Listen to the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, a play.it original in collaboration with CBS!
In 2011, right out of the Marine Corps, Nick Taranto took a job in private wealth management at Goldman Sachs. In less than a year, he was miserable. So Nick decided to team up with a friend from Harvard Business School, Josh, and start something of his own. After many nights of eating greasy takeout, Nick and Josh came to the conclusion that it can be prohibitively hard for a busy person to get a good meal on the table. And yet, every year, Americans waste over $300 billion in food. It seemed to them that the food supply chain was broken, and they decided to fix it using data and technology—and what they deemed BHAGs: Big Hairy Audacious Goals. After a few iterations, they came up with the idea for Plated, a service that delivers a weekly box of fresh and seasonal ingredients, pre-portioned for the recipes you choose, so you can create great food with less effort—and less waste.
In the early days, the Plated team learned a lot and failed a lot, too. From taking hundreds of conversations with potential investors that amounted to zero dollars, to spending $30k building a makeshift refrigerator in the old Guinness Factory that couldn’t cool the space more than 60 degrees, things didn’t always go smoothly. But the Plated team of two carved a path for themselves in the budding food technology space.
Now, after almost two years as a “real business,” Plated has grown over 500% and increased their team of tw0 to a team of 400, not to mention raised $57 million in VC funding. Download this week’s episode of the #VFApodcast to hear Nick’s theory on why it’s dangerous to raise too much money, and the “champagne problems” that come with high growth.