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So we don't actually have a good way to start episodes with the LP show. And we try and set a tone by making it a little bit more conversational. So it just started. Tracy, thanks for joining us. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me. Listeners, Tracy is down with David in the Wave Capital podcasting studio. I up here in Seattle. You know, our main show with Acquired is about these big splashy exits that you've heard of.
Thank you.
have been about one of these companies too, like our Product Ops episode at Uber or Growth at Airbnb. And today we wanted to do an episode with a founder that is running a company that is much more emblematic of how most growth companies go most of the time, getting a medium amount of press coverage, keeping extremely focused and diligent, putting in the hard work over a long period of time to build a sustainable and durable business. And so our guest today is Tracy Lawrence. Tracy Lawrence
Tracy is the founder and CEO of Choose, a 280-person company based in San Francisco that delivers family-style office meals from the best local restaurants to six cities in the U.S. Tracy started Choose right out of college eight years ago in 2011. She's been named USC's Entrepreneur of the Year and raised over $30 million for Choose from venture firms like Foundry Group, which is how Tracy and I originally met at the Foundry CEO Summit a few years ago.
She has a really unique way that she runs and describes her company, a love company, that I'm really excited to dive into this episode. So thank you so much for joining us, Tracy. For sure. Yeah, let's talk about love. Yeah. This is going to be a first for Acquired, I think. Seriously. Yeah, this is great. Good.
So I just threw out some numbers and sort of like eight years ago, 2011, raised over $30 million. So how do you describe Choose? And can you tell us about the business today? Our mission is really to drive authentic connection. And in the workplace, I think that's the place where people are spending the most time and where it's lacking.
especially when you look at sort of people 40 years ago that were starting families, you know, in their early 20s and now you're starting families much later. We kind of have this gap of time where it's like we leave home and
You know, we leave home for work opportunities and then we're in our 20s and we don't start families till our 30s. And work takes the brunt of it. Yeah, especially here in San Francisco. Yeah. I think San Francisco is, certainly in the U.S., maybe in the world, the city with the oldest average age of mothers when they give birth. Definitely in the U.S., yeah. I think it's San Francisco as well as D.C. Wow. That makes sense. Yeah. And New York, right? So a lot of the big urban centers. So...
You know, our goal is really to get people eating together. And so we're partnering with over 300 restaurants. And they're all local quality restaurants. My aunt, my grandmother, and my mom were all in the restaurant industry. And when I started the company, it was because I was an event planner, but I saw that office managers wanted access to great local food and they were sick of Subway.
So we work with offices in over 500 companies across the U.S. that want to order great local food. And we actually partner with the office managers at those offices, and we build out sort of a calendar of meal programs. And so instead of them having to order for themselves and kind of pick off of a menu or call up a restaurant, like 90% of the industry is still calling up restaurants directly, we
We have technology that actually builds out the menus on behalf of our customers. It's the only technology in the space that does it. And then we're using software to do the last mile delivery as well and ensure a really high quality experience at the end because they're choose employees. And we could talk about that as part of the love company ethos.
But it's kind of a different way of looking at the whole thing. How big and small customers do you have in terms of number of people in offices? Yeah. So the smallest is 15 people in the office. And then the largest, I think we've done 900 person offices. Wow. Yeah. But I'd say the range is about 15 to 500 usually. Wow. Yeah.
Yeah. So you're doing offices with multiple hundred employees every day. Yes. Wow. Yes. It's a lot of food. It's a lot of food. I mean, what's funny is one of the ways that we're now starting to work with like proper vans, but we used to use U-Hauls.
to haul that much food. I mean, for your standard order, like the driver can do it with their own car. But, you know, you have these big U-Hauls just loaded with food. And it's like, oh, yeah, this is a startup for sure. That's awesome. What is something that you are doing that is still surprisingly incredibly scrappy given the scale that you operate at? Like what would surprise people? Like, wait, Choose is doing deliveries to 900 person offices and it's still done this way?
Like with a U-Haul? We run a really tight ship. Even just earlier, less than a year ago, our HQ was still co-located with our warehouse in San Francisco. Wow.
What people might be surprised about is actually, and it's kind of on the scrappy side on a cultural perspective, we have this practice called attitudes of gratitude. Basically, every Friday we gather together and every office, now that we have six or seven offices, they all gather together, usually on a Friday for half an hour, and they offer gratitude to one another. And we're nearly 300 people and it still scales. Right.
The other surprising thing that, you know, was an experiment that's still scaling is open salaries. You know, I think people are surprised that that has worked and it's something that's really important to our culture. So those are a few things.
Open salaries can mean a lot of things. Do you literally have like a spreadsheet where everybody's salary is published? And does that include like other, you know, bonus type incentives? How does that work? So the philosophy behind it was actually that it wasn't the transparency that mattered. It was fairness. So really, it should be called fair salaries. But that doesn't always get across the message.
is clearly as transparent. So there are two components and the transparency is the less important one. The more important one is that we have a salary formula that's based on your output.
And it started because I, you know, when I was making offers, I found that women and engineers were not negotiating as hard or at all for their salaries. Yeah, I was just thinking like within similar job bands, oftentimes the company's people are compensated differently, not based on their salary.
Right. Which for sales makes sense, I guess, that you would correlate their output with their negotiation ability. But for engineering, for finance, it's like that shouldn't be what your pay is based on. And so I found I was paying women less than men and I was like, oh, this is a problem. So now what we do is it's based on performance.
And so you have a band, a salary range based on your role, and then you're either level A all the way down through G. And A is sort of entry level, and G is you're the unicorn, the only person in this role fit for it. And that's a multiplier on the base.
So that's the most important part. The secondary part to ensure that trust is built across the organization and to hold managers to a high standard of not making exceptions is transparency. We decided to publish one level of transparency, which is within the company. So everybody at the company knows my salary and my output and vice versa, but we do not publish it externally. And that was a decision we made as a company.
Right. That makes sense. And so everybody knows what letter everyone else is. And when you know everyone's letter, you could back into their salary. Yes, that's right. Well, no, we actually publish not just the letter, but also the salary. And there's a formula. So I guess you could do it without. But what we have found is that for our top performers who are at the highest output level, I've gotten feedback that they're like, I look at that and I say, I have to earn that every day because my peers know what I'm making.
So for the right players, it can actually be very motivating. Now, it has its challenges too, you know, because it takes a manager who can have really candid conversations, like hard conversations with their employees to say, here's why this is your output versus this person's.
right? But we try to focus the conversation less on a comparison game and more on here's what you need to do structurally to get to the next output level. So it's not perfect, but I think it's a much better system than closed negotiation-based salaries. And has it equalized pay across functions and genders and what
Within the company? Yeah. I mean, we've applied it across the company. Wow. So it does do that. Yeah. It's based on output. That's kind of the whole desired goal. That's awesome. Yeah. I know we're diving deep here, but when you're rolling that out, because I think a lot of people have sort of considered this, did you have to lower anyone's salary to switch onto this system? So the first thing is that we started it, we rolled it out when we were maybe 12 or 15 people. So actually, we found that there were people that needed to come up.
more often than lower. No, we didn't need to lower anybody's salary. We also timed it with the annual review, well, not the review process, the annual market review process. So that's typically when people are naturally getting a bump to keep up with market.
What I would say, though, is if I were to roll it out now at this level, let's say that you needed to lower someone's salary just based on the market, I would probably just grandfather them in but make that public and say, hey, look, this was technically supposed to be adjusted down. This is what their comp is. It's a little higher than band. It will be adjusted with their next output level increase. So at least you're just like, look, we're going to be fair to this person. We're not going to lower their salary.
Because that's pretty demoralizing. Exactly. But you're building trust with the team. You're like, hey, when they get their next output level increase, they're going to fall within the band. And that's usually an increase up still. So it's kind of a win-win. Again, none of these systems are perfect, but building the trust is about being forthright about it and then being open to the conversations that come from it. Yeah.
That's awesome. Well, should we rewind a bit back to how did you end up... I'm just here to mess this whole thing up. No, this is great. The point of the LP show is like, you know, building companies is not a straight line, you know? Yeah, got it. And the episodes aren't a straight line either. Totally. So how did you get from Idea to then the 15-person company when you rolled this out? What were the early days of Choose like? So I was at USC and I was... First off, I had all these random part-time jobs.
So I was a food tour guide at one point with a company called Six Taste Food Tours. It's an amazing job title. It was a hell of a job. It was like you were not just, you know, a museum curator and docent, but also like a kindergarten teacher because you had to like wrangle people and get them to stop eating and move and then start eating. But I used to take people on food walking tours in downtown L.A.,
And then I was also an event planner. So I was helping plan out food for events like TEDxUSC and feeding thousands of people. But it wasn't until – and then I actually did a first startup, and it was called the Dish Dash at USC. And that was almost like an early Foursquare for students to check in but to get discounts at local restaurants.
And it's because I love downtown LA. My parents, who are also entrepreneurs, were in the clothing business and they had offices down there. So I grew up in downtown. And this is way before downtown LA was cool again. Way before. Nobody went to downtown LA. No one went to...
Yeah, I was like hanging out in downtown in the 90s, you know? Oh, man. You survived. And I survived. Look, I'm in one piece. So I wanted people and I saw people at USC that just really hated downtown and I wanted them to fall in love with the city. So I thought it would happen through food.
So that's kind of what got me into all these jobs. And then as when I started the Dish Dash, you know, things kind of naturally happened. So the restaurants that I was partnering with on that platform were telling me, you know, walk-in traffic is fine, but what about those student organizations that are ordering meals? We want to get into catering.
And then office managers started to find me from my event planning side and go, listen, I know we order for events, but I'm spending thousands of dollars on food every month for like my 30-person team meetings.
And we're ordering from Subway. We're sick of it. And I was like, this is okay. There's an opportunity here. And when I started to go through the workflow, like my first customer, Erin Stumpf at USC Stevens Center, I remember she was like, okay, I've got this catering. And I was like, this is going to be super easy. 30 people, no problem. I've got all these restaurants on lockdown. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done.
I had to call up all these restaurants and they were like, yeah, listen, can't meet that budget. Sorry, we don't do delivery. You're going to have to pick it up. Oh, that's outside of our delivery radius. Ooh, you've got a nut allergy. Sorry, we can't guarantee that. Oh, man. When I was in business school at Stanford, I was doing a bunch of this for StartX. We would do founder dinners and like...
I'd take care of the food and like, man, it's hard. It's really, it was really hard, especially now where 60% of Americans have some sort of dietary restriction. It's, you know, we are picky employees now. So,
So that was when I was like, hmm. And I did my first order and it was through an e-fax line and a Word document template. So it was $10 a month and that was my startup cost. And I just started to transact orders. And I asked the restaurant, so I was like, what if I took an 8% commission on every order that I sent you? I was sending them like $200 to $500 orders and they're like, yeah, easy. It was incremental revenue for them.
And it's funny because the pitch to restaurants, although the technology is robust now and we actually have a ton more customers, the pitch is fundamentally the same. It's like, we're going to bring you incremental revenue that's super high value and that's recurrent.
High margin. And high margin. There's no table space that you need for this. You can cook during off hours. You're getting more mileage out of your fixed costs. Exactly. Because that's the cool thing about the marketplace approach, right? We do not use our own kitchens. It's asset light. And this is so critical to the model. It would be way too expensive to build our own kitchens in every single city that we're in.
But we help the restaurants because they're cooking during their off hours. So between 9 a.m. to 11.30 a.m., when they're not getting the walk-in lunch traffic, that's when they're using choose. And we're booking out four to six weeks in advance because we're not an on-demand service. So they know they can ingredient plan and labor plan. Labor plan, yeah. Yeah.
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So we live in a world right now where over the last five years, food delivery has become, you know, hotter than the beehive. I would assume when all these same restaurants or lots of the same restaurants are being approached by the DoorDashes and the Uber Eats of the world, they must love the model that you come to them with, which is it's predictable and it's bulk orders rather than sort of this like on demand and you have to prioritize us right now.
Right. This is why I choose – this is the perfect timing for this company to be built now because any earlier and you wouldn't have had these third-party aggregators knock down the door already for these restaurants. Right.
These restaurants are like, they're primed for it. They're like, okay, okay, so we work with an aggregator now. What do you guys do that's different? And then we're like, oh, yeah, our average order value is between $500 to $1,000. It's triple the margin. It's going to be recurring. And the restaurants are just like, wow, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah.
So it is a very different sale for them. But I'm actually pretty grateful, right? And when I think about, you know, for founders who are founding companies, like being the first to market in a category can be important. But like in our specific category of corporate, that's important. But the larger category of food delivery, way better that Uber Eats burned through a ton of their sales dollars to break down the doors for us so that when we go in the sales, relatively simple. Yeah. Market education. Yeah.
Where's the trade-off there? Does it come...
when they're saying, how are you different? And you're like, we're better in every way for you. Does, is there a take rate trade off that you make where your take rate is lower than say DoorDash or someone like that on a given order? Well, that's the other thing that we figured out about the model. So it's, it's not only that we're corporate and we figured out innovations on sort of the technology, but there's also the business model innovations, which can get nerdy really fast, but kind of fun when you think about like profit and money and,
But what we figured out, we started with the take rate. And we were like, we realized that we were totally capping ourselves. You know, let's call it a 20, 25% take rate. We capped ourselves because we could build orders in advance. What we realized is we're actually a bulk buyer. And so we started to treat ourselves more like that. And then to negotiate discounts based on the volume that we're sending to restaurants in advance.
And so that yields us margins that are certainly much higher than the 25% take rate. If I'm hearing you right, it sounds like you sort of flipped your mindset from we take a take rate to we are going to buy your food at a negotiated price that is less than if I walked into your restaurant. Correct. Got it. And we're going to build the technology infrastructure to help you plan it in advance so that way you can improve your margins and you get more operating leverage out of each order that we send you in advance. Right.
So now we can take even more of like an ecosystem approach to say, we want the local restaurants to succeed. You know, we're not out to gouge them or like squeeze blood from a stone. So now we can take like a thoughtful planning perspective and a technology perspective. Yeah. Well, in this playbook, I feel like we are a wave, you know, we focus on marketplace investing in marketplace businesses. We see this almost all the time now with B2B marketplaces of like,
In so many markets, you can't go into an existing functioning B2B market and say, I am a marketplace. I'm a technology company. You have to meet the players where they're at. And the way to do that is rather than saying, I'm a marketplace, I'm going to take a take rate. You just like, I'm going to transact how you are used to transacting. And so many times we see once companies really start to figure things out, it's when they come to that realization. How can we
go with the forces in the market, not against them. Yeah. I have found it is a fine balance between evolving the behavior and fundamentally changing it. Thinking of ourselves as a bulk buyer is an evolution. But it's still not natural, I wouldn't say. As a restaurant, you might...
work with a large company and say, okay, because you're buying in bulk, we're going to give you discounts. But you're typically not contracting and you don't have tiers of prices. And so it's like a little bit of, okay, we're going to take current behavior, but we're going to update it a little bit. They actually work with us because we're sending them so much volume. We know what they're motivated by, which is the incremental revenue.
So it is a bit of a balance. Yeah, that's a good point. And sometimes we've pushed it too far where we've been like, we're going to try this totally different thing. And they're like, what? And then we add way more time to the sales cycle than is necessary. And we feel good about ourselves. And it's like, okay, let's not innovate. These aren't SaaS companies. These are restaurants. Exactly. Exactly. Got it.
The next question that I have teed up here is around product market fit. I was having this discussion with some of my coworkers last night, and they were asking me, you know, how do you define product market fit? And, you know, there's the Marc Andreessen famous passage, and there's all these different ways to describe it. As you were evolving Choose, how did...
Like, what are some markers that showed up for you that were signals that say, oh, I have product market fit now and the world is different because X, Y, Z? You know, as you're starting, especially in the first $10 million of sales, you're
It's like you are tackling a ton of different markets and you're starting to figure out like, ooh, what's feeling right, what's not. So there's various levels of product market fit. In the beginning, we were mostly event planner driven. So we had office managers, but that was my base. I knew event planners.
I can tell you what product market fit does not look like. It's probably always easier to define. Yeah, a little bit. And then somehow we'll get there over the course of a lifetime. But we started with the event planners, but there wasn't a high reorder rate. And so then we got qualitative and we called them and we're like, hey, how come you're not using us all the time? They're like, yeah, we only have events every three months. Not really that top of mind.
So that's one area where we're like, huh. And so our first model evolution to get product market fit based on that feedback was when we called office managers and we saw their reorder rates were slightly higher, but we knew that there were gaps that they weren't ordering with us from. And our first platform looked more like a seamless. It was, you know, or a grub hub where you go online and you look at the interface and you pick your orders and they go, look, that's fine for two people, but at 2%.
200 people? It's just not easy. I don't know how much a tray actually feeds. If it says 5 to 10, which tons of catering menus say that, does it feed 5 or 10? I can't go over budget, but I don't want people to go hungry. And so our first big innovation was, oh, we'll build the menus for you. We'll take on the expertise of that. And then we took the product market fit approach of like, okay, let's build a hypothesis of what we want to see. And we saw reorder rates shoot up.
So that was kind of one way that we were like, oh, we're onto something. And then of course you see growth metrics go up. But I think in the early days, it's just a lot of like listening to the customers. Then we had another point. Double click for one second. Yeah. When you were building the menus for customers, um,
How did you do that in the early days? I mean, I assume it was just like you guys were like, all right. People. So how are you doing in the early days? And then how are you doing it now? Like, did you productize that over time? Yeah. I mean, in the beginning, it was me. You know, I was going on and looking at their menus. And I also had the relationship with the restaurant. So I sort of knew what a tray would feed.
I knew what items, what appetizer would pair with what main and what would feed what budget, right? I mean, it's basically I was the algorithm. And then the first level of scaling it was teaching our first account manager how to do it. And then she became the algorithm. Then she scaled out a team of human algorithms. And then we started to realize like this is not scaling. Right.
Or it's scaling linearly, right? And this will not scale exponentially. And so then what we did is we structured the data from the restaurants and built out a system where we could say, okay, let's assign tags, prices, portions, quantities, and combinations of menu items.
And then let's also take the customer preferences and input those and the system can match. And now the system is far superior to what I could do, not just at scale, but in accuracy. And like we build the perfect menu every time. Yeah. But it had to get there in order for us to scale. That's awesome. Yeah. So I think the product market fit question is just a concept. For us, it's been, I have that paranoia that we've
that we never hit product market fit. I never want to feel like we have because even great companies, the gaming companies, man, are big examples of this, right? You can hit product market fit. They're just extreme examples. You hit product market fit for a couple quarters and then all of a sudden it just drops off.
And it's like, I kind of want to approach us like that, especially because the trends in food delivery can rise and fall. And so I'm constantly thinking, what's next? What's next? And I think for us, the next steps are, how do you use data and intelligence to build the perfect menu in an environment where people, it's a convenience economy. People are on the go. You can use your phone to order Uber or groceries. How do you do that for the ordering environment as well?
That might last a couple years. Then what's next? So I don't know that we have, I don't know that we will ever have product market fit. That's why I think about it. Well, it's a spectrum, right? Like you have more than when you were working with event planners. Hell yeah. That's true. That makes me feel better.
Well, it's like the Andy Grove quote, only the paranoid survive. I think better to be paranoid than sort of happy and or fat and happy, as they say. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole conversation there about mental health because I believe it, but I hate it because the paranoia is the thing that I think taken incorrectly. I think it can create a lot of emotional damage to constantly be paranoid, to feel like
Yeah, that's such a good point.
you know, both of us have many friends at Amazon. I think they've done a pretty good job of institutionalizing, like the focus on the customer. And like, they have so, you know, like corny sayings of like, we're going to leave an empty chair in the conference room for the customer, you know? And it's like, but, um,
That's the best that I can think of a way to just try and have some grounding in not necessarily paranoia, but customer focus. But anyway, yeah, it's so hard. Right, right. Well, it's also the language that we apply to it. You can call it paranoia or you could call it innovation. So I think...
I mean, the language doesn't matter if the feeling's the same, but I'm just, I don't know. This is all an experiment that I'm running eight years in of how do I update my mindset to want to approach things with sort of like activating the pleasure center more than the pain center. Because I'm more likely to move away from pain and towards pleasure. So why don't I make innovation a game and bring play, literally playfulness into it?
And I see too many founders burn out because they've lost play and alignment with their mission and their cultures. Yeah. Yeah. It's so prescient and so true that...
that in a lot of these companies, you're trying to make an experience, in every company, you're trying to make an existing experience better for someone. When the human brain is under a lot of duress and stress, it's really hard to be creative and work on the very thing that got you to start the company in the first place, which is making something better by letting yourself be creative and letting yourself come up with better solutions than exist. And it's, I think, a really astute point
And worth a much longer discussion at some point that the environment of founding a company creates an incredible amount of stress. Or let's say working at a startup, working at a high growth company creates an incredible amount of stress that is literally antithetical to the mission that the company is on. It's like the environment by default conflicts with the mission. Right.
Finding the right way to thread that needle so that you can stay high growth and keep a sense of urgency while still allowing for that creativity and solving customer problems. That's the miracle of life.
Right. Right. And I know too many founders who start off on the journey saying, I wanted to do this to work with my best friends. Yeah. And then five years into it, they hate their best friends. They fired most of them. They lack alignment with what their mission is because to get product market fit, they actually had to swing away from the original idea. And they are so burnt out.
Sometimes it's just like, can we go back to why you started this company? Like what was the real, real reason? And then you can work backwards and make choices from there. All right. So this is a pretty good segue. So Tracy, you started a love company. What does that mean? Like you started a food delivery catering company, but you also started a love company. So where do those things meet? Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, well, love and food. Back in college, there was an organization that my wife was part of that literally the motto was food equals love. Yes, yes. It's like, where don't they meet? Yeah, exactly. I think when people say that they started the company and they knew exactly what they wanted to start, it's 95% of the time it's bullshit. So when I started...
I, you know, as I shared, you know, I was an event planner and I saw this big opportunity and I was like, cool, there's a market opportunity. There's a need. I think there were two underlying factors I wasn't really being conscious of, but they drive me to this day. One was a deep love for my city. I still feel a strong affinity to downtown LA and all of the food entrepreneurs in that city. And that scales to every market that we're in. I adore the food entrepreneurs there. Yeah.
The second thing, I actually discovered three years into it. So oddly enough, and Ben, I don't know if you know this story, but I ended up through a series of introductions meeting Jerry Colonna of Reboot. And I got a sponsorship to go to his boot camp.
It's a CEO boot camp. It's like three or four days out in the mountains of Colorado. It's beautiful. And 15 CEOs from pre-fundraising to exit and earn out. And not one of them was happy. And I'm like 24 or something. And I'm like, what? You're not happy? And they're like, yeah. And it's like, okay, wow. It's not really outcome-based.
And so we started to talk pretty deeply about our childhoods, our past, our motivations. And the thing that came up for me was being bullied. I was sharing the story when I was 10 years old. I used to be bullied so badly I would eat lunch in the bathroom stall. And at that point, I was feeling very emotional. I still get a little emotional talking about it. And Jerry walks over to me and he looks at me and he just says, what does your company do again?
And I said, we make sure nobody eats lunch alone. And in that moment, it felt like 30,000 volts of electricity went through my body. And I was like, oh, my God. Like I never put the past together with the present. I realized that I started Choose from a place of like deep love for that younger version of myself and a deep desire for people to connect together.
And so when I came back to the company, not only with this kind of reimagined sort of motivation for love, but also a big part of Jerry's work is to provide emotional intelligence and skill sets and vulnerability to leaders. With those two things combined, I was like, we did this out of love. And the team just rallied around it. And I got to tell you, the love company idea was pretty organic. I don't even know who came up with the phrase. I don't think I did.
It was an upwelling and it was so natural. And so where we've come to with it today and what it means is it's a high EQ organization that cares about the human and demands excellence, like finding the balance of love and excellence.
To wrap that story, what I don't think you know, Ben, and I often forget to tell people, is I found out later that that sponsorship to that boot camp was through Brad Feld. And this was before Foundry ever invested in us. Oh, wow. And then a year or two after that, they led our Series A. Wow. How did...
Brad and Foundry end up sponsored. Like, had you met them before? No, no. I was an introduction through a dear friend of mine, Matt Ellis, who is in the Foundry portfolio and connecting me to Jerry. And I think they just had it as a placeholder. Like, I don't think it was specific to me. They just had it as a placeholder.
I think that's where it happened. It's just a weird, wacky universe of things. Wow. That's so great. Yeah, Foundry is... I mean, Foundry is an investor in all three of our organizations. Oh, wow. Hell yeah. This could turn into a love fest about Foundry quickly, but they're the real deal. Yeah. Well, no more...
There's plenty of us and other folks singing their praises, which are well-deserved. That's so cool. What a cool story. Thank you for sharing. You're welcome. It was powerful. I think as we've evolved the love company, where it started was and where we had to evolve it. It started with us just being so much on the care side that actually we had missed out on the excellence side.
And so it was in that place when we realized that people were like, a love company wouldn't fire people. And we're like, ooh, this is a problem. This was my, and I'll take responsibility. Like, we're still building a company, right? You know, and so that's when we evolved it to add the second pillar, which is excellence. So it has taken an evolution. But in being so, and one thing I say to founders is, get really polarizing about your culture, right?
Because for us, I was afraid to call ourselves a love company for a long time. But now when we talk to potential recruits, like they either love or hate it.
Some people are like, you know what? This emotional work that you guys do, expressing gratitude, checking in with one another vulnerability, I don't want to do that at work. Like, I just want to go in, do a great job, and leave. We're like, cool. Great. You should work somewhere else. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And now, but then the people who just are rapid, like evangelists for us, they've joined the company. So being polarizing was scary at first. It still is scary. Yeah.
But it's helped us recruit like the best culture fits. That's so awesome. It's like, yeah, there's Netflix for you guys. Like, you know, like they have a super strong culture too. Totally. And like they embrace it. Right. It's a strong and a different direction. You care about love, you shouldn't work here. Yeah. Exactly. Having strong cultural statements like that is like getting to change the rules on the field of which you're playing. You're no longer like competing dollar for dollar or, you know, against another company for money.
what commodity company can I go work for? You have a completely differentiated offering for people to consider as their workplace. Right. And I do think about our culture as a product. So how do you differentiate in a really hot talent market? And
And so like a product, it has certain features, you know, open salaries as a feature, attitudes of gratitude or gratitude ritual is a feature. Vulnerability is a feature and vulnerability as a leadership style is a feature. And so then you've got, I mean, it really does act like its own product. I feel like listeners who aren't in the Bay Area might not appreciate this, but like,
to give you some huge props, to recruit 280 employees. I'm sure not all of them are in the Bay Area. You said you have seven offices across the nation, but a lot in the Bay Area in this insane talent market here. Being in food delivery with 16 other food delivery companies here, it really speaks to the power of your culture. Thank you. I'm very proud of the...
The integrity of which we've built the culture and it's constant adjusting. You know, sometimes I'm like, ooh, are we being vulnerable enough or, you know, and I can lose that path and then I have to come back to it. But it is the thing that people join for. And because we put such a premium on the mission and the culture, we're held to a high standard on it too.
That's something that like you have to accept in building a very opinionated culture. That the company, that the individuals, the humans at the company are like, all right, you sold me in this culture. We better live up to it. Here's some tough feedback, you know? Gotta cash the check. Bring it on. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. Always gotta pay the cost. Yeah, exactly.
You know, we talk a lot about fundraising on this show, but Tracy, I think you've helped so many others through their fundraisers and you yourself have gone through really, really great ones and really hard ones. So I got to take some time to ask you the questions. What's worked well for you and what hasn't as you've thought about capitalizing the company? I mean, 33 million bucks is a lot to raise. You're talking to a lot of different investor groups over many years. Yeah. I mean, I'll
avoid the tactical for now, unless it becomes really important. I think the mindset, the authenticity of the mindset. So I had my own hangups that I will take ownership over that were personal insecurities. So when I was raising my series A, I cut my hair really short. I was wearing Converse and I was wearing shirts and I was like trying to be kind of androgynous.
And I had this hang-up about being a woman fundraising. And fundraising for a love culture nonetheless. I was like, oh God, this is a big softie. And I had gotten feedback from an investor. What year was this? 2015. Okay. I had gotten feedback from an investor from a previous financing during the seed stage that
who we had gone through a ton of diligence with and who had come in and, you know, or he was about to come in to meet the leadership team. And he calls me up that morning, like in dramatic fashion. And he goes, listen, I've spoken to your customers. They say that your service is the best thing that's ever happened to them at work. Unfortunately, we cannot invest and I won't be showing up today. I'm like, why? And he goes,
He's like, frankly, this is a very difficult industry and it's going to require a lot of hand-to-hand combat and we don't have conviction that you're out for blood.
That just devastated me. At the time, I was probably 22 or 23. And building a company as your first job, first time CEO, it's like there's a lot of contending with yourself and your personality and learning. For me, learning who I am and what I'm not. But I was extremely impressionable. And so I took the message there and I said, fine, I'll just never show investors that
that side of me that's caring and loving. And so I go into the series A, I sort of like dress up like a guy because I'm like, they'll never know. Yeah, right. That didn't work. So then we end up- So ironic that Foundry ends up investing, which like- Well, I know. That's probably a turnoff for them that you're like not caring. Exactly. And the thing that changed at the end of that process where we had littered with rejections
We're meeting with them at lunch in Boulder and it's three of the partners are there. And Brad just asks a simple question. He's like, tell me about the trajectory of your business and what you want to build. And something clicked in me.
Something clicked to me because we were close to cash out. How much had you raised before? Before $1.7 million. So we're close to cash out. So you ran four years on $1.7 million. Yeah. I mean, the first few years, we were running very lean. But in that moment, I was like, you know what? If we close this company and I never get to tell my story, I will beat myself up forever. Wow.
And so at that point, I was like, I'm going for it. And my co-founder is sitting there and he kind of like sees the spark of me. He's like, oh, and I just I told him I was like, you know what? We're building a love company and we want a love company to go public. And and I totally get it if that's not the journey that you want to go on. And after that, they pretty much invested on the spot.
And so what's worked for me in the fundraise since then has been like almost owning the parts of myself and the company that I feel the most fear or shame about.
And I have this exercise now when I go out to fundraise where I list out all the things in my head that I feel ashamed of about the company that make me feel small or, you know, retracted. And I will share it with a very, very close audience around me. And they will help me get better perspective on it.
And I will realize that that is just a negative thought in my head, but there are so many different ways to approach it. And so when my community, my tribe comes around me and helps me deal with that, I realize I just need to own the parts of me that draw shame. And someone told me shame is like a vampire. Like you keep it in the dark and it just feeds and gets stronger. You expose it to light and then it just disappears. Right.
And so I think owning the parts that feel shameful, that feel scary, that don't feel in alignment with the tech culture, owning that, it's kind of like owning the love culture. There are people who are going to, investors are going to look at you and go, God, I would never invest in a food startup, right? Or I could look at it and go, this is a rapidly growing industry and consumer food delivery has come online. It's a no-brainer. Corporate's going to come online. It's 10% online right now.
and own it, right? Two different ways of looking at the exact same thing. So I think just owning the things that lie beneath the surface. Yeah. And there's also, you know, we've talked about a bunch on this show. I think it goes back to Amazon of like, you get the shareholders you ask for, you know? And like, you could like try and pretend that you're like some, you know,
traditional, you know, Mark Zuckerberg-y startup, you know, like tech, you know, high gross margin, blah, blah, blah. And then you could try and fool some investors into thinking that. Or you could just be like, this is what we are, you know? Right, right. And I think the problem is you accrue, you take on a debt and it's an authenticity debt that
If you're inauthentic and that's how you start the relationship, much like dating, eventually you're going to pay that debt down. And if that relationship lasts too long and all of a sudden the real you comes out and the other person's like, wait, I was sold on a different product, you know, you're just buying time. And I think that can create a lot of anxiety.
you come across in this podcast, I'm sure listeners are listening and like, you're so poised, you understand your business so well, like, you know, shoot, like, you know, we would love to come work for you. But I'm sure you didn't look like that when you were in college and starting this company. Like, are there things looking back now that you could see like in yourself or that other people saw in you of like, there's potential here? Like what separated you from all the other people who started businesses at the time? And like nine years later, they're not running their businesses.
It's probably still a chip on my shoulder, but it's a little bit better now. I had deep insecurities about my age. My age, but more so that I didn't have experience, that I'd never worked anywhere before and certainly didn't have any brand names on my resume. Yeah.
So I sometimes ask myself the question, I asked my early investors that question, why the hell did you invest in me when I was freaking, you know, 2021 raising money? And so I try to take an objective look at it. And I think over time, the thing I think about endurance and resilience, but what is that really? Like, what are the components of it? And the first, so again, let's look to the non-resilient.
founders in my community who I adore, by the way, and love them. And when I see a founder flame out, it is often first off because they have lacked alignment with their mission. So they've had to pivot away from the thing they actually love to the market opportunity that they do not care about. That can last for a bit. But over time, that will erode you internally. And I've seen that happen to many a team and a founder. The second is misalignment with the culture.
If all of a sudden they've got a culture that they're building that just doesn't reflect them at all, doesn't reflect the early joys, the early authenticity, the early sharing, and it evolves over time. But if it doesn't fall within the same direction, founders resent their companies. And so I have, and I would consider it sort of a selfishness that is generous. But I have been
Looking back, and I wouldn't have called it this, but now looking back, I think I was quite selfish in saying I cannot stand a culture that will not be vulnerable and will not care about others. I could not work at that company. So I will hold this company in line to those principles. And so when I have very down moments, and I have many of them,
The idea of leaving the company is not on my radar. And it is because I still have the hope and that youthfulness and that joy that comes with the alignment. So when it's hard, I go, but I'm still building the culture that I love. If I didn't have that, I would be thinking about leaving all the time. I don't know how you would – I really don't know how you could stay aligned with a company if I'm being very, very honest. Yeah.
Yeah, totally. You know, it's so funny. One of our investments that Ben knows, we've talked about, we invested in a founder and a founding team that was pursuing a market opportunity. And then they got, you know, a few months into the product and the team and they're just like,
This industry and market is not what doesn't reflect who I am or who I want to be. It was fortunately early enough in the company that we could just be like, all right, well, let's stop doing that and let's do something else. Then we spent a couple months, we figured out something else. They're actually doing something else in food. Consumers, not enterprise. But it's just like night and day looking at the company, but also the founders of just like, they're fired up.
And like in a way that before it was like every day was like dragging themselves out of bed, you know? Right. And there's this...
badge of honor with that. But there's no nobility in suffering, no nobility for your team or your customers to suffer that long. And eventually, again, it's a debt, you'll pay it down. Companies that are larger where that happens, you know, it doesn't mean the answer is to shut down. You know, there's graceful ways of transitioning power to a CEO and a team that love doing that, right? That love that mission and love that culture.
I think that's the other lesson that I've been learning about how to unwind my identity from the identity of the company to recognize it may be best for the company to make decisions, you know, to have a CEO that's not me. That could be a, like, that's a question I'm constantly pinging myself with. Am I the right CEO? Am I aligned with the mission? Am I aligned with the culture? And if the response back is no, then I have a few branches. Do I
Do I make changes to bring it back to alignment or do I find a different leader? There's shades of, you know, there's plenty other branches there, but that's kind of the rough tree and path that I think of. And when I'm energized, the team loves it.
And it's like life is far too short. I'm starting to get more perspective. I just turned 30. Like, whoop-dee-doo. Welcome to, you know... Oh, I feel now experienced. Still having many decades ahead. Now I'm experienced. Yeah, yeah. All my insecurities are gone. Yeah, you turn 30 and they all melt away. Yeah, right. That's what I expected. You don't understand TikTok. Yeah. So, but, you know, I think ultimately it's about the...
with oneself. When you're honest with yourself, then I, when I am honest with myself, I can radiate that honesty to my team, my investors, my family, friends, boyfriend, my industry. But it has to start internally. Otherwise, lying to yourself will serve nobody. It's crazy how it's obvious. Like, even though it's not explicit and you're not telling other people, like, you're not
you know, I'm grinning right now because I feel really great about what we're doing and I'm personally motivated by it. And it's laced with every verbal and nonverbal cue that you have. And I think it, you know, we talk a lot about on the show of something that
David and I both look for in founders is someone who's a magnet for talent and has an ability to uniquely recruit where it's so hard to recruit people. And really what you're doing is you're building this huge coalition of people that are willing to all go and do this same mission with you. And you're so right that a major component of that is once you're honest with yourself, once you're aligned and excited about what you're doing, you just naturally have this sort of energy where...
everyone feels at peace around you because you feel at peace with yourself. Right. And for me, I have a village. I've got a therapist. I've got an executive coach. I've got a peer group of other CEOs and founders that I can talk to. And they help me see my blind spots. Because being able to be that real with yourself is not an exercise done alone. Right.
people think it is. I used to think it was. I thought that was strength, you know, not to burden other people with it or reveal those weaknesses, but they see things about me that I don't see. And then when they share with me, I can give them the underlying context that they don't see either. And then we come to radical insights about myself that I can then use to power my energy as a human and as a CEO. Yeah.
How long did it take you to build that sort of village? And how intentional did you have to? Because I assume, you know, I'm imagining in the early years of the business, you were living with all that yourself. And then now you're not. But like, you probably had to be pretty intentional about building this. There have been a few key points where it almost felt like I didn't have a choice.
Last year, about this time, I was supposed to be married and my ex-fiance walked out on me. And I'll tell you, that was a moment, that was a radical transformation for me because everything that I worked on in sort of developing my own inner resilience, and I think as entrepreneurs, we're all just like, we're so independent and self-reliant. I had to learn to be less self-reliant.
I didn't feel like I had a choice. That kind of heartbreak is, you know, brought me to my knees. And so it was about reaching out. I mean, not only to my friends, but I had a conversation, a candid one with my board members too. And they were very human and empathetic with me. So I think it's moments like that. It's been, you know, times in the business where, you know, you have to
You have to fire somebody who you're super close to, who, you know, a co-founder leaves, right? Like these are all the hard things that it's like, wow, I literally right now cannot do this on my own. And it is better to be supported by the community. And then seeing the benefits of that, it's like fresh growth. It's like, wow, okay, I need to be intentional now.
Like I know what makes me feel better and I'm going to stop judging myself for it and just start building a community around me. But I kind of, you know, people told me that, but it was only, it's only when you go through hell that you're like, okay, I need an angel. Yeah. Yeah, man. It's like, uh,
in many ways probably mirrors the entrepreneur's journey, you know, itself of like, yeah, everybody's like, well, I know this is going to be hard. Like intellectually you're like, yeah, this is going to be hard. But then you're like, well, now I'm deep in it, you know? Right. Right. And there's the, yeah, something shift shifts in me over multiple, multiple years to get there. Wow. Um, first thank you for sharing Tracy. Um, welcome. Yeah. So the real stuff. Yeah.
We've zeroed in really hard on founder mentality and founder support here. Do you think this notion of mission self-fit or mission self-alignment needs to occur with all your team members too? And how do you figure out who it applies to and if it doesn't to some, who it doesn't apply to?
Where my thinking has evolved on this is I don't believe that there is always perfect alignment, you know, whether it's with the mission or even the values are a good one, right? You as a company may have three to ten values and it would be kind of ludicrous to say I must find the person that perfectly overlaps with all of these. Hell, I don't even, right? But do I think that they are all good in nature and directionally? Do I feel aligned? Yes. I think the...
I think it is important with the team. You know, our mission is about building authentic connection. Does that have to be the number one single driving force for every member on our team? No. But do they have to have quite a strong hook to it that may have come from their own challenges when they were young being bullied, their own experience at their last job where they felt unfairness, they felt alone, they felt dehumanized? Absolutely. And
And so if they can't relate, and often you get this out in the interview process where you just have a real authentic share, much like I've done here, and then you see how people react. And do people, that also is a...
It's another way of getting to high EQ too. Like, can they empathize with the story? Can they relate to it? Can they share their own inner experience of it? And then does that all feel authentic? You know, it's hard to codify that. I know, you know, tech founders would be like, give me the playbook. There's a, you know, there's a little bit of EQ here. Where's the algorithm for metric? Yeah, I know. I mean, who knows? That might be my next startup. Yeah.
But, you know, I think there's also like an inner knowing when you spend time with someone, like, are they actually moved by it? And you can sort of see it shining in their eyes. That's the way that I sort of think about it and feel it. And I'm sure I'm looking at facial expressions and other cues. But I do think especially at leadership. So for the leadership levels, the standard that I hold, I hold them to a higher cultural standard.
That is not to say that we hire anybody who was a cultural misfit anywhere in the organization. But at the leadership level, I think about if I...
If I were to put them on MSNBC or CNN on an interview about choose, I would trust them and be stoked that they were on the show, right? Representing choose. And if I don't feel that way, then they're not going to be on my leadership team. Because that's how the rest of the organization needs to feel about them. Like, yeah, that person holds our culture just as well as me as the CEO can. Because if it's all on my shoulders, like, A, selfishly, like, that sucks and that's a lot of stress. Right?
But B, you know, then I'm building an organization that doesn't scale beyond my ability to represent the culture. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, man, that's such a, that's such a big transition point in a company's life cycle, right? Like, cause in the early days, like it, um, I would imagine a big reason why Foundry Group invested in you and your series A is just that lunch with you. And they're like, all right, we believe in Tracy, you know, like, um, so yeah, that's actually, it's like, uh, I don't know that it's talked about enough, but I think that is a major, major inflection point for companies and going from the
early stage to growth stage, whatever you want to call it, but the next level is scaling that persona, right? Right, right. And it's still a balancing act for me where there's the...
It was very hard on me in some ways. The delegation ways were kind of natural for me. I don't know why, but I tend to start relationships from high trust. It gets me burned sometimes, but I think the upside is way bigger than the downside on that. So I didn't have problems with that, but the problems were in the building the single relationship authentic connection and starting to realize that people were putting me on a pedestal.
Whereas I'm like, hey, I'm a human. I've got plenty of insecurities. I'm happy to talk to you about that all day. Because part of like, I feel like part of my personal, one of my pieces of personal mission is to not do a disservice to other humans by saying that I'm crushing it and everything is great. I think it is a disservice. And I'd rather allow people the space to be real by being real first than
And one of the co-founders of Living Social once told me, as a leader, you have to go first and you have to be the most vulnerable. Otherwise, nobody else around you is going to be as vulnerable as you. So you are setting that tone for everybody else to play with him.
But it was, you know, and it's been sort of like, okay, how do I scale relationships? Because I'm a relational person. And also, how do I recognize that having the persona of the culture actually is a good thing, right? There are good components to it that people see me as holding the culture. I just want to make sure that people also see the vulnerable sides of me. And they also don't think that I am the exclusive carrier of culture, right?
And so that is something that I actively work on with the team and our community of ChooseLings, which is what we call them today. That's awesome. Yeah. The company's been around for eight years now, right? You have 280 people. Has anybody left and started their own companies? Have any entrepreneurs come from Choose yet?
I've seen folks go to earlier stage companies and build again or build even earlier. I've seen folks go off and do sort of their own consulting businesses. I don't think I have. I'll have to think about that. What I have seen, though, is that people transfer the culture that they learn at Choose and try to bring it into new organizations. And that is...
You know, that is what I imagine the pride of a parent is. Yeah, yeah. You know, like, wow, you know what? If one person leaves Choose and starts a company with, and they don't have to call it a love company, but with the ethos of emotional intelligence, I am proud. I've had some of the highest compliments that we've been paid is like when people say, I go home and I am a better partner or parent because of the emotional skill set that we learn here. Mm-hmm.
like there's the game. Like I'm, I die, I die happy. All right, Tracy, we've gone through most of the questions that I wanted to ask. Anything else you want to say to listeners out there or other things that, that you think people should know about you or choose? I do want to speak to women in the audience or anybody that is working with women that want to be founders in the tech systems. That's everybody. Yeah.
The thing that I have found in sort of the post-MeToo movement is that I'm seeing a split. I'm seeing a split of women who are taking that, taking that energy and using it creatively. And then also women that are, I call it the second box. So there's sort of the first box, which is like constraint, the world of constraints. And, you know, that's aging process. That's health issues, death.
And we all have those boxes and, and yeah, things like racism and sexism. But I see women creating a second box around themselves. And the second box is smaller. And it's oftentimes us looking at the world exclusively through that lens. And it actually impairs women from starting companies or joining the ranks of tech. And I want to tell women that this is the best time ever to start companies and to join tech.
And when I look at it, when I look at the funding that's going towards women, the support that women have from other women and from men, like this is the most supportive time to do this. And so no matter what you may hear in the press,
you know, the negative stories. I want to elevate the story for women and minorities and anybody who's a non-traditional founder. And by the way, I think it's not just about gender or sex or sexual orientation. Like non-traditional founders are people who like, you know, you could be a musician, right? But realize that there's a big problem in the space of music, but you're not traditional. You haven't, hell, you didn't get a college degree.
I think this is the best time for that because you're seeing all these non-traditional founders. And I think there's an important, it adds to the technology space because we're adding a dimension of EQ, of actual diversity of experiences and thought because people from all walks of life are joining. And I think it ultimately creates long-term value. And so I just, I want to lighten the mood for people. And, you know, I've pitched, I've probably gone through 350 pitches now,
And I'll tell you, not all the stories are like happy and positive, but I know, Jesus. But the environment is still rather supportive. And now I walk into the room and if I'm fundraising or doing a business deal, I'm like, certainly as a woman, I'm like, everybody wants to help me. And it is so, so damn true.
And that's the story that I choose to tell myself. And so I would like that for anybody who's thinking of joining the ranks of tech or founding their own company to elevate the story for themselves. Yeah, amen. And I think it's easy for...
everybody to feel some degree of that, you know, no matter who you are. Like, you know, when we were starting wave, we were like, well, we're all in our like early thirties. Like it's pretty audacious for three of us to start a venture firm. Like, do we belong here? You know, like even though, you know, I'm sure lots of other people on the outside were like, well, of course, like you guys are so, you know, pedigreed and like, that's a great voice because you can look at things on the outside and be like, oh man, Silicon Valley has never been more closed. Um,
But it's not true. Like it's never been, you know, it's as open as it's always been, if not more so. And it's always been very open. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a good point because really the trick is it's not about whatever identity group that you belong to. It's actually these feelings of non-traditionalness at the individual level are universal.
And every other founder feels it in some way, shape, or form. That's the ultimate truth that I've learned having interacted with hundreds of founders and leaders in technology. And so knowing that and knowing how relatable that is,
And now the ecosystem is open to sharing it. I was on a panel about founder mental health at a VC conference. Imagine that five years ago. I know. We all talked openly about how we had therapists.
Right? And people are like, wow, things are changing. Things are changing. And I'm sitting here in the ranks, not as a journalist trying to get clickbait on, you know, their article, right? I'm sitting here in the ranks telling you that it is more supportive than ever before. And, you know, I'll give a quick shout out to All Raise, which is a group that I'm a part of where they're elevating the story for women and helping women get introductions on VC and the operator side. Thousands of organizations like that. So, yeah, it's a great time to start a company. Yeah.
That's so awesome. Well, Tracy, what you've built is amazing. What you continue to build is amazing. And probably the crown jewel on top of all of that, the way that you've given back to the founder community and the level of transparency and openness that you have about everything that you've gone through and learned that you can share with others is really inspiring. So thank you so much for doing all of that, for coming on the show. Thank you for having me here.
Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. Where can listeners find you? I am, oh my God, saying my handle out loud is hilarious. I'm on Twitter at Chewish Girl. It's because, I guess I didn't say this, but my mom is Chinese and my dad's Jewish. So my friends called me Chewish when I was growing up and that's why we call the company Chews. That's amazing. So, yeah.
You could find me at Chewish Girl, Twitter and Instagram. Did the Twitter handle precede the company? Yes, it did. I think so. I think it did. And then at Chews as well, sharing your stories of vulnerability and founding stories with us. We'll promote it. Our brand is built, again, on authenticity. So happy to share those. What cities are you guys operating in? We are in
LA, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Austin, and Chicago. So if you're an office that's ordering food for teams, again, from 15 to 500, please reach out. We'd love to feed you. Yeah. Great.
Better than I'm waiting for you to serve three-person teams. Yeah, yeah. Give us a few years. We got a long vision to go here. We're not super profitable customers. Or for you to scale to 15. That's better. I don't think that's going to happen. That'd be a very long time. Yeah, fair enough. Awesome. Well, LPs, we'll hear you next time. And thanks again, Tracy. Cool. Thank you.