Seamless Success-Interview with founder of SeamlessWeb

In a region full of people with 24/7 careers, SeamlessWeb has become a valuable tool. Before the site was founded in 2000, busy workers who wanted a meal delivered after 5pm, but didn’t have the time to go out for one, would first have to hunt down the office delivery menus folder. After selecting from a limited variety of restaurants, they would have to actually pick up the phone, wait on hold, then give the restaurant their orders and addresses. Employees would then have to add unwanted cups of soup or bottles of soda to the order because they had to meet the restaurant’s $15 minimum for delivery. After waiting at least 45 minutes, the employees then had to pay – gasp! – in cash for their dinners and file the receipts with expense reports and wait for reimbursement.

That method of food ordering has gone the way of the manual typewriter. SeamlessWeb began serving hard-working Manhattanites in 2000 as an online, food- ordering application that allowed clients to manage their food spending and provide perks to hungry employees. Today, the company serves large and small corporate clients and has a burgeoning service for hungry consumers in New York; Boston; Washington DC; Philadelphia; Jersey City; Houston; Chicago; San Francisco; Los Angeles; London; and several other cities.

Before 37-year-old company founder Jason Finger and his partners sold the business to food industry giant Aramark in 2005, they were managing nearly $100 million in food orders, now only a small fraction of the volume of orders they process. NY Report editor-in-chief Robert Levin spoke with SeamlessWeb founder and CEO Jason Finger about making money in a bad economy, not selling to the highest bidder, and where the name of the company came from.

Robert Levin: How did you come up with the name SeamlessWeb?

Jason Finger: The initial idea was to create an umbrella company focused on automating administrative processes via the Web. That company was named SeamlessWeb. We were going to focus on automating food ordering and billing first, and we were going to call that Seamless Meals. Then, we were going to automate the procurement process for black car services, and that was going to be called Seamless Wheels.

Then, we were going to automate purchasing from other local merchants, and we were going to call that Seamless Deals. We launched the business under the SeamlessWeb name and it stuck.