CookUnity

“It was really hard to raise money to the point that I had to put my own money to keep the company going for like two, three months. And when we get the commitment from this investor, we were like minus three months of runway, right?”

“I mean, you ended last year at seven hundred and fifty million revenue run rate. Growing 70%, which are massive numbers.”

“The main learnings from that business were that people really want selection and customization in full, and it's really hard to scale high quality, so we couldn't quite do the very best version of the customer offering we wanted with that model”

“A 150 something, 170. Like Marcus Samuelson, Aynad and Moni, Rick Baileys, Kat Cora, like so many, like the list is very long”

“People will assume in our business that COVID created a spike in demand for us. The reality is that it didn't happen because nobody knew us or like awareness on top of mind was Close to zero.”

“That's why we chose, like, to empower chefs as users instead of employees and giving them the tools and incentives so they can unlock their full creativity and all their talents.”

“Yes, and we decided to shut down that entirely and start with zero revenue. I mean, we had some customers that were the ones that were ordering in that fashion, right? They said, okay, now you can only order in cookie.com, minimum order size for meals, and you…”

“And so like, okay, we're going to pivot the business. At that point, we were maybe making like two million in revenue.”

“Kukiti has, like, a first founding moment in 2016 when I moved from South America to New York, but then it has a second founding moment, moment when we pivot in April 2018 to the subscription service.”

“Volume wise we had around 600 employees And like similar, something like a 100,000 deliveries a month, let's say.”

“So, for example, Kukiti had around two months' payback since, since that moment, right? Like, we were able to keep it around two months' payback since 2018.”

“So, we raised our Series B back then, led by Insight Partners. That was a forty-seven million round, which is Like, 40% of what we raised in total since inception, even up to this day.”

“The first group of people that order recurrently were bankers, consultants, lawyers that work late at night and their employers will give them a stipend of 20 dollars, I believe was back then.”

“In the Kukiti model, we scale by adding more small producers, a chef, A restaurant, right? And they still cook in their, like, artisanal small batch way. It's not that they are, they need to cook in an industrial way. We just keep up with volume by adding more…”

“I think by Q one, 20, 20, we're doing maybe five million revenue, which wasn't top one percentile, but it was like, okay, we're competing. We're like growing three times per year.”

“Chefs and users, right? Like, which wasn't common back then and still isn't common today, right? Like the majority are vertical integrated business. Like Chipotle is a vertical integrated business.”

“There's a limit of how much you can rely on PR to grow your business. It's not as systematic as predictable scalable. So, to truly be able to do paid acquisition well, we had to be nationwide. It was really hard back then, to, like, be efficient in Facebook on…”

“What they, like, the aha moment of that made me realize is like, okay, the key part is ignoring the people that are, like, somewhat happy with your product, right?”

“One of the things that I have here about our journey is that a few years ago I was able to go to those people and say, hey, you can already sell your shares if you choose to.”

“DoorDash is just more like a logistics layer, a very efficient one, a very valuable one.”

“In 2018, when we raised our first institutional Money. We opened LA in that period before that and COVID. And we opened LA with the same approach. I opened my first company, very scrappy, MVP type thing. Three months later, I shut it down, came back to New Yor…”

“We were investors at Cookin and Cookin was acquired by CookUnity end of 2024.”

“600,000. Felt like a lot of money back then, especially because I haven't needed to raise money in my previous company.”

“I mean, in short, we tried to hire a professional CEO. It didn't work. And then my co-founder took over and some of the best people that we had already in the team, we ended up empowering them to run the business.”