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Scott, to what extent have personal hardships motivated your career as an entrepreneur?

The The purpose for me was pretty simple and pretty American, for a lot of a better term. I grew up without a lot of money. I recognized pretty early on that America was a loving and generous place for people with money in a violent, rapacious place for people who didn't have it. So that was exceptionally motivating. But I wouldn't say it was any revelation or special vision for how to improve the world.

What about your mom? I know that your relationship with her was important, especially when when you were paying her medical bills when she contracted cancer. Was that important to you? Did that inspire you at all?

Yeah, but I don't think it's unique. I think any person with family aspires to take care of their family, right? It's just something You're going to feel this, Ed. When you get older, you're going to want to be generous with your parents. You're going to want to take care of your kids. And part of that in a capitalist society is getting very good at something, saving more than you spend, investing in being able to do things. That's just what I think is being a man or being an adult or being a good family member. I don't think it's that unique to me. I think most people feel that need that obligation and that reward to help take care of the people who've taken care of them.

Welcome to First Time Founders. My next guest immigrated to the US at the age of five. He grew up poor but excelled academically, and he eventually made it to Wall Street, starting at Goldman Sachs, then Credit Suisse, and ultimately rising through the ranks to director. It was a pretty good gig, but it was all cut short when a life-threatening event put him into a coma. Brush with death, he decided to steer his life in a new direction. So he started a company, specifically a food company. The concept was simple. Help corporations offer meal benefits to their employees. The company's software platform connects businesses with local restaurants and provides data and insights on how their employees use those benefits. And so far, it's working. The company has raised $75 million in funding to date. It's partnered with multiple Fortune 500 companies, and crucially, it has donated nine million meals across the country. In the founder's words, this company exists for one reason, to solve hunger. This is my conversation with Dileep Rao, founder and CEO of Sharebyte. Welcome, Delepe. How's it going?

Going well. Thanks for having me yet.

You were just in New York, right?

I was just in New York. I grew up in New York City, and I'd worked back in my banking world. I'd done a couple of IPOs, but never actually set foot inside the New York Stock Exchange. And what a... Just a beautiful... It's incredible. A little bit of a history nerd. Most people don't really look at the New York Stock Exchange and go Well, this institution is why the country is here today, the country exists today. But there are a lot of foundational things that happened at the New York Stock Exchange and in that vicinity that led to the creation of the economic powerhouse that America is today and has been for some time.

And you were there because you were doing an interview, right?

Yeah, actually, I was on Chetter TV, live TV with Kristen Scholer, who I watch on regular TV, and I flipped between that and Bloomberg for the most part, just as having been a finance nerd for a long time, growing up in that world. I went on to talk really about something that's very topical today because President Biden's administration announced a plan to help combat food insecurity. I have a different perspective, which has been the reason why we started my company Sharebyte was really to help align the incentives for the private sector to undertake the burden of public good. One of the foundational thesis here is that in nearly 40 countries across the globe, it's actually a standard practice for companies to feed their workers. Some countries have made it like national law. Brazil has the Workers' Food Program. They call it ticketed restaurants in some countries. They call it meal vouchers or food vouchers and others. Like Belgium, for example, has a national law. I just think that that's good practice from any given government to basically at least place some of the burden on the private sector, which I believe does have an interest in wanting to solve this because it's a real problem.

I think that we can solve or at least put a massive dent in food insecurity in the country if we got the public sector and the private sector to engage together and to go do this. That's been my mission in starting Sharebyte in the first place.

What is Sharebyte? How is it solving hunger?

Sharebyte is a mission-driven employee meal benefits platform, and it's built exclusively for companies. I was ashamed for one reason or another of sharing my personal story with food insecurity. When I first started my career, I was working in finance in very prestigious firms. You wouldn't think that somebody working at companies like this I looked the part, I spoke the part, I fit in by all measures, but I had bills to pay. I had parents to take care of. I was taking my parents out of a financial... My dad had lost his job. We were like, at any given point, months away from losing everything. For me, it was more like, I'm on a mission to basically take care of my parents. I'm going to do whatever the heck it takes to make sure that the sacrifices that they made. We came here, I was an immigrant. I was born in a dusty little village in India. I say dusty, not in a bad way, but it's a very cute, very humble village, population about 6,000. And growing up in New York City, I saw my parents struggle. It's like the immigrant hustle, right? You grow up in New York City.

And that really shaped a lot of my own personal journey and how the way I view life and When I started my career, I realized that when you stayed late at the office, which is pretty much every night in finance and investment banking, you stay late at the office. I used to get a $20 meal allowance on the company corporate account. So I used to order I ordered that dinner, eat half of it for dinner that night, and then save the other half for lunch the next day. That's really how I was able to make ends meet for the first nearly two years of my career. Then you start doing better, you start making more money, and you're okay. Now that I've gotten more comfortable sharing that story, I've heard from a number of my close friends, all of whom are very successful in their own regard, that they, too, recall going through food insecurity at some point in their life, and it hits very close to home. You start to realize if the most successful people that you know, and in relatively higher paying jobs like banking, consulting, et cetera, recall experiencing these things, what's the plight of the average worker in America?

The thing that we are helping company executives with today, it's a few things. Number one, it's employee satisfaction. There's this crisis in America that company executives are talking about, and you hear it in the form of quiet quitting, and nowadays you hear about quiet staying or whatever that is. But what it truly is, is employee disengagement. Then also this concept of like, look, we want to give people, we want to invest in our workers. There's not another benefit out there that allows employees to feel that benefit every single day. Health insurance maybe is probably... It's like a must-have. It's table stakes. But again, if you're an employee that's used to the younger population, if you're 25, 26, 27, your health insurance is also underutilized. What companies are starting to realize is that, okay, well, look, a meal stipend, our technology enables company leaders to A/B test whatever program that they want. Whether it is, okay, look, I've got remote employees here. I need to bring employees back to the office. I'm going to use this to do that, or I'm going to try out three times a week for people in this office. You can do all of those things using our technology.

Just at a very practical level, what do corporations like about Shareby in comparison to just having a corporate credit card and you expense your meals? Or I'm sure there are other food benefit programs out there for corporate employees. What about the technology are companies liking?

Yeah, so it's truly the API, right? That is something that our team spent years and years building out. So now Nowadays, what we get is companies reach out to us and say, Hey, look, how do I engage my workers? We had a major social media company reach out to us and say, Look, we spend tens of millions of dollars on our real estate footprint, and we don't have anybody coming into the office. We've got 5,000 different settings on our back-end that allow any company, no matter what your policy is, to literally go in there and say, Look, this is what I need, and it gives the company administrator ultimate control over that. User insights, employee insights, data around what's working and what's not, how many people are coming into the office, or if they're working fully remote, we serve companies that are fully remote. Sharebyte is the technology that allows you to do that. If you're in the office, what we do is we rotate a bunch of restaurants. Typically, they're very high demand premium quick service restaurants like Sweet Green. You're in New York, so you'd get a Sweet Green, Dose Toros, Cava, Dig, all the Naya, the crowd favorites.

Typically, the window opens up a day before. As long as you place that order by the cut off time that your company sets, all of the meals get batched together and delivered to your office in one delivery. That's about half our business. The other half of our business provides our customers with that flexibility. So maybe you are in the office and maybe you have a very strict diet. Maybe you're, I don't know, maybe you're kosher, maybe you're vegan, maybe you have a very specific restaurant that you want to eat from Or maybe you just have a craving to step out and go get yourself. I ordered my sweet green at the office, but I still got five bucks left. I want to go get myself a green juice, juice generation. I could go step out and go do that. This gives companies the ultimate flexibility, right? Under one single API, one roof, one technology, all things pertaining to meal benefits.

There's also a philanthropic side to this business. You mentioned you're a mission-driven company, which is, I believe that for every meal that you serve to your corporations and to those employees, you donate a meal to a food rescue organization. Could you take us through how that works?

Yep, absolutely. We have partnerships with Feeding America and also City Harvest in New York City, which is local to New York City. For every transaction that comes to the platform, we make a donation to Feeding America or City Harvest, depending on where that transaction action happens, and that goes to feed somebody facing hunger in your local community. We just surpassed nine million meals donated. I'm here to put an extra zero at the end of that number.

Just some statistics on food insecurity. As of 2022, 44 million Americans have been struggling with food insecurity, and that's more than 10% of the population. It includes 13 million children, and the number is actually rising. It was up, I 45% from the previous year. You mentioned the people who are dealing with food insecurity aren't the people who you think. You are a banker on Wall Street struggling with food insecurity. The reason that... It It seems like the reason that people wouldn't know about that is because of what you said earlier, which is you feel ashamed of it. There's a shame to being unable to feed yourself. I think that's the part that I would want to examine is what is that shame? And do you believe that that shame around food insecurity could be contributing to our general unwillingness to address this or to treat this as a top priority issue, both in the private sector and also in the public sector?

I'll give you a slight parallel here. The first part of the mission was to help end childhood hunger. Children in food insecure communities, there was a stigma associated with saying, I'm hungry. Oftentimes, what you'd have is it's like they'd silently go hungry, but they didn't want to show that they didn't have anything. And food insecurity is rampant in some of these neighborhoods and communities that they did this study in. And what they realized was that, one example is free school breakfast. It had an abysmal adoption rate. I mean, I think it was, I forget the stat, but it was like 10% of the students actually went and took the breakfast because they were worried that if they were seen eating the free food, that they would get judged by their classmates. What some of these organizations did was they're like, Look, we're not going to ask kids anymore, and we're not going to make this a, Hey, it's free. Come and get it. What they started to do was they They started to introduce these nutritious free meals in the classroom. It didn't matter who was hungry or if you'd already eaten, you got it no matter what, whether you're food insecure or not insecure.

The stigma got taken away, and they started to see that there was a gradual improvement in not only attentiveness of the student, but also their grades. And so if you take that and you layer that on top of the plight of workers, adults, it's the same concept. People are struggling, families are struggling, workers are struggling all across the country.

We'll be right back.

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Com.

We're back with First Time Founders. Just in terms of purpose, you You had basically a near-death experience that initiated you wanting to start this company.

Yeah. Look, it's an even more emotional thing for me talking about it nowadays because we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of that. So that was July 2014. If you had asked me a day before getting hit by a car, Hey, man, what are you all about? It It was all career. Everything was going really well. Here was a quiet Saturday morning. I had my whole day planned out, just a year, not even a year since I'd gotten married, and just moved back to New York a few months prior. I was crossing the street to go to the gym, and an 87-year-old comes down 54th Street, turns on to Second Avenue, and he ends up pitting me. I had a sign. I was on the crosswalk. I did everything right. So of course, I was shell-shocked. I guess, reflexively, I must have jumped. My right knee took the first impact. I fell on top of the hood. My head went through the windshield. Actually, the woman who came to my aid, we all have these moments, right? It's like, Thank you for saving my life. I still stay in touch with her. I remember her all the time.

But she was in the corner waiting for... She had her bags waiting for a yellow cab. She drops her bags, comes running over, Young man, are you okay? Do you have anybody? I remember those words. Then I was about to stand up and I realized, well after the fact that when you go through something like that, your spine can collapse, and then you're done anyway. So She says the words to me. She says, Stop, don't get up. I'm a nurse. She calls my wife and says, Hey, your husband's been hurt. Then I black out. I get taken to the hospital. They weren't sure if I was going to make it. I wake up at the hospital, I can't really feel anything. I'm numb from the neck down, so my body has gone into shock. I started going through the worst-case scenarios. I didn't the magnitude of the car accident. Glass sticking out of my head, out of my neck, out of random areas of my body. So I start panicking. In my own head, of course, this entrepreneurs will understand the panic is only on the inside. On the outside, I'm exuding like, Oh, hey, I'm going to be okay.

Everything's going to be fine. But on the inside, I can't feel anything from the neck down. Can't move my fingers, can't move my toes. For the first, it's the same... Anytime you go into any shock, it's like, first you're angry, and then it's like, Hey, I had more time left. And then you start to go through this. At least for me, it was I went through this journey in my own head, and it was like, Why do I have to keep going through these types of things? Why me? What is my life worth? What purpose have I served? I could have done so much more if only I had one more chance. But if you get another chance to live a normal life again, at least that's how I was thinking, if I got another shot at life, to be able to stand, to walk, to laugh, to think. I really do believe that gratitude is the greatest healer. For me, this was like, if I get another chance to live a normal life again, I'm not sure what it is that I'll do, but I'm going to try to be more deliberate with my time.

It feels like the near-death experience for you, and from what I understand, is generally the moment for a lot of people where that feeling of purpose finally arises. Just some of the words that people use to describe those near-death experiences, based on research and reports, peace, acceptance, unconditional love, well-being, and meaning. It sounds like from your perspective, that was the moment where it all happened. Now, I don't know because I've never experienced it, but what I could imagine is that you have that experience you suddenly get that feeling of gratitude. But as you move through time, further away from that experience, I can imagine that life generally returns to the more mundane and the more trivial. I'm sure that that's the same way that it works starting a business. It's like you have this mission in mind, you have the idea, you're inspired, you're grateful for it, you're serving a purpose. Then a month, two, three months in, a year in, it's like, Oh, well, fuck, I've got to deal with the shit, the random shit again. It's just another day. I'm just wondering, from your perspective, how have you taken action to preserve that meaning?

Has it a way, or do you have to be diligent about maintaining that meaning and maintaining that purpose such that you are living a purposeful life?

Everything else, it's a habit. Purpose is a habit. You have to do the things that ground you and bring you back to who you are, or at least where you came from. Let me zoom out for a second. There's an old ad I think it was a newspaper ad, Patek Philippe, The Watchmaker. It was a brilliant ad. It said, You never truly own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation. That really applies to pretty much everything that you have. This Earth, the things that you have, you're merely a steward of it. One thing that I've always said I may be founder CEO, but this is a temporary seat. We are all temporary. In Indian philosophy, Vedanta in particular, it's like a lot of these things come up, even stoic philosophy, too, Buddhist philosophy. You have a small amount of time to make the impact or achieve the goals that you want to. But to your point, there is no linear path to entrepreneurship. It's as asynchronous, a-linear as it gets. You go through all of these messy, messy things to finally arrive at that thing. For me, what has been interesting is that throughout the years, I've met people who have had near-death experiences, and you start to look at an introspect on every one of us, those of us who have the privilege of being able to say, Hey, I can stand, I can walk, I can move my limbs.

I have blood flowing through my veins. Congratulations. You already hit the jackpot because you went through a one in, what's that odd, one in 400 trillion chance of becoming a human being, first of all, fully formed human being. If you've already defied the odds, and you've defied the odds by bumping your head and learning how to walk and all that stuff, you've got it all in you. Just find the problem that you want to fix or find the purpose. Finding your purpose is actually what I've learned is for a lot of people, is actually one of the hardest things for them. But the very second that they find it, something clicks. It's the conventional wisdom for startups that get thrown out. It's like, fake it till you make it. But for us to get to this point, it took a lot of other struggles. Look, you have to be very purposeful about what it is that you to do. But if you want to take that risk, know that you will fall. But in that falling, you'll catch yourself or you'll learn the technique and you'll figure out how to stand back up one more time.

As long as you have that inspiration to keep standing back up every single time that you fall, success is already preordained. The world is designed to give you exactly what you want.

I appreciate your honesty, your transparency, talking about all of this. I think it's important for entrepreneurs, but it's also important just for people. I mean, shame around food security and the experience that you went through. We need more transparent conversations like that, and we appreciate you doing that and sharing that with us today. So thank you.

And thanks for having me.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our executive producers are Jason Stavis and Katherine Dylan, and our associate producer is Jennifer Sanchez. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tune in tomorrow for Profit U Markets.

Support for this show comes from Mercury. There's an art to making the complex feel simple. Everything should be in sync so that even the smallest part serves a bigger purpose. Simplicity can transform your business operations. That's why Mercury powers your financial workflows from the bank account. So ambitious companies have the precision, control, and focus they need to perform at their best. Apply in minutes at mercury. Com.