ZeroCater (YC W11) Raises $1.5 Million For No-Hassle Office Lunches
techcrunch.com
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Unless this service is targeted mainly at companies that eschew personal assistant-style employment? I'll admit I've only run teams or worked at companies in the Seattle and Chicago area, where there is an abundance of "young liberal arts grads" to handle straightforward tasks.
I've never done the startup thing, so please feel free to correct me if C-levels are really handling this sort of work themselves (as the testimonials seem to hint).
The second issue is that someone responsible for ordering food part time isn't going to do it as well as someone who's concerned with nothing else. It's specialization of labor.
If I had a great candidate for admin/manager, maybe I'd consider it, but I could easily see getting to 20-30 employees before doing so.
If you're stuck hiring them on your own (i.e. not part of a big company that has its own infra for hiring and training staff employees), several of my buddies who have started smaller companies swear by temp agencies. Quickly scan a few resumes, do a couple of chats, and then bring them onboard for a few weeks or a month in a try-before-you-buy role.
Also, if your admin does not _remove_ stress from your life, they're doing it wrong. Having had both decent and great admins, I can say that a great admin is an incredible enabler. Need your schedule to always have a three hour block of uninterrupted work time? Hate responding to urgent-but-unimportant crises that people always email you about? A professional, organized, and utterly ruthless admin is net positive w.r.t. your time and stress far more than they will ever be paid.
b) One major problem that this solves is the randomness factor. We don't have to decide what we want, and if we don't like what we get on a particular day, we can just ask not to have that anymore. It's awesome.
(And they've stopped asking for that goofy video audition requirement in all their job postings, so props to them for seeing the light.)
Bill splitting is the service I want.
"Let's get lunch."
"Okay, where?"
"Chinese."
"Ugh. I don't feel like that today. How about that sandwich place?"
"We were just there on Monday!"
"Yeah. Feel like a burger?"
"That place isn't very good. Kind of expensive."
"Wish there was something new to try."
Then everyone goes back to work.
Then 15 minutes later you realize, ah, fuck, still hungry!
So the appeal with ZeroCater is that with no effort, boom, there's food. And it's often new food. And it's tasty. And you give no effort to thinking about it. So lunch is just a nice, social thing that lasts as long as you want it to without being prolonged by bad service, slow kitchen, whatever.
It's a pretty solid deal. Not a bad tradeoff. Picking lunch can be a miserable affair, especially when you work in a place with thin food options.
Oh, and as someone who was once subjected to truly fucking terrible office catering: wow, what a joy it is to get quality food delivered.
One of my phone app ideas (inspired by demoing Word Lens' real-time video translator over lunch) is a bill-splitting app that uses OCR:
1. Photograph the receipt.
2. OCR the items ordered.
3. User clicks the items to group each person's order. Or even cooler: fling items to the side or corner of the phone screen nearest that person (like a card dealer).
4. The app calculates each item groups' total with tax and tip.
Unfortunately, the market for bill-splitting or tip-calculating apps is probably pretty crowded. <:\
EDIT: I see now that an iPhone app that uses OCR to analyze your receipt already exists, though the reviews say the OCR sucks: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bill-split-ocr/id347826835
Having great food available daily would be a nice hook to bring in open source dev partners, potential employees (especially passive-recruit candidates), potential clients, etc. I know I've gone to Google and Facebook meals on that basis.
Basically if it's a "de minimis benefit" (generally, self-serve food is always included unless it's absurdly luxury), you're fine.
Serving it on business premises seems to be the key factor, at a dedicated cafeteria.
In all seriousness, let's keep in mind that startups need to remain focused on their core business.
I.E. you order a zerocatered meal for a team/exec briefing/whatever - and choose to add some arrangement along with it.
Personally - I have been wanting the netflix of floral delivery for some time at my home. There are already services that do whole corporate plant service, but this is a much broader scope (e.g. showing up regularly to service said plants). Adding simple floral arrangements to an already delivered product is not such a far reach from their core service - there would be no service - just delivery.
[edit: dang I suck at tenses]
Will they be signing up all the large ad agencies on Michigan Ave when they hit Chicago? Or is this more for the 10-40 person "in the know" startup?
But, you have a good point, being, many companies in the NYC/Chicago area already have very defined pre-arranged catering avenues in place. From the trained executive assistant with a drawer full of menus, to the executive dining room, to the go-to deli on the bottom floor, to the local pizza delivery place. These guys certainly have their work cut out for them with regards to penetrating this market and expanding. I would not be surprised if they are only working the startup ecosystem in San Francisco. It's a good start though.
I'm curious what happens when they venture out into "the real world". Seems to me like a company that survives only in the bubble of the valley. Cool idea nonetheless.
ZeroCater seems like a good solution to that problem ... I just had no idea there were so many companies doing that. Would love to hear experiences of people here.
Consequently, we'll see ramifications later this winter if rounds were negatively impacted.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494398 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/04/28.html
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2871/how-campaign-m...
If you do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation involving the hourly wage of a software engineer (for example), and the amount of time saved by not going out for lunch then it's a no-brainer for most employers to do this.
I intentionally order only things I know I'll like and can eat so I don't go through the day hungry and pissed off. The model of "tell us when you don't like something" might eventually approach something semi-reliable, but in the mean time there's going to be a lot of wasted food and low blood sugar.
But that's probably a little rarer than a failure of ZeroCater's model to satisfy every person, and I came away from my Waiter.com error primarily blaming myself, whereas since ZeroCater claims they can satisfy everyone without having you explicitly choose, it's really their fault when they fail at that
If you're going to say that when a company announces funding, at least provide some backup.
They provide a real service that lots of people (judging from these comments) seem to appreciate, which is easily monetizeable. In addition, I can see some great economies of scale here, including cheaper food due to mutually beneficial deals with restaurants.