Hangry
A Startup Journey
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Nautilus Book Awards' Better Books for a Better World | Axiom Business Book Award Winner
GrubHub founder Mike Evans reveals the inside story of how he grew a multibillion-dollar behemoth that changed the way we eat.
Hungry and tired one night, Mike wanted a pizza, but getting a pizza delivered was a pain in the neck. He didn’t want to call a million restaurants to see what was open. So, as an avid coder, he created GrubHub in his spare bedroom to figure out who delivered to his apartment. Then, armed with a $140 check from his first customer and ignoring his crushing college debt, he quit his job. Over the next decade, Mike grew his little delivery guide into the world’s premier online ordering website. In doing so, he entered the company of an elite few entrepreneurs to take a startup from an idea all the way to an IPO.
GrubHub’s journey from Mike’s bedroom to Wall Street doesn’t fit into how business schools teach entrepreneurship. In Hangry, he details step-by-step the grind of building an innovative business, with each chapter including sharp lessons for entrepreneurs and startups that Mike learned on the fly as he piloted GrubHub by the seat of his pants. Hangry reveals a decade of eighty-hour work weeks, detailed steps of how Mike garnered his first customers, his hunt for financing dollars, cliffhanger acquisitions, the near collapse of his marriage, a brutally difficult merger, and a pair of tumultuous quit/unquit moments, all to steer the company to become one of the most successful startups in the world. With a razor-sharp wit, Mike reveals hard-won truths about how startups succeed—and even harder-won truths about how startups fail.
Shocking everyone, at the pinnacle of startup success, Mike leaves it all behind, quitting the company he started to bike across the United States in search of balance. But eventually, the grand vistas of America bring the lessons of the past into focus, driving the realization that for entrepreneurs a hunger for success doesn’t end, and he starts another company, even more ambitious than the first.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Discontent is my driving force, my animus," writes GrubHub cofounder Evans in his illuminating debut, an account of how the food delivery service grew from a scrappy start-up to a multibillion-dollar company. Evans describes how one night in 2002, he came home exhausted from his office job and was unable to find in the Yellow Pages information on which restaurants delivered to him and whether they were any good. That night he created a website that listed all the venues that delivered to his Chicago zip code, and as soon as he had one restaurant willing to pay for a premium listing on the site, he quit his day job. Evans vividly recounts his 80-hour workweeks getting the business up and running, his efforts to expand beyond Chicago, and the relief he felt when, in 2006, his cofounder joined the business full time. Together, they brought on investors and venture capitalists, and by 2018, the company was worth $13 billion. Evans is frank about the challenges he faced as the company grew, his fights with his cofounder (Evans favored independent restaurants over chains), and his temptations to quit, and the whole tale is shot through with humor: "Mostly, this is a story about how I'm cranky. And that crankiness turned into a hobby." This punchy memoir delivers.
