A Conversation

Garg’s first company matched students with employers and earned annual subscriptions, but paying firms pushed the product toward recruiting by quotas and background. She sold it to LawWorks after deciding it no longer matched her goal. The idea for Gobble came after her father flew home-cooked Indian food to California, prompting her to focus on family meals.

Gobble moved from a marketplace for home-cooked meals to office catering, personalized dinners, and then meal kits for 15-minute, one-pan cooking. The marketplace struggled to scale because individual cooks could not reliably increase production. Catering generated revenue, but enterprise work accounted for about 75% of sales and pulled the company away from its consumer vision. Garg describes the changes as iterations that built on previous learning.

To find early customers, Garg placed promo cards at local businesses and shared offers with Meetup, moms’, and neighborhood groups; she tracked promo codes to see what worked. She used customer feedback and experiments to assess retention and growth, and said the personalized dinner service did not outperform the best takeout enough to scale quickly. When investors compared Gobble with competitors, she relied on her own experience and a framework from *Blue Ocean Strategy* to guide decisions.

Garg said she proved demand through sales before building websites, including landing a $10,000 recruiting customer while interning at Morgan Stanley. During Gobble’s product search, the team kept monthly burn near $40,000, raised two bridge rounds of about $200,000 each, and reached a point with roughly $8,000 left before joining YC. She also encouraged small teams to share the challenge with employees and solo founders to build a support network of trusted peers.

Garg credited executive chef Tomas Ricci with helping Gobble make food more consistent and innovate beyond technology. After testing meal prep kits, she shut down a personalized dinner service doing about $1.5–$2 million in ARR and launched the new product within about 30 days. She advised founders to prepare specific questions for mentors, keep notes on progress and challenges, and end investor pitches with an ambitious case for the company’s potential.