Ooshma Garg
Former Founder & CEO, Gobble. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@ooshma ↗gobble.com ↗
Ooshma Garg is the founder and former CEO of Gobble, a meal kit company acquired by Intelligent Foods in 2022. She previously founded the diversity recruiting platform Anapata and actively invests in early-stage startups.
2shows
2appearances
37statements
3resolved
2supported
1contradicted
67%fully supported
6said about them ↓ Everything Ooshma Garg said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Garg: Gobble avoided dirty VC terms that trapped competing meal kit startups
“I've been really conscious about the number of venture capitalists we work with, the amount of dilution we take, and expectations we set for ourselves, and avoiding any kind of tricky terms underneath the table, which I think other meal kit companies weren't a…”
Garg: Gobble plans to hit multi-billion dollar valuation and revenue levels
“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”
Garg: The company cracking food personalization will win the sector long-term
“I still today think that the power of personalization, what Amazon brings to e-commerce and what Netflix and Spotify bring to movies and music. That level of personalization has not taken off in food. And just like Google with search, the company that cracks i…”
Garg: Raising large sums early makes startups fragile by forcing premature scaling
“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…”
Garg: Gobble reduced Facebook marketing dependency by 50% through channel diversification
“First thing she did is took our Facebook dependency down by 50% and started planting the seeds into other channels that are growing such that we can genuinely turn knobs up and down.”
Garg: CPG industry sees D2C food delivery playing out over 20 years
“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 consume…”
Garg: D2C food sector will yield multiple multi-billion dollar companies
“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 …”
Ooshma Garg: Selling Gobble Now Would Leave Billions on the Table
“Now we've started, like, you know, doubling or tripling year on year, And so, if someone were to acquire us now, and we can't weather the storm of a bad meal kit market, I think we're, like, leaving billions on the table.”
Garg: Gobble shut down previous business model at $1.5M to $2M ARR
“I shut down that personalized dinner service, and we were doing maybe, like, one and a half to two million in ARR, but it wasn't going anywhere, and the food wasn't different enough”
Garg: Startups must scale without compromising LTV to CAC ratio and runway
“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.”
Garg: Overnight startup successes represent just 0.1% and rely on luck
“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.”
Garg: Venture capitalists play a fundamentally different game than founders
“Venture capital is playing a very different game Than the game that entrepreneurs are playing.”
Garg: Gobble achieved the highest customer LTV in the meal kit industry
“Even when our economics were strong and our customer LTV was the best in the industry”
Garg: Keith Rabois invested immediately after first meeting and recruited Reid Hoffman
“And by the end of the meeting, we had commitment and investment. And then he was messaging folks like Reed Hoffman, who then came in and other folks.”
Garg: Meal kit industry only serves 10-15% of population by income
“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”
Garg: Whoever pays a company determines how its product evolves
“What ended up happening is I learned the hard lesson that whoever pays you kind of owns you and determines how your product evolves.”
Garg: Investors view new startups as greener because they ignore competitors' flaws
“Every time there's new startups coming up, the grass is always greener, because the investors know all your problems, and they don't know any of the other problems.”
Garg: Founders can validate an MVP with sales instead of code
“In the first few months, you need to prove your concept. You need to have an MVP. You can do that with code. You can do that with sales, whatever.”
Garg: Early startup employees stay longer when founders share hard times transparently
“Sometimes you think you're protecting people by not telling them, but actually your closest employees, especially when you're four to six, if you bring them into the challenge, And if they are challenge oriented, they will stay with you. But if you hide it, th…”
Garg: Great products require cross-industry domain experts over homogenous engineering teams
“What I would suggest to an entrepreneur is that real entrepreneurship comes from diverse perspectives and from innovating at the edge of different industries. It's really hard just to get 10 homogenous engineers in a room and, like, make something incredible. …”
Ooshma Garg: Email Is the Best Tool for Early Pricing Experiments
“In a, if you're in a scrappy company, the best tool for pricing experimentation is email.”
Garg: Solo founders should crowdsource co-founder support from peer networks
“In the early days, what I say for single founders is, you kind of have, like, if you're swimming in the ocean, it's kind of like a net buoy system, so you have to find, like, three or six people that are, like, those orange buoys, and you're swimming by yourse…”
Garg: Investors do not care about getting their money back, only massive upside
“Investors do not care about getting their money back. That is not sexy to them. You shouldn't say that. Founders are kind of like hedging against themselves and saying, don't worry, I'll still protect your money. But You need to up level that when you go talk …”
The other half of the tape: Ooshma Garg's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Geoff Ralston 4Harry Stebbings 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 5
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 1
2019 4 mentions in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Why The Engineer Will Replace The MBA As CEO, Why The Peace Dividends From The Autonomous Car Wars Will Generate More Value Outside of Transport & Why Old and Boring Industries Are The Most Exciting To Build In with Avidan Ross, Founding Partner @ R
- David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ooshma's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Former Founder & CEO, Gobble | 1 | 23 | — | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Former Founder & CEO, Gobble | 1 | 14 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |