Inc. Magazine – September 2019

36 ● INC. ● SEPTEMBER 2019 ● ● ● ● ● ●

I helped restaurants improve their

websites. But I couldn’t find anything

that focused on the specific tools that

restaurants need to drive revenue—the

ability to take catering orders, sell

tickets for a private event, or manage

their presence on Google and Face-

book. Instead, restaurants were using

several different tools—Eventbrite here,

WordPress there—which wasted time

and cost them a lot of money.

Meanwhile, as technology became

more important to dining out, restau-

rants gave a lot of control to applica-

tions like OpenTable and Seamless.

While these help restaurants find

new customers, they take away that

one-to-one relationship that is key

to hospitality.

So in 2013, with my co-founder

Pierre Drescher, I launched BentoBox,

which helps restaurants do all those

simple, day-to-day tasks. Except

with BentoBox, the clients own every

aspect of their relationship with the

customer.

The first two years were really tough.

There was a period when I considered

giving up on a daily basis. We didn’t

have much financing, and I had gotten

feedback that I needed to do a “friends

and family” round before a seed round.

I thought, I don’t have friends and

family who have a bunch of money to

just give me.

I also had the misconception that,

because we were young and growing,

everything had to be built from

scratch—rather than automating some

part of the process. We were trying

to sell technology to become more

efficient, but we didn’t take our own

advice.

Back then, it was just me, an intern,

and my co-founder, and we barely paid

ourselves. I was doing freelance work

on the side to make ends meet—and

running up my credit cards.

In the fall of 2015, the year I finally

started paying myself, a VC fund I was

talking to flagged the financial risks I

had taken during the early days of the

company—like how I’d run up my cred-

it cards, and been selective about which

personal obligations I paid. It was also

impossible to get a company credit

card—probably for the best—since

that depended on my personal credit

history.

Because of that, there was a time when

I thought that the investment might not

happen. I remember having that diffi-

cult conversation on the phone with the

investor in the middle of a workday, and

having to continue meetings with cus-

tomers, pretending that everything was

fine. I couldn’t believe that all the risk

I took to make this work would be why

we didn’t succeed. I just wanted to

talk about it with someone—but there

was no one. Luckily, after some back

and forth, we moved forward with that

investor. And now we even have com-

pany credit cards.

Since then, BentoBox has grown to

125 employees, with 4,500 restaurant

clients worldwide, and we have raised

around $25 million. In May, my parents

came to New York City and visited our

office for the first time since the early

days. They realized that BentoBox is a

pretty large company now. I think they

started to get nervous—they were

advising me to be careful, not to grow

too fast or spend too much. But they

are very supportive.

My father now works for his local

government, in a very secure but lim-

ited position. Entrepreneurship, from

my parents’ perspective, was an oppor-

tunity for me to take my career as far

as humanly possible. Starting my com-

pany, they say, was the only way for me

to truly have freedom and ownership.

Which is exactly what they left Iran to

give me.

How BentoBox

Gets Bigger

BentoBox serves an industry

with notoriously thin mar-

gins—net profits for full-

service restaurants peaked

at only 6.1 percent in 2017,

according to Abrigo—which

poses challenges for Mobay-

eni: She needs to coax her

company’s future success

from customers who are

often cash-strapped and solo

operators. Her strategy: Start

with well-known restaurants

and use those marquee

names to bring in others. In

early 2014, her concerted

efforts to woo New York City

staples, like those in Danny

Meyer’s empire (including his

company’s iconic Gramercy

Tavern), paid off and greatly

helped her expansion there—

which then opened doors in

other cities, like Washington,

D.C. (with José Andrés’s

ThinkFoodGroup), and

Houston (with H-Town Res-

taurant Group). Up next for

Mobayeni as she strives to

scale: creating a white-label

product so other kinds of

providers can offer services to

restaurants, finding new types

of customers (like US Foods,

the nation’s second-largest

food service, which recently

inked a deal with BentoBox)—

and handling the tricky bal-

ancing act between growth

and management. “Busi-

nesses grow at a certain rate,

but people are human, and

they grow at a different rate,”

she says. “Making sure that’s

aligned is constantly chal-

lenging.” —Z.H.

Starting my company, my

parents say, was the only way

for me to truly have freedom

and ownership.
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