The lunch
One beautiful Tuesday afternoon, Dmitry and I went out for a late lunch. I asked my close friend of 20 years how he was doing. Dmitry answered, “Awesome! I love what we’re doing these days!”It was obvious that my most sarcastic friend genuinely meant every word. Little did we know then, that Dishero, the company we had co-founded a year and a half ago, would be shut down within the next 72 hours as a direct result of his answer. We laid off everyone that very Friday…
Success -ish
Let’s roll back. Dishero was founded by Ilya Ginzburg, Dmitry Fink and myself with the goal to replace the paper menus and give restaurants full control over their online presence.Our business was seemingly working and from 30K feet — it looked great:
- We had raised a total of $2.8M (2 rounds). Most of it was still in the bank, providing us with a comfortable 18 months runway.
- We had assembled great engineering and business teams, totaling 17 people in 6 cities and 3 countries.
- We had had happy customers and revenue almost from day one. Our revenue grew continuously for 11 months in a row.
- We had recently hired a VP of Sales, who was the first VP of Sales at OpenTable, hired their first 45 salespeople and signed up their first 1,000 restaurants. An absolute bullseye for us.
But here is the thing — mediocre success is worse than failure. Much worse. When things work out great — it’s obvious what to do. When things don’t work out at all — it sucks, but again, it’s clear what to do. However, there are no obvious answers when you are stuck right in the middle.
Despite of all of the above, Dishero was still in a mediocre category: we were burning $100K/m and making $9K/m in revenue. The revenue continued to grow, but the growth was painfully slow and unpredictable.
I could’ve continued to pretend that I can transform this into a success story, but the truth was — I couldn’t. It was time to admit the obvious: Dishero wasn’t working and it was my duty to either fix it or stop wasting investors’ money and everyone’s time.