly users. To date, users have spent over $69 billion at the restaurants on its platform.