Gadgetory

I'm Alexis Ohanian I started startups invested in them and met amazing people using the internet to change the world our generation has an opportunity unlike any other we can create small empires without anyone's permission plenty of tech startups use software to reduce human interaction in the name of efficiency that has always have to be the case in fact kitchen surfing comm is doing the exact opposite and they're doing it from a nondescript townhouse in gowanus brooklyn hello it's Alexis from small empires hello say it with more confidence and oh I am it's Alexis from small empires okay oh thank you oh yeah that's so a competitions are catchin surfing is a marketplace for amazing chefs all over the world and people that love food it's a place on the internet we can find chests that come to your home and cook for you and your friends the notion of a private chef is something that used to be perceived as and I think from a cost standpoint probably also just limited to like fairly wealthy individuals right you're in a lot of ways democratizing making this at least more accessible by making that market more efficient you you make the opportunity of getting you know having an amazing dinner party at your home actually something that people can perceive of is like doable in a way that you know you know sort of uber with private car service but it was different right it's like more like a utility it's like you want to get from a usable experience it's not an experience and and and I think it's about the experience and it's about really creating like lacking the people with the key that I created for you with kitchen surfing I mean I think that one of the things that I'd seen is just like with the pay scale for chefs was really really awful you know it's like in New York City you go and you work as a line cook at a really fancy restaurant like a per se or boule or whatever you know you're often making home $15 an hour everybody knows that the restaurants are bad businesses because you have this high fixed cost to high rent and you've got a little margin and all these all these things right and that cooks kind of get the raw end of that deal I think in many ways when when I got the domain kitchen surfing com I thought about my mom who's like you know was driving a lot I was I stayed I lived in Melbourne for a while member then constant and every time she's like really missing the food of my mom okay it was something about like there was like something like really homestyle you can really get anywhere else and I really really like this idea about like you know I'm finding more people that like like really good in cooking and you know especially mother's like hey man there's so many amazing people really good in cooking I went to culinary school but like my mom just like hey I just cook you like the best food at home I've been thinking a lot about what would it mean for chefs to get paid more often and I recently had to do like some parties I had hired people that I knew were like chefs that were looking for work and you're like crushed it and it was relatively cheap I was like this is interesting help me just understand what you were thinking when you got an email introduction from a friend of yours who said me and creating from wrong he was basically like listen just sold a domain name to a random guy on the internet you gotta meet him so yes I have a crazy friend and he had this done meaning that he was sitting on and this German guy's like hey I want to buy this from you and he says okay but you have to pay me in Bitcoin this is probably in like 2011 or something like that maybe 2012 like nobody knows what bitcoins are and though it's like yeah Bitcoin like what's this so the guy who saw the domain to me in bitcoins 50 bitcoins she introduced me to Chris and Sykes like hey just this crazy guy like technology kind of thing rest on that's like all right okay I'm is like okay well you should go to New York cuz in New York's awesome true and I here's a bunch of people you should meet and if you want to talk about food stuff you should talk to Chris so I went to New York and just like from just for fun on vacation and microfiche so we were hanging out getting done it a lot bow comes in to visit and he's just kind of like in hangout mode right like he's not really working on anything he's just like an hangout mary ii hey nice to meet you and whatever and i'm kind of sitting there like i'm like heads down working on something I'm like okay cool like who are you what do you want okay what can I do for you and then proceeded to kind of like give him a little bit of a hard time and we what are we give him over time I just trying to act like a figure out what it was that he was doing with himself I feel like like what do you do with your life yeah like what are you doing with your life like why are you here what kind of thing are you trying to work on what's interesting to you like it's like like all those things that should unfold over a three-hour conversation over like a couple of beers just sit down yeah yeah so you like let's just sit down and like get this done in 15 minutes I went back to put in and I was like I worked on a different projects and came back then and yet generally last year and we were just hanging out again and it's okay let's Sue's together on say your own okay I'm staying in for a couple month and and then we just pulled it off it's hard to take him seriously those googly eyes but uh he still makes a good point so that happened as a joke so we call our support team salt which is support and logistics team and so Evan decided to riff on that and called the Devon product team pepper kind of a stretch though to make that an acronym yeah he pulled it off with such panache when he said it but it just work no and why Jules uh I can get it's like gun or thermal ejection so uh we're in your living room living room yes so this this is actually the last floor that we annexed in the building we didn't have this floor until about a month ago and this is the product dev team in kitchen surfing we were originally gonna like build out almost like a Test Kitchen kind of environment down here and you might see some plans for that a little bit later and then we kind of grew too fast and had too many people and decided that we needed a space for other things this room was the divan where it gets done all of it except for I post in Poland Wow all right so this is where everyone spends their days just reading reddit and hacker news don't plug reddit I'm sorry what were you doing before kitchen surfing um I was working good night all right so have you been doing startups pretty much since college uh yeah entirely so you're spoiled we're saying there's no way you're going but I mean I go to a big place why kitchen surfing you could work you know right now obviously everyone's hiring for developer toner why did you choose kitchen surfing so kitchen surfing has this really interesting crossover between you're actually paying chefs to do what they want with their lives you know I mean that's that's not like a lot of opportunities you get to doing a lot of things so it's this new market that you're building out of which really most people just weren't aware existed even chefs themselves weren't aware that they could have like this lycra market and you're actually paying them to do it they want with their lives it's an amazing thing like that's what I found like super interesting about it that's a problem I like to see small and like I'd like to see that happen for you know painters artists musicians everything else but like green ass chefs step one yes all right and how how does it feel to get up in the morning and look forward to the work you do dude it's great I wouldn't have it any other way like if that stops happening I'll stop you okay there you go you make it seem really effortless how you met but at the time you said you were living in Berlin right yeah I am and and he was living in New York right and you were in town visiting you were eating or getting drunk together having a good time right so I started to start a company together Yeah right I mean I didn't know anything about him and I just liked him and we only had one beer together too and like and I was really confused I was like why would we start a company together I don't even know you but um we both like came like fun with reaction we were like in an arrive mindset of like doing something together and it's basically like okay come you know January of 2013 we're basically going to clear our decks from like everything and just like work it turned out that we ended up with like an amazing working relationship um which is weird ranks it's like who's this guy who's sort of you met through the internet but it ends up being like an amazing colleague give me end up being really good friends and everything just kind of like felt like I had a little bit of pixie dust on I always thought like this would be crazy to build a marketplace where we can find and engage with chefs anywhere as you travel and it's a great idea but I don't even know how to pull it off how do you get started you're in January 2013 what's the first thing you guys do we build a sign-up page for chefs like we're talking it's just really basic HTML CSS you're just it's just a web form yep really like it's not even connected to our database to start really like I just like you just like a little anything like that like dumps into a CSV file type of situation okay all right and we started asking people to sign up for two months was like really like hey let's set up a homepage a signup form do wireframes and all this kind of stuff and and then you figure out how you create more how do you find chefs and how do you Ventures um through this website where restaurant chefs were looking for jobs this is like a Craigslist guy sort of yeah yeah yeah it's Arizona general like for Peter I want to like find a place where we can work like in right in the food world and we just set up of sign up like a like an ad and saying hey um if you want to cook here sign up basically and and that's where not only people New York Philly from anywhere in the world like sign up and and I think this is something that made us realize like what kitchen stuffing can become marketplaces are only as valuable as the people who contribute to them Chris Lynch has been cooking since he was a little kid and he knows this new world presents some challenges but also a lot of opportunities the thing that always you know comes into my mind immediately is the fact that I think that they've created a need for something that people didn't know they had before I feel like that's what it's about it's like you don't know you need this but then I'm going to present it to you in such a way that now you can't live without it and I feel like Kitchen surfing is doing that not just for private chefs because before I met kitchen surfing outside of word of mouth I had a very hard time finding new clients somebody who wants to throw a dinner party on a Friday night or something you know what were your choices before catering from the local restaurant catering from a catering place which sort of really doesn't have a lot of appeal you know maybe your Italian restaurant down the street does but again they're cooking it they're the bringing the dropping it off and that's it you know this is you know we're coming into your home and we're cooking it's much more personalized though we have set menus on our profile that's more to give I think to give the client sort of an idea frame of reference how we cook where we come from okay this guy cooks Italian this guy cooks French so with narrow you know it narrows it down for you but then it becomes a one-on-one and you basically design your own dinner with the chef all right so we're in a Test Kitchen which is just the kitchen of the kitchen surfing offices so right behind us you can't smell it we don't know that technology but it smells amazing and all these people are trying to work we are not a regular office so we're a home right this is a home and so there's a home kitchen and this is what a chef on kitchens has been usually walks into the home kitchen they've never been in so part of the chef's coming with the kitchen surfing is them being able to see what it's like cooking another home so first of all these three ladies there are chefs today there's Malaika Isabel I only carry we have never met these three chefs applause and they have never met us so this is an opportunity for them to come in and start cooking and sharing their story and their food with the kitchen center team so they're given a prompt they have 45 minutes to cook prep and plate two dishes they thing represent their culinary staff and what their food represents about himself this is wow this feels vaguely like our competition reality TV show it's not a competition are we allowed to talk tune in a little I mean if you're in a client's home and you have a toddler who's nagging at your feet or legs you're comparing me to a nagging no I I'm the thing that there are a lot of situations so you should talk to all of it I'm Malika I'm originally from muscle Rock Arkansas so I'm a southern belle so to speak and I've been in New York a couple years and literally the second week I was here I have friends here so they were like oh we're doing a party can you come cater it and after that it was like continuous how did you hear about kitchen surfing I was um it was a random opportunity I saw online I believe I was just kind of looking at different private chef opportunities and I love like the startup culture and that's another I love life is digital stuff I just kind of came across it which is great for sigma-star because I've been cook that the name is out there people about so I started reading and I was just like oh a lot of New Yorkers don't have a ton of space you know every home in New York dozen have a sous vide in it so how do chefs adapt to that so I've got two chefs or punk rock like you give them a hit they give them a heat source and they're good yeah so you just have a Bunsen burner or like a hot tub totally totally like that's actually I creative like constraint for a chef when you pitch somebody on a menu you're assuming they have the basic things to cook a little with you know what I mean anything extra is always exciting to have but you've already sort of shown up with a planned menu so you're not gonna start doing you know a sous vide dish when you know the stakes are going on the grill like you might mess around I don't know it just seems a little it is nice to have challenges thrown your way because when you have to get dinner on the table at 8:00 if something unexpected happens you still have to figure out a way to feed those people because they really don't care what the problem is done like some man's my catering spaces just about a couple months ago I went into a place where I thought I was gonna have a kitchen and I didn't so you just have to wing it wait I'm sorry you were asked to cook somewhere where there was literally no kitchen no it was there a hot plate or there was supposed to be a hot plate unfortunately there was it but they may be a fire I had some sternal than some pants going and that's what we got so it's a challenge it's almost like okay well I met that challenge I can kind of move on to the next scene yeah happen just like your acid II do you believe that anyone can cook do you really think because I'm telling you sometimes I look at myself and I see these ogre hands trying to manipulate even the most basic things and it's easy to get to feel defeated is there is there hope can I get beyond just making egg sandwiches which I am great at I think anyone can cook with the right ingredients and just patience without patience you probably can't yeah a lot of cooking and it will be egg sandwiches yeah so I know that's a blowtorch I know that much and I've never done this before and I'm just I'm a little jealous that like you get to play with blowtorches um and I'd like to try all right so what is the proper blowtorching technique all right so this is like the small little kitchen when I do for like probably about this one so this is a safety we all need that so you pull that down and then if you want to continue with um fire I do push this button to hold it and then climb on oh wait wait for it flame on everyone I get close in the real slow you know I'm I'm considering this as my application video for touch okay this is exciting and a little terrifying I can't tell you this is actually really hot hey uh this is no joke what you're done you don't want to over brulee don't don't that's a classic rookie mistake over brulee so alright it's a little darker than yours but the new ally phone in theory you know five years from now if kitchen surfing keeps growing there are gonna be chefs who built their brands from kitchen surfing who have a following you know what's to say the next big celebrity chef isn't grown entirely from the internet and entirely from something like I think it's surfing I think it's totally positive yeah at the end of the day you have to be a good cook I think some people know exactly who they are I think some people are still figuring that out I know that my cooking has changed you know I thought I did mostly Italian but now I realize you know it's more Italians Mediterranean but it's really New York inspired because I don't if there's a good ingredient I want to use it and figure out a way to incorporate it into my own style but the only way you develop that is by doing it over and over and over again one of the things that's the most gratifying about kitchen surfing is seeing that it can be so many different things to so many different people it might be like a woman who like just wants to teach people like maybe she's from you know India and she wants to teach people how to make parathas and that's like all she wants to do and that she loves doing that like once a month and that's awesome what is the best lesson you would give to someone who is struggling or thinking about getting into a similar kind of sort of market system don't think about the technology for me it's really all about people and also always about people what I actually think that we're doing with kitchen surfing is that we're giving context for people to like enjoy more time with people they care about and that the food needs to be really good because people like great food but that it's almost like a background I don't know all the fancy restaurants in New York I am I just like to go to the same places all the time I like to book Asian chefs and like always Asian cuisine korean chef and just something that's i don't need a lot more and so it's like chris it's like really let's find the most human most simple thing we can have and this meal every day startups a lot like life can't really be planned for there's going to be serendipity and it may involve a domain name purchase and Bitcoin transaction you don't know so the founders of kitchen surfing were looking at a market that most chefs who were in it didn't even realize existed they still need to work on it they still need to grow it and the most important part is that they just started you