ezCater - the startup making catering a breeze for businesses across the nation - killed it last year. It made headlines this past fall when it raised $28 million in Series C funding and expanded its executive team. But what do you know about the woman behind this rapidly growing venture?
Stefania Nappi Mallett, founder and CEO of ezCater, is no novice in the entrepreneurship game. She's a two-time MIT alumna who, after a series of normal desk jobs, founded Insight Marketing Technology (sold), followed by PreferredTime (closed). Now on her third venture, she's all the wiser.
I was fortunate enough to speak with Nappi Mallett, and she bestowed upon me wisdom and plenty of refreshing humor. Here's what she had to say.
Olivia Vanni: What have your ventures (past and present) had in common?
Stefania Nappi Mallett: The thing that they all have in common is that in each case, I’ve brought technology to bear on solving a problem that hasn’t been solved by technology before. It’s really about building something that didn’t exist before. Something that humans did in our own nice little messy human way that we all operate but that with technology, we can make a much more efficient process. I like that intersection. The intersection between humans and technology. How can you make humans more effective? How can you free up our brains from the more routine aspects of our lives so we can focus on the more interesting work that human judgement and creativity needs to be brought to bear on. So that’s been my focus.
OV: What have each one of them taught you about launching and scaling a company?
SNM: With each one of them, you know, I’d like to think I’m doing better on the third one than I did on the second one or the first one. Companies, in the software as a service industry especially, are about people. They're completely about people. Without people, there would be no company, there would be no service to be delivered. I have been trying - even before these startups - to learn how to be better and better at doing right by people: Doing right by my employees, doing right by my business partners, doing right by the customers who we serve. I’m still getting better at that, and each company has taught me how to show more respect, be more decent, be more fair and be more supportive in all of my interactions….
I also have this saying “Scale brings cringing.” I have to learn as the company grows, I have to let more go. I have to delegate more and let other people take over more of the responsibilities, and it’s easy to be nervous about that, especially when you were employee #1, which I was at all of these companies. Well, you can think you know the right way to do it. No, you have to let it go and let everyone bring the greatness that you hired them for. My measurement for that, I would say a year ago, was that if I’m not cringing at least three times a day, I’m not letting go enough. Now I’m cringing every hour. I don’t even know when I’m not cringing about something anymore. And yet, I hired great people and they’re bringing their greatness to bear on the company.
OV: ezCater is your third startup. What keeps you going full-steam ahead with starting companies?
SNM: I can tell you, it just beats working for a living. It’s so much better than working for a living. It’s fun to take the blank slate and start writing stuff on it, and so my choices after each of them - both the sale and when we chose to shutter the company - were to go out and “get a job.” And I’d done that and I had a lot of benefit and success with it, but, turns out, I prefer starting new things and creating jobs.
OV: How did your undergraduate and graduate education at MIT influence your career?
SNM: There are many things that I learned at MIT that I only knew years later was the genesis of them. But even at the time I left MIT, I knew I had a can-do attitude that MIT fosters. The school helps you learn how to solve problems. That’s the biggest thing you get out of there - I don’t care what degree of science or engineering you pick up. But more than that, it’s this can-do attitude like, “We should just try that! That’s a good idea, so why don’t we just try that? It might even be a bad idea, but if we don’t try it, we won’t know. Try it.”
That’s something we do here at ezCater, and it’s something that I’ve done at all of my jobs since college. I carry forward that idea of “I don’t know - We should just try it. We’ll learn a lot just from trying it.”
OV: If you could go back and give advice to 22-year-old Stefania, what would it be?
SNM: I think my biggest message, and I wish I had known this when I was 22, is life is actually very long. There are a lot of chapters. You are going to have a lot of chapters, and that’s a great thing. Embrace the chapters because that means you don’t have to get it right. Just try it, try it. You’re going to pick a job that’s just OK at the moment, but it’s not like you don’t have to set your career in stone for the rest of your life. You’re going to pick a job, you’re going to do that job and then you’re going to learn a lot more. And that will help you pick the next chapter: the next job, or maybe the next city. You might say, “Well, Boston isn’t doing it for me anymore,” and you’re going to try somewhere else...
It’s chapters. Your life is chapters and you’re not going to get each one right - in fact - don’t even try. Decide you’re going to do something, learn and move on. You’re going to be richer for having tried it.
Image via Stefania Nappi Mallett.
