First Time Founders with Ed Elson – A Founder’s Mission to Solve Hunger in America

Ed speaks with Dilip Rao, co-founder and CEO of Sharebite, a corporate meal benefits platform. They discuss Dilip’s inspiration for founding the company, including his personal experience with food insecurity and a near death experience that motivated him to lead a more purposeful life. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 0:59Ed Elson?

  Scott, to what extent have personal hardships motivated your career as an entrepreneur?

• 1:05Scott Galloway?

  The purpose for me was pretty simple and pretty, pretty American for lack of a better term. And that is I grew up without a lot of money. I recognized pretty early on that America was a loving and generous place for people with money and a violent, rapacious place for people who didn't have it. So that was exceptionally motivating, but I wouldn't say it was like any revelation or special vision for how to improve the world.

• 1:29Ed Elson?

  What about your mom? I know that your relationship with her was important, especially when you were paying her medical bills when she contracted cancer. Was that important to you? Did that inspire you at all?

• 1:42Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's unique. I think any, any person with family aspires to take care of their family. Right? It's just something, you're going to feel this, Ed. When you get older, you're going to want to be generous with your parents. You're going to want to take care of your kids. And part of that in a capitalist society is, is getting very good at something, saving more than you spend, investing and being able to do those things. That's just kind of what I think is, is being a man or, you know, being an adult or being a good family member. So I don't, I don't think it's that unique to me. I think most people feel that, need that obligation and that reward, you know, to help take care of the people who have taken care of them.

• 2:27Ed Elson?

  Welcome to First Time Founders.

• 2:30Ed Elson?

  My next guest immigrated to the US at the age of five. He grew up poor, but excelled academically, and he eventually made it to Wall Street, starting at Goldman Sachs, then Credit Suisse, and ultimately rising through the ranks to director. It was a pretty good gig, but it was all cut short when a life-threatening event put him into a coma. Brushed with death, he decided to steer his life in a new direction. So he started a company, specifically a food company. The concept was simple: help corporations offer meal benefits to their employees. The company's software platform connects businesses with local restaurants and provides data and insights on how their employees use those benefits. And so far, it's working.

• 3:13Ed Elson?

  The company has raised $75 million in funding to date. It's partnered with multiple Fortune 500 companies. And crucially, it has donated nine million meals across the country. In the founder's words, this company exists for one reason: to solve hunger. This is my conversation with Dilip Rao, founder and CEO of Sharebyte. Welcome, Dilip. How's it going?

• 3:39Speaker 05

  Going well. Thanks for having me, Ed.

• 3:42Ed Elson?

  You were just in New York, right?

• 3:43Speaker 05

  I was just in New York. I grew up in New York City, and I'd worked back in my banking world. I'd done a couple of IPOs, but never actually set foot inside the New York Stock Exchange. And what a... just a beautiful... it's incredible. And a little bit of a history nerd. Most people don't really look at the New York Stock Exchange and go, "Well, this institution is why the country is here today. The country exists today." But there are a lot of foundational things that happened at the New York Stock Exchange and in that vicinity that led to the creation of the economic powerhouse that America is today and has been for some time.

• 4:25Ed Elson?

  And you were there because you were doing an interview, right?

• 4:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, actually, I was on Cheddar TV, live TV, with Kristin Scholler, who I watch on regular TV. And I flipped between that and Bloomberg for the most part, just as...

• 4:43Speaker 05

  Having been a finance nerd for a long time, you know, growing up in that world, you know, I went on to talk really about something that's very topical today because President Biden's administration announced a plan to, you know, help combat food insecurity. And I have a different perspective, you know, which has been really the, the reason why we started, you know, my company Sharebyte was really to help align the incentives for the private sector to undertake the burden of public good. And, you know, one of the, one of the foundational thesis is that here is that, you know, nearly 40 countries across the globe, it's actually

• 5:24Speaker 05

  a standard practice for companies to feed their workers. Some countries have made it like national law. So like Brazil has the workers' food program. They call it ticketed restaurants in some countries. They call it meal vouchers or food vouchers in others. Like Belgium, for example, has a national law. I just think that that's good, good practice from any, any given government to basically put, at least place some of the burden on the private sector, which I believe does have an interest in wanting to solve this because it's a real problem. And I think that we can solve, or at least put a massive dent in food insecurity in the country if we got the public sector and the private sector to kind of engage together

• 6:09Speaker 05

  and, and to go do this. So, you know, that's been, that's sort of been my mission in starting Sharebyte in the first place. What is Sharebyte? How is it solving hunger? Sharebyte is a mission-driven employee meal benefits platform, and it's built exclusively for companies. And I was sort of ashamed, for one reason or another, of sharing my own personal story with food insecurity, right? You know, when I first started my career, I was working in, in, in finance and, you know, very prestigious firms. And you wouldn't think that somebody working at companies like this, you know, I looked the part, I

• 6:51Speaker 05

  spoke the part, I, I fit in by all measures, but I had bills to pay, you know, I had parents to take care of, you know, I was digging my parents out of a financial, my dad had lost his job, you know, we were like, at any given point, like months away from having, you know, losing everything. And

• 7:11Speaker 05

  For me, it was more like, you know, I'm on a mission to basically like take care of my parents. Right. And um, I need to do whatever the heck it takes to make sure that the sacrifices that they made. You know, we came here, I, you know, I was an immigrant. I was born in a dusty little village in India. I say dusty, not in a bad way, but it's like, it's, it's a very cute, uh, very humble village, population about six thousand. And, you know, grow, growing up in New York City, I saw my parents struggle. You know, it's like the immigrant sort of hustle, right? You grow up in New York City. And that really shaped a lot of my own personal journey and how the way I view life. And when I started my career, I realized that when you stayed late at the office, which was pretty much every night, right?

• 7:55Speaker 05

  And in finance and investment banking, you stay late at the office. I used to get a twenty dollar meal allowance on the company corporate account. So I used to order, ordered that dinner, eat half of it for dinner that, that night, and then save the other half for the lunch, for lunch the next day. And that's really how I was able to make ends meet for the first nearly two years of my career. And then, you know, you, you start doing better, you start making more money and you're, you're okay. And now that I've gotten more comfortable sharing that story, I've heard from a number of my close friends. All of them, you know, sort of very successful in their own sort of regard. That they too recall going through food insecurity in some, at some point in their life, and it hits very close to home.

• 8:40Speaker 05

  So uh, you start to realize like, if the most successful people that you know. Right. And in relatively higher paying jobs like banking, consulting, et cetera, recall experiencing these things. What's the plight of the average worker in America? The thing that we are helping company executives with today. It's a few things, right? Number one, it's employee satisfaction, right? Employee, so there's this crisis in America that, you know, company executives are talking about and you hear it in the form of quiet quitting. And nowadays you hear about quiet staying or whatever that is. But what it truly is is employee disengagement.

• 9:21Speaker 05

  And then also this, this concept of like, look, we want to give people, we want to invest in our workers. There's not another benefit out there that allows employees to feel that benefit every single day, right? Health insurance maybe is probably, you know, it's like a must have, it's table stakes. But again, if you're, if you're an employee that's skewed to sort of the younger population, if you're 25, 26, 27, your health insurance is also underutilized. And so, so yeah, what, what companies are starting to realize is that, okay, well, look, a meal stipend, our technology enables company leaders to sort of A D test whatever program that they want.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  So whether it is, okay, look, I've got remote employees here. I need to bring employees back to the office. I'm going to use this to do that. Or I'm going to try out three times a week, right? For people in this office. You can do all of those things using our technology.

• 10:22Ed Elson?

  Just at a very practical level, what do corporations like about share by in comparison to just, you know, having a corporate credit card and you expense your meals? Or I'm sure there are other like food benefit programs out there for corporate employees. What about the technology are companies liking?

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's, it's truly the API, right? That is something that our team spent years and years building out. So nowadays what we get is companies reach out to us and say, hey, look, how do I engage my workers? We had a major social media company. Reach out to us and say, look, we spend tens of millions of dollars on our real estate footprint and we don't have anybody coming into the office. And so we've got 5,000 different settings on our backend that allow any company, no matter what your policy is, to literally go in there and say, look, this is what I need. And it gives the company administrator ultimate control over that, right?

• 11:26Speaker 05

  User insights, employee insights, data around what's working and what's not, how many people are coming into the office, or if they're working fully remote, we serve companies that are fully remote. Sharebyte is the technology that allows you to do that. So if you're in the office, what we do is we rotate a bunch of restaurants, right? And typically, they're very, you know, high demand, premium, quick service restaurants like Sweet Green. So you're in New York, so you'd get a Sweet Green, Dos Toros, Kava, you know, Dig, you know, all sort of the, you know, Naya, you know, sort of the, the, the crowd favorites. And typically, you know, the window opens up a day before.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  And as long as you place that order by the cutoff time that your company sets, all of the meals get batched together and delivered to your office in one delivery. So that's about half our business. And the other half of our business provides our customers with that flexibility. So maybe you are in the office and maybe you have a very strict diet, maybe you're, I don't know, maybe you're kosher, maybe you're vegan, maybe you have a very specific restaurant that you want to eat from, or maybe you just have a craving to step out and go get yourself, you know, I ordered my Sweet Green at the office, but I still got five bucks left. I'm going to go get myself a green juice at, you know, Juice Generation. I could go step out and go do that. This gives companies the ultimate flexibility, right?

• 12:54Speaker 05

  Under one single API, one roof, one technology, all things pertaining to meal benefits.

• 13:00Ed Elson?

  There's also a philanthropic side to this business. You mentioned you're a mission-driven company, which is, I believe that for every meal that you serve to your corporations and to those employees, you donate a meal to a food rescue organization. Could you take us through how that works?

• 13:17Speaker 05

  Yep, absolutely. So we have partnerships with Feeding America and also City Harvest in New York City, which is, you know, which is local, local to New York City. For every transaction that comes through the platform, we make a donation to Feeding America or City Harvest, depending on where that transaction happens, and that goes to feed somebody facing hunger in your local community. So we've we just surpassed nine million meals donated. I'm here to put an extra zero at the end of that number.

• 13:47Ed Elson?

  Just some statistics on food insecurity. So as of 2022, forty four million Americans have been struggling with food insecurity, and that's more than ten percent of the population. It includes thirteen million children, and the number is actually rising. It was up, I think, forty five percent from the previous year. You know, you mentioned the people who are dealing with food insecurity aren't the people who you think. Like, you are a banker on Wall Street, struggling with food insecurity, and the reason that it seems like the reason that people wouldn't know about that is because of what you said earlier, which is you feel

• 14:25Ed Elson?

  ashamed of it. There's like a shame to being unable to feed yourself. And that feels like, I think that's the part that I would want to examine, is what is that shame? And do you believe that that shame around food insecurity could be contributing to our general unwillingness to address this or to treat this as a top priority issue, both in the private sector and also in the public sector?

• 14:56Speaker 05

  You know, I'll give you a slight slight parallel here, right? So the first part of the mission was to help end childhood hunger, right? Children in food insecure communities, there was a stigma associated with saying, I'm hungry. So oftentimes, what you'd have is it's like they'd silently go hungry, but they didn't want to show that they were they didn't have anything. And and food insecurity is rampant in in some of these neighborhoods and communities that they did this study in. And what they realized is that, one example is free school breakfast, right? It had like an abysmal adoption rate. I mean, I think it was, I

• 15:37Speaker 05

  forget the stat, but it was like 10% of the students actually went and, you know, took the breakfast. Because they were worried that if they were they were seen eating the free food, that they would get judged by, you know, their classmates. So what what some of these organizations did was they're like, look, we're not going to ask kids anymore. And we're not going to make this a like, hey, it's free, come and get it. What they started to do was, they started to introduce these nutritious free meals in the classroom. And it didn't matter who was hungry, or if you'd already eaten, you got it, no matter what. If you were, whether your food insecure, not insecure. So the stigma got taken away.

• 16:20Speaker 05

  And they started to see that there was a gradual improvement in not only like, you know, attentiveness of the student, but also like their grades. And so if you take that, and you layer that on top of the plight of like, workers, right, adults, it's the same concept, right? You know, people are struggling, families are struggling, workers are struggling all across the country.

• 16:47Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 17:03Scott Galloway?

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• 20:28Ed Elson?

  We're back with first-time founders. Just in terms of purpose, you had basically a near-death experience that initiated you wanting to start this company.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. Look, it's an even more emotional thing for me, talking about it nowadays because we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of that, right? So, there's July 2014. If you had asked me on a day before getting hit by a car, "Hey, man, what are you all about?" It was all, oh, it was all career. Everything was going really well.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  And so here was a quiet Saturday morning. I had my whole day planned out, just a year, not even a year since I'd gotten married. And just moved back to New York a few months prior. And I was crossing the street to go to the gym. And an eighty seven year old comes down fifty fourth street, turns on to Second Avenue. And he ends up pitting me. And I had a walk sign, I was on the crosswalk, I did everything that I, you know, everything right. So of course I was shell shocked, you know, I guess reflexively I must have jumped. My right knee took the first impact, I fell on top of the hood. My head went through the windshield.

• 21:53Speaker 05

  Actually, the woman who came to my aid, you know, we all have these like, these moments, right? It's like, thank you for saving my life. And I still stay in touch with her, you know, I remember her all the time. And but she was in the corner waiting for, she had her bags waiting for a yellow cab. So she drops her bags, comes running over, young man, are you okay? Do you have anybody? I remember those words. And then I was about to stand up and I realized like, well, after the fact that when you go through something like that, apparently your spine can collapse. Right? And then you're kind of done anyway. So

• 22:36Speaker 05

  so she she says the words to me, she says, stop, don't get up, I'm a nurse.

• 22:43Speaker 05

  And so she calls my wife and says, hey, your husband's been hurt. And then I blackout. I get taken to the hospital. They weren't sure if I was gonna make it. And so I wake up at the hospital and I can't really feel anything, right? I'm numb from like the neck down, so my body's gone into shock. And so I started going through the worst case scenarios, right? I didn't know the magnitude of the car accident. Like glass, you know, kind of sticking out of my head, uh, out of my neck, out of like random, you know, areas of my body. So I start panicking, right? Like in my own head, of course, you know, this, you know, entrepreneurs will understand, you know, the panic is only on the inside, you know,

• 23:28Speaker 05

  um, on the outside, I'm exuding like, oh, hey, I'm gonna be okay. Everything's gonna be fine. But on the inside, I can't feel anything from the neck down, can't move my fingers, can't move my toes.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  You know, and then for the first, you know, it's the same kind of, anytime you go into any kind of shock, it's like, first you're angry and then it's like, hey, I had more time left. And then you start to go through this, at least for me, it was I went through this journey in my own, own head. And it was like, why do I have to keep going through these types of things?

• 24:04Speaker 05

  Right? Um, why me? What is my life for? What purpose have I served? I could have done so much more if only I had one more chance. But if you get another chance to live a normal life again, at least that's how I was thinking. If I got another shot at life, to be able to stand, to walk, to laugh, to think. I really do believe that gratitude is the greatest healer. And so for me, this was like,

• 24:34Speaker 05

  you know, if I get another chance to live a normal life again, I'm not sure what it is that I'll do. But I'm going to try to be more deliberate with my time.

• 24:43Ed Elson?

  It feels like the near death experience for you and from what I understand is generally the moment for a lot of people where that feeling of purpose finally arises. And just some of the words that people use to describe those near death experiences based on research and reports, uh, peace, acceptance, unconditional love, well being, and meaning.

• 25:09Ed Elson?

  And so it it sounds like from your perspective, that was the moment where it all happened. Now, I don't know because I've never experienced it, but what I could imagine is that you have that experience. You suddenly get that feeling of gratitude. But as you move through time further away from that experience, I can imagine that life generally returns to the more mundane and the more trivial. And I'm sure that that's the same way that it works starting a business, right? It's like you have this mission in mind, you have the idea, you're inspired, you're grateful for it, you're serving a purpose. And then a month, two, three months in, a year in, it's like, oh, well, fuck, I've got to deal with the shit, the random shit again.

• 25:54Ed Elson?

  It's just, it's another day. So I'm just wondering from your perspective, how have you taken action to preserve that meaning? Has it faded away or do you have to be diligent about maintaining that meaning and maintaining that purpose? Such that you are living a purposeful life?

• 26:16Speaker 05

  Like everything else, it's a habit, right? Purpose is a habit. And you have to do the things that sort of ground you and and bring you back to who you are, or at least like where you came from. Let me kind of zoom out for a second, right?

• 26:34Speaker 05

  There's an old ad, I think it was like a newspaper ad, you know, protect Philippe the watchmaker. It was a brilliant ad, it said, you know, you never truly own a protect Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation. That really applies to pretty much everything that you have, right? Like, you know, this earth, the things that you have, you you're merely a steward of it, right? Like I, look, one thing that I've I've always said is that I may be founder CEO, but this is a temporary seat. We are all temporary. And, you know, in Indian philosophy, Vedanta in particular, it's like a lot of these things kind of come up, right?

• 27:18Speaker 05

  Even Stoic philosophy too, Buddhist philosophy. And you have a small amount of time to make this, you know, make the impact or achieve the goals that that you want to. But to your point, like. There is no linear path to entrepreneurship, right? It's as asynchronous, a linear as it gets. Like you go through all of these messy, messy things to finally arrive at like that thing. So, um, you know, for me, what's been interesting is that throughout the years I've met people who have had near death experiences. And, um, you start to look at an introspect on every one of us, those of us who have

• 28:00Speaker 05

  the privilege of being able to say like, hey, I can stand, I can walk, I can move my limbs. I have blood flowing through my veins. Congratulations, you know, you already hit the jackpot because you went through a one in, what's that odd like one in 400 trillion chance of like becoming a human being, first of all, right? Fully formed human being. If you've already defied the odds and you've defied the odds by, you know, bumping your head and learning how to walk and all this stuff, you've got it all in you. Just find the problem that you want to fix or find the purpose. And, you know, finding your purpose is actually what I've learned is for a lot of people is actually one of the hardest things for them.

• 28:44Speaker 05

  But the very second that they find it, something clicks. And it's like, you know, it's sort of the conventional wisdom for startups that get thrown out. It's like fake it till you make it. But for us to get to this point, it took a lot of other struggles. And, you know, look, you have to be very purposeful about what it is that you want to do. But if you want to take that risk, know that like you will fall, but in that falling, you'll catch yourself or you'll learn the technique and you'll figure out how to stand back up one more time. As long as you have that inspiration to keep standing back up every single time that you fall, you know, success is already preordained, right?

• 29:25Speaker 05

  The world is designed to give you exactly what you want.

• 29:31Ed Elson?

  I appreciate your honesty and transparency talking about all of this. I think it's important for entrepreneurs, but it's also important just for people. I mean, shame around food security and the experience that you went through. We need more transparent conversations like that and we appreciate you doing that and sharing that with us today. So, thank you.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  And thanks for having me on.

• 30:02Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our executive producers are Jason Stavas and Catherine Dillon, and our associate producer is Jennifer Sanchez. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tune in tomorrow for Prof G Rockets.

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