November 30, 2011

Hello World

ZeroCater started in my living room in December 2009. It grew out of my own biggest pain: while working at Justin.tv, I discovered that ordering food for a group of people was a laborious task that no one wanted to be responsible for. Finding good restaurants, figuring out the set of menu items meeting everyone's dietary restrictions, and then communicating them to the restaurants was taking up a big chunk of each day.

I took the pain for granted until I was trying to come up with startup ideas of my own. Justin Kan mentioned that friends at another Y Combinator company had just been complaining about it too. Maybe I could help them out since I was already doing it for Justin.tv?

ZeroCater (zero-effort catering) was born. I quit my job within three months to go full time.

ZeroCater 1.0, a.k.a. "The Spreadsheet Era." Redefining minimum viable product.

Things didn't always go smoothly. Once, a restaurant didn't receive an order cancellation, so I had sausages for 40 people routed to my apartment.

https://twitter.com/#!/arram/status/23946438900

Life gave me lemons sausages, so I made lemonade a sausage party.

https://twitter.com/#!/arram/status/23950441754

ZeroCater turned out to be something people wanted. My schedule spreadsheet grew as new customers joined. I experienced growing pains.

https://twitter.com/#!/arram/status/24172723730

After I'd been searching for a technical co-founder for a few months, I was having dinner with a friend from Justin.tv, Bill Moorier. Bill was Justin.tv's first engineering hire and he is one of the smartest people I know. When he mentioned he was leaving to do his own startup, alarm bells went off in my head. I immediately asked him to be my co-founder.

I'm happy to say that the spreadsheets are now retired.

We're now feeding many of the great Bay Area companies you know and love. We've been through Y Combinator, raised a $1.5M seed round, and built the team to 12 amazing people.

Team Dinner, November 2011.

Team lunches are an obviously good idea. Facebook and Google have chefs for a reason. People work harder when you feed them. The only reason you don't see office meals everywhere is the effort they take to coordinate. We're determined to change that. We're getting ready to take ZeroCater to every major city. Watch for us.