Arram Sabeti's ZeroCater Feeds Other Startups

Five years ago, Arram Sabeti was a 21-year-old in Orange County and growing bored with the community college classes he was taking in computer science and philosophy. He worked part-time at a machine shop making medical equipment, but his eyes were starting to drift northward, attracted by the growing clout of entrepreneurs like those coming out of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator incubator program. “I absorbed everything he wrote,” says Sabeti of Graham’s popular essays. “I was willing to do anything to get my foot in the door.”

So he dropped out, moved to the Bay Area, and in 2008 took a job at Justin.tv, a San Francisco startup that lets people broadcast live video. One of his tasks was to place daily lunch orders. Pretty quickly, “I realized that the biggest pain I have in my life right now is making sure the lunches for Justin.tv show up, that people like the food, and that people’s dietary restrictions are met,” says Sabeti, now 26. “I started doing it for the companies of a few friends of mine and the response was so positive that I realized I had a business.”