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ZeroCater (YC W11) Raises $1.5 Million For No-Hassle Office Lunches
- Aloisius 15y agoWe use ZeroCater at our SF office. It really does make choosing what to get a lot easier.
- danilocampos 15y agoThey'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.)
- xal 15y agoWhat 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 15y agoEmployees 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 15y agoIt would be great to have a premium option where an office can also order some flowers/plants to be delivered as well.
- blantonl 15y agoit 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 15y agoWell, 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.
- samstave 15y agoWhat is the minimum order? I didnt see it in "Learn More" -- I work from home and am a single consultant. Can I use ZeroCater?
- ChuckMcM 15y agoThese guys have been providing us lunches at Blekko and we are a lot happier. [edit: dang I suck at tenses]
- biot 15y agoI assume you mean "we are now a lot happier"?
- guimarin 15y agothat 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 15y agoFeel free to send us an email any time: hello at zerocater
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- reemrevnivek 15y agoAn alternative wording of that statement could be "The average of the [already averaged] Yelp ratings of the restaurants listed on this page is over 4 stars." I don't think that they're claiming that every restaurant has a 4-star or above rating. The claim is that the cumulative average of the 60-some restaurants on that page is over 4 stars. It's possible that they have 46 5-star restaurants, and 14 1-star locations.
- njharman 15y agoI 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.
- danilocampos 15y agoLeaving the office is nice. But who among us has never had this conversation? "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.
- thomasgerbe 15y agoI don't know why you got downvoted. That's a legit concern.
- flyingyeti 15y agoHave you tried https://www.paydivvy.com/ https://www.paydivvy.com/ ?
- cpeterso 15y ago> Bill splitting is the service I want. 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 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bill-split-ocr/id347826835
- gaborcselle 15y agoCongrats 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 http://i.imgur.com/umToE.jpg)
- boredguy8 15y agoI 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.
- hristov 15y agoWould anyone from ZeroCater care to comment on whether there were additional difficulties in raising money due to the recent stock market crash?
- pitdesi 15y agoI 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 15y agoThis is correct. We closed the round more than a month ago.
- ericfrenkiel 15y agoAnytime you read about a funding announcement, you can be certain the round closed anywhere from 1 month to 3 months beforehand, and that the funds are now safely deposited. Consequently, we'll see ramifications later this winter if rounds were negatively impacted.
- bretthoerner 15y agoCongrats Arram!
- larsberg 15y agoAre 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 15y agoThe 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 15y agoThere'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 15y agoThat 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.
- mey 15y agoIf you are in the Portland or Denver areas, check out http://d-dish.com/ http://d-dish.com/ for both personal and catering needs.
- Hexteque 15y agoIf this isn't the peak of the bubble, I don't know what is.
- kapilkale 15y agoReally? Because a company regarded extremely well by its peers and advisors, with a solid business model and clear plans for expansion, raises a seed round? If you're going to say that when a company announces funding, at least provide some backup.
- guiseppecalzone 15y agoThis company is killing it. Real, serious revenue and they haven't even scaled yet. Do some research before you criticize.
- losvedir 15y agoFunny, 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.
- jvandonsel 15y ago"Lunch is for wimps." - Gordon Gekko
- Dramatize 15y agoAm I the only person who brings lunch from home? Eating out every day gets expensive.
- abstractbill 15y agoIndividual 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.
- rednaught 15y agoFor 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494398 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/04/28.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/04/28.html
- timjahn 15y agoI'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 15y agoI 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 15y agoExactly 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.
- albahk 15y agoAn 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-monitor-does-lunch/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2871/how-campaign-m...
- pg_bot 15y agoThis seems like a perfect company for the culture of SF. I'm not sure how well it will scale to other cities though.
- ginkgoo 15y agoDo 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 15y agoThis 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 15y agoI'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.
- nknight 15y agoWhat 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 15y agoBut 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 15y agoBut 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 15y agoThat'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
- Hominem 15y agoThis 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?
- espeed 15y agoCongrats Zain!
- charliepark 15y agoI'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.