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

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0:49We'll be right back. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. Scott, to what extent have personal hardships motivated your career as an entrepreneur? The purpose for me was pretty simple and pretty American, for lack of a better term. 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. 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.

1:37Was that important to you? Did that inspire you at all? Yeah, but I don't think it's unique. I think 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 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 being a man or being an adult or being a good family member. So I don't And I don't think it's that unique to me.

2:12I 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.

2:25Welcome to First Time Founders. My next guest immigrated to the U.S. 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.

3:09And so far, it's working. The company has raised$75 million in funding to date, it's partnered with multiple Fortune 500 companies, and crucially, it has donated 9 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 Sharebite. Welcome, Dilip. How's it going? Going well. Thanks for having me, Ed. You were just in New York, right? 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.

3:54And 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, you know, 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 sort of kind of the economic powerhouse that America is today and has been for some time. And you were there because you were doing an interview, right? Yeah, actually, I was on Cheddar TV, live TV with Kristen Schoeller, who I watch on regular TV.

4:35And I flip between that and Bloomberg for the most part, just as 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 help combat food insecurity. And I have a different perspective, you know, which has been really the reason why we started, you know, my company ShareBite 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 uh here is that you know nearly 40 countries across the globe it's actually 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 uh 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 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.

5:55And 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 and to go do this. So, you know, that's sort of been my mission in starting Sharebite in the first place. What is Sharebite? How is it solving hunger? Sharebite 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 finance and, you know, very prestigious firms.

6:43And you wouldn't think that somebody working at companies like this, you know, I looked the part, I spoke the part, 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 um 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 um 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 didn't do whatever the heck it takes to make sure that the sacrifices that they made, you know, we came here, you know, I was an immigrant, I was born in a dusty little village in India.

7:26I say dusty, not in a bad way, but it's like, it's a very cute, very humble village, population about 6 ,000. And, you know, 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? In finance and investment banking, you stay late at the office. I used to get a$20 meal allowance on the company corporate account.

8:02So 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 start doing better, you start making more money, and 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 whom, you know, sort of are very successful in their own sort of regard, that they too recall going through food insecurity at some point in their life, and it hits very close to home.

8:38So you start to realize, like, if the most successful people that you know, right, and in relatively higher paying jobs like banking, consulting, etc., 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.

9:19And then also 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 an employee that skews to sort of the younger population, if you're 25, 26, 27, your health insurance is also underutilized. And so, yeah, what companies are starting to realize is that, okay, well, look, a meal stipend, our technology enables company leaders to sort of A-B test whatever program that they want.

10:01So 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 for people in this office. You can do all of those things using our technology. Just at a very practical level, what do corporations like about ShareBite 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? Yeah, so it's truly the API, right?

10:42That 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? User insights, employee insights, data around what's working and what's not.

11:30How many people are coming into the office? or if they're working fully remote, we serve companies that are fully remote. ShareBite 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 high demand, premium quick service restaurants like Sweetgreen. So you're in New York, so you'd get a Sweetgreen, Dos Toros, Cava, Dig, all sort of the Naya, sort of the crowd favorites. and typically, you know, the window opens up a day before. And as long as you place that order by the cutoff time that your company sets, all of the meals get bashed together and delivered to your office in one delivery.

12:16So 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 want 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?

12:52Under one single API, one roof, one technology, all things pertaining to meal benefits. 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? Yep, absolutely. So we have partnerships with Feeding America and also City Harvest in New York City, which is local to New York City. For every transaction that comes to the platform, we make a donation to Feeding America or City Harvest, depending on where that transaction happens.

13:34And that goes to feed somebody facing hunger in your local community. So we've just surpassed 9 million meals donated. I'm here to put an extra zero at the end of that number. Just some statistics on food insecurity. so as of 2022 44 million americans have been struggling with food insecurity and that's more than 10 of the population it includes 13 million children and the number is actually rising it was up i think 45 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 were a banker on wall street struggling with food insecurity.

14:15And 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 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? You know, I'll give you a slight parallel here, right? So the first part of the mission was to help end childhood hunger, right?

15:02Children 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 didn't have anything. And food insecurity is rampant in some of these neighborhoods and communities that they did this study in. And what they realized was that, one example is free school breakfast, right? It had like an abysmal adaption rate. I mean, I think it was, I 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 seen eating the free food, that they would get judged by, you know, their classmates.

15:49So 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. Whether you're food insecure or not insecure. So the stigma got taken away and they started to see that there was a gradual improvement in not only like, you know, attentiveness to 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?

16:37You know, people are struggling, families are struggling, workers are struggling all across the country.

16:46We'll be right back.

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19:05We're back with First Time Founders. just in terms of purpose you had basically a near-death experience that initiated you wanted to start this company yeah um look it's a it's it's an even more emotional thing for me um talking about it nowadays because we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of that right so it was July 2014. You know, if you had asked me on, you know, a day before, you know, getting hit by a car, hey man, what are you all about? Right? It was all, oh, it was all career. Everything was going really well. 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.

19:59And, uh, I was crossing the street to go to the gym and an 87 year old comes down 54th street, turns onto second Avenue and he, uh, ends up hitting 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've jumped. Um, my right knee, uh, took the first impact, I fell on top of the hood. My head went through the windshield. 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. You know, I still stay in touch with her.

20:41You know, I remember her all the time, 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 she says the words to me. She says, stop, don't get up. I'm a nurse. and so she calls my wife and says hey your husband's been hurt and then i black out i get taken to the hospital they weren't sure if i was going to make it and so i wake up at the hospital 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, glass, you know, kind of sticking out of my head, out of my neck, out of like random, you know, areas of my body.

21:55So 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, on the outside, I'm exuding like, oh, hey, I'm going to be okay. Everything's going to 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 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 is like, why do I have to keep going through these types of things?

22:40Right? Why me? What is my life worth? 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, 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. 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.

23:30And just some of the words that people use to describe those near-death experiences based on research and reports, peace, acceptance, unconditional love, well-being, and meaning. And so 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?

24:15It'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. 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? Like everything else, it's a habit, right? Purpose is a habit.

24:58And you have to do the things that sort of ground you 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? There's an old ad, I think it was like a newspaper ad, you know, Patek Philippe, the watchmaker. It was a brilliant ad. It said, you know, you never truly own a Patek 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're merely a steward of it, right? One thing that I've always said is that I may be founder CEO, but this is a temporary seat.

25:47We are all temporary. And in Indian philosophy, Vedanta in particular, it's like a lot of these things kind of come up, even Stoic philosophy too, Buddhist philosophy. And you have a small amount of time to make the impact or achieve the goals that you want to. But to your point, there is no linear path to entrepreneurship, right? It's as asynchronous, alinear as it gets. You go through all of these messy, messy things to finally arrive at that thing. So, you know, for me, what's been interesting is that throughout the years, I've met people who have had near-death experiences. And you start to look at an introspect on every one of us, those of us who have the privilege of being able to say like, hey, I can stand, I can walk, I can move my limbs.

26:42I have blood flowing through my veins. Congratulations. calculations, 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, So finding your purpose is actually, what I've learned is for a lot of people, it's actually one of the hardest things for them.

27:22But the very second that they find it, something clicks. And it's like, you know, 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 the world is designed to give you exactly what you want I appreciate your honesty and transparency talking about all of this.

28:14I 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. And thanks for having me on.