Startup Spotlight #117: Taste
Taste is a new approach to bringing top-rated restaurant meals to your door.
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I got the chance to speak with Daryl Sew, co-founder and CTO of Taste, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Daryl Sew is the CTO and co-founder of Taste. He loves technology and is a huge foodie - when he and his friend Jeff Chen (CEO and co-founder) saw that restaurants were really struggling at the beginning of COVID, they created Taste to help.
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Startup Spotlight: Taste
Problem: For people in the suburbs, it’s really difficult to get nice food. They have to travel long distances and often get a hotel or a babysitter as well.
Market: There are 40 million households in the US with 6 figure incomes, and we think they will order from Taste twice a month. We make $12 per order, so this is a $12B opportunity just in the US.
Solution: Taste is an online marketplace where you can order ready-to-eat dinners from great restaurants, shipped nationwide. The next time you want to have a nice dinner at home, instead of cooking for hours or getting low-quality take out, you can order a nice multi-course dinner from Taste to enjoy with friends or loved ones.
Team: The founders are Jeff Chen, CEO - formerly sold his company Joyride to Google; Daryl Sew, CTO - formerly worked on autonomous vehicles as well as augmented reality at Snapchat. Key team members are Rachael Henriques, Lizz Spano, Nicole Yu, Troy Ramsarran, Hadassah Salazar, Charles Orr, Julia Robinson, Reyanna James, Danni Luo, and Amisha Wadhwa.
Recent Success:
Sew: We’ve created a really great solution for date nights at home. For busy parents with small kids or foodie couples with no time, Taste is a way to enjoy great food without having to travel. When Jeff and I started this project, we wanted to solve this problem for ourselves - with most of our local options closed and in-restaurant dining inaccessible, Taste was a way for us to enjoy that multi-course restaurant experience at home. Now, we’ve given hundreds of thousands of dollars back to the restaurants and delivered thousands of meals throughout NYC, all based on that initial intuition.
Recent Struggle:
Sew: We allocate a lot of our time to innovating on the core product, talking to users, and bringing them more things that they want. However, as the number of users of the product increases, the surface area for bugs and operational issues increases. With the growth we’ve seen lately, we’ve had fires in areas of the codebase and areas of our operational processes that have historically had no issues.
For example, our site had so many restaurants and users that it slowed to a crawl and eventually went down for a few hours two weeks ago; on Valentine’s day weekend, we had to get a taxi to deliver some food due to the crazy volume spike and driver scaling issues - and many more. It’s been challenging to strike the right balance between core product development, and building a foundation for us to scale on top of.
Founder Advice:
Sew: I think it’s really important to care about the problem you’re solving. In the past when I was working on something I wasn’t passionate about, it was hard to bring my A-game. With Taste, I’m super excited about what we’re doing to help the restaurants - Jeff and I were dining at one of our restaurants a few weeks ago and they told us that, thanks to Taste, they were able to turn a (small) profit during the pandemic, despite all the closures. And I love the fact that we’re making it easy for people to access these amazing dining experiences.
The startup journey is often a 5+ year affair, and the majority of companies do not end up successful. To devote that much of your life to something, you need to be sure you’re working on something for the right reasons - if your startup doesn’t succeed, would you still be glad that you made progress on a worthy cause? And if it does succeed, would you be proud of the impact your company has on the world?
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Sew: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Leo Mehr, Co-founder of Lumos: Lumos is working towards becoming the new identity platform for everyone.
Tina Roh, Co-founder of every.org: Every.org is a technology platform connecting givers and nonprofits through a joyful and social donation experience.
Peter Gao, Co-founder of Aquarium: Aquarium is a machine learning data management system.
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