Chewse CEO Tracy Lawrence on growing both as a company and a founder

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

So we don't actually have a good way to start episodes with the LP show, and we try and set a tone by making it a little bit more conversational, so it just started. Tracy, thanks for joining us.

Tracy Lawrence (0:12)

Yeah, for sure, thanks for having me.

Ben Gilbert (0:16)

Listeners, Tracy is down with David in the Wave Capital Podcasting Studio, I up here in Seattle. You know, our main show with Acquired is about these big splashy exits that you've heard of.

Slack, Shopify, ESPN, and a lot of our LP episodes, which covers the nitty gritty of the journey along the way, have been about one of these companies too, like our Product Ops episode at Uber or Growth at Airbnb. And today we wanted to do an episode with a founder that is running a company that is much more emblematic of how most growth companies go most of the time, you know, getting a medium amount of press coverage, keeping extremely focused and diligent, putting in the hard work over a long period of time to build a sustainable and durable business. And so our guest today is Tracy Lawrence. Tracy is the founder and CEO of Chewse, a 280 person company based in San Francisco that delivers family style office meals from the best local restaurants to six cities in the US. Tracy started Chewse right out of college eight years ago in 2011 She's been named USC's Entrepreneur of the Year and raised over $30 million for Chewse from venture firms like Foundry Group, which is how Tracy and I originally met at the Foundry CEO Summit a few years ago.

She has a really unique way that she runs and describes her company, a love company, that I'm really excited to dive into this episode. So thank you so much for joining us, Tracy.

Tracy Lawrence (1:42)

For sure. Yeah, let's talk about love. Yeah.

David Rosenthal (1:45)

This is gonna be a first for Acquired, I think. Yeah, this is great.

Ben Gilbert (1:50)

So I just threw out some numbers and sort of like eight years ago, 2011, raised over 30 million. So how do you describe Chewse and can you tell us about the business today?

Tracy Lawrence (2:00)

Our mission is really to drive authentic connection.

And in the workplace, I think that's the place where people are spending the most time and where it's lacking. Especially when you look at sort of people 40 years ago that were starting families in their early 20s and now you're starting families much later. We kind of have this gap of time where it's like we leave home, we leave home for work opportunities and then we're in our 20s and we don't start families till our 30s and work takes the brunt of it.

David Rosenthal (2:28)

Yeah, especially here in San Francisco.

Tracy Lawrence (2:30)

Yeah.

David Rosenthal (2:30)

I think San Francisco is, certainly in the US, maybe in the world, the city with the oldest average age of mothers when they give birth.

Tracy Lawrence (2:39)

I think it's San Francisco as well as DC.

David Rosenthal (2:42)

Wow, that makes sense.

Tracy Lawrence (2:44)

Yeah, and New York, right? So a lot of the big urban centers.

So our goal is really to get people eating together.

And so we're partnering with over 300 restaurants. And they're all local quality restaurants. My aunt, my grandmother, and my mom were all in the restaurant industry. And when I started the company, it was because I was an event planner, but I saw that office managers wanted access to great local food and they were sick of Subway. So we work with offices, and over 500 companies across the US that want to order great local food. And we actually partner with the office managers of those offices, and we build out sort of a calendar of meal programs. And so instead of them having to order for themselves and kind of pick off of a menu or call up a restaurant, like 90% of the industry is still calling up restaurants directly, we have technology that actually builds out the menus on behalf of our customers. It's the only technology in the space that does it. And then we're using software to do the last mile delivery as well, and ensure a really high quality experience at the end, because they're Chewse employees, and we could talk about that as part of the love company ethos. But it's kind of a different way of looking at the whole thing.

David Rosenthal (4:03)

How big and small customers do you have in terms of number of people in offices?

Tracy Lawrence (4:07)