Walk through the doors of Palo Alto’s Calafia, located in a shopping center across the street from Stanford, and you’re retracing the footsteps of giants. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were once spotted talking shop there. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg all frequent the place.
When I sat down across from Rajat Suri, who dropped out of an MIT doctoral program in chemistry, so he could tell me about his startup, I could practically smell the Next Big Thing in the air. This is, of course, why he wanted me to meet me at this place, but we’re not just there for the ambiance.
Suri gestures to a device that I’ve never seen that’s sitting on our table. It sort of looks like a small iPad, maybe a thick Kindle Fire. Presto is its name. The screen shows an animation that says, “Touch me!” with half a dozen different animations. It’s a menu and a way to order food and a method for paying the check all in one.