Is this just an illustration of the difference between a "startup" and a "new business"? If I started a business, I'd probably use a home office or crappy cheap rented space, pack a sandwich, etc, and wait until I had enough revenue to do nicer things. Seems like startups are about getting and burning money from Day 1, hoping to take off but maybe crashing.
ZeroCater's minimum order size is 10, if I recall.
Imagine you could get an extra half-hour of productive conversations out of people for ten bucks each. That's paying people $20/hr! What a good deal for engineers in the Bay Area.
"Imagine you could get an extra half-hour of productive conversations out of people for ten bucks each. That's paying people $20/hr! What a good deal for engineers in the Bay Area."
It is, and it isn't.
I might be an oddball, but I prefer to get away from the office for an hour a day. It's become conventional wisdom in the valley echo chamber that catered lunch is a "productivity win", but there's a lot to be said for the change in perspective that getting out of the office provides. When I go out for lunch, I feel more relaxed, more creative, and calmer about my work. And don't forget -- just because I'm sitting around a table eating with my co-workers does not mean that I'm talking about work (in fact, I suspect it's a net-neutral benefit, if you're only looking at worker productivity).
Last, but not least, there's a health component: carry-out for lunch, every day, is a good way to kill yourself. My cholesterol levels (and body weight) shot up dramatically when I was eating take-out on a daily basis. Google cafeterias serve healthy food; cheap restaurant food doesn't measure up. Once I went back to finding my own lunch, my cholesterol levels dropped back to normal.
Not to mention that it's a really nice perk that people talk about positively. It can be basically cheap PR. Free lunch may not be a reason to work somewhere, but it's something that current employees will mention and anything that gets them to paint your business in a positive light is worth something.
1) The cost of good engineers in the Bay Area is ridiculous. Bringing lunch in, say, once a week, will be less than a 1% difference in your compensation budget. And you are competing with places like Google which have free awesome food daily.
2) People are not robots. In theory, it should make no difference who orders or pays for food. In practice, it's swell to just have something tasty show up so that everybody can have lunch together with no hassle.
