
ZeroCater (YC W11) Raises $1.5 Million For No-Hassle Office Lunches - abstractbill
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/10/zerocater-raises-1-5-million-for-no-hassle-office-lunches/
======
larsberg
Are administrative assistants either really expensive or ineffective at meal
purchasing in the SF area? This seems like a tasty service and all, but back-
of-envelope I would think it hard to compete with ~an hour a day of
$15-20/hour labor. Especially since even with this service I still need to pay
my admin a half hour for door open/setup/cleanup.

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).

~~~
arram
The people ordering food usually also end up responsible for every other
miscellaneous task, so are very happy to have someone take care of one of
their least important, but most time consuming jobs. One of the most frequent
reactions from new signups we see is a big sigh of relief.

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.

~~~
rdl
There's definitely a period in a startup where founders or management end up
handling a lot of minor tasks like this, before hiring admin support staff. I
personally would rather pay for services (garbage collection, catering, copier
repair, etc.) vs. hiring an admin person to do this, because managing yet
another employee (and one from a different background than engineers) adds
stress to my life.

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.

~~~
larsberg
That makes sense, and follows with my general experience: once your team
reaches >= 8 people, there will always be one of them having a Major Life
Issue (cancer, drugs, burnout, divorce, etc.) that will consume incredible
amounts of your time too.

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.

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danilocampos
They've been feeding me and my colleagues the last couple weeks and I gotta
say: pretty awesome. Great variety of food and everything has been delicious.
I crow about new food several times a week since they started, and I'm a
pretty tough sell.

(And they've stopped asking for that goofy video audition requirement in all
their job postings, so props to them for seeing the light.)

------
gaborcselle
Congrats Arram and Bill! I vividly remember the "Wave of Food" illustration
from Demo Day. If that's not a reason to invest in a company, I don't know
what is. (<http://i.imgur.com/umToE.jpg>)

~~~
boredguy8
I echo the congrats. However, the 'wave of food' was gluttonous and off-
putting to me personally. It also features fried food and carbs, which seems
to run counter to the healthier trends I've seen. But I'm way on the outside,
so maybe i'm missing something.

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njharman
I don't want lunch delivered. Lunch is time to _leave_ the office and
socialize with team members I'm not working with all day.

Bill splitting is the service I want.

~~~
rdl
Also, food provided in-office is 100% deductible; meals outside are 50%.

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.

~~~
charliepark
Out of curiosity, how do you categorize expenses such that in-office food is
covered? I've wondered this before with coffee (getting in-office coffee as
deductible, whereas out at Starbucks is 50% at best). Would be interested to
learn how you file these expenses for your taxes.

~~~
rdl
<http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15b.pdf>

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.

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xal
What is the process for employees like? Does food just show up or is there
some kind of website / email that everyone gets before lunch?

~~~
abstractbill
Employees get to see a webpage on zerocater.com that has all of their upcoming
menus for the next couple of weeks. On the day the food is delivered, they can
use that page to rank the food and comment on it. That feedback is critical to
us because we use it to figure out what to order in the future (I tell people
we're "Pandora for food").

~~~
samstave
It would be great to have a premium option where an office can also order some
flowers/plants to be delivered as well.

~~~
blantonl
it would also be great to have new senior programmers delivered with the
skills that are needed upon request - of course as a premium service.

In all seriousness, let's keep in mind that startups need to remain _focused_
on their _core business_.

~~~
samstave
Well, sure, I agree that they need to focus on their core service; in this
case - delivering "lunch" -- which by my comment _could_ be inclusive of
accompanying floral arrangements.

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.

------
Aloisius
We use ZeroCater at our SF office. It really does make choosing what to get a
lot easier.

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ChuckMcM
These guys have been providing us lunches at Blekko and we are a lot happier.

[edit: dang I suck at tenses]

~~~
guimarin
that said, they need to fix their portioning. We typically get wayyyy too much
food. and our vegetarian options are always out of whack with the number of
vegetarian's we've listed.

~~~
arram
Feel free to send us an email any time: hello at zerocater

------
timjahn
I'm curious what percentage of their customer base is startups and what
percentage is other types of businesses (ie, businesses they'll encounter in
other markets than the valley).

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?

~~~
blantonl
I suspect that their goal is obviously to expand into other major metro
markets like Chicago and NYC. Thus the funding.

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.

~~~
timjahn
Exactly my thoughts. My hunch is these guys are surviving solely from the
saturation of startups in San Francisco and the surrounding area.

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.

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charliepark
I'm not in SF, so maybe this is ignorance on my part, but how common is it for
employers to provide lunch for their employees? Is that a Thing now? A few
years ago, it was a big part of news stories about Google, how they have in-
house chefs and lunch is free to all employees and all that, and that seemed
like a big deal at the time. Has "lunch for employees" trickled down to small
companies and startups? What % of startups do that? And is there a split
between VC-backed startups and bootstrapping startups regarding who
does/doesn't do it?

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.

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ginkgoo
Do people really think working on problems like this is impactful? Guessing
the guys running this are pretty smart engineers, bums me out that they are
making "solving the office lunch problem" their big hack.

~~~
yoshyosh
This is only the starting point. If such a company were able to hit critical
mass, think about the potential they could have feeding residents and helping
healthcare monitering. Perhaps even disrupting the concept of needed super
markets. The possibilities are endless beyond whats on the surface

~~~
ginkgoo
I'm not sure the "possibilities are endless". At best they are lowering
transaction costs between ppl selling food and ppl buying food. Feels like
there are bigger problems out there.

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hristov
Would anyone from ZeroCater care to comment on whether there were additional
difficulties in raising money due to the recent stock market crash?

~~~
pitdesi
I would guess that they almost certainly had all of their commits before the
past week and have just announced them now. Too early to see the effects of
the crash on VC's in funding announcements imo

~~~
arram
This is correct. We closed the round more than a month ago.

------
rednaught
For those who may have missed a great discussion on "lunch at the office" a
few months ago from a Joel Spolsky blog post:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494398>
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/04/28.html>

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albahk
An interesting solution from Campaign Monitor solves this problem for them and
was coded by an intern...

[http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2871/how-
campaign-m...](http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2871/how-campaign-
monitor-does-lunch/)

------
Dramatize
Am I the only person who brings lunch from home? Eating out every day gets
expensive.

~~~
abstractbill
Individual employees don't pay for zerocater, their employers do.

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.

------
Hominem
This is awesome, but how do they deal building with crazy security. Would I
still have to go all the way down to the building messenger center to pick up
the food?

------
mey
If you are in the Portland or Denver areas, check out <http://d-dish.com/> for
both personal and catering needs.

------
pg_bot
This seems like a perfect company for the culture of SF. I'm not sure how well
it will scale to other cities though.

------
bretthoerner
Congrats Arram!

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espeed
Congrats Zain!

------
jvandonsel
"Lunch is for wimps." - Gordon Gekko

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nknight
What distinguishes this from waiter.com? So far it sounds like the primary
distinction is "you don't get to directly choose what you get every day",
which is a big loss.

~~~
jackowayed
But at the same time kind of a big win. I spend a nontrivial amount of time on
picking my food on waiter.com. We also have 2 offices that people switch
between, and people order to the wrong office all the time. That would be a
little problematic for ZeroCater too (we'd have to be able to give them a
sense of how many people will be where on a given day, and a sense of where
the people with diet restrictions are going to be), but it's a little more
flexible.

~~~
nknight
But the day ZeroCater misunderstands a dietary restriction, or just shows up
with something I can't stand, there would be a big problem.

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.

~~~
jackowayed
That's true, but nothing's perfect. Once so far I have misread a (somewhat-
confusing) menu item and ordered meat by mistake.

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

------
Hexteque
If this isn't the peak of the bubble, I don't know what is.

~~~
losvedir
Funny, of all the recent YC companies I've been reading about lately, this one
makes the most sense to me.

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.

