Founders Roundtable | Building, Exiting, and Building More: How a 5x Restaurant Founder Scales Brands and Elevates Hospitality with AI
Join us!
The Center for Entrepreneurship at Monmouth University in collaboration with the AMA Marketing Club, Enactus and IEEE are excited to invite you our upcoming Founders Roundtable.
🍴 Building, Exiting, and Building More: How a 5x Restaurant Founder Scales Brands and Elevates Hospitality with AI
Join us for a conversation with Chris Viola, who has built and exited multiple restaurant ventures—and continues building a hospitality portfolio while innovating with AI to elevate the industry.
Chris will share his journey from launching his first concepts to managing restaurants, construction, and tech simultaneously. He'll discuss scaling brands, leading teams across multiple ventures, building technology to solve industry challenges, and the realities of exits—offering valuable lessons for aspiring and established entrepreneurs and brand-builders alike.
👥 Featured Founder
Chris Viola, 5x Restaurant Founder | Multiple Exits | Tech Founder - After Cornell's School of Hotel Administration and Four Seasons Hotels, Chris transformed The Taco Truck from a single truck in Hoboken into a beloved fast-casual brand with locations from Boston to Philly before successfully exiting in 2015. He founded and leads Culture Collective Hospitality Group, operating Barrio Costero, Reyla, and Laylow in Asbury Park, Red Bank's Anderson Food Hall, and a design-build construction firm specializing in large-scale hospitality projects. He's also building TeaConnect, an AI platform streamlining operations for multi-unit restaurant groups. Check out Culture Collective Hospitality and Anderson Market on Instagram.
More Info
✨ Founders Roundtables are interactive conversations with successful founders who share their journey from concept to company across diverse industries and diverse levels of scale. This semester we welcome founders across hospitality, technology, and consumer goods. These are candid, behind-the-scenes conversations where you'll learn how real entrepreneurs launched and scaled their ventures, navigated early-stage challenges, built their brands, and achieved success.
👋 Who should attend? Everyone is welcome. Students interested in entrepreneurship, hospitality, technology and ai, marketing, real estate, students eager to learn real-world brand-building strategies, anyone in the community considering starting their own venture, those interested in impact-driven business and future leaders who want to learn from those who've walked the path.
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