The Exchanges

Q You mentioned investors there, and as you know, I do my work, and so I spoke to, naturally, all of yours, and so I want to ask you then, what do you think you did particularly well in the fundraise process, and really would do again and double down on?

A What I think I did really well is work with investors who are very aligned with our vision. So, Gary Tan and Keith Raboy had invested in our business early on. Keith Raboy was one of our first checks. Gary Tan was a seed investor, and then kind of initialized, grew as Gobble grew, and then he co-led our Series B financing. And they both see the long-term vision of the company. In fact, Gary and his wife built their young son's Halloween costume out of gobble boxes. They built a gobble rocket, which I think is an omen for the company. And so Halloween was yesterday, and they showed everybody this gobble rocket, and I think that's just a great sign of investors who are literally eating and wearing your product with their kids.

AI assessment note: “What I think I did really well is work with investors who are very aligned”

Q Not at all, but I want to get started on you. And how did you make your way into the world of startups from the world of Wall Street? And was it always the plan to change the way we eat with Goblin? What was that aha moment for you?

A Sure. Starting Gobble surprised me. I interned on Wall Street for just a hot minute for two summers, more out of parental obligation to explore a steady and stable life, which is funny because I was interning in the summer of 2008 and saw the Lehman Brothers collapse happen outside of the window from JP Morgan. But I had another company when I was in college at Stanford. And in fact, I was entrepreneurial all the way through my childhood and But just didn't know what that meant, and so I would start student groups and ask our principal to give me a thousand dollars to start the Model UN Society and run big charity functions and garage sales and all kinds of entrepreneurial things, and I sold Girl Scout cookies for, like, all the way through school for 18 years, and then finally, I think coming to college, I figured out what that was meant to be, and I was lucky enough to go to school in Silicon Valley and Work at startups starting in my freshman year, and then come up with my own ideas, and through a bit of trial and error, I started my first company that I bootstrapped for three years, and we were making quite a bit of money, but not in the way that I intended, and this disconnect between mission and money, and actually just kind of running a bootstrapped business with teams all over the world, and burning on both ends, led me to one of the most dark places that I've been in i…

AI assessment note: “Starting Gobble surprised me. I interned on Wall Street for just a hot minute”

Q theme of competition, because meal delivery is a space where everyone seems to have an opinion, justified or not, with Blue Apron's very public nature, and with that competition in mind, when we chatted before, you said to me, and I love this, small and mighty beats loud and weak. How can I not start with this, Ushma? What did you mean by small and mighty versus loud and weak?

A Yes, I meant that Silicon Valley has a lot of companies and cautionary tales that raise a lot of money early on, and when you raise a lot of money early on, you have to be very big very quickly, and you have to be very loud, and you set your expectations sky high from the first minute, which I actually think makes you weak by definition. Because you're pouring money into half-baked ideas very quickly, half-baked marketing channels or products or this and that, just to get growth very quickly to meet the expectations that you set for yourself. It's a bit like the tortoise and the hare, and I think that in this world of Silicon Valley, sometimes we focus on just the here and now. Companies, at least in our history, in the food market have come and gone. And at the time, everyone, you know, would bet on them and not bet on us. But there's this sort of grow as fast as possible without breaking your core metrics, without breaking your LTV to CAC ratio and your cash burn and runway. And then we kind of just followed that strict cash management strategy all the way through our trajectory. And here we are as kind of the slower, as fast as possible and steady company. When companies that kind of put their pedal to the metal ran out of gas when the market turned or, you know, when their industry wasn't favorable.

AI assessment note: “I meant that Silicon Valley has a lot of companies and cautionary tales”

Q I love that one. And then I want to finish today with the next five years for you and for Gobble. What's that exciting roadmap ahead?

A You know, I think, as I've mentioned, this industry itself is at the very tip of the iceberg for many reasons. One, even just in the market of dual-income busy households, we're at the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the U.S. companies have not expanded internationally, and our industry is actually an international industry in the U.K., Canada, Australia, etc. And a very interesting thing is that we're only serving 10 to 15% of the population by income, and I think there's a huge opportunity for the UberX of our industry to serve the mass market that actually needs this the most and help them make easy and healthy food at home and rely less on takeout or frozen food that may not be the most healthy or the most satisfying. I just think with regards to international expansion, product expansion, kind of, you know, revenue and market diversification to even larger markets that could use the products that companies like Gobble make, there's a huge opportunity out there, and we have our plan to reach the multi-billion dollar valuation and revenue levels in the next upcoming years with a number of these efforts, and we just recently closed a deal with Walmart, which has kind of launched us into a new realm where other partnerships are coming our way, And helping us establish these moats with exclusive access to millions of people who could use Gobble. So we have a few announcements comi…

AI assessment note: “we have our plan to reach the multi-billion dollar valuation and revenue levels”

Q Lots of bets and doubling down on the winning channels. How do you think about this and respond to this with the distribution channel testing and iteration mindset?

A Yes, I think it is somewhat like a venture portfolio, and I think it's even more like the life of a scientist and someone who has, you know, dedicates their life to a few amazing discoveries that take working or 16 hours a day and thousands of sub experiments and iterations to get there. So I have a lot of respect for Really, really, really great demand generation or quantitative marketers, because the right way to do it is so tedious and requires so much patience. So like a venture portfolio, you are planting a lot of seeds, but unlike a venture portfolio, it is your sole responsibility to iterate on each of those seeds, water them and check them every single day to tell everyone else to be patient, to make sure they know that a lot of money will be lost and some of the seeds won't grow. And then only months and then years down the line, you see all of the fruit on the trees of the seeds you planted long before. So luckily we have a fantastic VP of marketing, Robin Risso, who spent 12 years in the subscription business, joined us, and has really taught me about this diversified and iterative and long-term approach, and it's been paying off quite nicely.

AI assessment note: “it is somewhat like a venture portfolio, and I think it's even more like”

Q ask. In terms of kind of those cautionary tales of pouring fuel on the fire, maybe of half-baked products and half-baked marketing channels, who's to maybe kind of take the slight blame for that? Is that kind of the founders who are kind of incessant on this aggressive growth and kind of unicorn statuses, or is it the VCs kind of pushing them for such aggressive growth behind the scenes?

A You know, at this point, I think it's a combination. I think that the entrepreneurs are very excited to get big very quickly and people by nature want shortcuts and they would rather not do the hard thing. And I think that there are companies that have gone from zero to hero overnight, but they are the .1%, and they have a large amount of luck that goes with it. And so I think that, you know, venture capital is playing a very different game Than the game that entrepreneurs are playing. And so for them to invest in a portfolio of companies and give them lots of money and hope that one of them will be lucky if you invest in enough numbers, that may happen and should happen, especially as you get growing insights underlying your investments. But for the entrepreneur, you only have one real bet. And it's just like this big Powerball, you know, mega millions lottery that's happening right now. I would rather do everything I can to have a guaranteed Multi-billion dollar outcome than a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

AI assessment note: “I think it's a combination.”

Q the saturated marketing channels. I mean, you say they're about wanting growth tomorrow, and you said before, and I love this The core mistake with the current thinking is maybe conflating execution with market opportunity and thinking of still early markets as zero sum versus markets of abundance. Can I ask, what did you mean by that quote, and what do you think the right mindset to the problem is?

A Yes, every market is different, but so many of the greatest multi-billion dollar companies that we see in the public markets today were built over decades, and some of them have been around for over a hundred years now. This direct to consumer market is still in its first decade. It's five to maybe six or seven years old, depending on the sub industry. And especially in our market and direct to consumer food delivery, venture capital oftentimes thinks that it's played out based on a couple players trying and failing, but actually the CPG industry could not be more excited about the shift to direct to consumer and understands that it's going to be playing out over the next five, 10 and 20 years. An analogy would be like if you were to judge Instacart a thousand percent on web fan, and some VCs do, but I find that it's important to specialize at least in some areas so that you can look under the hood because people eat in many different ways, and it's a multi-trillion dollar industry where there's multi-billion dollar companies in fast food, in grocery, in delivery, and in fact, if you choose the people who have the right DNA to stay the course, continue being innovative, Hire a fantastic execution team. You should have multiple food companies in your portfolio, because with that right DNA, there are multiple opportunities in this space to be the next multi-billion dollar players…

AI assessment note: “there are multiple opportunities in this space to be the next multi-billion dollar players”

Q ask. In terms of kind of those cautionary tales of pouring fuel on the fire, maybe of half-baked products and half-baked marketing channels, who's to maybe kind of take the slight blame for that? Is that kind of the founders who are kind of incessant on this aggressive growth and kind of unicorn statuses, or is it the VCs kind of pushing them for such aggressive growth behind the scenes?

A You know, at this point, I think it's a combination. I think that the entrepreneurs are very excited to get big very quickly and people by nature want shortcuts and they would rather not do the hard thing. And I think that there are companies that have gone from zero to hero overnight, but they are the .1%, and they have a large amount of luck that goes with it. And so I think that, you know, venture capital is playing a very different game Than the game that entrepreneurs are playing. And so for them to invest in a portfolio of companies and give them lots of money and hope that one of them will be lucky if you invest in enough numbers, that may happen and should happen, especially as you get growing insights underlying your investments. But for the entrepreneur, you only have one real bet. And it's just like this big Powerball, you know, mega millions lottery that's happening right now. I would rather do everything I can to have a guaranteed Multi-billion dollar outcome than a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

AI assessment note: “I think it's a combination. I think that the entrepreneurs are very excited”

Q Tell me about this. What do you mean by survivalist success, and why is it maybe more paramount in offline versus online business?

A Yeah, well, with a business that's offline and online, every dollar counts. There's inflation that's increasing your costs, and there's so many little fees and costs along your supply chain that even one leak can kill you along the way, and what's interesting is, is that we saw a lot of companies in the food market have to shut down immediately to One day, they were gone, and we saw other companies forced to sell, other companies really taken a beating by the public markets, so in, in our minds, it wasn't necessarily the best time to pour all this money into growing overnight at a time when there was a storm in our industry, but rather, even when our economics were strong and our customer LTV was the best in the industry, we, somewhat counterintuitively for Silicon Valley, Made it a practice every week to look at our operating expenses and to cut costs and cut fixed costs so that should we ever need to face any difficult situations that we could weather The winning player. What's interesting is some people think that they have to win today, or that they have to win tomorrow, but to me, winning, um, and success is being the last person standing. It's not being the best person today or tomorrow. It's being the best person at the end of the day, and the number one thing you have to do for that is survive.

AI assessment note: “to me, winning, um, and success is being the last person standing.”

Q theme of competition, because meal delivery is a space where everyone seems to have an opinion, justified or not, with Blue Apron's very public nature, and with that competition in mind, when we chatted before, you said to me, and I love this, small and mighty beats loud and weak. How can I not start with this, Ushma? What did you mean by small and mighty versus loud and weak?

A Yes, I meant that Silicon Valley has a lot of companies and cautionary tales that raise a lot of money early on, and when you raise a lot of money early on, you have to be very big very quickly, and you have to be very loud, and you set your expectations sky high from the first minute, which I actually think makes you weak by definition. Because you're pouring money into half-baked ideas very quickly, half-baked marketing channels or products or this and that, just to get growth very quickly to meet the expectations that you set for yourself. It's a bit like the tortoise and the hare, and I think that in this world of Silicon Valley, sometimes we focus on just the here and now. Companies, at least in our history, in the food market have come and gone. And at the time, everyone, you know, would bet on them and not bet on us. But there's this sort of grow as fast as possible without breaking your core metrics, without breaking your LTV to CAC ratio and your cash burn and runway. And then we kind of just followed that strict cash management strategy all the way through our trajectory. And here we are as kind of the slower, as fast as possible and steady company. When companies that kind of put their pedal to the metal ran out of gas when the market turned or, you know, when their industry wasn't favorable.

AI assessment note: “I meant that Silicon Valley has a lot of companies and cautionary tales that raise”

Q Lots of bets and doubling down on the winning channels. How do you think about this and respond to this with the distribution channel testing and iteration mindset?

A Yes, I think it is somewhat like a venture portfolio, and I think it's even more like the life of a scientist and someone who has, you know, dedicates their life to a few amazing discoveries that take working or 16 hours a day and thousands of sub experiments and iterations to get there. So I have a lot of respect for Really, really, really great demand generation or quantitative marketers, because the right way to do it is so tedious and requires so much patience. So like a venture portfolio, you are planting a lot of seeds, but unlike a venture portfolio, it is your sole responsibility to iterate on each of those seeds, water them and check them every single day to tell everyone else to be patient, to make sure they know that a lot of money will be lost and some of the seeds won't grow. And then only months and then years down the line, you see all of the fruit on the trees of the seeds you planted long before. So luckily we have a fantastic VP of marketing, Robin Risso, who spent 12 years in the subscription business, joined us, and has really taught me about this diversified and iterative and long-term approach, and it's been paying off quite nicely.

AI assessment note: “Yes, I think it is somewhat like a venture portfolio, and I think it's”

Q the saturated marketing channels. I mean, you say they're about wanting growth tomorrow, and you said before, and I love this The core mistake with the current thinking is maybe conflating execution with market opportunity and thinking of still early markets as zero sum versus markets of abundance. Can I ask, what did you mean by that quote, and what do you think the right mindset to the problem is?

A Yes, every market is different, but so many of the greatest multi-billion dollar companies that we see in the public markets today were built over decades, and some of them have been around for over a hundred years now. This direct to consumer market is still in its first decade. It's five to maybe six or seven years old, depending on the sub industry. And especially in our market and direct to consumer food delivery, venture capital oftentimes thinks that it's played out based on a couple players trying and failing, but actually the CPG industry could not be more excited about the shift to direct to consumer and understands that it's going to be playing out over the next five, 10 and 20 years. An analogy would be like if you were to judge Instacart a thousand percent on web fan, and some VCs do, but I find that it's important to specialize at least in some areas so that you can look under the hood because people eat in many different ways, and it's a multi-trillion dollar industry where there's multi-billion dollar companies in fast food, in grocery, in delivery, and in fact, if you choose the people who have the right DNA to stay the course, continue being innovative, Hire a fantastic execution team. You should have multiple food companies in your portfolio, because with that right DNA, there are multiple opportunities in this space to be the next multi-billion dollar players…

AI assessment note: “venture capital oftentimes thinks that it's played out based on a couple players trying”

Q ask you a question, again, off schedule, but too interested? How does that affect morale? Does it boost morale, allowing employees to know that it's kind of a sustainable, wholesome business with a kind of healthy unit econ, but then it also doesn't have the Overnight explosive growth that some of the top people maybe look for. How do you think about that and how it impacts morale and culture?

A Yeah, I think that you have to hire a team that aligns with your vision and that has the same culture as you, and one of our cultures is not to play for optics, not to be too showy, and not to be a flash in the pan. One of my family members just got an offer from a company in Silicon Valley. She's in school and joining the company next year, and the offer letter said, You know, we're so excited to have you. We will either be a multi-billion dollar company or we'll be dead. Either way, sign here and looking forward to seeing you. And that was actually in the letter. That's exciting. And I hope that they're around and I hope they grow very, very, very quickly. But we're building a company with people who want a job for the rest of their lives. And they believe in the mission of what we're doing. And it's not just mission driven. It's also business and opportunity driven.

AI assessment note: “we're building a company with people who want a job for the rest of their lives”

Q I mean, I love that quote. You sound always composed, put together, calm, and collected, so I have to ask this one. How do you deal with shit hit the fan moments, Sushma?

A Oh, man. You know what's funny is, first of all, if I have time, I like to work out. I think all the benefits of working out, And if I have time, I like to do that. Although most of the time when shit is hitting the fan, I completely do not work out and I eat lots of carbs instead. So what I really do if I have to act fast is I lean into the discomfort. So it's kind of like firefighters that teach themselves and learn to run into the fire. When there is a shit hits the fan moment, I know I have to solve it. I have to solve it at some point and it's really urgent and it's on my mind. So it's probably the most important thing I could be doing right now. So I just teach myself to lean into it and And, like, go into it head on, because then it'll be over as soon as possible.

AI assessment note: “So what I really do if I have to act fast is I lean into the discomfort.”

Q Not at all, but I want to get started on you. And how did you make your way into the world of startups from the world of Wall Street? And was it always the plan to change the way we eat with Goblin? What was that aha moment for you?

A Sure. Starting Gobble surprised me. I interned on Wall Street for just a hot minute for two summers, more out of parental obligation to explore a steady and stable life, which is funny because I was interning in the summer of 2008 and saw the Lehman Brothers collapse happen outside of the window from JP Morgan. But I had another company when I was in college at Stanford. And in fact, I was entrepreneurial all the way through my childhood and But just didn't know what that meant, and so I would start student groups and ask our principal to give me a thousand dollars to start the Model UN Society and run big charity functions and garage sales and all kinds of entrepreneurial things, and I sold Girl Scout cookies for, like, all the way through school for 18 years, and then finally, I think coming to college, I figured out what that was meant to be, and I was lucky enough to go to school in Silicon Valley and Work at startups starting in my freshman year, and then come up with my own ideas, and through a bit of trial and error, I started my first company that I bootstrapped for three years, and we were making quite a bit of money, but not in the way that I intended, and this disconnect between mission and money, and actually just kind of running a bootstrapped business with teams all over the world, and burning on both ends, led me to one of the most dark places that I've been in i…

AI assessment note: “Starting Gobble surprised me. I interned on Wall Street for just a hot minute”

Q ask you a question, again, off schedule, but too interested? How does that affect morale? Does it boost morale, allowing employees to know that it's kind of a sustainable, wholesome business with a kind of healthy unit econ, but then it also doesn't have the Overnight explosive growth that some of the top people maybe look for. How do you think about that and how it impacts morale and culture?

A Yeah, I think that you have to hire a team that aligns with your vision and that has the same culture as you, and one of our cultures is not to play for optics, not to be too showy, and not to be a flash in the pan. One of my family members just got an offer from a company in Silicon Valley. She's in school and joining the company next year, and the offer letter said, You know, we're so excited to have you. We will either be a multi-billion dollar company or we'll be dead. Either way, sign here and looking forward to seeing you. And that was actually in the letter. That's exciting. And I hope that they're around and I hope they grow very, very, very quickly. But we're building a company with people who want a job for the rest of their lives. And they believe in the mission of what we're doing. And it's not just mission driven. It's also business and opportunity driven.

AI assessment note: “we're building a company with people who want a job for the rest of their lives”

Q Tell me about this. What do you mean by survivalist success, and why is it maybe more paramount in offline versus online business?

A Yeah, well, with a business that's offline and online, every dollar counts. There's inflation that's increasing your costs, and there's so many little fees and costs along your supply chain that even one leak can kill you along the way, and what's interesting is, is that we saw a lot of companies in the food market have to shut down immediately to One day, they were gone, and we saw other companies forced to sell, other companies really taken a beating by the public markets, so in, in our minds, it wasn't necessarily the best time to pour all this money into growing overnight at a time when there was a storm in our industry, but rather, even when our economics were strong and our customer LTV was the best in the industry, we, somewhat counterintuitively for Silicon Valley, Made it a practice every week to look at our operating expenses and to cut costs and cut fixed costs so that should we ever need to face any difficult situations that we could weather The winning player. What's interesting is some people think that they have to win today, or that they have to win tomorrow, but to me, winning, um, and success is being the last person standing. It's not being the best person today or tomorrow. It's being the best person at the end of the day, and the number one thing you have to do for that is survive.

AI assessment note: “winning, um, and success is being the last person standing.”