He moved to the US with nothing. Now he does $750M ARR. | Mateo Marietti, Founder of CookUnity

Mateo Marietti (00:00:00) :
I was confident as a second time entrepreneur. I was confident on certain things. I understand the basics of building a team, building a culture, operations. But the part that was very new for me was first the U.S. market. Second, building a team in a different country, different culture, and with literally zero credibility. Because people knew what I built in Argentina, but nobody knew what I built here and then raising capital. We saw the product market fit very obviously because those phones, you couldn't even get a handle on one person taking the phone calls, right? And then we put two people, and then again you would call, and you'd hear the kind of occupied sound. I think it took us three, four years to match supply and demand. So the moment that it felt very special was the first interview that I did with one of these customers that were ordering multiple meals a week. The first time I started conceptualizing the job to be done of meal planning. That was like I haven't even thought about this, this makes sense, but actually our meals are the best for us. How big is this market? What is this time? I wanted to almost escape that interview, start making models and research, and say what do we have here?

Previous Guests (00:01:12) :
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:25) :
Do you think the product market fit show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders, and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Mateo, welcome to the show, man.

Mateo Marietti (00:01:41) :
Thank you, Pablo and it's a pleasure to be here with you.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:44) :
Well, I'm especially excited to do this one because unlike most of the people that I talk to here, typically it's kind of like a first time meeting them. In our case, it's a little different. We were investors at Cookin, and Cookin was acquired by CookUnity end of 2024. So that's just over a year or so ago. So I know a lot more about the story. Let's say, than many of the others that we cover here and it's been an excellent, excellent ride. I mean, you ended last year at $750 million revenue run rate, growing seventy percent. Which are massive numbers and the other thing that's special here is I've actually used your product. I've tried the food that comes out of CookUnity, and it is stellar. And I really do think something that, you know, everybody eats. And I think this is something that can be absolutely massive. So that is a long intro, much longer than my normal ones. But all that to say, this is a special one for PMF Show. Let's start, you know, where we normally start. Tell me a little bit, you know, you started CookUnity about ten years ago, right? 2015, 2016, tell me a little bit about what you were doing right before you started, just to kind of set that context.

Mateo Marietti (00:02:50) :
Great, thank you for that and Pablo, thank you for the support as an investor. I'm very glad to be in this journey together, and we're just getting started. And also thank you for supporting our community of independent chefs as a customer every week.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:03) :
Happy to do it. The food really was, I mean, it's like eating in a restaurant or eating the best home cooked meals, and you don't have to do anything. So it's great.

Mateo Marietti (00:03:11) :
So look, it's going to be about ten years, which is a great moment for reflection for me this year. I moved from South America, Argentina. Where I'm from, to New York in 2016. So it's going to be ten years this year.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:28) :
Which I think you're also the first Argentine that's on the show, except me. Which I'm on every episode, but in terms of a guest though.

Mateo Marietti (00:03:34) :
And what are you doing there? What's running in your right hand?

Pablo Srugo (00:03:38) :
The mate, for sure. Every episode.

Mateo Marietti (00:03:40) :
Is that a common thing or more like a very generous gesture?

Pablo Srugo (00:03:44) :
No, this is every episode. I think I started doing, maybe fifty or a hundred episodes ago, yeah. I'm just like, this is the key.

Mateo Marietti (00:03:51) :
I love it. I should tell you though that I don't do caffeine, and I try to do mate. Because I love the ritual and a few weeks ago. I did it for a whole week, and I was so pumped with all the mate. So probably too much for me, but I still love it. So going back to your question, it's going to be ten years for CookUnity, and that journey. I obviously was here from day one, so ten years for me as well. But my journey with food is longer. It's almost twenty years old and the reason why I say that is because from my point of view, my previous company and CookUnity are part of the same journey. Even though these companies are completely unrelated. CupTables, Starry Steams, and my previous company still exist as separate entities. And when I moved to New York to start CookUnity with a relatively clear idea of what I wanted to build. I came almost as an iteration from my previous company, right? With all the things that I learned that worked and all the things that didn't work. I thought that we couldn't fix without our company. We needed to literally create a new business model. So my previous experience, my previous company that I started in 2007, and we could touch on this if you're interested. When we talk about product market fit, because in that experience, we found product market fit immediately. I really felt what product market fit looked like because we couldn't even, like the phones were busy all the time. You couldn't even get a handle on them.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:20) :
This is in Argentina in 2007.

Mateo Marietti (00:05:22) :
This is in Argentina and that company was what we now call cloud kitchens or virtual kitchens or some of these terminologies to basically say a restaurant without a storefront that does delivery only.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:35) :
Without an Uber either, right?

Mateo Marietti (00:05:37) :
Without an Uber either. We have our own delivery people, but basically. My intuition back then, as an older millennial, was that my generation would cook less than the previous generations and we'll need a more modern solution. I think that was kind of directionally correct and there was a lot of delivery and delivery only in cloud kitchens. Happening in the last twenty years but the main learnings from that business were that people really want selection and customization in food. And it's really hard to scale high quality. So we couldn't quite do the very best version of the customer offering we wanted with that model and that's why I decided to move to the U.S. to start with CookUnity.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:19) :
It's interesting. In 2007, the cloud kitchen stuff became most popular probably ten plus years after that and your model was what? You would bring in the other, different restaurants, and under their own brands, they would cook in your kitchen?

Mateo Marietti (00:06:32) :
We had multiple kitchens without a storefront and those kitchens could do more than one cuisine, more than one brand. So customers were ordering from different places without knowing that they were coming from the same kitchen. We also experimented with putting all those brands together and seeing if people liked to order salads and sushi together. And basically, that was the model.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:53) :
And how big did this company get by 2015, or so when you when you decide to come to New York?

Mateo Marietti (00:06:58) :
Volume-wise, because revenue highly depends on the currency change, but also because this was mostly coming from Argentina. We have brands and our own operation, our own locations and franchises of our brands in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Paraguay. But the Argentina microeconomics are not super stable, so the currency revenue will change a lot. But volume-wise, we had around six hundred employees and something like a hundred thousand deliveries a month, let's say.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:29) :
Oh, wow, okay. So, I mean, it's a massive operation. Maybe let's go deeper on your decision to come to New York. That's a big, it's one thing if the company is failing, you want to start over. But you guys, a company that's doing very well. How do you decide even to come to New York? Just tell me more about that.

Mateo Marietti (00:07:43) :
Yeah, I'm sure that another factor there, if this company. In this same moment of progression, was in the U.S., would probably have continued pivoting and iterating with that same model. The fact that it was in a different region with a lot of microeconomic challenges probably was a big factor in deciding to start a new company and move to the U.S. A different market altogether and I also thought that even though that company was bootstrapped. Started with a co-founder, and we didn't have investors. I think that this new ambition of CookUnity, creating a completely new business model from scratch. Would need capital and would need a much longer time horizon. So even though I didn't have experience raising capital myself, I thought that that was kind of a necessary component and also, both the talent that you get in the U.S., and the customer open-mindedness, right? The appetite to try new things and a lot of new services that is more common in the U.S. markets.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:40) :
How developed was the CookUnity idea when you came to the U.S.?

Mateo Marietti (00:08:43) :
I came only to build this. I was a little naive in that sense because I realized then, obviously, everybody outside. At least in the Western side of the world, but I was in China a year ago and I talked to a lot of people there. So I guess this also applied to other parts. Obviously, a lot of us admire the U.S. culture and the U.S. dynamics when it comes to entrepreneurship and company building, and just the general model of invention, right? And creating value for consumers, and as a consequence of that, being rewarded. So that, for sure, I was one of them and even growing up, a lot of my mentors or inspirations, or people I look up to were U.S. based entrepreneurs. And part of the CookUnity idea, the model, the two-sided marketplace idea, was inspired by U.S. based marketplaces, right? Like Uber, DoorDash, Airbnb. The part that maybe I was very naive on is, it's obvious from the outside view that the U.S. is a great place for immigrants to come, and you have enough energy and risk capitalized. You can build something but most of the foreign entrepreneurs, immigrant entrepreneurs, have some sort of onboarding experience, study here, or working at a company. That is my excuse for why the first two years of CookUnity weren't the most successful ones and it was like we had to push hard to get some traction at the beginning. Until I understood what was what, how to recruit talent here, and all that.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:18) :
When you come here, you come here alone. What's step one?

Mateo Marietti (00:10:23) :
Step one was the transition out of my previous company, which was already hard and I'm incredibly proud of my co-founders, and the team there, and the job they've done since I left. Probably even better than the years when I was there as the co-founder and CEO. So, and kudos to them but as a builder. You have to put in the time of a CEO just because that's how things work, but you care about building something. You don't care about being the CEO of a company. Really, I think most founder CEOs would probably agree with that. Definitely the ones that I talked to but at some point, you need to take on that responsibility and one of the harder parts is succession, right? And, kind of living a sustainable culture and team. So I think step one was that because I really decided to move to the U.S. more in 2014, and I already had the idea, and we were thinking about the idea in 2014. So the first step was succession and transition.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:25) :
And you did what? You put your co-founder in charge, or did you guys hire somebody new?

Mateo Marietti (00:11:28) :
I mean, in short, we tried to hire a professional CEO. It didn't work and then my co-founder took over. And some of the best people that we already had in the team, we ended up empowering them to run the business.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:41) :
And then when you come here, you have startup capital? Or is your first step to fundraise, to just get some traction?

Mateo Marietti (00:11:47) :
We decided to come here and I say we, because I came with my wife. Who is also my co-founder in the business. So quick funding story, I started CookUnity with two co-founders, Matias and Lucia. But in the early stages of the business, we parted ways and Clara, my wife. Former banker, joins full-time.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:07) :
She was your wife already back then, right? Ten years ago?

Mateo Marietti (00:12:09) :
Yes, she's an early but late co-founder, as we say, in the business. But we moved together, right? So we said, OK, I need you. Please join me, let's go, let's go all in. We didn't have kids back then, so we were rich in time.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:25) :
So it's the two of you. That's the we, but what is your first step? Do you start signing up chefs? Do you start building? Do you fundraise?

Mateo Marietti (00:12:32) :
Yeah, that's the part that was a little bit messy that I was referring to before. I was confident, as a second-time entrepreneur. I was confident on certain things, where like, hey, I understand the basics of building a team, building a culture, operations, money gets in, no more than that should go out unless you have some more financing. The basics of running a business, marketing, consumer, consumer satisfaction, and product market fit or those types of frameworks. But the part that was very new for me was first the U.S. market. Second, building a team in a different country, different culture, and with literally zero credibility. Because people knew what I built in Argentina, but nobody knew what I built here. And then raising capital. So you add on top of that that our first intuition of what model we should pick for CookUnity, because the first intuition was right. That is this two-sided marketplace. Can we do for food what already happened in music, in video, in travel?

Pablo Srugo (00:13:37) :
Between what? Chefs and users? That was the idea?

Mateo Marietti (00:13:39) :
Yeah, chefs and users. Which wasn't common back then and still isn't common today.
The majority are vertically integrated business, like Chipotle is a vertically integrated business.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:49) :
Yeah, or I mean, you guys see what I have, like DoorDash UberEATS. But these are like three sided marketplace with like delivery, kind of the aggregator.

Mateo Marietti (00:13:55) :
Not only are there three-sided marketplaces. There's a difference between a DoorDash and an Airbnb. And I'm not saying one is better than the other. Airbnb is the type of marketplace that is aggregating fragmented supply that you cannot find in another way, right? Yes, theoretically, you can go and knock on the door of the owner of that beach house and say, hey.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:14) :
It's not realistic. It doesn't happen, yeah.

Mateo Marietti (00:14:17) :
But there could be some Craigslist ads, but that's kind of what I love about marketplaces. DoorDash is more like a logistics layer, a very efficient one, a very valuable one, like the utility is truly there. But I am a little bit more fascinated and kind of intrigued by the Airbnb type marketplace, even the Spotify type marketplace. I mean, I'm old enough to remember that I used to go with $15 and choose one band, one release, right? Listen to these fifteen tracks for the next three months and now you just open Spotify and you listen to whatever you feel like, right? Or whatever the algorithms feed you nowadays. That's not the state of things in food. You need to go to DoorDash and say, you know, one thing at a time. We'll pick this sushi place, and we'll pick this menu. And if you're not satisfied with that, next time you can make a different choice. If you're not satisfied with your choice in Spotify, you click a button and you move to the next thing. And of course, there are limitations to that analogy because food is part of the physical realm. But I think that's kind of an exciting vision of what we can do with a two-sided marketplace. That's why we chose to empower chefs as users instead of employees and give them the tools and incentives so they can unlock their full creativity and all their talents.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:38) :
Well, the Airbnb analogy is very compelling because if you think about it. If you want to stay in a bed before Airbnb, you can but you got to go through a company. You got to go to a hotel, and yeah, you got booking.com and these other aggregator types that will show you many hotels in one place. But ultimately you got to stay in a hotel. If you want to go deeper, like to the long tail, you're mentioning, to the individual house or an individual apartment, it just can't be done, right? And in food, it's kind of similar. If you want to eat different food, you can, you can go to a restaurant, you got to go to a company, right? You can't go to the chef. I mean, some chefs are so famous that if you want to eat from that chef. You go to that restaurant, but most of the time, you don't actually know who the chef is that's cooking for you, right? And so what you're doing is you're taking that really long part of that tail and connecting that with users.

Mateo Marietti (00:16:25) :
Yep, and that matters. At least for some very meaningful purchase of the customers, that will be a superior experience for a bunch of reasons. One is, instead of getting a chain-type experience, right? As hotels or QSR food, that comparison. You get a much more personalized one from a real person, from a creator. So the connection is very real. The connection is very meaningful for a lot of people. A lot of our customers, part of what they love about CookUnity is they’re connecting with their favorite chefs. They’re supporting them but the other piece is, I think in a marketplace, in a developed, mature marketplace. The long tail of supply is what allows customers to truly find the supply that optimally can cater to their needs, right? Instead of, OK, I have a family with three kids, and I'll book two rooms, and try to get those two rooms next to each other in the hotel. We love saunas, and we love swimming pools, and we love this view. And obviously we can do that much better in Airbnb than in hotels.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:27) :
So that was your first intuition, which was this marketplace. What was the first step to kind of realize that vision?

Mateo Marietti (00:17:32) :
So then we had to make a decision of, okay, in practical terms, right? Again, we chose to create the first food marketplace, or the first food creator marketplace at least. How do we do it practically? One option could be restaurants already exist, and they have some idle time, and chefs already live there. Maybe they can do some extra meals in the idle time. Another option was home kitchens. Those also already exist, and there's a lot of talent, or maybe there's a lot of talent that hasn't found their way to the marketplace. Ultimately, we researched those two options. We even tested those two options a little bit. But ultimately, we decided that, we will outgrow, even if we were successful. We would outgrow both options quickly. None of those pieces of infrastructure would be optimized for what we want to do. So we decided that we need to build our own kitchens.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:23) :
How quickly was this? Is this a many years decision or a couple months?

Mateo Marietti (00:18:27) :
Maybe like half a year. I hope I'm honest with the memory tends to.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:32) :
And you're doing this still bootstrap or you'd already raised some money?

Mateo Marietti (00:18:35) :
We raised kind of friends and family type round. Not because they were literally friends or family, but an angel round of relatively close network angels.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:46) :
How much did you raise in that first round?

Mateo Marietti (00:18:47) :
$600,000 felt like a lot of money back then. Especially because I hadn't needed to raise money in my previous company and it felt like incredible support. I felt very energized to have people believe in our mission, but at the same time, it felt very heavy, right? One of the things that I’m happier about in our journey is that a few years ago, I was able to go to those people and say, hey, you can already sell your shares if you choose to. Now it's up to you, right? But I obviously understand, and I was able to internalize as a founder that they're not doing a favor, it's a smart, intelligent decision. And I know how the VC power will work now. But still, as a founder, I think you have a lot of connection and loyalty with people. Especially the first people, but all people. Especially the first ones that believe in your vision. So we raised that money, that round. I probably learned the basics about fundraising, and I'm saying the basics just to understand the minimum to not make horrible mistakes after two years. So the first two years were also messy in that sense, that friends and family angel round was pretty good for a year. So we had to raise relatively quickly another round or some sort of extension of that round, and then late 2017. I believe, or early 2018, we had the first institutional investor, Collaborative Fund from New York, that invested and I think only from 2024, we did the classic round for twenty-four months. These are the miles that I went to check with that round and we didn't raise much in the last few years because the company was already kind of self-funding. But the first few years, the learning curve from fundraising can be painful.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:32) :
And so, going back to that first six month period. Where you're testing these, you know, cooking in the idle time of the restaurants and then the home cooking. How are you testing? I'm just curious, are you actually creating meals? Are you shipping them to users? You're already starting the marketplace, making it happen? Or what do those tests look like?

Mateo Marietti (00:20:49) :
Yeah, so what worked really well for me in my first company, and then, of course, we all tend to gravitate towards the playbooks. The things that work for us, was very scrappy and in my personal journey. What happened a lot is, because I started relatively young as an entrepreneur at twenty one, some steps, some decisions happen intuitively, and then I found a framework that validated that intuition, right? It's not that I learned or read about product market fit or MVPs or Lean Startup before doing my first company. I found those frameworks later, and then I could refine my own approach using those frameworks plus my own experience. So in my first company, we did a very, very, very, very rough rudimentary MVP. Which was literally renting an office, a commercial office, floor 6B, and bought a residential fridge and hired a sushi master for an event. And then convinced that person to come work with us for a month, and then put a phone number on a magnet and handled those magnets in a corner of downtown. You get the idea, right? We saw the product market fit very obviously because those phones, you couldn't even get a handle on one person taking the phone calls, and they would put two people, and then again, you would call and you'd hear that kind of occupied sound. And then, I think it took us three, four years to match supply and demand. So that was pretty obvious. So I tried to do the same in the CookUnity version. So we'll go to a restaurant and say, hey, why don't you cook fifty meals for us in this idle time? We'll pick them up, that kind of thing. Go to some home cooks and post on Craig's List, say, hey, we're looking for home cooks or maybe professional chefs that cook from their homes. That kind of thing and we were selling those meals in Seamless, which back in the day was the predominant delivery platform.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:44) :
You were like a store on a Grubhub-like app.

Mateo Marietti (00:22:48) :
We opened a store, right? Like a cloud, like a virtual brand. So was CookUnity. Our first happy customers, the first group of people that ordered recurrently, were bankers, consultants, lawyers that worked late at night, and their employers would give them a stipend of $20. I believe, back then.

Pablo Srugo (00:23:07) :
But that was a way to hack kind of go to market. Because go to market on the user side, as you well know, is not easy, takes a lot of money, a lot of brand building, etc. So it was a way to hack that side and just focus on cooking the food.

Mateo Marietti (00:23:20) :
And yes, I think I'll be using a lot of language and tone. As we made a lot of mistakes in the first years and a lot of things I would do differently. But directly I would do the same in terms of trying to grow as quickly as you can and gather some signal from the market. One of my favorite mottos from the Coinbase CEO, Brian, is action produces information, right? Very much default to speed and to test something imperfect in a controlled way, of course, right? You don't want to harm the brand. You want to be able to make conclusions, so it needs to be properly set up. But in that case, we wanted quickly to get some feedback from merchants and from customers. So the first sign of potential product market fit was all these bankers, lawyers, and consultants in Manhattan ordering CookUnity, saying they loved it. The problem is they were really buying it for free, right? Because they had a budget from their employers, so they could order anything.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:20) :
How do you even know who they were? Did you query them or ask them or something?

Mateo Marietti (00:24:23) :
Well, back then, these platforms. Still today, they don't give you the full information. So you don't own the customer data, which is one of the problems to then be vertically integrated in that sense. But it's pretty obvious because you have twenty percent of your orders going to 383 Madison Avenue, which is.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:38) :
Gotcha.

Mateo Marietti (00:24:39) :
Great Swiss, or was Great Swiss. So then you realize, right? Then maybe you reach out, or I deliver orders myself and say, hey, can I invite you for coffee tomorrow, right? And then you have a coffee with the first customer and then, those types of things. I think if you're constantly pushing for motion forward, it's irrelevant in secondary, the how, right? Of course, there are better and worse ways to do customer research. There's better and worse ways to ask a customer to have an interview, but the important part is doing. It's like moving forward and just having that motion. Constant momentum is so important in startups. So just to wrap up, to not make this part too long. The first sign of what felt probably product market fit was these bankers and lawyers ordering late at night. I think it was not totally false because they really loved the food and it was, even though they had a free budget. They could order anything, right? And they were coming back to us almost daily. So it did mean that at that price point, people were willing to put that money versus other places. Then what I learned in that year or so selling via Seamless. Because CookUnity has a first founding moment in 2016, when I moved from South America to New York. But then it has a second founding moment when we pivoted in April 2018, to a subscription service. That word is a little confusing because Spotify is a subscription service and CookUnity is a subscription service, and they couldn't be more different. So I think probably the better term is weekly meal plan service, right? You have a weekly service that comes as a habit, comes every week at the same time. Starts knowing your preferences over time, that kind of thing.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:20) :
And it comes cold, right? I assume these meals at first, they were on demand, hot, ready to eat meals.

Mateo Marietti (00:26:25) :
Yes, first they were like warm up.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:28) :
Right.

Mateo Marietti (00:26:28) :
I mean, we tried both. We tried to warm them up. So we were, I don't know how much detail and color is fun to share. But the first version, once we chose to have centralized kitchens, which I don't know why I use plural. Because it was one, was a kitchen that was sublet in Brooklyn for half of the day. But then what we did is we rented a bunch of refrigerated vans and we put six around the city. So we had the meals already pre-cooked, ready to reheat, ready to get the Seamless orders. So then we would pick and pack inside the refrigerated van, and then a driver would go to, JP Morgan and deliver to five bankers. And then we also tried renting commercial spaces, very small, like micro-fulfillments. And, reheating the food and seeing what difference that would make. Would people be willing to pay more, like it more? Because it was novel and probably a point of friction for people to receive the food, and have to go to a microwave in their offices, and do that.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:31) :
Yeah, I would think.

Mateo Marietti (00:27:32) :
So we tried both, but the key insight we learned in that Seamless long pilot of a year and a half. And this was, in my view. The first sign of product market fit, is that at some point I started seeing that some customers were ordering four to ten meals at a time. Which was very different than the bankers ordering one meal for dinner as they stayed longer, and I started seeing this from some bankers, lawyers themselves. And when I talked to them, asked for coffee. They would say, oh no, I take advantage and order a few, and then I don't really consume them at my desk. I take them home, put them in my fridge, and reheat them, right? We hadn't even designed the product for a week shelf life or a weekly meal planning type solution and then we started seeing some families in the Upper West Side, in Tribeca. That also ordered eight to ten, and they would say, this is ideal. Because it tastes like the restaurant food we love, but in a more homemade, healthier version, and at the daily price point. And that was our more precise definition of the job to be done. And so, okay, we're going to pivot the business. At that point, we were maybe making $2 million in revenue.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:41) :
OK, and what year is this? Is this 2017-ish that you're starting to see this?

Mateo Marietti (00:28:45) :
The first quarter of 2018. So one year and a half.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:48) :
That you see these people ordering like five to ten meals at a time?

Mateo Marietti (00:28:51) :
Yes, and we decided to shut that down entirely and start with zero revenue. I mean, we had some customers that were the ones ordering in that fashion, right? Then we said, okay, now you can only order on Cookin.com, minimum order size four meals, and you need to order days ahead.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:07) :
I'm really worried because, listen, you've been listening for like what, ten, twenty, thirty minutes now? Clearly you like it, and the thing is, the next episode is way better. And you're going to miss it. You're going to miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. So I have many questions about this. Obviously, that key insight led to the beginning of what CookUnity is today, the massive business that it is. So maybe just the first very basic question, but people are ordering on UberEats, DoorDash all the time and rarely. I mean, you might order and get some leftovers, right? But rarely do you order five or ten of them on purpose. What was it about the design of these meals or the setup of them, or whatever that some people were even doing that at that point?

Mateo Marietti (00:29:47) :
I think that's why it's so important to be out there experimenting and trying as early as possible, and iterating as quickly as possible. Because we wouldn't have guessed that. I had such a strong bias towards on demand delivery because I did that for ten years. Before that, I didn't even know what a weekly meal plan was. I didn't even know what a subscription was. I hadn't even looked at the subscription services back then, kind of fresh, the meal kits. Even though a very different solution because those were delivery ingredients. I wasn't even thinking in that. But it's not that I was considering that as an option. I was completely ignoring that path. So your customers will participate in your product market fit discovery, or, of course, they're the key actors there. So as much as possible, you need to put things in front of them. There's a bunch of methodologies to that. This is one, right? Like an MVP and try to launch products, but you can also do user testing. You can also do customer discoveries, of course not the same level of signal and such a different version versus my first company, right? So I'm very grateful that our customers told us, hey, this is what we want you to do, guys.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:55) :
When you look at those meals that people ordered ten of back then, was there something in the setup of them? Like, people don't order ten pizzas. They don't order ten Chinese fried rice or whatever and have it for ten days. What was it about your meals, do you think, now thinking back, that made some people take those actions?

Mateo Marietti (00:31:11) :
I think it's pretty straightforward. So again, if we go back to why we started CookUnity in the first place, right? The gap that we saw in the market is that even though there were a ton of food services out there. In simplifying terms, there are restaurants, there is QSR, which is like a fast restaurant. 
Then there are groceries, and then you have food factories. Let's say, some sort of proper meals version. Customers care about quality, selection, quality slash flavor, selection, price, affordability, and convenience, right? Like time-saving, peace of mind and I will argue in the last ten years. Maybe a little bit more, and it's accelerating, nutrition as well, right? Like the wellness, the health, food as a driver, as a key input for their well-being. None of these services, none of these models, restaurants, QSR, do all of them well for customers. So customers are constantly forced to compromise, right? They go and get frozen meals from whatever is their favorite grocery shop, and of course, it's not the highest quality, and they won't be super joyful eating every bite, right? But it's very affordable and convenient. So you always have to accept these trade-offs as a consumer, as a food consumer particularly. So we thought that with this marketplace model, there was a potential for a flywheel, that the bigger it gets, the better the customer experience, the better the offering for consumers. Inspired, of course, by the Amazons of the world, the Uber software world. I think back then we all would be users and say, hey, Uber used to take ten minutes to arrive. Now it's taking two minutes to arrive. Amazon, I don't know what it was in their early days, but two-day delivery was a big innovation, and then next-day delivery. So you get the benefits when you have a flywheel. My previous business, which was a more traditional model, we didn't see clear benefits of having twenty locations versus two locations. In fact, a lot of people would say your quality is going down as you scale.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:06) :
Because you were the one determining the menus and the quality versus just letting chefs.

Mateo Marietti (00:33:10) :
There's no network effects. There is no flywheel, right? Yeah, you can charge a little bit less. There are some price benefits, right? Maybe delivery is a little bit faster the more locations you open. But it doesn't get easier to offer more selection, more options to customers with size in that model and it doesn't necessarily get higher quality. In the CookUnity model, we scale by adding more small producers, a chef, a restaurant, right? And they still cook in their artisanal, small-batch way. It's not that they need to cook in an industrial way. We just keep up with volume by adding more of them and adding more of them also means more selection, more options. So now we have more than twenty five cuisines. In that Seamless pilot, maybe we had three or four.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:55) :
Gotcha. Well, the quality was still similar. It was still kind of the chef. 

Mateo Marietti (00:33:58) :
And the price point. 

Pablo Srugo (00:33:59) :
And the price point.

Mateo Marietti (00:34:00) :
My interpretation of why, as your question of why people will order four, six, seven. When they don't order that amount of pizzas, is because by design, we're trying to solve the daily meal. We're trying to solve the gap between people used to cook every meal. People didn't even question that in the 90s, right? Or 80s, now people are aware. Either by choice or by limitation of time, more hectic lifestyles, crookedness. So you needed to have a price point that fits in the budget of real households. and even though we started in New York City. Which is a more affluent city, and we started, as I said, with bankers and lawyers. So we started very high, we understood that it needs to be perceived in the minds of the consumer as a daily budget option.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:45) :
When you see this happen, and this is obviously huge insight. How do you make the decision to forego the other $2 million and just go all in on this new opportunity?

Mateo Marietti (00:34:54) :
I mean, there's a bunch of criteria there, but fundamentally. The moment we chose to raise money from investors. Especially venture capitalists, the deal is we have this very big vision. If you give us capital, some support, and some patience. I think we can, we'll do our best, we'll try to build it. The first model, seamless model, we have learned that there were limitations to it and as tempting as it was to keep the $2 million while we tried the other part. It is too distracting, and we already knew that it couldn't scale. So the moment you find something that feels like a real job to be done, a meaningful problem to solve, that you have a potential innovation. A potential solution to solve that problem better than anyone else, you need to lean in, you need to roll in. I don't think, especially early on, I would argue even today. There are very, very vigorous discussions about should we do this new product, should we do this new business. Which will dilute focus from the core offering. But especially early on, your resources are so limited. We're mostly the two co-founders and maybe two more employees, and we need to roll in.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:01) :
So I mean, I fully agree with that mindset. How does going all in on this business look like? What you do lose out on is on the go to market, on the user side, right? Because you are using Seamless to effectively put you in front of potential customers. Now you kind of have to own that part. How do you, how do you solve for that?

Mateo Marietti (00:36:17) :
Well, the opportunity that we saw and what made me bullish to that and this was paired with our first institutional round as well. So this was part of a plan that we kind of agreed with that first institutional investor. More capital came in because we needed to rebuild that. So, sometimes you have the chance, and sometimes you just don't have a choice, right? And there are successful businesses that have, for example, in this comparison. Kept both businesses for some time because they have to. So I'm not being fundamentalist about it. I'm saying, directly try to lean in as much as possible, try to focus as much as possible. But in our case, the opportunity that we had was that because the change, the insight is people are still ordering one meal per day. Even if they order every day, the unit economics of that are very different than if people order six meals one day. So the unit economics were much healthier and much more predictable revenue per user. So what we couldn't do in Seamless, or the reason why we chose Seamless also, was not only to access a group of customers, but also to avoid the CAC, payback, lifetime value CAC game, right? Now that the game was a possibility for us, because you say, OK, I can predict my lifetime value better and I believe I have a more substantial lifetime value in this meal plan behavior than the previous one. And also the units of earnings are healthier. For example, CookieD had around two months payback. Since that moment, we were able to keep it around two months payback since 2018. So that is a very healthy self-funding machine for growth.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:47) :
How much did you raise in that round? In the pivot round?

Mateo Marietti (00:37:50) :
It was some number between $1.5 and $2 million.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:52) :
Tell me a little bit then about growing to that first million or so in ARR. What was, you and the economics on paper made more sense. What channels did you end up using to get users?

Mateo Marietti (00:38:03) :
And then I will connect with what I think is the missing piece of the story of product market fit for us that happened with COVID. So this is now we are in Q2 2018. We have much more understanding of what customers care about, what is the exact problem they're trying to solve and what I did for around two years until COVID happened in New York in March 2020, is try to get to as many of those types of customers as possible. So, for example, families in the Upper West, and I met with as many as I could. I went to their houses, I had coffee there, helped babysit their babies while they were sharing feedback and everything in between. We still have many customers from those days. Those insights were valuable to go deeper and deeper, right? And not only understand this job to be, as I defined it before, but also understand how do you find us? What were you doing before? What, if CookUnity no longer exists, what happened later? I'm sure this was mentioned in your podcast because of the obsession around product market fit. But around this time, I don't remember when this came exactly. There was a blog post from, there's an email service called Superhuman.

Pablo Srugo (00:39:15) :
The superhuman, yeah, yeah, of course, and you want that forty percent very disappointed.

Mateo Marietti (00:39:20) :
Yeah, I don't remember exactly when that was, but Rahul, right? Articulated that very nicely. I have already read the original forty percent rule in that book on growth hacking. I forgot the name of the author now.

Pablo Srugo (00:39:36) :
Yeah, Sean Ellis. Who was on the show as well, yeah.

Mateo Marietti (00:39:38) :
Yes, so I really used it myself, but I think Rahul articulated it better than anybody else. But the aha moment of that made me realize it's like, okay, the key part is ignoring the people that are somewhat happy with their product, right? So it's almost like the big decision was cutting from Seamless and moving to this, but then even within that. We were trying to get as narrowly focused as possible. So, we did farmer's markets, for example. We would join farmer's markets in these different neighborhoods in Manhattan, have our own stand, right? Then, even though we weren't offering anything from farmers exactly, these are people that care about the integrity of the food, that are willing to put a little bit more time, a little bit more money. They care about the stories. So that's an example. We did other things, like Facebook groups of moms. We did a lot of things, and we also were learning the basics of direct response advertising like Meta, Facebook back then, direct mail, those things. The interesting piece, I think until from that moment, eighteen months, we were, if we look at the charts, it would look up and to the right, like no big events to share.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:46) :
And all still in the one location, all still kind of in New York?

Mateo Marietti (00:40:50) :
All New York, yes. All New York still and then the next big moment for the company is we're getting slightly better, right? Every month, learning a little bit more. I think by Q1 2020, we're doing maybe $5 million revenue. Which wasn't top one percentile, but it was like, okay, we're competing. We're growing three times per year, we're in the ranges of what you want to see to stay alive and another framework that I love is from Paul Graham, right? The stay alive, the fundable, what is exactly how he used it?

Pablo Srugo (00:41:22) :
Like default alive, you're talking about?

Mateo Marietti (00:41:24) :
Default alive or default fundable, right?

Pablo Srugo (00:41:26) :
Yes.

Mateo Marietti (00:41:27) :
And we're in that default fundable level at least. At least with the rules of pre-2021, correction reckoning. When the capital was almost free, but basically the next inflection point happened in COVID. People assume in our business that COVID created a spike in demand for us. The reality is that it didn't happen because nobody knew us or awareness on top of mind was close to zero. Yes, our customers ordered a little bit more, increased their order rates, etc. We weren't on the lucky side of businesses, if that term is allowed. But the interesting part for us, and maybe what I didn't dig yet, is CookUnity is a platform. Where many, and soon probably most, of the best chefs in America have offered their creations.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:14) :
There's how many chefs now? A hundred and fifty?

Mateo Marietti (00:42:15) :
One hundred fifty-something, one hundred seventy. We had like Marcus Samuelsson, A. Nathan Myhrvold, Rick Bayless, Scott Conant. So many, the list is very long. In 2026, the chefs joining that we will announce soon is incredible. It feels like we're really spoiled to be able to get food from these people on a Tuesday lunch. But back then, if we're talking like the 2018–2020 moment of our journey, there were no famous chefs on the platform. They were all, what I consider equally talented and passionate, but they were all the type of seller that were professional chefs in the majority. There were some amateur cooks that wanted to do this as a living, and this was a platform that allowed them to take that risk. But they worked as number two in some of the restaurants that we love, but they weren't behind in the basement, in the kitchen, right? They're behind the.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:08) :
They're unknown. 

Mateo Marietti (00:42:09) :
And that was enough to make amazing meals, but not so much for marketing. COVID happened, and I was knocking at the door of our favorite restaurants in New York, and trying to convince them to join. It was like, oh, cute idea, maybe next year I'm opening a restaurant, thank you. So even though we had product market fit with chefs, we had product market fit with one segment of chefs and that segment was great at creating and producing meals. But not at engaging audiences and doing marketing, which was another important piece of the puzzle. So COVID came, one, two, three months passed. Not a big change on the demand side, people ordered a little bit more, a little bit more often, a little bit more meals. But the big change was when a few months after, chefs that before were saying, good idea, but too busy, maybe next year, now said, hey, I want to try it. I want to, I'm ready to try it, I have the time, my restaurant is closed. Either on board or we need another revenue stream. Of course, this was a very serious situation in New York, where we were based back then. We hadn't expanded to other cities then. I felt like that was a moment designed for us, right? In the sense that nobody would have chosen being in that situation. But having that opportunity to me was like almost a calling, right? OK, we're ready for this. This was what we wanted from day one. This opportunity, we won't mess it up. We won't miss this opportunity. So the chefs were gracious to give us a chance, to try something new. I think there was a lot of experimentation in food models during COVID. In some way, I'm a little disappointed that some of those experiments didn't develop much further, like cooking classes and other things. Maybe CookUnity can bring some of those. Some of those were great ideas and maybe another angle. I don't know if any of your guests or you have thought about these, but I think most startups are not big enough. Are not meant to be standalone businesses, but more like a feature or a product in a bigger business, right? And as amazing as an M&A, as an exit is, and super admirable. The reality is that when you do an M&A, that's what it means basically, right? That your business will become a product or a feature of a bigger business. So I think we can do some of those ideas as features or products of CookUnity. But the big difference was when some of the best chefs in New York joined our platform and then we had all the media in New York talking about CookUnity as the new Spotify for food and doing articles about these chefs.


Pablo Srugo (00:45:36) :
Yeah, that's my key question. When they join, obviously now you have a brand name chef on the platform, but what is it that gets the message out? Is it those chefs posting? Is it just now you get crazy PR about it? Do you change your ads to now just highlight those chefs? What is the messaging part of that equation that lets everybody know that CookUnity exists?

Mateo Marietti (00:45:57) :
That was clearly, or mostly at least. A PR-led phase for our growth and even though we had a lot of PR after. And let's say that, that was like Q2 2020 to mid-2026. That was a very low marketing spend era and a very fast growth era, mostly driven by sellers, mostly driven by PR.

Pablo Srugo (00:46:19) :
Until, sorry, you said mid-2020 till when?

Mateo Marietti (00:46:21) :
2021, sorry. Mid-2021.

Pablo Srugo (00:46:23) :
And that's, is that. Because now you cover the entire United States and actually some of Canada as well. When did you expand from one city to the rest of the country.

Mateo Marietti (00:46:32) :
Yeah, I think this is also how you like to dissect businesses and the journey, a set of steps. I like to think about craft startups also almost as video games, not in a hopefully immature or irresponsible way but as a way to make it a bit lighter, right? And make it a little bit more fun. And sometimes you just need to get to the next level, right? You don't need to do everything perfect or nail everything right now. You just need to nail certain milestones, certain parts of this level to get to the next level. So in that case for us, my list of things I would like to do or things I knew the business still had to develop was gigantic. But what we really thought was necessary next was to prove that this model could exist in other regions apart from New York. Because there was a lot of skepticism, well maybe this works only in New York because New York has the restaurants and all the culture around food. But second and more importantly, as nice as this kind of PR-led bump was, and seeing the sellers promote CookUnity, go to PR, media events, TV shows with a CookUnity bar. There is a limit of how much you can rely on PR to grow your business. It's not as systematic, predictable, scalable. So to truly be able to do paid acquisition well, we had to be nationwide. It was really hard back then, 2021, to be efficient on Facebook only in a city. So we raised our Series B back then, led by Insight Partners. That was a $47 million round, which is like forty percent of what we raised in total since inception. Even up to this day. So very meaningful inflection point for us and the mandate was to replicate this model around the country.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:09) :
And how fast did you grow between kind of 2020 and 2021? You mentioned you were at $5 million or so at the beginning. 

Mateo Marietti (00:48:15) :
10x. 

Pablo Srugo (00:48:16) :
10x in a year?

Mateo Marietti (00:48:19) :
No, not 10x in. So end of 2029, we were doing $4 million.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:23) :
End of 2019?

Mateo Marietti (00:48:24) :
Yes, 2019, sorry and the round, the Series B was in Q2. Let's say May, June 2021. Those year and a half, 10x.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:35) :
Wow, that's crazy. That's clear product market fit.

Mateo Marietti (00:48:40) :
We had already opened LA back then. It was only open for a few months. We wanted to prove that this could work in our markets to do the round. Maybe one of those very real stories of building a company that are not the sexiest or where everything worked perfectly. I had made a mistake, or maybe not a mistake, but definitely the execution wasn't good enough. In 2018, when we raised our first institutional money, we opened LA in that period before that and COVID and we opened LA with the same approach. I opened my first company, very scrappy, MVP-type thing. Three months later, I shut it down, came back to New York, concentrated our funds. I realized I had a plan that was like, if everything was perfect, the plan didn't allow for any temporary bump or iterations or we need six months to figure this out and that's obviously not smart, not cautious enough. So we shut down LA and in 2021, I thought that to do the round at the right terms with a great investor, we had to show another market that was working. Be a little bit counter intuitive because, hey, you already did it. It didn't work. So what are you iterating on exactly? You should do something different. You should open a different city. You should do it differently, right? But I really felt, and this is where the founder needs to have intuition about their own interpretation of data. There's a lot, a ton of data, quantitative, and ultimately you need to make your own interpretation. And that interpretation will include intuition. It's very rare when the data is so obvious that everyone will agree on what we should do next. So my intuition was, it was mostly execution, right? The hypothesis still makes sense and we launched LA, and in three, four months, it was absolutely firing. And with that, we did the Series B, and then with that, we started opening more markets.

Pablo Srugo (00:50:29) :
Was there, I'm sure when you talk about execution, there's probably a bunch of little things. But was there in particular any big things that you remember that you did differently? The second time around that had a big impact in LA?

Mateo Marietti (00:50:39) :
Yes, very different and of course, this is a mix of strategy risk and execution risk. And in the LA one, attempt one, and LA attempt number two, there were improvements in strategy and improvements in execution. The first LA, I massively underestimated how important it was which chefs would choose and you can also use chef as a proxy for quality, and a proxy for cuisines, and diets, right? It wasn't super thoughtful, super sophisticated, how we chose what cuisines we needed to launch with, et cetera and also, because back then we only had the non-famous chefs segment. The up and comer or first time entrepreneurs, as we call them. When we launched again in 2021, some famous chefs were already willing to join. So the selection was much larger, much better matching the demand in LA. We researched much better and then the team, the execution, everything was just more polished.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:40) :
Perfect. Well, listen, Mateo, let's stop right there and I'll ask the three questions we always end on.
The first one, and I'm curious because of all the different changes that happened that led to what CookUnity is today. But when was the moment when you personally felt like you'd found product market fit?

Mateo Marietti (00:51:54) :
I think that for me, what I remember as the moment that felt very special was the first interview that I did with one of these customers. Who were ordering multiple meals a week through Seamless. The first time I started conceptualizing the job to be done of meal planning, I hadn't even thought about this, like this makes sense, but actually our meals are the best for this. Like, oh, shoot, how big is this market? What is this time? I wanted to almost escape that interview and start making models, and research. And so, what do we have here? And that was the moment I felt that we had found something. And by the way, that lady from that first interview still is a customer today. And every two months or so, I ask our customer support team, is she still subscribed? Yes, and I talk to her once a year, I send her a letter or something. It makes me so happy and recently she also told me that she lost like forty pounds, thirty pounds eating CookUnity over the years.

Pablo Srugo (00:52:52) :
And then was there ever a period, especially in those first few years, or maybe during COVID, or whatever it might have been. Where you thought things wouldn't work out and maybe this whole idea of CookUnity could fail?

Mateo Marietti (00:53:03) :
I mean, we need another hour. Because as I said at the beginning, our first two years were very messy. So we almost ran out of money so many times in the first two years. There were several rounds of capital that we got with very few months left and there was one, the last before COVID. So even in the 2018–2020 range, the business performance was already kind of up and to the right. And we didn't have any extraordinary outside the common challenges that a Series A company or Seed company would have. It was very hard to raise money because one thing that happened in our journey is in the years that we've been building CookUnity. There have been very big rounds for food companies and so there have been clear moments of hype, and clear moments of skepticism, right? So this was one of those valleys of skepticism and despair, and food is kind of doom. And there's no opportunity for innovation, and those kinds of things. So it was really hard to raise money to the point that I had to put my own money to keep the company going for like two, three months and when we got the commitment from this investor. We were minus three months of runway, right? So that was the last time I thought maybe we wouldn't make it. From that moment forward, it's only a matter of how big this can become and what are the right strategic choices that we need to make to maximize that chance.

Pablo Srugo (00:54:29) :
And last question, what would be your number one piece of advice for an early stage founder that's looking for product market fit?

Mateo Marietti (00:54:36) :
I have to say one thing that is kind of a meta principle for the pre-product market fit phase. Is what we mentioned before about the bias to action, action produces information, and the default alive or default fundable, right? I think there has still been a lot of healthy correction, but we still have some of the bad habits from the free capital era, the SERP era, right? There have been cases that proved me wrong, but generally speaking, you cannot brute force your pre-product market fit phase with capital, right? You need time to go and figure it out, you and your team, and you might need to pivot many times. And if you have the energy to grow in that discovery, you'll likely find it. Some amazing companies find it in a very different place than they started. We had a very meaningful pivot ourselves, and maybe we will come back to on demand one day. It's part of our ambition, but you need to be very open-minded and you need to be low ego about it. But the condition for that is you need to be doing things, and you need to not die. And the don't die part is such an important part of any advice. You need to really maximize your chances. Just don't die.

Pablo Srugo (00:55:48) :
I like that. Just do things and don't die. It's a good way to leave it. Well, Mateo, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great having you.

Mateo Marietti (00:55:58) :
I really enjoyed it, thank you.

Pablo Srugo (00:55:59) :
Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.