Anthony Robinson

He was raised inside the trade. His father worked for his own parents in hotels and bars before opening a restaurant business of his own — three generations in hospitality, and a childhood spent around the particular arithmetic of a room that has to be full tonight.

His first job was not for his father. It was at McDonald's, taken deliberately, because he wanted to see what the corporate version looked like from the inside and know exactly how it differed from the one he had grown up in.

That comparison — the chain against the independent, the marketing department against the owner doing it at midnight — turned out to be the question he would spend the next thirty years qualified to answer.

He answered it from abroad. He went out as an Erasmus student in 1987, the scheme's very first year, before any of it was routine, and never really came back. What followed was an international career built on the slowest-compounding asset there is: long-term partnerships and relationships across Europe and beyond, in markets where the deal is the easy part and being trusted takes years.

He answered it first in music and media. As Vice President of Music Marketing Partnerships International at MTV Networks, he built the alliances that carried emerging formats to international audiences — including some of the first music-industry mobile content deals ever done, at a point when nobody had settled what a phone was for. Negotiated across dozens of markets, where the contract was never the hard part. Trust, humour and aspiration do not translate on their own.

As President of International Marketing Partnerships at Live Nation he moved from reach to relationship, connecting more than a hundred brands a year to the largest live-music pipeline in the world, with partnerships reaching 300 million people worldwide and loyalty experience programmes engaging 30 million music fans a year across Europe. Hot lists. Early access. Status, recognition, the feeling of being known by something far larger than you.

Along the way he led teams across a dozen European markets and as many disciplines — commercial, creative, technical, operational. That is a particular education in what actually makes someone good at their job, and how little of it ever appears on a CV.

His formal training followed the same path his work did: Agile Change Management Practitioner, certified by Agile Change Management Ltd from 2018 to 2023, then ICAgile Certified Professional in Agility in Marketing in 2021. He spent those years as a change agent for businesses navigating digital upheaval — as interim COO and chief product owner as often as consultant — working out not only what a company needed to do differently, but how its people had to move for the change to survive contact with reality.

Then he narrowed it to the thing he cared about most. Through his loyalty consultancy he built a retention methodology for growth-stage businesses, pulling them off acquisition-heavy spend and onto keeping the customers they already had, and left an internal champion trained behind him each time so the improvement outlived the engagement. Four years of that produced the customer understanding booteek is built on.

Which is also why the product has the shape it does. Telling a restaurant owner what to fix is trivial. Getting it done, in a business with no marketing department, across weeks in which something breaks every single day — that is change management, delivered to an audience of one to twenty people. So booteek is a companion working over months, not a report delivered once, and it trains the owner rather than doing it to them.

A neighbourhood restaurant lives on word of mouth: the regular who brings four friends, the bartender people return for, the table that got looked after. None of that has stopped mattering. But the moment of discovery has moved. When someone asks an AI assistant where to eat and drink tonight, the venue is not being judged on what it serves. It is being judged on whether the machine can see it at all.

Which is the McDonald's question again, forty years on. The chain has a team for this. The family place across the road has better food, better drinks and nobody at all.

booteek is the AI agent for independent restaurant and bar owners. It works through their Google Business Profile alongside them, so the assistants people now ask — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI — can name their venue. Owners get a working companion rather than a report: something that knows their venue, tells them what to fix this week, and keeps going after the fix.

Its sister project, donde-onde-where, is the proving ground — published Hot Lists of genuinely independent restaurants and bars, built from real customer signal rather than editorial opinion. It is the same hot-list instinct from twenty years of music, pointed at neighbourhoods.

Hot Score ranks venues on how a place is actually doing right now, not on how long it has existed: the pace at which real customers are writing about it, the standing quality of what they say, and how completely the venue has described itself. It carries a qualification floor, so nothing ranks on thin evidence. One of its four original components was deleted outright when measurement showed it was rewarding small numbers.

The B.E.S.T. Score covers the rest of the business — what you have built, the team you have built it with, the service people actually receive, and the momentum you are carrying. It stays hidden until there is enough data behind it to be worth showing, because a confident number computed from nothing is worse than no number.

The team layer is where three decades of running cross-disciplinary international teams stops being biography and starts being product. It maps the life skills and talents a hospitality team actually needs — the ones that never make it onto a job description and decide everything — and connects them to who a venue hires, how it trains, and which of its people customers are already naming in reviews. When a customer keeps praising someone by name and that person appears nowhere in the venue's profile, that is a gap worth closing.

He lives and works in Porto, and the conviction he has arrived at after three decades of cross-border partnership is a specific one. European ventures rarely fail on product. They stall at the border, because operating credibly in the next market has always meant a native team, a local agency and a year, and most start-ups have none of the three. Meanwhile the American competitor scales across a single language and a single culture, and is simply further ahead by the time anyone catches up.

He believes AI finally makes that barrier surmountable, and he is not making the argument in the abstract. booteek reads customer reviews in the language they were written in, because a customer's own words are the most honest description of a venue that exists, and translating them first throws away exactly what makes them useful.

Where booteek writes back, it does not machine-translate. European Portuguese is re-authored through a purpose-built lexicon, with gates that reject Brazilian constructions outright; German gets the same treatment. The difference between a translated sentence and a native one is the whole difference between being tolerated in a market and being trusted in it — which is a lesson from partnership negotiation long before it was a lesson in engineering.