I want to start off by saying how much I appreciate your patience! I had hoped to write again sooner, but I was working on something that ended up taking up most of last week, and I am also dealing with a sciatic injury (old condition, exciting new symptoms!) that makes it very uncomfortable to be in a keyboard typing position for very long. It’s getting a bit better, though. 

So let’s get to the things! 

As you’ve probably noticed, many of us (like me) are struggling to find steady work because the specialized skill sets we’ve cultivated over decades of experience are no longer in demand for economic or “technological advancement” reasons. Or, speaking of chronic back injuries, maybe age has caught up and it’s no longer feasible to work a job that entails standing for 9+ hour shifts and lifting heavy objects, which is a requirement of just about any job in hospitality, but also a plethora of other industries. 

In late 2025, I attended an event with several journalists who had all recently been let go from what seemed like solid staff jobs—different publications. In the past few weeks I have had separate conversations with women—one in her 30s and the other in her 40s—who were unexpectedly thrown into the giant freelance ocean and now looking into electrical training because humans still need electricians. Well, at least for now. 

But I’m not here to bum you out or toss a career choice regret bomb at your feet. 

I’m writing because I recently had an uplifting conversation with someone who worked in hospitality and landed a job in tech specifically because of skills honed working in bars and restaurants: work station setup, time management, staff coordination, organization, problem-solving, bookkeeping, payroll management, grace under pressure—oh, and making coffee. Granted, the job materialized from a long history with the founder of the company. It wasn’t a lucky LinkedIn application or anything (do those ever lead to real work?). 

Still, the gig wasn’t merely a friendly favor. Life behind bars was what made it possible to live on the outside.

I wanted to learn more. Though his situation is a bit of an anomaly, it still has real life applications.

The back story

In 1993, David Moo moved to New York City from Boston (via Rochester, where he attended school) to pursue a theater career. One of his first odd jobs was for one of the first NYC locations of Starbucks—back when it was still a small company that styled itself as a legitimate coffee bar—extensively training its employees in both service and coffee knowledge. 

From there he waited tables at restaurants and eventually came to work for a friend, Nick Merrill, who ran a small internet startup. The business was never able to gain enough traction to earn a liveable salary and he had to find other work. However, the two kept in touch over the years, and Merrill eventually found success in tech. Well, there’s a whole context about his experience with internet privacy vs. the FBI (you can read about it here).  

Back to David. In the mid 1990s, his next full time job was in Soho at Tennessee Mountain barbecue (a favorite haunt, though we don’t recall meeting then we must have at some point). His theater background helped him fake his way into a bartending gig, though only for the less desirable shifts at first. Eventually after getting the hang of bartending in prime time, he went on to work in different bars over the years, before opening his own—Quarter Bar in South Slope, Brooklyn in 2007. 

A few years after that, Merrill was starting up a new tech company, Phreeli, a wireless phone service provider dedicated to online privacy. In the 2020s, he got back in touch with David, and started making overtures to bring him into the fold. He could pay him this time. But David wasn’t taking him seriously. Yet. 

However, in 2023, David ended up closing the bar, which never quite recovered from the pandemic. He was working two shifts at The Long Island Bar and picking up consulting gigs, as well as ruminating over other entrepreneurial options in hospitality. Meanwhile, Merrill was ready to bring Phreeli to fruition, and kept insisting on working with David. 

He said one of the main reasons he wanted David on the team was familiarity with his quirks, but he also insisted that the specific skillsets he’d picked up from decades in service industries would be valuable for managing a team of tech workers. He specifically wanted that approach to team management. 

There’s a through line, or should I say “lime?”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

David Moo: One night after a shift at Tennessee Mountain, one of the servers took me out for drinks after a shift and told me I suck. 

Amanda Schuster: Your face and delivery totally changed when you said that. How has that feedback affected you all these decades later?

DM: It has happened on various occasions in various ways that I am told that I am bad at the thing that I'm doing. It always irks me and in this case I remember it because it still irks me, but I engaged in the process of working hard to be better at it. 

I was filling in for someone at Tennessee Mountain on a Friday night. I had to cover the bar, with all the hightops too, and the service bar [for the whole restaurant]—a one man show. I barely got through it, but I hadn’t realized I crashed and burned until someone took me out for drinks and told me I sucked. 

AS: So how did this moment brace you for the career that was to come? 

DM: I didn't even understand that I had crashed and burned and that's of course part of the process of learning. I had to understand what was crashing and what was burning, right? It’s not like at the time I thought “oh that was a fun and easy kind of thing” but definitely it was like I don't think I understood the magnitude of the way in which it sucked. Jack, a server, took me out for a beer and said, “You gotta figure it out. We need our [the restaurant’s] drinks faster.”

But I eventually became the Friday night bartender.

AS: And what did you bring with you when the job ended? 

DM: That whenever you start a new bartending job, you need to build the muscle memory of that room. Each bartending job is a completely different strategic, tactical situation. And so you have to figure out what the tactical rules are for that environment and that takes time: how many steps to this section? How can this be set up better? Also just the rhythms of the place, how that POS system works, the proclivities of your co-workers, what the bar back will and won't do for you in this particular place or this particular bar back on this night, you know? That all takes time. You have to learn all that.

AS: And it can absolutely be applied to other things because when you're handling the job, and especially if it's a new job, you have to figure out how it all coordinates or not and then what to do to make it coordinate better.

DM: There are some things we can and should talk about regarding ways in which being a bartender is applicable to other jobs, and the work I do now—multi-tasking, list-keeping especially for different levels of service. 

AS: And of course, managing a staff. 

DM: But one of the keys to managing other people is figuring out how to manage yourself. That's something that I've realized over the years is I have all kinds of like, you know, peccadillos and weirdnesses and personality quirks [such as the casual use of the word “peccadillo’] and issues of my own. I realize that at least to a certain extent, I have to protect my staff as much as possible from myself. 

AS: So a big lesson learned in service, especially since you are around other people you depend on for so many hours of the day is understanding how people click. Or not. And how to manage working with them, not against them. 

[At this point, David tells me an anecdote about how too much micromanagement can be toxic to a hospitality situation. Focusing too much on one aspect of the team flow can make service less efficient. Venues have failed because of too much micromanagement with teams unable to work cohesively.

He also tells me that he’s now managing 15 people at his company, and, as of the time of this writing, they are expecting many more to come on board. He puts this in the perspective of an establishment like Long Island Bar, which has at least 20 people employed—between bartenders, servers, and kitchen staff.]

DM: One of the things we should talk about is scope of work. 

[He goes on to describe a situation where an outside agency was hired for an important task. A meeting was called. It demanded a considerable amount of preparation in terms of research and giving direction to the outside agency. The question was, which details should be examined the most to maximize the available budget?]

AS: So in many ways, prepping for this kind of meeting is like showing up to a shift and cutting the fruit, arranging the bitters, making sure there is enough ice…

DM: You could say a lot of this goes back to mise en place (shift setup) at the bar. You don't want to prep too much on one thing when what you really need is this other thing. [For instance, if most of the drinks on the menu have lemons, why cut as many limes?] 

AS: Do some aspects of prep for your office workspace resemble the bar? 

DM: Now I have stacks of post-it notes and multicolored index cards and then multicolored index cards that are used for different things. I did at the bar too, but now the index cards get reconsolidated into larger paper to-do lists. 

As the conversation wraps up, it’s dawning on me that in a way, figuring out a budget for a phone service company is a lot like cocktail menu building. Hear me out: it involves creative strategy and design, weighing overhead vs. spend, using the ingredients in stock and determining what else should be ordered, testing the recipes, accepting certain defeats, recalibrating, and making various tweaks along the way. 

AS: [Remembering a conversation at Quarter Bar when he was tidying up.] Do you still have to keep used toothbrushes around in case you need to polish small crevices in your workspace?

DM: You should always keep used toothbrushes around. You never know. 

The Takeaway

Pay attention to not only what you think your job is now, or what you think you are only trained to do, but what skills got you there. Which ones are transferable? In what ways can they be adapted? And most importantly, how can you describe your expertise when thinking about a new line of work? 

Can you think of any other examples of transferrable skills? Please leave a comment!

More soon.

—A