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💨 Tracksuit’s Bootstrap To Series B. A company that is growing really, really, really fast.
🗣️ Unfiltered: Hyperbound From The Inside. The conversations that shaped the company.
🍿 Inboxed: Tech Partnership, Tech Poaching. A behind-the-scenes look at the technology hiring wars.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I am starting to lose my voice with the amount of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms features in my housekeeping, but I just love this show. What I find particularly great is that we aren’t painting everyone in grey like in Game of Thrones; good simply gets to be good.

I am writing a piece (taking forever) on how we can choose our heroes more effectively, and this show fills my heart with joy. For our realm needs more good men. Enjoy!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Joey Grassia, Co-Founder & CEO at Shef

Joey Grassia is the Co-Founder & CEO of Shef, a Y Combinator–backed marketplace that empowers home cooks to share their culinary talents and earn income by selling homemade food. Before launching Shef, Joey worked at Facebook and went on to found and sell two successful consumer food startups, cementing his reputation as a builder who thrives at the intersection of food, tech, and community.

Since its inception, Shef has become a cultural and economic force, helping thousands of cooks generate tens of millions in earnings while transforming how people access authentic, home-cooked meals. The company has attracted backing from Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, Craft Ventures, and prominent supporters like Naval Ravikant, Michael Dell, Padma Lakshmi, and Katy Perry, reflecting both its strong business fundamentals and cultural resonance.

What did your early ventures teach you the most?

I’ve learned you’re constantly evolving as an entrepreneur, and each new company carries lessons from the previous one. The biggest lesson was how critical it is to have a phenomenal team around you if you want to build something enduring and large. In my first ventures, I was a solo founder without a co-founder and had no team for the first year or two. Even after that, the team was very small, so I was naturally limited by my own skill set, knowledge, and bandwidth. Those companies did fairly well, but they could have gone much further.

With Shef, I was smart enough to bring in an amazing co-founder from day zero. I’m super grateful to have Alvin; he left the White House, he’s super sharp, and his skills complement mine. From day one, we were intentional about surrounding ourselves with phenomenal investors; we joined Y Combinator not because we had to, but because we wanted great people around us who would lift us up and help us learn. We treat every hire the same way: whoever we hire should be better at their craft than we are, and we should be learning from them and leveling up. That’s the biggest thing; I was bound by my own limitations before. Shef has gone further because of the people I’ve surrounded myself with.

Why did you start Shef? What problem drives you?

We started with one simple vision before we even had a product: empower people like our parents with economic opportunity. We’re both sons of immigrants and bonded over our experiences: my dad owns a delivery company, and I was driving delivery trucks as soon as I had my license; Alvin grew up in a motel, handing out key cards and renting rooms as a kid, and later his family tried to start a restaurant.

We grew up with amazing homemade food. Our moms stayed home to take care of us, and if they’d had the opportunity to sell their food beyond the household, they could have earned meaningful income doing something they loved without leaving their kids. That was the founding idea behind Shef: empower incredible cooks like our mothers.

As we learned more, we realized that marketplaces require solving both sides. It started with empowering immigrants and refugees on the supply side and, on the demand side, giving families access to authentic, amazing food they couldn’t find elsewhere. The pandemic expanded the problem overnight; people across the service industry lost income, and many in food service were looking for work.

We widened the mission: anyone who wants to share their culinary talent with the world should be able to pursue that dream. Starting a restaurant costs $300,000 to $400,000, and even a food truck is $70,000 to $80,000, which is unattainable for most, especially new immigrants. With Shef, there’s zero cost to start on the platform.

For consumers, the core need is a homemade meal on the dinner table, which is hard today with two working parents and limited time for shopping, meal prep, cooking, and cleaning. Takeout is expensive and unhealthy; it’s a solution with a ton of compromise. Our mission is to put humanity back in mealtime, neighbors feeding neighbors again. With our model, we can provide the quality and care of a homemade meal at a price that beats takeout. In many ways, we’re the opposite of typical food tech; we’re trying to get back to the roots, which is good for chefs and good for families.

What was hardest about going from zero to one?

Finding product-market fit, especially in a marketplace where you need it on both sides. These are completely different audiences with different problems and solution sets. We went through 13 versions of the business in the first four months to find something that worked for chefs and also for consumers. One example: we launched with on-demand hot food because we thought that’s what consumers wanted. But if you’re a parent cooking at home in your spare time and you get an order at 6 p.m., it’s hard enough to get dinner done for your own family, let alone deliver a hot meal to another household at the same time. What worked for one side didn’t work for the other.

We also had the classic chicken-and-egg problem: consumers don’t want to use it until chefs are using it, and chefs don’t want to use it until consumers are using it. Early on, we literally cooked ourselves—me, my co-founder, and a chef friend who was crashing on our couch—so consumers had something to order. Once orders started coming in, chefs were more willing to join. Solving for both sides simultaneously at the beginning was probably the hardest part.

Who do you manage, and what does the org look like?

This has evolved a lot. There was a time when I had 15 direct reports because that’s what the business needed, but it wasn’t sustainable for me as a leader. Today I have four direct reports: a COO, a head of product, a head of engineering, and a head of marketing. We try to be as lean and effective as possible. Today, more than ever, I’m grateful to say we have a tight-knit team of absolute rockstars - more aligned and more focused than ever.

We’re also very flat. Even though I have four direct reports on paper, I have one-on-ones with everyone in the company, I know what they’re working on, and people feel comfortable talking to me directly. Updates and reporting—both at the beginning and end of the week—come from the people owning the work, not only through their managers.

How do you think about building company culture?

In my experience, culture emerges from a few places. First, there’s the inherent part: the founders, the early employees, and the ‘why’ that brought them together. At Shef, my co-founder and I are high-empathy, heart-forward founders. We started the company for our moms, and that shows up in everything we do. We never wrote it down or tried to enforce it; it’s just there. And it’s hard to change because it’s rooted in who we are.

Second, you can intentionally shape culture as you scale by being explicit about which actions you reward, and then ritualizing those. These have been far more intentional over the years. If we want more transparency or accountability, we don’t just say it; we make it visible and repeatable. That might mean calling someone out at all-hands, Slack shout-outs, weekly awards tied to our values, or simply modeling the behavior ourselves, publicly and consistently. Rituals are what transform values from words into lived reality.

I’ve come to believe that culture is a balance between what’s inherent and what’s intentionally designed. A meaningful portion of culture comes from the people who are there and why; that’s difficult to shift unless the composition of the team changes. But the other portion can evolve through sustained, deliberate effort. Over time, we’ve chosen the areas that matter most and invested energy there, knowing culture isn’t static; it responds to what leaders consistently reinforce.

Do you run hybrid on-site or remote on-wire?

We’re back in person, in SF and NYC. I spend my time between the two offices. We’ve tried every version you can think of. Fully remote, bi-weekly hub meetups, and even flying the whole company to one Airbnb for a week every other month. I personally believe in in-person work when problems are ambiguous, and solutions are unknown. The more ambiguous the problem, the stronger the case for being together. You don’t get the same communication cadence, problem-solving, idea-bouncing, or unplanned epiphanies over planned video calls.

We reinvented the product after an ‘oh-shit’ moment in 2023, and I don’t think it would have happened without sitting with our head of engineering and head of product every day. For known-problem, known-solution work, remote can be fine. For the fuzzy, high-leverage stuff, being in the same room matters.

How do you get the best from yourself?

I used to be bad at this. I’m obsessive about the problem and could work 24/7 until every user is happy—which is never—so you just keep going. Over seven years I’ve learned that’s not sustainable without more self-care, structure, and time to think. I still obsess, but I carve out time for meditation, workouts, walks, and being with friends. Counterintuitively, the breakthroughs often come when you step back and create space to think. Early on, I ran a polyphasic schedule: Facebook by day, startup by night, two-hour naps in between for three years. That worked at 22, but not now.

And that’s it! You can follow Joey on LinkedIn or check out Shef on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Tracksuit*—a modern brand-tracking platform that shows how your brand is growing, how people feel about it, and where you’re winning (or not) in the market.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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