Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

At Silicon Valley Companies, There’s Certainly Such a Thing as a Free Lunch — For Employees

In Silicon Valley, you no longer have to work at the Googleplex to get a free gourmet lunch.

San Francisco Bay Area companies who want to keep their employees happy and productive have many options for convenient office lunch deliveries. Of course, the lunch isn’t free to the employers.

One such vendor, EAT Club, told us this week that it served more than 750 companies in the past year with more than 60,000 lunches.

And by the way, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up said it raised a previously undisclosed $1.5 million seed round last summer from First Round Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Launch Capital, Siemer Ventures and Brian Lee (founder of ShoeDazzle and LegalZoom).

EAT Club meals come at a flat rate of $7.50 per person with free delivery.

Another recent entrant to the space is San Francisco-based ZeroCater, which, coincidentally, has also raised $1.5 million, from a large group of angel investors.

ZeroCater is a bit more full-service, with family-style orders for meals throughout the day placed well in advance and fulfilled by about 100 vendors. A spokesperson said that ZeroCater prices vary, but the average cost per person is about $12.50.

Here’s a Quora answer that goes into some of the other competition, which includes GetQuik and Waiter.com.

Or you could always hire your own chef — something even small companies are doing these days.

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work