A Conversation with Ooshma Garg - Moderated by Adora Cheung
Thank you for coming today. My name is Dora; I'm one of the partners here at Y Combinator. Today we're going to have a conversation with Oozma Magog, who is the CEO and founder of Gobble, which creates and delivers 15-minute pan dinners to you. I am personally a happy customer; it's great for people who don't have time to do grocery shopping, prep ingredients, actually cook, and then clean up afterwards.
So, Gobble started in 2011, and while it's doing pretty well today—it’s growing around 100 million revenue per week—I believe it's gone through many ups and downs. So, for my talk today, I want to discuss a couple of things. One is the evolution of her business. She's mostly been in the food business, but she has iterated her business model many times, and I think it'd be interesting to talk about that.
The second topic is something she is an expert in, which is grit and determination. I think she's one of the few people that I've seen who just never gives up. Determination is one of the qualities many people think they have, but when things hit the fan, and things start to fall apart, it can be difficult. So, I think it’s also interesting to talk about. With that, I would love to welcome you to the stage. Thank you! [Applause]
So, welcome, Oozma!
Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming.
So, maybe we can just briefly start from the very beginning. You were a student at Stanford, and I believe you started your first company then, which was—correct me if I'm wrong—you helped students get jobs at banks?
Yes, obviously that didn't work out, and you moved on to Gobble instead. But can you explain why that didn't work out and what made you think that you should just move on from that idea?
Sure! So, back when I was at Stanford, I started this company out of my dorm room. A fun visual is that I had this like, you know, 150-200 square foot room with no space. I lofted my bed like five inches from the ceiling and stuffed some IKEA desks under my bed. We could only fit like three desks in there. I was a junior, so I hired all these really smart freshmen as interns and got a boyfriend so I could sleep somewhere else for the business—joking! Our dorm room became our office. I hid the key in the girls' bathroom, and people would come between classes and get the key from my pink shower caddy, then go into my dorm room and work on our startup.
So that was our house—my first company in Napa. The idea was to help students get jobs. I was the head of this group, Stanford Women in Business, so we were matching people to banks and law firms and consulting firms. I worked on that for three years. I bootstrapped it, and no one would fund me; they told me the idea was too nice or what-have-you. But really, no one was using LinkedIn at the time, and all of these students were looking for work.
I thought that we could really be the LinkedIn for students, and it was all centered around their interests and student groups. Long story short, the idea was working, and we were making money—these companies would write us $20,000, $25,000 checks for annual subscriptions to my recruiting website. It was a two-sided marketplace.
What really happened is, first of all, I poured everything I had into the business, and my health went down the drain, which later leads to Gobble. But what ended up happening is I learned the hard lesson that whoever pays you kind of owns you and determines how your product evolves. These banks and consulting firms and all of them were paying me, and they wanted to recruit students based on quotas—based on like their GPA, their race, or other parts of their background that didn't really have to do with if they were a good cultural match.
So anyways, I was making money, but the mission and the initial vision and all of that of the business—of helping people find good jobs—wasn't true anymore. I actually got to a very dark place and ended up selling the business. So, it could have worked, but the lesson is that it could have worked longer term, but it wasn’t the right fit.