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.

However, almost immediately after we launched the business, we decided that we’d rather be extra focused on food purchasing and do that right. It definitely has been a subject of conversation because the name has little to do with food. People ask, “Why don’t you change it?” Realistically, it would be extremely hard now because we’ve created a brand. Some of our clients say, “I’m going to have a seamless night” or “I’m going to SeamlessWeb some pizza.”
That means you’re working late and you’re going to order dinner. I’m not implying that we’re the Kleenex or Xerox of the web, but we’ve got brand equity and credibility that is hard to build, and there’s little incentive to take any unnecessary risks since the name hasn’t seemed to slow us down much, if at all.

RL:  What was your first experience with entrepreneurship?

JF:  When I was growing up, my mother and my aunt had a small family jewelry business and a lot of the conversations that we had over the dinner table were about operating the business. It was a small business, but I learned some of the basic building blocks of entrepreneurship, like hard work, valuing your people, being willing to do any job - big or small - and understanding how to manage through difficult situations and be creative.
The two big things I learned from my mother’s business were one, if you treat people in your business with a tremendous amount of respect and with an eye on a long-term relationship, they’ll be much more passionate about what they do.

They will be much more loyal to you and they will help you to identify opportunities instead of taking them and running with them on their own. And two, if you give people that may be less experienced an opportunity, they will very frequently rise to the occasion, and they’ll be much more dedicated to you and your success.
The impact of a family business going bankrupt is far more dramatic than if an employer goes bankrupt, in terms of risk aversion. You have huge emotional and financial involvement and it affects your whole family at the same time. It affected my mother, my aunt, my cousin, my grandparents, and me in a very painful but, in hindsight, educational way.