Ooshma Garg at Startup School SV 2016

Good morning everybody! [Applause] Thank you all for coming and spending your Saturday with us. This is always one of our favorite days of the year. We get to meet many new founders. There's a long tradition of people in the audience later coming to speak at Startup School after they start a company and become really successful. So, I hope you enjoy the talks we have today. I especially hope you get to know each other. I think a lot of the value comes from the casual conversations, breaks at lunch, and after the event.

But we have an incredible set of speakers today! Awesome! I'm going to teach a class in the first half of 2017, and it is a successor to the class that I taught two years ago called "How to Start a Startup," and hopefully, it'll be a lot better. So, if you're interested in more content after today, please check it out. If you go to startupschool.org today, you can put your email address in, and we'll let you know when we're ready to go.

Our first speaker today is Ushmagard. Ushma is the founder of Gobble. Gobble is a YC company. Ushma is one of the many speakers today that has been in the audience many times before and today she runs a company that not only am I a happy user of; my mom sends me Gobble boxes because it's exciting to eat more! But the company next year will do more than 100 million dollars in sales. Yeah, for sure!

So, Ushma, thank you very much for coming and speaking with us, and here she is!

Thank you so much, Sam! How are you guys doing today? Wow, what an audience! Sam is so nice to call me a speaker with the lineup that you have today. I consider myself an opener. You have such an amazing set of speakers today. I'm just very grateful to be here and share in this moment with you.

My name is Ushma and I'm the CEO and founder of Gobble. We help anyone cook dinner in just 10 minutes. We're the inventors of the 10-minute one-pan dinner kit. Today, I'm going to tell you my story and also the power of a mission. I could tell you the whole story with our graph. This is a Stripe revenue data dump of our revenue over the last five years. If I were you, I would be wondering what happens right here. Doesn’t it look like I had no idea what I was doing and then we just figured everything out? Unfortunately, that's not the case.

In order to understand what happens at the Promised Land, you have to know what happens at the beginning, the middle, and all along the way. The words that you see up there are actually the words of the startup curve. Paul Graham coined this and said that most great startups follow this curve. You start with this really exciting launch. Little do you know that you're falling into a multi-year slog and trough of sorrow. Then, you get wiggles of hope. I call them hope because any sign at that point is good, but he calls them wiggles of false hope.

If you have the stamina and the grit, maybe you'll reach the Promised Land. I started Gobble when I had another company. I was helping students get jobs at law firms, banks, and consulting firms, and I was a student myself at Stanford. As you know, startups are a 24/7 job. I started treating myself like crap. I would survive off of Starbucks and takeout. I would eat alone at my desk and alone in my car, and I would eat in my car more times than I would eat at my apartment. Eating takeout was very unhealthy and very lonely.

This is even more personal for me because I grew up with a very colorful upbringing of nutritious home-cooked Indian food. [Laughter] It is delicious! I would come home after track practice to my dad, who would be singing and cooking in the kitchen, starting this ritual that was near and dear to our family every night of enjoying dinner as a family connected together.

When I went to school and started companies, this tradition went down the drain. My dad actually flew here to California and he packed two India-sized suitcases full of his food and filled my fridge. It was at that point that I thought there had to be another way. I posted an ad on Craigslist and asked, "Who will make me dinner for eight dollars a plate in 24 hours?" We had 70 responses! There were people all over the Bay Area that wanted to bring me food and were so proud of their cooking and wanted to earn a living with it.

First, I thought, "Oh my gosh, this is a great dinner hack!" I called all my friends and I said, "Hey, I have all these chefs and their interview is to cook us dinner, do you want some free food?" You can guess the response. I was the most popular friend for a good three months there! I emailed the chefs; they would come and make food for us. What started as fun and games and just feeding myself very quickly became a serious opportunity.

I made a calendar of chefs that we liked and the meals that they would cook each day, and then I emailed my friends to ask who wanted dinner that day. It was that simple! I was just organically feeding myself and my friends. What started on paper and PayPal and me driving my car was actually the foundation of what would become a business. The supply and demand was building and I was getting really happy.

I was getting happy again, and I saw that a mission was forming. I tried to figure out what was energizing me, and I was getting my home back and my tradition back. I was feeling love again, and I was giving my friends healthy home-cooked food and nourishing my soul. People were starting to order dinner from me every day. I wanted to take this further. Some of my friends told me, "Well, if you want to make this a business, you'll need to get a technical co-founder."

So, I started shopping for co-founders. I did founder dating. We went to coffee, we went to drinks, and ultimately I couldn't find anyone that was willing to quit their job but cared about this idea as much as I did and wanted to play the long game with me. So then I said, "I feel so strongly about this, screw it! I'm gonna do it anyway!" I started talking to my friends about who I could reach out to that might want to invest in me.

I made a list of investors. One of them at the top of that list was Keith Rabois. He was an early investor in Airbnb and Yelp, and at the time he had just invested in Airbnb and now he's a partner at Coastal Ventures. Some of my friends knew him, and I knew he would love what we were doing from the consumer side and just from the essence of the business. So, I asked for some introductions. One friend introduced me to Keith, who's now a multi-billion dollar public company CEO, and Keith said, "Sorry, I just started a new job at Square. I'm not investing in any more companies."

So, then I asked another friend. I said, "No, no, no, he doesn't know what he really wants, sorry." So, I asked another friend, and that friend is another YC founder, Bill Clerico of WePay. He asked Keith if Keith would be willing to meet with me, and Keith said the same thing: "No, no, I'm starting a new job. No new investments."

Finally, I asked my friend Jason Patorti, who was one of the founding designers at Mint.com and a serial entrepreneur, who actually connected me on email with Keith. So, that gave me an opportunity to follow up. You can see here that every few days for almost six weeks I was just emailing him little pings with no response. So, I meet up with Jason at Red Rock Cafe right here in Mountain View, and he says, "Ushma, what's going on? Has Keith met you yet?"

And I said, "No, and I feel so strongly that he would love what I'm doing," and he goes, "Do you want me to text him?" And I said, "Yes, do it," and if we could have sent him emojis, snaps, giphys at the time, I would have added those on too. The good news is that it worked! Jason texted Keith and he said, "Oh my God! I'll give her 20 minutes. Can she be here in an hour?"

Pro tip: If you ever want to meet someone that's really hard to reach and you really want to meet them, always tell them you're nearby or next door! I got in my car and I sped so fast down the 101 to Square's offices in San Francisco, panting as I got into his office but really trying to act like I was just around the corner. Within five minutes, Keith came up and met me, and he said, "Who are you?"

I got into my pitch. Another five minutes later, he was writing our first check. That's how I got our first seed investor, which led to many more, and we raised our seed round! [Applause] That stunned me for a moment! [Laughter] Everything was going so great. I remember the feeling. We got a new office, I started hiring people, we launched our first product, and I sent out a company update. All of our investors were so happy. Little did I know we stood on a cliff overlooking this vast trough of sorrow.

In the first few months, I fought tooth and nail for every user. I would go to coffee shops and convince them to put my little Gobble card on their counter. I would go to moms' groups and pitch Gobble myself in front of groups of 20, then 50 moms that are local in the area. These are photos of personal letters that our team and I wrote that I actually stuck my favorite flower on, which is “Alstroemeria,” this Peruvian lily. I stuck it on every envelope, and then we put our running shoes on and our headphones and we ran up and down the streets of Palo Alto, putting these envelopes at every door.

YC tells you to do things that don’t scale. This is the thing that doesn't scale: first, you figure out your distribution innovation and then you'll figure out how to scale it. Things weren't working so well for us; we weren't taking off and we were in that trough of sorrow. A lot of people told me to consider enterprise catering. They said that I would make a lot of money and they had dollar signs in their eyes in the interest to have an up and to the right graph.

I went about enterprise catering. I started emailing different portfolio lists and we started feeding lots of companies. We were making lots and lots of money. This is a slide from my first series A fundraising deck - up and to the right. We were making more money. It was everything that I thought we needed. I went out to raise Series A, and pretty quickly investors saw that eighty percent of my revenue was from enterprise catering, but a hundred percent of my vision was for consumers and for families. I fell flat on my face, and after 40 meetings and six months of sales and fundraising, I had no Series A and I had no progress on my mission.

That feeling is best explained by a quote from one of my favorite plays, Macbeth. He says, "I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent but only vaulting ambition which overleaps itself and falls on the other side." This is exactly what happened to me. I had all ambition but I had lost my mission. My North Star was revenue. We remained in the trough of sorrow. Investors were losing faith in us. At this point, I had tried two different full models for Gobble, I had tried to raise Series A and failed. One of our angel investors even asked me to get acquired by a clothing startup.

It was then that I started listening to my instincts and my insights. I had been working on Gobble for a bit over two years, and I knew that I was the only person who had been thinking about this 24/7 and who had all the learnings to come up with something brand new that aligned with my true mission. This was our first real step forward. I thought to myself, "Dinner is something we eat every single day. Technology is at the point where it should be able to guess exactly what you want at any given time for any different industry, especially with food."

I was an admirer of companies like Netflix and Pandora and their personalization technology, and I thought to myself, "It's crazy that no one has applied this to the food industry." It was my vision then that what the future would look like is a software that had a Pandora-like personalization algorithm that took all of my tastes, my past orders, what people liked similar to me, and would be able to guess and suggest what I should eat for dinner every single day. That's what we built.

It started taking off and it was showing in the numbers. We were making five times the revenue of any previous Gobble model, and over 35% of people were eating Gobble on autopilot. That meant that I understood their tastes and I could send them a menu and they wouldn't change it at all. Some people would add sides or change their meals, but this was really exciting to me. I went out to raise Series A again. We had an awesome software product; it was showing much more success. It would definitely be our moment.

Unfortunately, many other food startups had started during this time, and now they had gotten their investment before I was looking for mine. So venture capital firms had already made their bet or they thought that the space was too crowded and they wanted to see how everything would play out. I failed at raising Series A again, and this time the fall was much harder because I was running out of money. One of my friends suggested, "Why don't you think about and try Y Combinator?"

My first reaction was that this is a huge blow to my pride. I've worked so hard and we've already raised a seed round! How could I go to a startup accelerator? When your choices are to join Y Combinator or die, you put your ego aside and you choose Y Combinator. I am so glad I did! Y Combinator was the lifeline that we needed, and we wouldn't be here today without them. Just so you know how bad it was, I had made my last full payroll before getting the YC money.

We had employees, we had drivers, we had customers ordering, and I was so close to losing everything that I was staring into death. Y Combinator saved us. We still had to be scrappy. You have to remember that that whole time in the trough of sorrow, you have to make every penny count, and even afterwards. This is a photo of our head of engineering, Chris Woodford, and I. We’re putting on all of our rain gear because our office was this rickety warehouse in East Palo Alto that would leak from the roof when it rained.

So we would have buckets next to our Mac Cinema displays during the spring because the roof was leaky! One day it was so bad that it started flooding under the building and getting into our floor. So this is us getting in gear to put sandbags all around our warehouse and try to stop the flooding. By the way, the other photo is our conference room with YC. We made every penny count.

I went back to the basics. As the founder of your company, it is always good to go back to the basics, and it's always good to talk to your customers. I visited customers every single week, and I learned something. Why Y Combinator tells you to talk to your customers is because it'll help you test and iterate your product and it'll help you find product market fit. What they don't tell you is that if you meet with your customers, you'll learn; you'll not only see what you're doing but you'll see why you're doing it.

I thought our mission was to deliver home-cooked food to busy people. That's what I said in the beginning of this presentation. But really, that's what we do. That's our product spec, and in fact, it's very narrow. What I learned from visiting people is I wasn't measuring my success by just if we completed the delivery to their house. I was watching their reaction and their emotion and how they felt about the food. That's when I learned and uncovered our true mission, which is the “why” we do what we do and why people care about Gobble, and it's because we create moments of love.

We create love through food. Once you find your mission and your North Star and you set it in the right place, everything falls into place. We talked about ambition earlier. Ambition is very singular; mission is shared. Ambition is not enough. Mission is the strength it takes to get through the trough of sorrow and all the way to product market fit. Mission is something that I shared with these 10x hires who stayed with our company through all the ups and downs.

If you recruit people or convince people based upon ambition, they will leave in the tough times. If you recruit people with your mission, they will stay with you for the long game. Just as we had found our mission, I had recruited our team and we were meeting with all these customers. One journalist came out with an article covering the entire food space. This is what she wrote about Gobble: “Gobble was puttering about on the peninsula with its paltry funding and its ever-evolving business model.” She might as well have taken a sword, put it in my heart, and twisted it!

This was the hardest thing for me to hear and for our team to see. But because of our mission, some people on our team took it even lighter than I did and helped encourage me that we were really onto something and that we needed to compete with ourselves and not with others. Focus on our customer and keep moving forward! That's what we did. When we visited customers, we found that cooking takes way too much time and it's completely exhausting.

Takeout takes no time, but it doesn't feel good. It was then that I worked with our executive chef, Thomas Ricci, in our kitchen, and I thought, "Why can't there be something quick that feels really good?" He said, "Well, why don't you cook?" I said, "I'm so busy; you know cooking Indian food takes two hours and you have to soak things overnight. Who has the time for that?"

And he taught me about the French culinary term "Mise en Place." It means everything in place. In practice at a restaurant every day, the prep cooks and the sous chefs come to work and they chop all the vegetables, they marinate meat, they prep sauces so that when dinner service starts, the executive chef has everything in place to cook dinner in just 10 to 15 minutes. I thought this concept was brilliant! So we've tried to apply it to our families, and we thought, "Would they be willing to do a little work?"

This is me giving some of our first test kits to a TaskRabbit in our warehouse. You can see some barbecue short ribs and barbecue sauce in a bin and a chicken marsala dinner kit in the pan. We crossed our fingers. I was really enjoying this experience, and I wanted to see what our customers would say. Turns out they loved it! Enthusiasm was building on its own; there was a groundswell on social media. Our sales started going up, our referrals started going up, our reviews started going up, and we had finally hit the Promised Land!

Very quickly after that, we switched our entire business to 10-minute dinner kits. We knew we had invented a new way of cooking—something that people would really enjoy! We had no marketing person on our team, and we grew from zero to millions of dollars per year in ARR in just less than one year. We were able to finally raise our Series A round that I had worked so hard on with Andreessen Horowitz and Trinity Ventures. Both of these firms had rejected me in both previous rounds.

It's important to play the long game with your startup and recognize that these relationships are not just for now but forever, because you may be coming back to the exact same people that you met earlier at another point in your journey. This is our team today. This is a photo from Thanksgiving of last year. I can't wait for Thanksgiving this year! We expect it to be three times as big! It's our biggest company event and we invite all of our employees plus their family, their friends, and their kids.

Outside of our company, we have customers who've now been using us for 80 weeks. This is one of those customers. She told me that Gobble saved her marriage. Cooking with her husband every day is their moment to put the phone down, do something simple, and feel what it really means to be a family. Other families, like that of Loretta Gallegos, she lives in Fremont. She said that her life used to be like Groundhog Day! Every day she would come home and she would have to start cooking, then do the dishes, then get ready for the next day, put her kids to bed, and she never had any time to spend with her family.

Now she has an hour to play with her beautiful daughter Olivia every day, and Olivia's a total boss! She gets home and she puts on fairy wings to do anything she wants to do. Some people ask me how I got through all of this! [Laughter] [Applause]

I wish it was that easy. I have three takeaways for you. The first is grit. Grit comes from your core! This is a painting of one of my friends, Bernadette K, in San Francisco. Grit is your ability to keep going even when it hurts. Your body and your mission will energize you at those really tough moments and will let you keep going if you allow it. We had so many moments where I felt so alone, but our mission and our team strengthened me, and I know it will do the same for you.

The next is to experiment. We went through four different models with lots of little experiments along the way in order to be where we are today. Product market fit is not just an "aha" moment; it’s a summation of lots of broad experiments and micro learnings over many, many years. And last but absolutely not least is mission. Figuring out your mission will allow you to approach everything and everyone—investor, employee, or friend—with something to give them.

It's very important for you to give with your startup so it can grow to be beyond you and grow to be a long-term, lasting, and meaningful company. Have grit in your core, have experiments in your head, and have your mission in your heart, and you will be successful. Thank you! [Applause]