Apr 5, 2021 · 1h 29m · how-i-built-this
Food52: Amanda Hesser
Amanda Hesser · 1h 1m spoken Guy Raz · 20m spoken Eric Powell (Character in 'Julie & Julia') · 4s spoken Julie Powell (Character in 'Julie & Julia') · 2s spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of How I Built This, Amanda Hesser recounts her journey from an acclaimed New York Times food writer to co-founding Food52, a leading digital media and e-commerce lifestyle brand. She shares candid insights on overcoming severe financial breaking points, mastering culinary crowdsourcing, and building a hundred-million-dollar company.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 26.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 3.8 Guest teaching 1.6 Guest disagreement 0.4 Guy pushing back 0.5
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 53:35 Rejecting the simplistic 'food blog' categorization
Amanda firmly counters the reductive labels commonly applied by investors and outsiders, insisting that Food52 represents an entirely new hybrid model spanning media, community, and commerce.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 28:54 Guy confronts Amanda with Ruth Reichl's critiqueGuy directly presses Amanda on Ruth Reichl's public characterization of her as 'frighteningly ambitious' and asks whether her newsroom reputation for creating conflict was accurate.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 39:15 Amanda corrects Guy on Sea Winkle's conceptAmanda politely rejects Guy's simplified framing of Sea Winkle as a photo album app, detailing its sophisticated algorithmic life-timeline architecture.
Guy holds their own ▶ 0:50 Guy deconstructs reporter psychology vs entrepreneurshipDrawing on his own lengthy journalism career, Guy delivers a nuanced breakdown of how journalistic skepticism helps and hinders startup founders.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Critical Breaking Point at Roberta's Pizzeria | 6 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Guy Raz sets the stage with an extended monologue comparing the mindset of seasoned investigative reporters with startup entrepreneurs, drawing deeply on his own journalism background. | |
| Entrepreneurial Lessons and Resilience from Amanda's Father | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Amanda shares formative memories of her father's promotional stunts like the Jell-O Jump and his resilience when the car dealership burnt down. | |
| Adolescence, Family Values, and Early Culinary Roots | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | The conversation covers Amanda's childhood, her father's heart attack when she was eleven, and her mother's seasonal, scratch cooking philosophy. | |
| Finding Direction in Boston Kitchens and Food Writing | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Amanda gently corrects Guy's timeline assumption, clarifying that her father passed away between junior and senior year of college, which liberated her to pursue cooking and writing instead of finance. | |
| European Apprenticeships and Discovering a Writer's Voice | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Amanda recounts apprenticing in a German bakery in the Black Forest, living under taxidermy trophies, and discovering her writing voice through letters home. | |
| La Varenne, Monsieur Malbert, and The Cook and the Gardener | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Amanda describes her time at La Varenne with Anne Willan and shadowing the gardener Monsieur Malbert, which led to her debut book proposal. | |
| Landing a Food Reporter Job at The New York Times | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Amanda details getting hired by Rick Flast at The New York Times dining section just as she was preparing to move to Los Angeles. | |
| Thriving in the Newsroom and Shifting to Action | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Amanda talks about learning newsroom basics like the nut graph on the job and realizing she was fundamentally a doer rather than just an observer. | |
| Navigating Ambition, Newsroom Politics, and Bureaucracy | 5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Guy presses Amanda on Ruth Reichl's description of her as frighteningly ambitious and her own quote about pissing people off, prompting Amanda to reflect on sexism and corporate bureaucracy. | |
| Mid-Episode Intermission and Sponsor Announcements | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Amanda explains crowdsourcing recipes from readers for The Essential New York Times Cookbook and meeting Merrill Stubbs. | |
| The Sea Winkle Startup Experiment and Leaving Legacy Media | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Amanda corrects Guy's assumption about Sea Winkle being a simple photo platform, explaining it was an ambitious digital life timeline data project that taught her essential startup lessons. | |
| Conceiving Food52 and the Decision to Bootstrap | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Amanda contrasts visionary pitchmen with proof-of-concept bootstrappers, explaining why she and Merrill decided to validate Food52 before taking outside capital. | |
| Launching in a Recession and Defining a New Business Model | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Amanda pushes back against the label of Food52 being merely a food blog or media site, emphasizing their intentional hybrid model of community, content, and commerce. | |
| Fostering Community, User Content, and Editorial Trust | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Amanda outlines how traditional media failed by broadcasting at audiences rather than building interactive communities and explains why they delayed monetizing commerce to build authentic editorial trust. | |
| Running Low on Cash and Facing the Breaking Point | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Amanda describes reaching the financial brink in 2010 and crying over pizza at Roberta's while deciding whether to persevere. | |
| Mid-Episode Intermission and Mid-Roll Sponsor Announcements | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Amanda clarifies that their seed round came from institutional angels rather than friends and family, and explains their refusal to join the contemporary clickbait volume race. | |
| Apartment Operations, Bedroom Photo Shoots, and Viral Traction | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Amanda describes the scrappy early operations in her Brooklyn apartment bedroom and the accidental viral breakout via an unpassworded Vimeo video. | |
| Expanding Revenue Streams and Navigating Series B Investor Turmoil | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Amanda corrects misconceptions about why they launched commerce and shares the crisis when their lead investor checked out during their Series B fundraising. | |
| Leadership Growth, Company Culture, and Management Feedback | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Guy asks Amanda about employee survey feedback depicting her as demanding and Merrill as the nice one, leading into their 2019 private equity transaction and 2020 profitability. | |
| Executive Evolution, Merrill's Departure, and Parental Reflections | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Amanda discusses Merrill's departure, her continued passion for Food52, and how her mother gradually transitioned from calling it a project to a real company. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Hesser's debut cookbook pioneered modern seasonal cooking advocacy
“It really is, it was one of the earlier cookbooks that, that celebrated seasonal cooking, and kind of made a point to say that it matters, and that it's a better way of approaching cooking.”
Hesser received a $10,000 publishing advance for her first cookbook
“It was 10,000 dollars, I believe.”
The New York Times judges output over pedigree in a competitive culture
“I actually don't think of the Times as a particularly, like, snobby place about, like, your resume. It's really about the work you're doing. They're really focused on, like, what you're producing. It is incredibly competitive. It's not warm and fuzzy”
Hesser self-funded her first startup, Sea Winkle, with her personal savings
“Yeah, so I just, I essentially just funded it with my savings, and I look back at that year as my, as sort of my startup grad school year, because I did nothing but sort of spend money, but and I did. It was, you know, it was in the tens of thousands of dollar…”
Hesser pitched her 2008 startup to Fred Wilson and Betaworks
“And, you know, I look back, and I, you know, I met with Betaworks, I met with Fred Wilson, I met with all these, like, amazing investors who you could never get access to now.”
Hesser divides founders into charismatic vision-sellers and bootstrapped proof-of-concept builders
“There were two kinds of founders. There were founders who were just great at selling an idea, and the idea might not have much substance, or they might not know a lot about whether or not it can work, but they can really just, like, spin a yarn, Get people eng…”
Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs funded Food52 using their cookbook advance
“We didn't want to have to try to raise money, and so that's where we use the advance money, which is what you usually use to pay yourself as an author. You know, while you're writing the book, we spent all of that on building the site And operating it for the …”
New products lack easy descriptions because consumers demand analogies to familiar businesses
“When you're building something that's new, and that's different, and there's going to be the, that's going to really feel natural in the future, like, people aren't going to necessarily have an easy way of describing it. They always want you to be the Uber of …”
Curated user-generated content allows founders to build media companies far more efficiently
“You can create the sort of foundation of a really powerful media company so much more efficiently because you can do it through user-generated content as long as you figure out a way to curate it.”
Hesser: Food52 initially avoided affiliate links to build reader trust
“Now, that's really common now, and there's a whole, people get affiliate, you know, commissions for that, but we didn't do that, because we did, A, affiliate systems, like, well, they sort of barely existed, and they were wonky. B, we really, it was so importa…”
Venture capitalists completely avoided investing in media businesses during 2009 and 2010
“It was in 2009, 2010, Like, nobody wanted to invest in media.”
Food52 secured $25,000 angel checks but struggled to find a lead investor
“We definitely had people interested, but we just couldn't get that lead. We couldn't get that one person to be, like, I'm gonna, like, I'm gonna champion this round. There were a lot of people who were like, yeah, I'll put in 25 K or I'll put in this or that.”
Food52 raised a $750,000 seed round primarily from professional angel investors
“And it was 750,000. ... Actually, it wasn't really friends and family. It was actually mostly institutional or professional angel investors.”
Hesser and Stubbs took $50,000 annual salaries following Food52's seed round
“So we gave ourselves 50,000 dollars which is Like what I made in 1997 when I was hired at the New York Times.”
Food52 launched with 10,000 members after an unlisted Vimeo video leaked
“What happened was thousands of people signed up on our splash page, and so, which allowed us to do a closed beta where we could let like a couple hundred people in per day, so that when we finally launched, we already had, you know, like 10,000, I think, commu…”
Launch coverage from Goop and Daily Candy crashed the early Food52 website
“Goop wrote about it on our launch week, and Daily Candy did, and both of them, like, broke our site. Like, they, our site went down, because we obviously didn't have the most amazing technology at that point.”
Food52 lost a Series B lead investor over a misinterpreted exit discussion
“We had, you know, previously tried to understand what our board, like, how they thought about exits, and like, what were, like, what was on their mind, and it's always a delicate conversation, and I think that conversation for this particular investor, like, s…”