Building the Future of Hospitality: How Operators Can Adopt Automation Without Losing the Human Touch

Tord Olav Dønnum is a Norwegian serial-entrepreneur and operator based in Silicon Valley who has spent his career building technology companies that solve real-world problems at scale. He founded his first venture at 16, and after three months in a master’s program at UC Berkeley, left to build a capital-raising platform that connected over 20,000 startups and hundreds of funds, facilitating more than $10 billion in transactions in its first three years of operation. Today, he serves as CBO at OLHSO, the company behind the world’s first fully autonomous Korean BBQ kitchen. He is leading the brand's expansion into airports and high-throughput off-premises locations, navigating the operational and technological realities of a new model of hospitality, one where automation handles the cooking so that people can focus entirely on what technology will never replicate: genuine human connection, the kind that makes a guest feel seen, remembered, and taken care of. The lessons have been hard-won, the unit economics surprising, and the model is now being replicated across new markets. When he’s not building, Tord has brought internet access and technology resources to indigenous communities in Ecuador and Papua New Guinea, a reminder that the most powerful technology is the kind that actually gets deployed.