Tech Bro of the Week: The Guy Putting Breakfast Tacos on the Blockchain

All characters in Tech Bro of the Week are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or pitching at Capital Factory, is purely coincidental.

Chadwick Brenner-Hollis moved to Austin from Palo Alto in 2022 because he "heard the taco scene was, like, really authentic." He now lives in a $3,200/month one-bedroom in the Domain — or as he calls it, "the innovation corridor" — and has spent the last eighteen months building TacoChain, a blockchain-based platform that assigns each breakfast taco a unique NFT proving its provenance.

"Every breakfast taco is a unique transaction," Chadwick told us from a WeWork on South Congress, wearing a Patagonia vest over a hoodie that said BUIDL. "Every transaction deserves to be immutable."

The pitch deck is forty-seven slides long. We read all of them. Here's what we learned:

• Each taco gets minted as an NFT at the point of assembly, with metadata including tortilla type (flour or corn, because Chadwick has learned there are two kinds), protein selection, and "salsa velocity" — a proprietary metric nobody asked for.
• TacoChain's whitepaper references "the breakfast taco crisis" seven times but never once mentions the word "lard."
• The platform requires taqueria owners to purchase a $400 "TacoNode" hardware device that looks like a Ring doorbell with a tortilla sticker on it.

Chadwick has raised $2.3 million in seed funding from a VC firm whose other portfolio companies include a smart water bottle and an app that rates sunsets. He describes his target market as "anyone who eats tacos and also has a crypto wallet," which in Austin narrows the field to roughly Chadwick and his roommate, Kyle.

When we asked Don José at a Riverside taqueria what he thought about putting his tacos on the blockchain, he stared at us for eleven seconds, then handed us a barbacoa taco wrapped in foil and said, "Three dollars." This is, incidentally, how tacos used to cost everywhere.

The TacoChain app currently has fourteen users. Twelve of them are Chadwick's employees. The other two appear to be bots.

Chadwick is undeterred. "People laughed at Uber too," he said, sipping a $9 cold brew. We reminded him that people in Austin are, in fact, still laughing at Uber. He did not respond.

His next venture? A DAO that lets taco lovers vote on what should constitute a "canonical" Austin breakfast taco. He has already drafted the governance tokens. The working name is $QUESO.

We asked if he'd ever been to Las Manitas before it closed. He said, "Is that a blockchain?"

We wished him well and ate our taco in the parking lot. It was perfect. It was three dollars. It did not need a ledger.