Adora Cheung: Thank you for coming today. My name is Adora. I'm one of the partners here at Y Combinator and today we're going to have a conversation with Ooshma Garg who's 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 100,000,000 revenue per week, I believe. It's gone through its many ups and downs and so with Ooshma today, I want to talk to her about a couple things.One is evolution of her business. She's mostly been in the food business, but it's iterated business model many times.
And so I think it'd be interesting to talk about that and then two 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.
And so I think grit and determination are one the qualities many people think they have. But when shit hits the fan, things start to fall apart.
And so I think it's also interesting to talk about. So with that, I would love to welcome Ooshma to the stage.
Thank you.
Ooshma Garg: Thanks for having me.
Adora Cheung: Thanks.
Ooshma Garg: [inaudible]
Adora Cheung: So, welcome Ooshma.
Ooshma Garg: Thank you for having me.
Adora Cheung: 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, is you helped students get jobs at banks and other companies.
Ooshma Garg: Yes.
Adora Cheung: 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?
Ooshma Garg: Sure. So back when I was at Stanford, I started this company out of my dorm room.
And fun visual is that I had this 150, 200 square foot room, with no space and I laughed at my bed, 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 freshmen, really smart freshmen as interns and got a boyfriend so I could sleep somewhere else for the business, joking.
And then our dorm room became our office, and I hid the key in the girls bathroom and people would come between class and get the key from my pink shower caddy and then go into my dorm room and work on our startup. So, that was my first company [inaudible] .
And the idea was to help students get jobs. I was head of this group Stanford Women in Business. We were matching people to banks and law firms and consulting firms.
And I worked on that for three years, I bootstrapped it.
And no one would fund me.
They told me the idea was too niche or what have you.But really, no one was using LinkedIn at the time. And all of these students are 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 cheques, for annual subscriptions to my recruiting website, and it was a two-sided marketplace. So 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, and based on their GPA or 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. So I actually got to a very dark place and ended up selling the business. So it could have worked, and it could have worked longer term, but it wasn't the business I initially intended and I'm not the kind of person who, just going to do something to make money, I want to do something that I believe in.
Adora Cheung: Who did you sell it to?
Ooshma Garg: So in our third year, we were taking off with law firms.
There are thousands of law firms and only 10s of banks on Wall Street.
And so I sold it to a company called LawWorks.
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.
Adora Cheung: So you mentioned briefly ...
This is good transition into maybe talking about Gobble in the beginning, your health was going down the drain. How did that actually turn into Gobble itself?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. I'm sure as you all are 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, your partner, but your partner is sick of hearing about it, and your co-founder may or may not work out. So there's lots of loneliness.
And basically, 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 and I think it not only affects your physical health and I gained a lot of weight, but it also affects your mental health. So all of that came to a head when my dad insisted on visiting.
And 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's spent 30 years of his life studying diabetes, obesity and nutrition.
And then at home, he would make sure we all ate home cooked food and real good food.
And your parents always know when something's wrong, you can't lie to them. So just a matter of time. So anyways, he 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 international suitcases that were nicely packed and checked in, everything's on foil and zip blocks and whatever. Flew here to California to my little dingy studio apartment and without even saying hello, comes in the apartment, goes to the fridge and starts stuffing the food in the fridge.
And it just showed his anger and sadness and emotion about me not taking care of myself and how bad things had gotten and he warmed a little plate of some sabzi which is a Vegetable Indian dish with some bread and rice and just put it in front of me, and I had this 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.
And it showed me that 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.
And so anyways, that first bite of my dad's home cooking, inspired Gobble.
And that moment was when I decided that home cooking and the sense of family dinner is very important to me.
Adora Cheung: So the first version on Gobble, if I got it correctly, it was a marketplace for people to create home cooked meals and sell it on the marketplace. So that was 2011.
And then I believe, one year later you turned it into if I have this written down, catering.
Ooshma Garg: Yes.
Adora Cheung: And then year later, it was personalized dinner service and then to pretty much what is today, 10, 15 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 these four.
Ooshma Garg: 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.
And I posted on Craigslist and looked for moms or dads that would cook for me.
Anyway, the way that we described the idea ultimately became a marketplace for personal chefs and, and families and we described it as peer to peer lasagna.
And everyone remembered that, and just said it and 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 what we described the marketplace. Catering was just like home cooked food for office.
The personalized dinner service was exactly that, it was meals personalized exactly to your tastes.
And our current dinner kits we describe just as a meal prep service, 15 minute one pan cooking.
Adora Cheung: 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?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. So recently I met one of our very first 10 users.
The guy's name is Sheel Tyle, and it's really funny. I actually met him and he was a user of ours in 2011. So now it's some seven, eight years later. I met him a few weeks ago at a wedding in New York.
And he was, "Are you Ooshma?" I was like, "Yeah." He was, "I used to eat your food." Your product goes through so many iterations that when someone remembers, the first website of yours, and all that, those bugs and things, it's really special. He was a Stanford student, and he would email us pages of feedback, every time he tried the food.
And so it was kind of the canonical early adopter that 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.
Adora Cheung: 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 guess bother people to order from Gobble. So all of those things probably didn't work. But anything that you remember that actually worked?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah.
There are two things that worked, and I was reflecting on this. One of them is ... I guess the things that work is when you're just starting out, you can't throw $1,000,000 into Facebook ads in one week. But it doesn't also work to just like talk to 10 individuals, that's to unscalable. So it's all about reaching like micro groups. One thing I did is I went to all my favorite shops like coffee shops, restaurants laundromats, whatever and I actually bought card holders on, whatever, equipment website and made promo cards that were business card size and it said like to free dinners Gobble.com and it had the restaurants 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 ZombieRunners on California Avenue, it's this 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.
Adora Cheung: The attribution point is very I think key there, which is even if you're doing a spray and pray method of just everyone, use me at least you know when they come in the door or they actually-
Ooshma Garg: Absolutely, yes.
Adora Cheung: 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 got to think of something else?"
Ooshma Garg: Right.
The funny thing is that and 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 1,000 days of finding product market fit, we had four different iterations to the product.
And this is a minor little point but I know that, I think Michael Seibel spoke recently and 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 online video game. We just iterated and then found success. So I think that 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 real people, Italian grandmas, and Mexican moms, and Ethiopian chefs and things, and food you can't get anywhere else, that's not 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 and she didn't want to make 200 and she wasn't a caterer. So that model ...
Airbnb is a peer-to-peer model that can scale and 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 skews on the marketplace.
Then we pivoted to the catering because we had built that marketplace with seed funding.
And we maybe had like a half a year of money left or something. But one of our investors was very insistent that we pad our growth with money, and we do something that will definitely make us money.
And 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 got like box [inaudible] and Pinterest.
And these companies signed on, and they rarely quit.
And 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, the previous startup lesson we learned, all your attention goes to what's giving you the most money.
And so that really sucked, because unless I wanted to build a catering business, then I wasn't going to 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 a long-term vision. 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.
And just like Google with search, the company that cracks that 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 and then we started using restaurants and caterers and we focused on the technology, because that 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 tastes they wanted. So we ended up getting thousands of picky eaters and people who didn't eat night shades.
And they were vegan, but they still didn't like olives and lettuce, and like crazy stuff.
And no matter what your tastes were, I said I would feed you.
And so anyway, that model really stretched our technology, and by doing the hard thing we learned.
Adora Cheung: If you're vegan, and don't like lettuce, what are you eating?
Ooshma Garg: I know, I don't know, like lots of beans.
Adora Cheung: So you move the business model a little bit each time or quite a bit, actually, each time.
Ooshma Garg: Yes.
Adora Cheung: 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 keep pushing the current model, trying to make it work. So was it scary for you? And what was your thought process and actually just saying, "No, not going to do the enterprise catering anymore, even though it's making tons of money."
Ooshma Garg: Right. It was, it was so scary.
And it was really scary.
And actually, some of our investors would call me into their office and just use it as, me as a punching bag, sit down at their reclaimed wood table and their kitchen or something, and, and I'd be sitting in a stand top, and they'd be ...
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'll be, "This company, Montroy is starting, and this company OrderAhead is starting, and all these companies are starting and what are you doing?" And it was much louder and much worse than that.
And so, but 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 my gut.
And 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.
And 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, "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 logic and with market drawings. 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 and existing industries, talks about Southwest Airlines, Yellow Tail Wine, and some really interesting companies, and that no one thought would work.
And it gives you a framework with which to think about your company.
And I would draw that framework and keep using it as my North Star.
Adora Cheung: In a previous talk, and let me read this, so I get it right, you said something really 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? 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 the beginning? And how did you visualize this summation of stuff?
Ooshma Garg: 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.
And 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, 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.
Adora Cheung: So moving on to maybe more about grit and determination. So in the beginning at Stanford, you are a Bioengineering Major?
Ooshma Garg: Yes.
Adora Cheung: Technical, but not a coder. How did you manage actually doing all of this without being technical?
Ooshma Garg: Yes. Well, initially, and everyone is going to use their skill sets.
And 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 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 funding. So with the recruiting business, I did know, like Photoshop and design, and I taught myself all of that and loved it. So I enjoyed that.
And I designed these sales packages that would ...
And I made up stuff, I was like, gold, platinum, whatever, $20,000, I would like to see if people would give it to me, which is very bold as a college student.
And I had a mock-up of a website that wasn't built yet.
And I took a semester off and only did sales, because that was my proof of concept.
And my parents said that only if I got a sale, could I not go work on Wall Street, which was horrible. So side note, I didn't get a sale that semester.
And I made I met maybe 80 or so people through introductions.
And I went to go work at Morgan Stanley in 2008, in that horrible summer, and I hated my life. It was like equities trading.
And three weeks in, I got a cheque in the mail for $10,000, because it was a founding customer price from this law firm.
And it was like the coolest day of my life. It was revenue, it was validation.
And it took me seven to 10 days to figure out how to quit the internship. People were all, "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 that was weird at the time, and now I fully understand it. And it's because, once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur in your heart, in a way. So anyways, I think the quitting is hard. It's a long story short, but it's hard to avoid.
Adora Cheung: So around 2011, 2014, you had a hard time raising money. Correct? So, 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 when you can't get money, that's a huge distraction. So how did you focus on your business and keep going?
Ooshma Garg: 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 10 people, we kept it to about four people.
And everyone had to be like, co-founder style generalist, because we were still iterating. So if you make your burn 40 K, you can make your 1.5 million last 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 of my money.
And we had one payroll in the bank. I think our bank was $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. I didn't know I was about to figure it out. Everybody had lost faith.
And I'm 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, they would fund me for three more months.
And six months after that, we figured out our 15 minute one pan dinner kit.
Adora Cheung: So you mentioned you had employees during this hard time. How did you keep them motivated to keep going?
Ooshma Garg: 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 were some shared values and shared trust there.
And 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.
Adora Cheung: At one point you said that you got an acquisition offer, or one of your investors wanted you to just get acquired by a clothing startup-
Ooshma Garg: A clothing startup, yes.
Adora Cheung: Completely different. I mean, you're having a hard time and here's potentially money in your bank account. What was your thought process in just turning that down?
Ooshma Garg: 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 kits space if you like. See the news, it's very popular drama in the news. I mean, there's all these companies like Facebook, or Snapchat, or this or that, that have turned down different offers over time.
And sometimes it's right, some it's wrong, judged by society. I just see so much potential in Gobble.
And once we ... Early on, I turned that clothing startup thing down in that product market fit time, because this is what I want to work on, and I have nothing to lose, I didn't have kids or whatever. And I just didn't imagine a better life than working on a hard problem.
And 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 like leaving billions on the table.
Adora Cheung: Speaking of competition, there has been billions of dollars in venture funding going into competitors, or so called competitors, like [inaudible] and so forth. I mean, you were the original meal kit company, what do you think about? Is it like all that money is going over there, but you're, "I'm here, surviving and I'm growing fast." What's really going in your mind?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah, well, we can look at the silver lining of it, which is that necessity breeds invention.
And 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 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.
Adora Cheung: So you talk a lot about mission. But beyond that, what actually really ... How did you keep going over the seven, eight years? Is it genetic? What do you think it really is beyond just the mission?
Ooshma Garg: Wow. Man, maybe it is some nature nurture thing. Mission is a big part of it. But with regards to the grit and determination thing, from an early age, I think I just ... My parents wanted me to go to the school, this all girls school, and I hated my current school, I was bullied a lot.
And there was bad phrases and racist things on my locker and bad stuff.
And I applied to this girl school in kindergarten, and I didn't get in.
And then in first grade, and I didn't get in, and in second grade, and I didn't get in, and you had to take this ERB test.
And then in those early grades are asking what's a triangle or something, right? And I didn't get in. So I was, "What's going on?" And my parents weren't donating, and there's all these other factors. But I didn't know that.
And so I kept applying, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade didn't get in.
And I remember one time my parents were, "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 I was letting them down, and I didn't want to take the test. I was, "Who needs this school? Forget it, it's stupid." And I took the test, and I still didn't get in.
And 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 start a Model UN society. I saw it in a different way.
And 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.
And so somehow, early on, 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 10 years in the making.
There are some flukes that are 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 this lead bullets, grit do not give up strategy.
Adora Cheung: You were a very ambitious third grader, and a [inaudible] too.
Ooshma Garg: Thank you.
Adora Cheung: I wish that we had known you then. We would have just predicted all this, and funded you all the way back in kindergarten.
Ooshma Garg: That would have been great.
Adora Cheung: So you talked about, obviously never quitting, but do you think there are reasons to quit?
Ooshma Garg: I guess I quit on my first startup, and on one of the iterations of Gobble, and the only reasons I have ever quit is because I think that what I was doing didn't have enough impact in the broader world, or fulfillment and for me, and meaning and purpose for me. I thought about this question.
And those are the only reasons I have quit in the past. I think, though, that said, I think if the environment evolves, and you can't keep up with it, and things are just waste surpassing you, then that would be a really hard look in the mirror. And I may 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.
Adora Cheung: So two more questions, and then we'll take questions from the audience. One is, when you look back, are there decisions that you made in the early days that you're thankful that you made, that were really critical to your success, and if so, what were they?
Ooshma Garg: Well, I'll talk about two. So one of them is that one of them is, a lot changed when we hired our Executive Chef, Thomas Ricci.
And it wasn't just ... We hired a chef to make consistent food and good food, and safe food in the kitchen. What we gained, though, was the ability to innovate in food.
And what I have learned, 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 10 homogenous engineers in a room and make something incredible. You have to have other experts in consumer or food or something. Whatever else is in your industry to really find those little insights. 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 contracts or chefs.
The second thing was, I have to thank a 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, I got matched up with Adora, and we didn't even figure it out by Demo Day, like we raised 200 K on Demo Day was nothing because it wasn't the right timing. We hadn't figured it out. And we had just hired our chef, 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, 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, "Ooshma." And she was, "This is it. You need to fucking do it." And she was, "You need to do it now." And I was, "Okay." And she was, "How fast can you do it?" And want to impress people, so I'm, "I don't know, two weeks." She was, "Great." I mean, she basically was ... We had four weeks. So she was just ... It was in July, and I remember because it was August 1st, and she's, "Do it by August 1st." I was, "Okay, great." And I don't even know if she remembers all of that, but that's what I thought of every single day for 30 days.
And I shut down that personalized inner service.
And we were doing maybe like one and a half to two million in ARR, but it wasn't going anywhere.
The food wasn't different enough.
And when we had tested and R&D these prep kits, where people cook it themselves and feel like a superhero, that was magical in our 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.
And then on August 3rd, we launched this thing.
And I emailed Adora this long email of, "Here are the screenshots, here's this." And I was using her to hold myself accountable. I was like, "It's launched." And that was the best decision of our lives.
And so just speed 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.
Adora Cheung: Cool. Yeah, one of the things I tell people, "Just do it already, do it."
Ooshma Garg: Yes, exactly.
Adora Cheung: You have the idea, just stop meddling, just do it. Okay. So last question for me is 50 to 100 years from now, Gobble is going to be even bigger it is today. But what do you think it's going to be?
Ooshma Garg: Wow, in the 50 to 100 year vision, I actually want Gobble to be let's call it Disney of the home.
And 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, single parents, hourly working, affluent people. 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.
And I think at the end of the day, when our lives are over, all we care about are the moments with our loved ones.
And 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.
Adora Cheung: That's interesting. So [inaudible] more than just food? Didn't know.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah, we're working on a few other things around education and learning and things like that.
Adora Cheung: Awesome. Cool.
All right. So, who has questions? Speaker 3: This question is [inaudible] You talk about grit and determination, right? But besides that, you've actually [inaudible] the problems, people who are in here have customers here, but let's working visa, H1B, stuff like that, right? They eventually [inaudible] legal hurdle, you see them making progress, and they've officially made progress but now they're, "I didn't know what I what do I do with grit." Because [inaudible] that problem, right? So, what kind of suggestion do you have for those people that are in that situation? And now they're, "Shit I just can't do anything about it, I don't know what to do."
Ooshma Garg: Yeah, so I think the question is around, that there are environmental constraints and legal constraints like with regards to immigration H1B and things like that that prevent people from being where they want to be with their customer, right? Speaker 3: They've already been there, and what do they do now? They have to do it full time, they've reached the stage.
Ooshma Garg: If you have to do it full time but you have to live in another country, is that what you're asking? Speaker 3: You're already here, you have your customers here, there's no point going back to where you came from. So you are here, you've made progress on the side of the progress, you have your first customer.
And now you've reached a point where you can pull this thing off on the weekends or on the evenings, so you're having this full time, but you can't. So what do there, grit, determination? What's the way out?
Ooshma Garg: Well, I know one of my good friends had a similar problem.
And these are very tactical things, they established some shell company.
And then one of the investors was put on as a board member, and then that board member sponsor the sponsorship, but you're really the CEO of the company.
And so there are ... I think, first of all, getting that H1B visa is insane, right? And we have people who can't get that visa. So Gobble, actually has an engineering team in India and in South Africa.
And we're just waiting for the visas.
And some people have been waiting for 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 is some things you can do. I think YC has helped with some of that stuff.
Adora Cheung: If you're making revenue, and you have an actual company going, there's ways to go about it. I would just talk with a lawyer.
Ooshma Garg: Great. Speaker 4: Hi, thank you so much for coming and sharing with us.
Talk a little bit about the pricing [inaudible] of Gobble. I have a very successful offline business that I'm bringing online and I'm scared.
And I'm holding that because of pricing, so please inspire me and everyone else, tell us about your pricing strategy.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah, interesting. So we've done a lot. Oh, yeah, sorry 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 in a scrappy company, the best tool for pricing experimentation is email, because it's hard to put 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, different clusters of people, three different prices.
And then the early days, I did it with 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 ...
And then sometimes to each individual person, I would send three plans. I'd say, "Do you want Plan A, B, or C?" And so that 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 multiply the profit times how many people buy it, and whichever one wins, and most profit is your best price. Speaker 4: Thank you. Speaker 5: Thank you coming to talk to us today. YC is really pro having a co-founder, and you did it on my own for a while. So can you talk about that?
Ooshma Garg: The question is that YC is very pro, having a co founder and that I did it on my own for a while. Can I talk about that? When I started Gobble, I looked for a co-founder.
And I just started it. I found chefs on Craigslist.
And I was delivering food in my car. But I was dating co-founders that are now other YC founders at the time.
And no one at that time, in that three, 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 a unique ...
This was all very organic, I didn't really think, "I must have a co founder or I must be a solo co-founder." I tried to find one, and my priority was 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 as 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 a co-founding team. But at scale.
And the early days, what I say for single founders is, "If you're swimming in the ocean, it's like a net buoy system." So you have to find 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 talk to them, and they help you. But then since you don't have a co-founder, no one can be a rock, right? So next time, you'll need to rest, you swim over to another buoy, and you hug that.
And 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 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.
Adora Cheung: Yes. Speaker 6: How has your life changed as CEO now versus when you started? What were the lows? What were the highs?
Ooshma Garg: Wow.
Adora Cheung: There aren't.
Ooshma Garg: Please apologize.
Adora Cheung: So the question is, how has your role as CEO changed beginning to what it is now? Must have been dramatic?
Ooshma Garg: Yes. Okay. In the beginning, one of the highs is just that you're constantly innovating. That 24-7 maker time is very precious to me. By contrast, now, my day is like, full of meetings. It's meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, and then dinners.
And so yesterday, I get home at 11.00 pm.
Today we're starting at 8.00 am.
And it's 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 nobody cares about you. You barely have any customers, I'm just sleeping at our office or laying on our couch.
And I remembered in some of the lows, I just would put white paper all over.
And I'd lay on the floor, and I would just be like a blank slate and be, "Okay, what's next? Come up with it." And so those are the lows.
The highs now are it's really gratifying when people start to know you, every time I meet a customer, in the wild, it makes my day.
And 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.
Adora Cheung: Okay, let's take few more questions. One in the back. Speaker 7: Yeah. Hi, my name is [Shrays] the co-founder [inaudible] . One of my question is that in early stages, you have to work with a lot of people, and how do you work with those people? So you have your sales where you're getting the money from but you also have people that work with you and help your company grow. So my question is, how do you get that happening without pestering them? "Hey [inaudible] ." But how do you do that in a good manner and way, make them believe in your vision?
Adora Cheung: Yeah.
Ooshma Garg: That's a great question.
The question is, in the early days, you have your ... I think the question is this, that you have your team that you're working with, and your customers, but there are other people that aren't on your team that help you and they're, mentors, advisors, friends, how do you get those people to work with you without feeling that you're pestering them? I had a lot of this. So this is a really good question.
Two things. One, I targeted the right advisors to help me and I would find out where they were speaking.
And I would wait till everybody was done talking to them, and be the last one to talk to the speaker, because they would remember me, and then I would walk them to their car because they were in a rush. So again, this is about psychology, and what does what does a speaker need to do? They've talked to 100 people, they need to go, if you carry their bags to their car, you're helping them in a small little way.
And you're showing some respect there.
That's how I found Aaron Patzer from mint.com, back in the day, who was one of my early advisors and some other people.
That was a hack to finding the right mentors, find out where they are and wait, and then follow up.
The other thing is, I only asked people questions that was in their wheelhouse. So I learned a lot about, "What should I ask this person? Because when you spend time with someone who's a mentor, and let's say, you asked me about enterprise sales. I don't know anything about, I do a little bit, but I don't know a lot about enterprise sales.
And so it makes them feel bad.
And it's also a waste of your time.
And what I would do with people is I would bring ... I structured a white piece of paper, and three thirds, I guess.
And the top would be my progress, "What have I done since I last saw you?" The next third would be, "What am I working on now?" And the last third would be, "What are my challenges?" And I was very organized about all the time that I asked from people.
And so they always saw progress.
And then they would see their advice come back, and I would save all my notes. So in the early days, I met Reid Hoffman.
And there was this cafe called University cafe, and I went to cafes that only had paper tablecloths, and we would write all over the tablecloth.
And then I would take it had coffee stains on it and stuff, and I would take it home.
And I still have this box of those tablecloths that are like big butcher papers from five, six years ago. So it's just like, I think about all those little things and about making time useful, taking notes, being prepared and meeting with the right people.
Adora Cheung: I think also, and you mentioned this, but I just want to pull it out as being very thoughtful of the questions you asked, and being very specific, instead of asking broad questions that could take hours to answer.
Ooshma Garg: Yes.
Adora Cheung: You'll more likely get an answer, as a result. Okay. Last question. Make it good. Guy in the back. Speaker 8: Hi, my name Mark Rafael, In fact I was so eager to hear you today, I left my exhibition [inaudible] to come here.
Ooshma Garg: Oh, my gosh, thank you so much. Speaker 8: My question is about investors, actually you said struggled a lot to get investment at the very beginning. You gave some hacks, how we get customers, you said before we get mentors in a budget. What did you do? Did you develop some strategy overtime to get good investors?
Ooshma Garg: Wow, great question.
The question is, we talked about the hacks with getting customers and what are the hacks around getting investors because I struggled with getting investors in the in early days. I think as you observe all your friends, everybody has lucky, 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. 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. 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.
And it's because Amazon acquired Whole Foods, and everyone is afraid of Amazon. So they just thought Amazon's going to do Gobble.
And also because Blue Apron went public, and they don't have a lot of defense ability.
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 everyone help you with your deck and your pitch.
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, "Even if 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 hedging against themselves and saying, "Don't worry, I'll still protect your money." But you need to up level that when you go talk to investors and not say even if, you need to say that, "We have the potential to be the next big x, we have the potential to be a $10 billion business in three years.
And like pump yourself up, stretch, power pose, but you have to end on that really big high note, very strong.
And that's my piece of advice.
Adora Cheung: All right.
Thank you so much Ooshma.
Ooshma Garg: Thank you.