Lunch, disrupted: ZeroCater helps startups get fed
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Imagine you could get an extra half-hour of productive conversations out of people for ten bucks each. That's paying people $20/hr! What a good deal for engineers in the Bay Area.
It is, and it isn't.
I might be an oddball, but I prefer to get away from the office for an hour a day. It's become conventional wisdom in the valley echo chamber that catered lunch is a "productivity win", but there's a lot to be said for the change in perspective that getting out of the office provides. When I go out for lunch, I feel more relaxed, more creative, and calmer about my work. And don't forget -- just because I'm sitting around a table eating with my co-workers does not mean that I'm talking about work (in fact, I suspect it's a net-neutral benefit, if you're only looking at worker productivity).
Last, but not least, there's a health component: carry-out for lunch, every day, is a good way to kill yourself. My cholesterol levels (and body weight) shot up dramatically when I was eating take-out on a daily basis. Google cafeterias serve healthy food; cheap restaurant food doesn't measure up. Once I went back to finding my own lunch, my cholesterol levels dropped back to normal.
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Seriously, not sure if you were here the first go round, but thats exactly what the first bubble was like.
However now we have concepts like lean startups and the fund-them-young-and-hungry model of today.
But look at startups like Color.com got 40+MM without so much as user validation.
1) The cost of good engineers in the Bay Area is ridiculous. Bringing lunch in, say, once a week, will be less than a 1% difference in your compensation budget. And you are competing with places like Google which have free awesome food daily.
2) People are not robots. In theory, it should make no difference who orders or pays for food. In practice, it's swell to just have something tasty show up so that everybody can have lunch together with no hassle.
Reminds me of the story of a saloon during the original California gold rush that would sell a bowl of soup for an astronomical sum. The people who stuck it rich would buy it so they could brag about how much they paid for a bowl of soup. Not sure how true it is, but believable.
Two 'new money' Russians are riding in a limousine in Moscow, and one says to the other "You know, I paid $1000 for this tie". The other guy says, "Idiot! I know a shop where you can get that tie for $2000!"
Also variable is the labeling. I'm a vegetarian, often I have to play the guessing game of "is that meat or not?" Just last week I bit into a meat filled burrito that was in a bagged marked as 'vegan'.
So they'll have to work on the quality of the restaurants they make available, but the service itself is great.
ZC is a YC company. He's probably afraid of the downvotes if he doesn't keep up the crowd fawning going on here.
Their product is food. That's the important thing. All the CS and effort in the world is meaningless without the food quality being better than just acceptable and certainly not "pretty bad".
In the non-startup world a restaurant serving bad food would only survive on a toll road rest stop or where there are no other alternatives.
I have to agree with what you say. A very inspiring story!
This is so cool. Running a restaurant is extremely difficult and the margins are low. ZeroCater is helping them operate a different kind of business in an efficient way (like catering but with way less overhead and sales).
I've gone out and talked to restaurants that work with ZeroCater. ZeroCater has become a significant source of revenue for many of these small businesses.
You are right, I wouldnt call it disruptive either, but it is a very useful service.
(and I'd argue you are disruptive when others call you so, not when you do it yourself) That applies to the word "Hacker" too.
I don't see any reason why a middleman that's doing something innovative shouldn't be considered a disruption.
I agree that it is an often overused term and one which is too often used to describe innovative business models or small startups. I don't see how it applies here. That said, a business certainly does not need to be disruptive to be successful. Disruptive companies are extremely rare and only come along once in a while.
I once had a professor who said that a great way to spot the potential for a disruptive product is to look for situations where you find yourself using a hybrid model- that is you use two or more solutions to solve a single problem. One meets a single need but not enough to replace the others.
Pls let it be New York City. We'd love to sign up.
Not only that it makes the afternoon far more productive too as I am much more awake than if I skip it.
At the risk of sounding like the person who predicted the need for only 100 computers worldwide (or whatever that small number was) I don't see how this idea can be expanded to offer a similar service in the legacy corporate world where companies are not trying to be "mommy" to their workers to squeeze out ounces of extra productivity.
Food service is really hard even if you operate the food service place and the people come to you. Here you are maintaining quality among multiple food places with many chances for things to get screwed up. Additionally the typical workplace is not filled with a young forgiving workforce.
I am saying that maintaining quality with this is extremely difficult.
You are dealing with food service and rag tag food service at that.
Having owned (non food service companies) that employ the type of workers that are essentially the same as in food service with an equivalent amount of variables (that can go wrong because of human error) it is my feeling that this is difficult to scale.
And while it is true that zero cater will be an important customer to any of their vendors, they don't have control over hiring and food quality as well as other things that will impact their customer base. And they can't just switch to a supplier in another state. They are limited by the existing suppliers in their market.
Now of course if they want to operate the food suppliers (with their own canteen) that would give them the control they need. But that is an entirely different business.
Basically, every day they pick a restaurant. I place my order off the menu. It gets delivered w/ my name on it. Works fantastic.
It was quite common to have this service during the internet bubble. Some folks put on a pound per month.
Also, there were similar services for keeping refrigerators stocked, soda machines, etc.
Most of the new people allegedly take an quite a few pounds.
Not worrying about what to get the team for lunch is a huge time saver.
It gives us more time to spend on users.
Disclaimer, we use ZeroCater twice a week and absolutely love them.