Tech Bro of the Week: The AI-Powered Queso Disruptor

All characters in Tech Bro of the Week are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deploying models to production without testing, is purely coincidental.

Brennan Kyles-Whitford doesn't eat queso. He's lactose intolerant. This has not stopped him from founding QuesoAI, a startup that uses machine learning to "optimize the queso experience across the entire Central Texas dining ecosystem."

"We trained a large language model on every queso recipe in Texas," Brennan explained from the back patio of a Rainey Street bar, nursing a mezcal flight. "It recommended Velveeta. We are not funded enough to be wrong."

QuesoAI's pitch is simple: restaurants upload their queso recipes, the algorithm analyzes viscosity, cheese-to-pepper ratio, and something Brennan calls "dip sentiment," then produces a "Queso Score" from 1 to 100. Restaurants that score above 85 get a badge for their window. Restaurants that score below 40 get an email that reads, and we are quoting directly, "Your queso needs disruption. Let's talk."

What the algorithm actually does:

• It scrapes Yelp reviews for the word "queso" and runs sentiment analysis, which means a review that says "I come here for the queso even though the parking is terrible" gets flagged as mixed-negative.
• It cannot distinguish between chile con queso and nacho cheese. When pressed on this, Brennan said, "That's a V2 feature."
• It once rated a gas station in Buda higher than every restaurant on South Congress, and Brennan called this "a breakthrough in democratized taste."

The company has eight employees, none of whom are from Texas. Their Slack channel is named #queso-wars. Their office dog is named Velveeta. When we asked about revenue, Brennan said, "We're pre-revenue but post-insight," a sentence that made our eye twitch for forty minutes.

Local response has been, charitably, lukewarm. Maria, who has run a Tex-Mex counter on East Oltorf for thirty-one years, received a QuesoAI email suggesting she "consider adding truffle oil for a premium uplift." She printed the email, taped it to the wall, and now points at it when she needs a laugh. Her queso, for the record, is transcendent and costs $4.50 with chips.

Brennan recently pivoted the company to include a "Queso-as-a-Service" subscription model where restaurants pay $99/month for real-time queso analytics. He presented this at a SXSW side event to an audience of eleven people, three of whom were there for the free tacos.

His next move is a partnership with the blockchain breakfast taco guy. Together, they plan to create the first "fully verifiable queso-and-taco pairing protocol." We do not know what this means. We suspect they don't either.

When asked what old Austin queso spot he misses most, Brennan said, "I moved here in 2023." Yeah. We know.