1/23/2024 0 Comments Seamless grubhub ipo![]() Going off the railsĪnd the business did grow. The terms were sort of bad, but it was cash. "It allows me to work hard without the specter of getting stuck," he wrote. It also came with one other caveat: Evans couldn't be co-CEO, but embedded in the paperwork was the provision that Evans could leave the company if and when it sold, without an earnout period. The pair used that network to find more investors, eventually signing what Evans joked in the book was the "worst investment deal ever signed" with Origin Ventures, which gave them $1 million for terms including what is called "participating preferred investment" (which means they get a larger chunk of a company after it sells than in most venture deals). Meanwhile, Evans and Maloney went to raise money, winning the University of Chicago's New Venture Challenge and $50,000 in 2006, which gave them the capital to bring Maloney on full-time and access to the "startup Illuminati," Evans wrote. It's not a particularly good idea." But it drove traffic to the website, which helped him convince restaurants to take online orders and bring in more customers.Įvans hired someone named Tyler from Craigslist to be the business's first employee in the area and sign on restaurants in San Francisco. "My answer to that question is cheat," he says, like how Uber paid drivers to sit idle before it had customers. In any marketplace business, Evans says, you have to find a way to set up the network. In perhaps the book's most memorable anecdote, Evans recounts traversing the entire city of San Francisco picking up menus to add to This success led Evans to decide it was time to head to the capital of startup land, San Francisco, as the next city to add to the platform. After adding it, orders on the site tripled, and a month later Grubhub pulled in $20,000 in revenue. Evans and Maloney eventually realized online ordering was a lot easier for customers. Evans taught himself to get restaurants on board, as he memorably recounts, buying Selling for Dummies at Borders bookstore. It brought orders in, and Grubhub made a small commission on each sale. Despite the intensity of building a network, subscription-based business from the ground up, Grubhub was actually good for restaurants, at least the way Evans tells it. He even came up with a tagline: "You don't make a dime unless you make a dollar." "Why can't we just charge the restaurants per order?" Maloney said. It was a churn and burn, on-foot business - until Maloney had the breakthrough moment. They - well, mostly Evans, he contends in the book - started by going door-to-door, restaurant-to-restaurant in Chicago and picking up menus to scan while trying to sell the businesses on paid advertising. Maloney is generally identified as a co-founder, but Evans refers to himself as the founder in the memoir.)īut before all of that, they were just two men with an idea and a desire to promote Chicago restaurants. (Maloney left the company in 2021, seven years after Evans did. Maloney was, and he served as CEO from 2004 to 2021 per an agreement the pair made when they raised money a few years in. "From this moment on, it's a legitimate business, not a hobby." But as he wrote in his memoir, he was never really the face of that business. "A business comes into being with the first sale," Evans wrote. It was the first dollar the company made. Shortly after, Maloney left their office for a long lunch, talked to a Chinese restaurant owner and her bartender son about this newfangled online delivery guide, and they paid $140 to be "premium listed" on for six months. Evans told Maloney about his idea to have restaurants pay to be listed at the top of the Grubhub website. So he decided the hobby delivery guide needed to make some money, get him off someone else's payroll and maybe even help him pay off the $236,000 in student debt he and his wife Christine had accumulated.Įnter: friend and coworker Matt Maloney. Evans hated his job at the time - like, listening-to-"I-quit"-songs hated his job. After the armpit moment, Evans created a map with Chicago restaurants, restaurant names and phone numbers during an all-night coding session and Lucky Charms binge.Īt the time it had no delivery service - it was just an online list and map divided out by zip code, and sometimes Evans would scan and add menus after ordering from nearby restaurants using the list. ![]()
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