Kaplan left Cisco shortly before it closed the Flip unit and emerged with a fast-casual restaurant startup concept similar to Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. but for grilled cheese sandwiches. The Melt restaurant was another place of tech innovation – one of the first chains to let customers pre-order food for takeaway on their smartphones. Although the company was a modest success it never reached the disruptive status he’d targeted and Kaplan departed in 2016.
President Joe Biden has selected tech entrepreneur Jonathan Kaplan to be the next US ambassador to Singapore, planning to fill a position in the critical Pacific trade hub that hasn’t had a formal US ambassador since the end of the Obama administration in early 2017.
Kaplan, whose appointment requires Senate confirmation, was CEO of Pure Digital Technologies when he invented the Flip video camera, according to a biography released by the White House. The company was sold to Cisco in 2009 for US$590 million ($798.8 million).
