20VC: Being A Wartime Leader in a Time of Peace, Why Marketing Channel Diversification Is Like The Life of A Scientist and Why Small and Mighty Beats Loud and Weak with Ooshma Garg, Founder & CEO @ Gobble

Ooshma Garg is the Founder & CEO @ Gobble, the startup that allows you to cook a fresh homemade dinner in just 15 minutes. To date, Ooshma has raised over $30m in funding for Gobble from some of the best in the business including Initialized Capital, Keith Rabois, Reid Hoffman, Founder Collective, Felicis, Andreesen Horowitz and Thrive just to name a few. As for Ooshma, prior to founding Gobble she founded Anapata, an online site that matches students looking for jobs with potential employers. The company was ultimately acquired by LawWerx. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ooshma made her way from Wall St to changing the way America eats with Gobble today? 2.) Everyone has an opinion on the food delivery space with the public nature of Blue Apron, what does Ooshma mean when she says "small and mighty beats loud and weak"? Why did Ooshma not take the path of other competitors in the space of racing big and running fast? What is Ooshma's advice to founders on dilution and raise amounts? 3.) Would Ooshma agree with Alex @ LSVP that marketing portfolios are like venture portfolios, diversified and then double down? Would Ooshma agree with the concern around unfeasible CACs due to incumbents bidding them up on major platforms? Where does Ooshma see blue ocean when it comes to marketing channel success? 4.) What does Ooshma mean when she says "success is survival"? Why is capital efficiency even more important in online/offline businesses? What are some of Ooshma's examples of her "wartime approach" to capital efficiency? How does Ooshma explain this more sustainable growth to the growth-hungry VC community? Who is to blame for the insatiable desire for unreasonable growth; the founders or the VCs? 5.) Ooshma has raised over $30m with Gobble, analysing herself in fundraising, what does Ooshma believe she did particularly well during the raise and advise other founders to do? What elements would she like to improve upon for the next round? What is the story behind how Ooshma sprinted down the 101 to get Keith Rabois as an angel? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Ooshma’s Fave Book: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ooshma on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, at H Stebbings1996 on Instagram. And my word, what a Founders Friday we have in store for you today. I have to say, this one was so much fun to record, and I'm very excited to welcome Ushma Garg to the hot seat today. Ushma is the founder and CEO at Gobble, the startup that allows you to cook a fresh homemade dinner in just 15 minutes. To date, Ushma's raised over $30 million in funding for Gobble from some of the best in the business, including initialized capital, Keetra Boy, Reid Hoffman, Founder Collective, Felicis, Andreessen and Thrive, just to name a few. As for Ushma, prior to founding Gobble, she founded Annapater, an online site that matches students looking for jobs with potential employers. The company was ultimately acquired by Lawworks.

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd also have to say a huge thank you to two people who've always been so awesome and supportive to me, Alexis Ohanian and Gary Tan. I really do so appreciate the intro here, and it means a lot. But before we dive into the show today, I want to talk a little bit about Hims, a new wellness brand for men. So although I look positively young enough to be Harry Potter in disguise, doing three episodes a week is stressful. And did you know 66% of men lose their hair by aged 35? Ouch. And so you do not want a bald spot to pop up, or do you want to do something about it first and be proactive? In that case, head to forhims.com, the one stop shop for hair loss, skincare and sexual wellness for men. Why do I love it? Well, there is no waiting room, awkward doctor visits. It literally saves hours by going to forhims.com.

• 1:24Harry Stebbings?

  Plus, I'm busy and I don't really want to go to a store either, and so they deliver right to your door. Enough said, they really are awesome, and 20 VC listeners get a trial month of Hims for just $5 today, right now, while supplies last. Go to forhims.com/20vc, that's forhims.com/20vc. So if Hims can transform yourself, Terminal can transform your company. As we all know, the reality of hiring amazing developers is hard, and it's much, much harder if you only look within a 25 mile radius of your office. And that's where Terminal comes in. Terminal is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Well, Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, set up and support these teams, from physical

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But don't take my word for this. Take the word of Eventbrite, Hims and DialPad, all customers and lovers of Terminal. And you can find out more today at terminal.io. And finally, thanks to my friends at WePay, let me introduce you to another cool player in the space we love, Joyce. Joyce has built the go-to platform for contractors, designed for ease of use in a mobile world. It enables contractors to professionally handle everyday tasks like estimating invoicing, collecting payments and managing projects. And with more than 500,000 contractors who use the Joyce platform, managing more than $8.5 billion in invoice work in North America, the UK and Australia. And you can learn more at joyce.com.

• 2:53Harry Stebbings?

  And to learn how you can grow your revenue with integrated payments, just like Joyce did, visit wepay.com/harry. And WePay's got this fantastic case study about how another platform, TeamSnap, is working with WePay to make payments its number one revenue stream, more than its subscription business. Get it at wepay.com/harry. But I'm now very excited to hand the mic over to Ushma Garg, founder and CEO at Gobble.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:24Harry Stebbings?

  Ushma, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. As I said, I feel like I know you well already, having heard so much from Micra at Found, Collective, Gary and Alexis at the Initialized and Sundeep at Felicis. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:38Harry Stebbings?

  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 Gobble? And what was that aha moment for you?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  And I sold Girl Scout cookies for like all the way through school for eighteen 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 in my entire life. And out of that dark place, Gobble was born.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  My family ate together every single night growing up. My dad is the head of nutrition at UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas, the chief of nutrition and an endocrinologist there. So he dedicated his life to studying diabetes and obesity and then would come home and prepare this colorful, warm, healthy North Indian meal for our entire family every day. And God forbid you talk about eating out, this was just the way it was done. Going to school and starting businesses, I lost that sense of family and that home-cooked upbringing. And it was much more than just calories and nutrition. It was a groundedness and a sense of home and connection that I was missing. My parents would send me food and hope that I would eat it. They live in Texas, they'd send it to California.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  And when I was in that very dark place, I wasn't calling them, I wasn't calling any of my friends, I wasn't eating home-cooked food, things were going to waste. And that's where that aha moment came from. My dad actually visited California, got himself on a plane, came to my house, and fed me a plate of his food. And all of the emotions and the feelings of love and purpose and abundance and self came back. And that became my mission. From that day in 2010, the mission became integrating home-cooked food into the life.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  A very busy people and into the modern family and maintaining this sense of love and belonging, which I think is is very intrinsic to every human being.

• 6:38Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I absolutely love that. And I have to admit, my mother still does bring me food today, but we don't have gobble in the evening. You cannot blame me for that. But I do want to dive in today, straight away and touch on the theme of competition, because, you know, meal delivery is a space where everyone seems to have an opinion, justified or not, with blue aprons, very public nature. And with that competition in mind, but 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?

• 7:10Speaker 02

  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. But a lot of companies, at least in our history, in the food market have come and gone.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 8:26Harry Stebbings?

  Now, this is so unfair of me, Ushma, not in the schedule, but I'm too interested not to 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 is 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 scene?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  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 point 0001% and they have a large amount of luck that goes with it. And so I think that 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.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  But for the entrepreneur, you only have one real bet. And it's just like this big Powerball 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 point 0001% chance at a overnight multi-billion dollar outcome.

• 9:51Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I totally agree with you, which is why I'm a VC and not an entrepreneur. But I do have to ask you, you mentioned obviously pouring money on the marketing channels there. And Gobble really grew in the early days through word of mouth. I'm always really interested, once that low hanging fruit and early adopter ecosystem's been saturated. We had Alex Tausig on the show from Lightspeed and he said about marketing being very much like a venture portfolio, placing 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?

• 10:23Speaker 02

  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 dedicated their life to a few amazing discoveries that take 14 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.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  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. Luckily, we have a fantastic VP of Marketing, Robin Rissow, 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.

• 11:30Harry Stebbings?

  No, I mean, absolutely it has. And it's been incredible to see Goggles' growth. But I do want to ask, in terms of those distribution channels, I think a big concern for me is maybe the large incumbents really paying up for the channels. And you said about kind of really keeping in mind your cat to LTV. But with the paying up, it makes the catch just too high in a lot of cases. How do you think about this? And would you agree that there's maybe a lack of free and open distribution today?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  You know, I think that companies go through a product innovation, a marketing and distribution innovation, and a cost innovation. And actually, to excel at each of those three steps is extremely hard. And I assume that each of those worlds and steps is very saturated. You know, our product innovation and product market fit moment took some time. And then took that thousand days to product market fit. That's the folklore in Silicon Valley. And now that we're in this marketing and distribution bucket, we have to approach it with lead bullets and in the most strategic way and dedicated and ambitious way that we can. But I don't think that there's a silver bullet for free or easy marketing in any industry long term. There might be flashes of light.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  But this is why diversification was so important. And when I was talking about our VP Marketing, Robin, earlier, 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. So I think that there are hundreds of millions of people in the country. And if you want to grow tomorrow, you think that all the marketing channels are very saturated. But if you want to grow long term, you can find blue oceans in these saturated marketing channels for yourself.

• 13:12Harry Stebbings?

  I love that element of finding blue oceans in the saturated marketing channels. I mean, you say there about wanting growth tomorrow. And you said before, and I love this quote, that 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?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  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, in 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.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  An analogy would be like if you were to judge Instacart 1,000% on Webvan. And some VCs do, but I find 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 in direct-to-consumer.

• 14:59Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I couldn't agree with you more there, and especially on the excitement for CPG around D to C. But you mentioned the element of looking under the hood there. And I want to dive a little bit deeper, because you said to me before that survival is success. My word, you should coin all these quotes. But tell me about this. What do you mean by survival is success? And why is it maybe more paramount in offline versus online business?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  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. 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 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,

• 16:06Speaker 02

  we somewhat counterintuitively for Silicon Valley, made 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 storms and be 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 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.

• 16:39Harry Stebbings?

  Can I 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?

• 16:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  And it's not just mission driven. It's also business and opportunity driven. They think it's a fertile ground for a business and that they can make tons of money working in this company while also doing something that makes. them fundamentally happy at night every day with their family. So I want to do right by that. And it's similar to sort of a Warren Buffett strategy. I think a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of people in general don't fully grasp and embrace the benefits of compounding. And so if we can continue growing at a certain pace, year after year after year after year, you get to some really big numbers very, very quickly. And that just requires patience and vision and showing people that and saying, hey, you

• 18:27Speaker 02

  know, by 2020, we'll be X billion valuation and then by 2025, we'll be here and we'll be international. So it's kind of the founder's job to really share that vision for the future, not just for tomorrow and to kind of teach people to long for the endless mystery of the sea.

• 18:44Harry Stebbings?

  For sure. And I love the element of kind of the compounding growth there. I do have to ask then, in terms of kind of putting the pedal to the metal, so to speak, and pouring fuel on the fire, does that mean there maybe doesn't have to be a time when you have to really aggressively do so? And then if you do have that time, when is that time?

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Yes, you do have that time. I think every company does. It's a combination of seasonal factors, of having the right team in place, the right infrastructure and how much cash you have. We've raised how much cash we needed. 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 able to do so readily. So that discipline has really benefited us and it has allowed us to keep expectations in alignment with our investors.

• 19:36Harry Stebbings?

  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?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  What I think I did really well is work with investors who are very aligned with our vision. So Gary Tan and Keith Rabois had invested in our business early on. Keith Rabois 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.

• 20:27Harry Stebbings?

  I did actually see that. I thought it was incredible to see that. It was so cute.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. So choosing people who can play that long game with you is very valuable. Our series A lead was Ajay Chopra from Trinity Ventures, you know, who built an extremely successful company himself. And his kind of operational discipline has taught me a lot and has been valuable to the company through all the ups and downs of the industry and made us one of the most successful survivors still standing today.

• 20:54Harry Stebbings?

  So if we flip sides of the table, if you're being maybe self analytical and self critical, are there elements where you think you could improve and would like to improve with subsequent rounds, with subsequent fundraisings?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yes, I think it's, you know, recently, as we have so little time and every minute matters. You know, there's this quote from Augustus Caesar to hasten slowly. So every single minute matters in my day, but I understand that all the big gains will happen over time. So in that regard, I think it's important to be as upfront with potential venture capitalists for you as possible and to be radically transparent, listen radically, be candid, and just really share your vision for the company out of respect for yourself and your team and ensure that those stakeholders are 1,000% aligned with if you want to sell in three years, if you want to go long, what happens when things go bad, the kind of executives you want to hire, the team inside your company,

• 21:49Speaker 02

  because little differences along the way can really make for a lot of frustration on the board and for the board members and for the CEO. And I think that that in some cases can actually like kill companies working with the wrong people at the very highest level of a business. So being very careful about that is what I would bring to the table next time around. The other thing is that every year I work on this idea and this problem, I actually see an even bigger opportunity and I see how gobble could be. Even bigger and do more and I understand it more deeply. I think that also has some parallels to science, which is the more you discover, the more you see that is unknown. And the more you see that you can still learn.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  That's exciting because I wish I could have explained the fullness and vastness of the vision even in earlier fundraising rounds. And one thing that I'd like to do very well next time around is to be able to really articulate and map that opportunity for us.

• 22:43Harry Stebbings?

  When I was at school, we always used to finish with story time. So before we move into the quickfire round, I want to finish with a bit of story time. I spoke to Keith Rabois before the show. You mentioned being one of your first investors. And he said to me, ask Ushma the story behind how she persuaded me to invest. So let's go with that for story time.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm a very deliberate person. There wasn't a circuitous path for me. And when I see something and intellectually know it's the right decision and also know from my core, then I go after it and like God help you if you're blocking me because I've learned the power of imposing your will. And it's like a drug. It's so exciting to have the privilege to impose your will on something in the world. And if you do it with all your might and from a good place and from that intellectual place, incredible things happen. And so in a micro fashion, that's what happened with Keith. I was researching angel investors for our company. And at the time Keith was at Square and he had been involved in Yelp.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  And he had been angel investing in a number of other consumer companies, especially in peer to peer and e-commerce. And the first version of Gobble was what we called peer to peer lasagna. And it was a marketplace similar to Airbnb, but for home cooks to make food and deliver to everyday people. And I could not get a hold of Keith. I think he had actually blogged or tweeted or something about not investing anymore. And it was at the tail end of a lot of investments and a lot of work he was doing at Square. So I actually asked everyone I know if they knew him and if they could message him. So I had Bill Clerico from WePay message Keith for me and Keith said, I'm not interested. And then Jason Patori from Mint and Vodizen played soccer with Keith. And so I met up with him and said, hey, can you message him?

• 24:24Speaker 02

  And a couple of other folks and he just said, no. Three or four times and I was having coffee in Mountain View at Red Rock Cafe with my friend Jason. I think maybe six or eight weeks later and he said, hey, did Keith ever get back to you? I said, no, he didn't. I really would have loved to work with him, but maybe the timing isn't right. And Jason said, well, do you want me to text him? And I just thought, yeah, why the hell not? Absolutely. Please text him, put in some emojis, do what you gotta do. And so he texted him and he said, hey, I'm at coffee with Ushma. You know, she really wants to meet you. I think it'd be great. Do you want to meet her? And he said something like, oh, I have an hour. Is she nearby? She can come over. And I did the common entrepreneurs and saleswoman's trick of, yeah, I'm absolutely nearby.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  But you know, I was an hour away and had to speed down 101 as carefully as possible. And arrived at Square just kind of out of breath and trying to act like I was just around the corner. And the first thing he said is, who are you? And just was astonished with the tenacity with which I approached meeting with him. And I did it not just because I thought that it would be good for me, but because I thought that he would enjoy working with me and our business and because I'd done all of my homework. And sure enough, we had a philosophical conversation about convertible notes and the structures and what they mean and how we should structure this whole thing. And by the end of the meeting, we had commitment and investment. And then he was messaging folks like Reid Hoffman, who then came in and other folks. And that really started our seed round in a really high quality way

• 25:52Speaker 02

  that obviously then, years later, led to our Series B and a long-term relationship with one of the best venture capitalists in the industry.

• 26:00Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I mean, I think that was well worth the coffee and the speeding down the 101 for that. Keith is an exceptional person. I'd love to have seen that. But I do want to move into a quickfire round now, Ushma. So I say a short statement and then you give me your thoughts in 60 seconds or less. Are you ready?

• 26:15Speaker 02

  I am ready.

• 26:15Harry Stebbings?

  So your favorite book and why?

• 26:17Speaker 02

  The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. My favorite genre is magical realism. And I love the way that we can learn about people and situations from writers like Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Garcia Marquez, with the creativity in which they describe the world.

• 26:33Harry Stebbings?

  What would you most like to change about Silicon Valley and VC?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  We have a very diverse company in team and in skill set. We have chefs and engineers, supply chain executives. And sometimes we are butting heads, but actually the diversity of experience and thought and background is unique to our DNA and I attribute a lot of our success to it. So I'd love to see a lot more diversity in Silicon Valley, both in companies, in investors, and also just in people, so that we can learn more from artists and musicians and scientists in our daily lives.

• 27:05Harry Stebbings?

  What motto or quote do you frequently revert back to?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  I often say that startups die of suicide and not homicide. That is a Paul Graham quote and essentially it describes our industry very well. No one is going to kill you. There's trillions of dollars for the taking and everything is about execution.

• 27:24Harry Stebbings?

  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 moment, Sushma?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  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 are not appreciated enough. 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 like go into it head on because then it'll be over as soon as possible.

• 28:16Harry Stebbings?

  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?

• 28:22Speaker 02

  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 US companies have not expanded internationally and our industry is actually an international industry in the UK, Canada, Australia, et cetera. 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 uber X 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.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  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 coming out in the next couple of months that are very, very big for the company and the industry.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  So do look out for them, because you'll be seeing a lot more from us.

• 29:53Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Ushma, I cannot wait for you to relieve my mother of delivering food to me and come to the UK. It's a very exciting time ahead, but thank you so much for joining me today.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Thank you. You'll be our first customer.

• 30:06Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I'm not sure what I'm more excited about, that fantastic interview with Ushma or the fact that I will be the first customer in the UK for Gobble. Either way, I want to say huge thank you to Ushma. You can find her on Twitter at Ushma. That really is a must. Likewise, we'd love to see you behind the scenes here on Instagram. You can do that at H Stebbings nineteen ninety six with two Bs. It really would be great to see you there. But before we leave you today, I want to talk a little bit about Hims, a new wellness brand for men. So although I look positively young enough to be Harry Potter in disguise, doing three episodes a week is stressful. And did you know sixty-six percent of men lose their hair by age thirty-five? Ouch. And so you do not want a bald spot to pop up. Or do you want to do something about it first and be proactive? In that case, head to fourhims.com, the one-stop shop for hair loss, skincare,

• 30:51Harry Stebbings?

  and sexual wellness for men. Why do I love it? Well, there is no waiting room, awkward doctor visits. It literally saves.

• 30:57Harry Stebbings?

  Hours by going to fourhymns.com plus I'm busy and I don't really want to go to a store either and so they deliver right to your door enough said they really are awesome and 20 VC listeners get a trial month of hymns for just five dollars today right now while supplies last go to fourhymns.com forward slash 20 VC that's fourhymns.com forward slash 20 VC so if hymns can transform yourself terminal can transform your company as we all know the reality of hiring amazing developers is hard and it's much much harder if you only look within a 25 mile radius of your office and that's where terminal comes in terminal is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams how do they deliver both speed and quality well terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source set up and support these teams from physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment to ongoing resources like HR payroll legal professional learning and development but don't take my word for this take the word of Eventbrite hymns and dial pad all customers and lovers of terminal and you can find out more today at terminal.io and finally thanks to my friends at we pay let me introduce you to another cool player in the space we love joyst joyst has built the go-to platform for contractors designed for ease of use in a mobile world it enables contractors to professionally handle everyday tasks like estimating invoicing collecting payments and managing projects and with more than 500,000 contractors who use the joyst platform managing more than 8.5 billion dollars in invoice work in North America the UK and Australia and you can learn more at joyst.com and to learn how you can grow your revenue with integrated payments just like joyst did visit we pay.com forward slash harry and we pay's got this fantastic case study about how another platform team snap is working with we pay to make payments its number one revenue stream more than its subscription business get it at we pay.com forward slash harry as always I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you a phenomenal set of episodes next week