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, and today we're going to talk and 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 its many ups and downs. So, for me, today I want to talk to her about a couple of things. One is the evolution of her business; she's mostly been in the food business but has iterated her business model many times, and I think it'd be interesting to talk about that.

Then, too, is something she's an expert in, which is grit and determination. I think she's one of the few people that I've seen that just never gives up. So, I think in determination, or one of the qualities many people think they have, but when hits the fan, things start to fall apart. I think it's also interesting to talk about. So, 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 got this wrong, you helped students get jobs at banks?

Yes! Obviously, that didn't work out and you did 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, and a fun visual is that I had this, you know, 150-200 square foot room, like, 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 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. Just joking! And then our dorm room became our office. I hid the key in the girls' bathroom and people would come between class, get the key from my pink shower caddy, and then go into my dorm room and work on our startup. So, that was our house, my first company in Napa de.

The idea was to help students get jobs. I was 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. So, 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. So, these banks and consulting firms and all of them were paying me, and they wanted to recruit students based on quotas, based on their GPA or their race or, you know, 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 the good jobs, wasn't true anymore. So 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 business I initially intended, and I'm not the kind of person who, you know, is just gonna do something to make money. I want to do something that I believe in.

In our third year, we were taking off with law firms. There are thousands of law firms and only tens of banks on Wall Street. So, I sold it to a company called Law Works, and basically they're a recruiting company and software, and they wanted to add community to their offering. At that time, it was like 2010, and social and communities and all of that were not as common as they are now.

So, you mentioned briefly this is a good transition, and we're talking about Gobble. In the beginning, your health was going down the drain. Yeah, how did that actually turn into Gobble itself?

Yeah, and I'm sure you all are, you know, too familiar with starting a company, at least especially in the first thousand days is very, very lonely. Very few people believe in the idea outside of yourself, and most people think you're crazy. Most people don't care about you, and so you're the only thing that keeps yourself going, and maybe your co-founder or your partner. But your partner's sick of hearing about it, and your co-founder may or may not work out, so there's lots of loneliness.

Basically, this I became just very insular. I stopped visiting my family and my friends. I was working on the business, but I was staying up too late and then waking up too late and then just eating all this takeout and soda. I think it not only affects your physical health, and I gained a lot of weight, but it also affects your mental health. All of that came to a head when my dad insisted on visiting. I was here in California; my parents are in Texas, and my dad is the head of nutrition at UT Southwestern in Texas.

So, he spent 30 years of his life studying diabetes, obesity, and nutrition. At home, he would make sure we all ate home-cooked food and, like, real good food. Your parents always know when something's wrong; you can't lie to them; it's just a matter of time.

So, anyways, he like got on a plane. Actually, first he cooked for three days and made all of this, like, home-cooked Indian food, stuffed it in these like international suitcases that were, like, you know, nicely packed, checked in. Everything's in foil and Ziplocs and whatever, and he flew here to California to my little dingy studio apartment. Without even saying hello, he comes in the apartment, goes to the fridge, and starts stuffing the food in the fridge. It just showed his anger and sadness and emotion about me not taking care of myself and how bad things had gotten.

He warmed a little plate of some subzi, which is like a vegetable Indian dish with some bread and rice, and just put it in front of me. I had this, like, IKEA two-person dining table in a corner, and I ate this first bite, and I just started crying uncontrollably because the food was so good. It showed me that I—like, that's how much I had lost, and it wasn't just nutrition; it was like a sense of self and being, and that's really easy to do.

So, anyways, that first bite of my dad's home cooking inspired Gobble, and that moment was when I decided that the home cooking and the sense of family dinner is very important to me. So, the first version of Gobble, if I got it correctly, was a marketplace for people to create home-cooked meals and sell it on the marketplace.

So that was 2011, and then I believe then, one year later, you turned it into, if I have this written down, catering. Yes. And then a year later, it was personalized dinner service, and then to what it is pretty much today: 15-minute dinner kits. So, maybe you could start off with—if you remember your one-liner for each four of those business models to help us distinguish the difference between those four.

Absolutely! I definitely remember the first one because it's what I raised our seed round off of. So, we started, after I ate that food, I wanted to replicate my dad in the Bay Area. I posted on Craigslist and looked for moms or dads that would cook for me. Anyway, the way that we described the idea, it ultimately became a marketplace for personal chefs and families. We described it as peer-to-peer lasagna, and everyone remembers that. It was catchy and weird, and the peer-to-peer economy was really hot at the time. Airbnb was just coming up; Etsy was coming up, and there were all these rental or sharing startups in 2010 to 2012.

So, that's how we described the marketplace. Catering was just like home-cooked food for offices. The personalized dinner service was exactly that; it was meals personalized exactly to your tastes, and our current dinner kits we describe as just a meal prep service for 15-minute one-pan cooking.

So, everyone who built the product always remembers their very first user, who wasn't their mom or dad or family. Do you remember that person, and what was he or she like?

Yeah, so recently I met one of our very first, like, ten users. The guy's name is Shaltile, and it's really funny; I actually met him, and he was a user of ours in 2011. So now, it's some seven or eight years later, I met him a few weeks ago at a wedding in New York, and he was like, “Are you?” and he's like, “I used to eat your food.” You know, your product goes through so many iterations that when someone remembers, like, the first website of yours and all those bugs and things, it's really special.

He was a Stanford student, and he would email us like pages of feedback, you know, every time he tried the food. So, it was kind of the canonical early adopter—someone who really wants to work with you and who wants to help improve your company and make it good for them and for everybody else.

So, in the beginning, you also did a lot of unscalable things to get users. I read you did promo cards everywhere you went, to Starbucks, and I just bothered people to order from Gobble. So, all of those things probably didn't work, but is there anything that you remember that actually worked?

Yeah, and there are two things that worked. I was reflecting on this. One of them is, I guess the things that worked is when you're just starting out, you can't throw a million dollars into Facebook ads in one week, but it doesn't also work to just, like, talk to ten individuals—that's too unscalable. So, it's all about reaching like micro-groups. One thing I did is I would go to my favorite— I went to all my favorite shops: coffee shops, restaurants, laundromats, whatever, and I actually bought cardholders on, like, whatever equipment website and made promo cards that were business card size.

It said, “Two free dinners at gobble.com,” and it had the restaurant's name on the back. One of the first valuable innovations or features that we released into our product was the ability to accept promo codes, because attribution of your growth is extremely important from day one, or else I can't tell you what's working or not working.

So, there's Zombie Runners on California Avenue. This is a coffee shop, and it's inside a running store that used to be a movie theater; it's very weird; you should go there; it's my favorite coffee shop! And so, they put a little thing at their register, and it turned out to be more effective than the nail salons, the laundromats, anything else.

Another YC company, Order Ahead, actually for a while was very successful with coffee shops and promos and ordering at coffee shops. One other thing was I spoke to as many meetup groups or moms' groups, and neighborhood groups, as possible, and I would get them— I would always try to have an offer that was—I tested offers, and I knew what would work. So, every single one of them would send my offer on their email list, and it had to be an email with your offer to a group, and that converted. The attribution point is very key there, which is even if you're doing a spray-and-pray method of just, like, “Everyone, use me,” at least you know when they come in the door, were they actually?

Absolutely, yes! Cool, so again, going back to the evolution of the business. At what point in each of the business models did you realize, “Oh, this isn't it; I gotta think of something else?”

Right. The funny thing is that—so first of all, we talked about these business models—all of that was going on from 2011 to 2014, so between three and a half years, which is still roughly that thousand days of finding product-market fit, we had four different iterations to the product.

This is a minor little point, but I know that Michael Seibel spoke recently, and he said he talked about the difference between pivoting and iterating, and I thought that was really important because people say Gobble pivoted, but we didn't pivot. We didn’t turn into some, like, you know, online video game; we just iterated and then found success. I think that a lot of nuance is important because pivoting, I think you don’t carry a lot of your learnings with you. Iterating is always building on your previous learnings.

So, with these business models and different iterations and launches, they all failed for different reasons. We had a marketplace first, and everyone loved the food because it was this authentic, small-batch home-cooked food from, like, real people: Italian grandmas and Mexican moms and Ethiopian chefs and things—food you can’t get anywhere else; it’s not like ruined by capitalism, I guess.

Anyways, that food wasn’t scalable, so we started getting success with that marketplace idea, but when I asked this Italian mom in San Carlos to make me 200 of her lasagna when she used to make 20 a day, it wasn’t fun anymore. She didn’t want to make 200, and she wasn’t a caterer. So, that model, you know, Airbnb is a peer-to-peer model that can scale; it’s sharing an asset; it’s sharing a space.

This is a peer-to-peer model that has a lot of break points at scale of quality time capacity and so on. So, that’s why the marketplace model didn’t work. We were supply constrained—not by the number of chefs, but by the juice we could squeeze from each of our SKUs on the marketplace.

Then we pivoted to catering because we had built that marketplace with seed funding, and we were—maybe we had like a half a year of money left or something; but one of our investors was very insistent that we had our growth with money and we do something that will definitely make us money. So, I went into the catering world. Frankly, to me, I think it's very easy, and I didn’t really want to do it.

We just got, like, Box.net and Pinterest and these companies signed on, and they rarely quit, so you’re just making this money in the background. We did that, we made good money, and we showed growth. But the problem is that when we went to raise Series A, the investors asked how much of your money is from families and the model you’re pitching and how much of your money is from catering and from enterprise, and at that point, some 75% was from enterprise because when you do something like that, like the previous startup lesson we learned, all your attention goes to what’s giving you the most money.

So, that really sucked because unless I wanted to build a catering business, then I wasn’t gonna get funding. So, we were in a pinch then, and I had to raise a bridge round and wind down the catering business, which was hugely unpopular because we were making lots of money, but it wasn’t my long-term vision.

The vision was that people don’t have access to this home-cooked food, and I wanted to crack it and figure it out and give it to everyone. So, we wound that down because it wasn’t part of the long-term vision. The third month, so then we focused on this personalized dinner service. I still today think that the power of personalization—what Amazon brings to e-commerce and what Netflix and Spotify bring to movies and music—that level of personalization has not taken off in food.

Just like Google with search, the company that cracks it in food, I think will be like the long-term winner and have all these learnings built on top of each other to where you build a long-term sustainable advantage. So, that’s what we did with that personalized dinner service. We took these chefs and then we started using restaurants and caterers, and we focused on the technology because that’s what—that’s the talent that we had in our headquarters. We had engineers and product people, so we focused on the tech to match to take—we allowed people to give us whatever taste they wanted.

So, we ended up getting like thousands of picky eaters and people who didn’t eat nightshades, and they were vegan, but they still didn’t like olives and lettuce and like crazy stuff. And I—and no, what your tastes were, I said I would feed you! And so, anyway, that model really stretched our technology.

By doing the hard thing, we learned: If you’re vegan and don’t like lettuce, what are you eating? I know—I don’t know—lots of beans!

So, you move the business model a little bit each time, or yes! And so, one of the difficult things in doing that is taking the risk and bringing down your current business for hopefully future success. And that I think a lot of people actually don’t do that because it’s very, very scary; they just try to keep pushing the current model, trying to make it work.

So, was it scary for you, and what was your thought process like, actually just saying, “No, I’m not going to do this enterprise catering anymore,” even though it’s making tons of money?

It was so scary! It was really scary, and actually some of our investors would call me into their office and just use me as, like, a punching bag, you know? And like sit down at their reclaimed wood table and their kitchenette or something, and they'd be like—and every time there's new startups coming up, the grass is always greener because the investors know all your problems, and they don’t know any of the other problems.

So anyway, so they would be like, “This company Mantri is starting, and this company Order Ahead is starting, and all these companies are starting, and like what are you doing?” And it was much louder and much worse than that.

And so, but you know, I have found—I think that’s what you mentioned earlier about the grit and determination. I don’t know if it’s learned or what it is over so many years; I have found that I cannot listen to anything. There’s nothing more loud than like my gut, and it’s just when you know something and you’ve been in it for three years or thousands of days, you can’t avoid it; you know what you have to do. Other people think about you like 1% of the year and just in the one-hour meeting.

So, I think early on we put a lot of weight into investor meetings, even into YC partner meetings, into all these meetings, and it can really throw you off your game for a few days. You’re like, “Oh, this one person didn’t like my idea; who am I?” And it’s just something you have to get through.

And I would always try to justify each direction with, like, logic and with market drawings, and one book that really helped me was Blue Ocean Strategy; it’s my favorite business book to date. And it talks about how companies broke through the noise in existing industries talks about, Southwest Airlines, Yellowtail wine, and some, like, really interesting companies that no one thought would work.

So, you should—and it gives you a framework with which to think about your company. I would draw that framework and keep using it as my North Star.

In a previous talk, let me read this so I get it right: you said something insightful, which is product-market fit is not just an “aha” moment; it’s a summation of lots of broad experiments and micro-learnings over many years. Can you briefly expand on that?

Like a common mistake is for people when they look at product-market fit is to just look at one metric, and then if it moves in one direction, then that's good. So, what did you look at at the beginning, and how did you visualize this summation of stuff?

Yeah, ultimately, I think that product-market fit is the center of the Venn diagram of ability to grow on one side and retention on the other side. So, if you look at our history, in the marketplace model, we weren’t able to grow because of the chefs. We were supply constrained. In the personalized dinner model, we actually weren’t able to grow really fast because of the customers. Even though it was personalized, the food wasn’t better than the best takeout that you could order.

So, if you want to change the world or change your industry, you have to do something that is materially better—like iPhone level better than the market—so people weren’t racing to our doors. So, we didn’t have that ability to grow. Our dinner kit model has the ability to grow and scale internally and externally from customer demand, and it also has high retention.

So, moving on to maybe more about determination. So, in the beginning, at Stanford, you were a bioengineering major?

Yes! So, technical but not a coder. How did you manage actually doing all of this without being technical?

Yes, hmm. Well, initially, and I mean, everyone is gonna use their skillsets. I think the one common theme is that in the first few months, you need to prove your concept; you need to have an MVP. You can do that with code; you can do that with sales, whatever. So, I did not know how to code.

I learned a little PHP, but in both my businesses—in the recruiting business and the chef business, or the food business I have now—I made initial sales without a website, and I proved our concept in the first three months before any other kind of funding. So, with the recruiting business, I did know Photoshop and design, and I taught myself all of that, and loved it, so I enjoyed that.

And I designed these, like, sales packages that would, like—and I made up stuff. I was like, “Gold, platinum,” whatever—twenty thousand dollars, and I would like to see if people would give it to me, which is very bold as a college student. And I had a mockup of a website that wasn't built yet, and I took a semester off and tried and only did sales because that was my proof of concept.

My parents said that only if I like got a sale could I not go work on Wall Street, which was horrible! It’s a side note; I didn’t get a sale that semester. I met like maybe eighty or so people through introductions, and I went to go work at Morgan Stanley in 2008, and that horrible summer, and I hated my life. It was like equities trading, and three weeks in, I got a check in the mail for ten thousand dollars because it was a founding customer price from this like law firm.

It was like the coolest day of my life; it was revenue; it was validation. And it took me like, you know, seven to ten days to figure out how to quit the internship. People were all like, “You’ll get blacklisted; you’ll never get a job,” and I told the head of the program, and he said, “You will always have a job here, but you will never come back.” And I thought that I thought that was clear at the time, and now I fully understand it.

It’s because once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur in your heart, in a way. So anyways, I think quitting is hard; it’s a long story short, but it’s hard to avoid. So, around 2011 to 2014, you had a hard time raising money, correct?

So how did you—I mean, it’s three years—how did you fund all of this? And then also, at the same time, what did you spend your days doing? It must have been really—it’s when you can't get money; it's really distracting. Like, that’s a huge distraction, so how did you focus on your business and keep going?

Yes, so first of all, over those three and a half years of finding product-market fit, our monthly burn was $40,000 on average. That's pretty low; that's not a fancy office; that's not ten people. We kept it to about four people, and everyone had to be like co-founders-style generalist because we were still iterating.

So, if you make your burn $40K, you know you can make your 1.5 million last lasts a while. But we raised two bridge rounds during that time, and there were some investors who refused to invest. Some of them who saw would listen to the next iteration and invest in me.

Both of those bridges were like 200-some K, and one critical thing there was a time in 2013 when no one would invest in me, and I was running out of all my money. We had like one payroll in the bank. I think our bank was like $8,000 or something, and that’s when I did YC. So, I didn’t do YC at the beginning of Gobble; I did YC three and a half years into the struggle when I didn’t know I was about to figure it out, everybody had lost faith and I was the only one who had faith.

And the only money I could get was from Jessica and PG, and so I did YC, and they said they would help me raise a Series A, like, they would fund me for three more months, and six months after that, we figured out our fifteen-minute one-pan dinner kit.

So, you mentioned employees during this hard time. How did you keep them motivated to, you know, keep going?

That’s a tough one! I think that there’s a lot of turnover in the early days and even in the later days after venture financing and you’re learning how to hire execs. But the employees that ended up lasting the longest were by referral, and so there was some shared values and shared trust there.

I also really clued them into the hard times. Sometimes you think you're protecting people by not telling them, but actually, your closest employees, especially when you're four to six, if you bring them into the challenge, and if they are challenge-oriented, they will stay with you. But if you hide it, then they're not really feeling that excitement and that challenge.

At what point you said that you got an acquisition offer? One of your investors wanted you to just get acquired by the clothing startup?

Absolutely, yes! I mean, you're having a hard time, and here's, like, potentially money in your bank account. What was your thought process in just turning that down?

Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about this right now. Even in our space, there's a lot of consolidation in the food space and the meal kit space. If you see the news, it’s very popular drama in the news.

There are all these companies like Facebook or Snapchat or this or that that I’ve turned down different offers over time, and sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong, judged by society. I just see so much potential in Gobble. Once we early on, it was just that early on, I turned that clothing startup thing down in that product-market fit time because this is what I want to work on. I have nothing to lose; I didn’t have kids or whatever, and I just didn’t imagine a better life than working on… working on a hard problem.

Now, we've started doubling or tripling year-on-year, and so if someone were to acquire us now, and we can’t weather the storm of a bad meal kit market, I think we’re leaving billions on the table.

Speaking of competition, there's been billions of dollars in venture funding going into competitors or so-called competitors like Reaper and Plated and so forth. I mean, you're the original company. What do you think about all that money going over there? But you’re like, “I’m here surviving; I’m growing fast.” You know, what’s really going in your mind?

Yeah, well, you know, we can look at the silver lining of it, which is that necessity breeds invention. So, by not having that much money, we didn’t get comfortable, and we had to innovate, and we had to have good numbers. So, I'm not saying that we should all starve our companies, but because we were, like, somewhat cost-starved, I wasn’t distracted by lots of fancy things, and I just focused on making all the dollars count and doing something meaningful.

So, you talk about mission, but beyond that, what actually really kept you going over the years? Like, is it genetic? What do you think it really is beyond just the mission?

Wow, hmm, maybe it is some kind of like nature-nurture thing. The mission is a big part of it, but with regards to the grit and determination thing from, like, early age, I think I just—my parents wanted me to go to this school, this like all-girls school, and I hated my current school. I was bullied a lot, and there were like, like bad phrases and racist things on my locker and like bad stuff.

I applied to this girls' school in kindergarten, and I didn’t get in, and then in first grade, I didn’t get in, and in second grade, I didn’t get in, and you had to take this ERB test, and then like in those early grades, they’re asking you, like “What’s a triangle?” or something, right? And I didn’t get in, and so I was like, “What’s going on?” My parents weren’t donating, and there were all these other factors I didn’t know, and so I kept applying like third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade; didn’t get in.

I remember one time my parents were like, “The test is coming up. This is for your future; you need to do this,” and I was just so mad. I just remember being so defeated and so distraught, and like I was letting them down, and I didn’t want to take the test. I was like, “Who needs the school? Forget it; it’s stupid.”

And I took the test and I still didn’t get in. Finally, in seventh grade, I got into that school, and it changed my life. I used every resource they had; I started new organizations; I got funding from the principal of the school to like start a Model UN Society, and like I saw it in a different way.

I just seized the entire opportunity when I was there because I knew how special it was, and I worked so hard to get there. So, somehow early on, like that was one experience, but there were experiences like that that I just learned that life is about hard work, and it’s about lead bullets, and I’m always enamored by these real overnight successes. I think the most overnight successes are like ten years in the making. There are some flukes that are like one year, two year, three years that the media celebrates in a disproportionate amount, and I'm always very enamored by them.

But the only way that I know is like this lead bullets grit: do not give up strategy.

You are a very ambitious third grader.

Thank you! I wish that we had known you back then; we would’ve just predicted all this in front of you all the way back in kindergarten. That would have been great!

So, you talk about obviously never quitting, but are there—do you think there are reasons to quit?

I guess I like quit kind of on my first startup and on one of the iterations of Gobble, and the only reasons I have ever quit is because I think what I was doing didn’t have enough impact in the broader world or fulfillment and for me, meaning and purpose for me.

I thought this question—I think those are the only reasons I have quit in the past. I think, though, that said, if the environment evolves, and you can’t keep up with it, and things are just surpassing you, then that would be a really hard look in the mirror. I would maybe need to quit in that instance.

So, not getting comfortable and constantly iterating and being not dogmatic is important. A good example of that is Netflix. Netflix evolved to stay alive. There are a lot of big titans of industry that fell along the way because they couldn’t evolve.

So, two more questions, and then we'll take questions from the audience. One is, can you, when you look back, are there decisions that you made in the early days that you’re thankful you made that were really critical to your success? If so, what were they?

Well, I'll talk about two. So, one of them is that one of them is something—a lot changed when we hired our executive chef, Tomas Ricci. It wasn’t just because we hired a chef to make consistent food that is good and like safe food in a kitchen. What we gained, though, was the ability to innovate in food.

What I have learned is what I would suggest to an entrepreneur is that real entrepreneurship comes from diverse perspectives, and from innovating at the edge of different industries. It’s really hard just to get ten homogeneous engineers in a room and, like, make something incredible. You have to have other experts in, like, consumer or food, or something, whatever else is in your industry to really find those little insights.

So once—so, our success came from innovating in technology and personalization, but a lot from innovating in food and doing that prep work and sending these food packages in a way that no other company sends them—that's not trivial. So, making room for creativity in different areas of your business is important, and we didn’t have that creativity when the suppliers were just contractor chefs.

The second thing was I have to thank Adora. She is way too humble. When I had no money and I did YC and I swallowed my pride, we were still doing that personalized dinner service, and somehow, like, I got matched up with Adora, and we didn’t even figure out by demo day. Like, we raised 200k on demo day; it was nothing. It wasn’t the right timing; we hadn’t figured it out, and we had just hired our chef like maybe six weeks or four weeks before demo day.

So, I started working with him and innovating with him and focusing on our future and meeting with Adora at her office. And anyways, I came to her and I told her about this meal kit idea, this 15-minute prep kit back in 2014, and she was just so scary to me and really badass and really aggressive.

And she was like, “Ooh, Sh'ma, if this is it, you need to do it. It’s just like you need to do it now.” And I was like, “Okay.” And she was like, “How fast can you do it?” You kind of want to impress people, so I’m like, “I don’t know, like two weeks?” She was like, “Great.”

And she was like—and so I mean, she basically was like, we had four weeks, so she was just like it was in July, and I remember because it was August first. She was like, “Do it by August first!” And I was like, “Okay, great!”

And she probably like, I don’t even know if she remembers all of that, but that’s what I thought of every single day for 30 days. I shut down that personalized dinner service, and we were doing maybe like one and a half to two million in ARR, but it wasn’t going anywhere, and the food wasn’t different enough.

When we had tested and, indeed, these, like, prep kits where people cook it themselves and feel like a superhero, that was magical in our testing and our customer visits. So, within 30 days, we just ripped the band-aid off, shut down that business—it was the highest revenue making iteration that we had ever built—with every iteration we made more revenue ultimately, even though we shut it down.

Then on August third, we launched this thing, and I emailed Adora this like long email. I’m like, “Here’s this and not like.” I was using her to hold myself accountable, and I was like, “It’s launched!” You know, and that was the best decision of our lives.

And so, you just need to execute, and the other lesson is like finding people who are in your corner. You need people who are in your corner, and it's okay to not talk to the ones who aren't. But finding people who are in your corner, who you can use as an inspiration to motivate you is really critical for speed.

Oh yeah, one of the things I tell people: just do it already! You know exactly the idea, stop just, stop meddling, just do it.

Okay, so last question for me is, 50 to 100 years from now, Gobble is gonna be even bigger than it is today, but what do you think it’s gonna be?

Wow, I—you know, in the 50 to 100 year vision, I actually want Gobble to be, let’s call it the Disney of the home. My thing with Gobble is about creating magical experiences at home that are easy and fit into this busy life—for any kind of person: like single parents, hourly working, you know, affluent people.

I think there’s— I think that with all this technology and all this fast food, we’ve over-instrumented a lot of industries and I was missing that connection. At the end of the day, when our lives are over, all we care about are the moments with our loved ones. So if I can facilitate some of that, whether it’s with learning, whether it’s with dinner or food, and I’ll keep evolving with the environment, I think that’s a worthy cause.

That's interesting. So, it’s gonna be more than just food?

Yeah, we’re working on a few other things around like education and learning and things like that.

Awesome! Cool! All right, so who has questions?

Like, you see them in progress, and they really made progress, but now they're like, “I don't know what to do.” So, what do you suggest? What kind of suggestions do you have for those people who are in that situation?

Yeah, so, I think the question is around that there are like environmental constraints and legal constraints, like with regard to immigration and H-1B and things like that that prevent people from being where they want to be with their customers.

If you have to Newton full-time but you have to live in another country, is that what you’re asking? [Music]

Well, I know one of my good friends had a similar problem, and these are very tactical things. Like, they established some like shell company, and then one of the investors was put on as a board member, and then that board member sponsored the sponsorship, but you’re really the CEO of the company.

So, there are like, I think first of all getting that, like, H-1B visa is insane, right? And we had someone; we have people who can’t get that visa. So, Gobble actually has an engineering team in India and in South Africa and like we’re just waiting for the visas, and it’s been—some people have been waiting for like 14 months, and they’re still working for us remotely.

So, in those situations, that’s nuts! And now there’s very few loopholes, but if you already are here, sometimes there are some things you can do. I think like YC has helped with some of that stuff. If you’re making revenue and you have an actual company going, there are ways to go about it. I would just talk with a lawyer.

Yeah, interesting!

So, we’ve done a lot, like, oh, yeah…

Sorry! The question is: tell us about the pricing strategy for Gobble and how our pricing strategy evolved?

Pricing is a big part of product-market fit! So, you know, it has to be priced appropriately for your market. Initially, we had different offerings at different prices on our marketplace. If you’re at a scrappy company, the best tool for pricing experimentation is email because it’s hard to put, like, different prices all over your website for different users.

So, what I would do is email people, and I have a zillion things in beta all the time. So, I’d email our existing customers, and I’d say, “Hey, here’s a beta on premium dinners,” or “Here’s a beta on value meals,” or “Here’s a beta on our wine program,” and I would—first do all the research of the market and then send people like different clusters of people three different prices.

In the early days, I did it with like 20 people each, and then now I do it like thousands of people each. So, in the early days, it was a plain text email, and I would say like, “Would you—?” And then sometimes, to each individual person, I would send three plans. So, I’d say, “Do you want plan A, B, or C?” You can send different groups different sets of three plans, or you can send different groups different pricing for one product, but I would—you just basically—you multiply the profit times how many people buy it, and whichever one wins, the most profit is your best price.

Thank you!

My seeds really grow having a co-founder. The question is that YC is very pro having a co-founder, and I did it on my own for a while. Can I talk about that? Hmm.

When I started Gobble, I looked for a co-founder, and I spent—I kind of just started it. Like, I found chefs on Craigslist, and I was delivering food in my car, but I was dating co-founders that are now Y Combinator founders at the time, and no one at that time—in that like three- or four-month period—was willing to quit their job and join me or was randomly as passionate about my idea as I was.

So, it was unique; this was all very organic. I didn’t really think, you know, “I must have a co-founder,” or “I must be a solo co-founder.” I tried to find one, and my priority was like leaping on this idea, and so I didn’t find one, and I just went with it.

Long term, I think it is hard—very hard—as a single founder. Right now, our exec team operates kinda like a hive mind, and I share everything with them. So, after many, many years now, we have like a five-person super team that’s all very invested and kinda like a co-founding team.

But at scale, in the early day is what I say for single founders is you kind of have like if you’re swimming in the ocean, it’s kind of like a net buoy system. So, you have to find like three or six people that are like those orange buoys, and you’re swimming by yourself, and you’re super, super tired, and when you want to rest, you swim over to one of the buoys, and you hug it, and you like talk to them, and they help you. But then, since you don’t have a co-founder, no one can be your rock, right? So, the next time you’re like, you know, need to rest, you swim over to another buoy, and you hug that, you know, and you’re kinda like—you basically crowdsource your co-founder from other founders and friends, and you have to really find—and in fact, some of my closest friends were other single founders, and so I had a group of like two or three single founders, and we all would constantly meet up for coffee or drinks after work and trade stories and help each other.

Yes, how has your life changed from, like, see you now versus when you started? What were the lows? What were the highs?

Wow, or please, I apologize. So, the question is, how has your role as CEO changed from beginning to what it is now? Must have been dramatic.

Yes, okay! In the beginning, one of the highs is just that you’re constantly innovating; like that 24/7 maker time is very precious to me. My contrast now is my day is, like, full of meetings—like meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings—and then dinners.

And so yesterday, I get home at like 11:00 PM, and today we’re starting at 8:00 AM. It’s like really full, and I have to fight for strategic time and maker time, and we still need that to keep evolving, right? So, I cherish that part of the early days.

Obviously, the lows are when like nobody cares about you. You barely have any customers, like I’m just sleeping at our office or laying on our couch.

I remembered in some of the lows, I just would put white paper all over, and I’d like lay on the floor, and it would just be like a blank slate, and I’d be like, “Okay, what’s next?” Come up with it. So, those are the lows. The highs now are it’s really gratifying when people start to know you, and every time I meet a customer, like in the wild, it makes my day. When I get too far from the customer, I actually notice myself getting unhappy.

Again, I think if you care about the customer and that experience long-term, all the money will come.

Okay, let’s take two more questions—one in the back.

Oh my gosh, thank you so much!

Wow, great question. The question is: we talked about hacks with getting customers, and what are the hacks around getting investors? Because I struggled with getting investors in the early days.

I think, as you observe, all your friends, everybody has lucky, kind of, or easier fundraising rounds, and everyone has hard fundraising rounds. So, even if someone has it easy right now and you have it hard, it’s okay! Like, it might be hard for them later, and the stories are very up and down.

How do you get investors? Wow, it’s still tough! For example, even last year for our Series B, I had a very difficult time raising money. Like, it all looks fantastic, and there’s lots of news and videos, but it took every ounce of my being; it was the hardest fundraising.

It’s because Amazon acquired Whole Foods, and everyone is afraid of Amazon, so they just thought Amazon’s gonna do Gobble. Also, because Blue Apron went public, and they don’t have a lot of defensibility, and there’s lots of companies that are repackaging groceries, so their stock price went down, and that meant that Gobble wasn’t going to work, so last year was really, really hard.

What advice do I have? I think that—oh, here’s one good piece of advice: a lot of it is grit, and a lot of it is testing and then watching what resonates with people and perfecting your pitch. And it’s weird to practice in front of friends, but you should really, really do it, and have everything, like, everyone help you with your deck and your pitch, and that’s important.

But the one advice I have—and this may not be true for everyone—but some founders that are like shyer or not as confident, when they get to their last slide, they say, “Even if,” and they say like, “Even if you know the world ends, I will still get you your money back,” and investors do not care about getting their money back. That is not sexy to them!

You shouldn’t say that. Founders are kind of like hedging against themselves and saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll still protect your money.” But you need to uplevel that. When you go talk to investors, not say “even if,” you need to say that we have the potential to be the next big X. Like, we have the potential to be a ten billion dollar business in three years. Like, pump yourself up! Like, stretch Power Pose!

But you have to end on that really big high note, very strong, and that’s my piece of advice!

All right, thank you so much! Huge well thank you!