Maria Rose Belding didn't think of herself as an entrepreneur until her co-founder sat her down and told her she needed to read up on Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel and others.
At first, she didn't quite get why he was telling her to do this. Her nonprofit focused on minimizing food waste didn't appear to fit the startup mold. Belding was starting a nonprofit that would help food pantries and other emergency food providers connect with potential donors, like restaurants or grocery stores.
In 2013, she founded the MEANS Database, with the idea that restaurants and other groups that have excess food could list their extra items in the database, rather than toss it out, and participating food pantries would get a notification about the new items that they could pickup.
Since launching the website in February 2015, Belding's tech nonprofit has expanded to serve 48 states and D.C. And it grew so quickly that after her first semester of sophomore year at American University last fall, Belding had to take a hiatus from her studies to manage the workload. Yet it wasn't until recently when Belding considered that maybe — just maybe — she is a tech entrepreneur.
Q: It seems that you have always worked with groups that work to end hunger. What drew you to this cause, specifically?
A: Growing up, our family was very dinner-table oriented. I have absolutely awesome parents, and they made it a priority to sit down and eat healthy, well-balanced meals together. As I got older, I began to realize that not all parents did or could do what mine did for me — not everyone had time to sit down as a family unit, not all had the nutritional background to make healthy meals and not everyone could afford it. The idea that my elementary school peers might not have the anchoring influence family dinner had for me and my brother because their families couldn’t afford it broke my heart.
Q: Tell me about the MEANS Database. Where did the idea for it come from?
A: I had this idea at 14, but it wasn’t until four years later, when I met Grant Nelson, my co-founder, that we were able to take it from an idea to a working, food-moving website. MEANS is a very simple concept. Agencies create free profiles on our website and tell us what kind of foods they’re looking for, the quantities they can take, and how far they’re willing to travel to go get those foods. We send them text messages and/or emails when someone, whether that’s another emergency food agency or a traditional donor like a grocery store or restaurant, has what they need. And it’s always free for emergency food providers.
It should not be easier or less expensive to send food to a landfill than to give it to people who need it.
Q: Where do you see MEANS heading in the future?
A: I see us continuing to grow. We opened the website in February 2015, and we’ve now signed up agencies in 48 states and D.C. We came along at just the right time — the U.S. is really starting to have a national conversation about food waste, and what businesses, nonprofits and the general public can do to address it. It’s my hope that we change the game for food recovery, playing a part in making it the norm instead of the exception. It should not be easier or less expensive to send food to a landfill than to give it to people who need it.
Q: I feel like your nonprofit here marries the nonprofit world with the tech world. What is that juxtaposition like for you, and how does it play out when you're making business decisions?
A: The first time I told someone we were a nonprofit tech start-up, he looked at me, raised his eyebrow and asked, “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
That’s a pretty typical reaction, especially because the views from one sector to the other can be pretty grim. Nonprofits can be perceived as optimism-rich and strategy-poor, and tech start-ups can be cast as soulless money-making machines. In my experience, neither narrative is true. For us, marrying the heart of a charity with the brain of a business just makes sense.
There are plenty of for-profit social good companies, and there are many markets where that business structure makes much more sense than a nonprofit. In our very specific space of food pantries, soup kitchens and homeless shelters, it doesn’t. There is immense distrust of for-profit social good companies among these agencies, as they’re seen as trying to take advantage of the goodwill associated with helping the hungry while also pulling in not only revenue, but profit. In the words of one of our agencies, for-profit social companies in the emergency food space are like “wolves trying to borrow our clothing.”
For us, it’s just very important that we make sure our agencies and donors know that we will never charge them for the use of our platform, and our goal at the end of the day is always to feed more people.
Q: How did being an entrepreneur and innovator pretty much from the get-go influence you as a person?
A: I wouldn’t have used those words to describe myself until very recently. I didn’t know what a startup was until I met Grant, who introduced me to the concepts of incubators and VC and insisted I immerse myself in the writing of Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel and the like. At the time, I was still a teenager and had the eye rolling skills to match — Why did I need to care about startups? Weren’t we trying to feed people?
Now, three years in, I’m so grateful for a co-founder who insisted I learn what was unfamiliar. Growing up in startup culture has made me a much more strategic thinker. It’s taught me to think of MEANS’ growth as a game of chess instead of checkers — not only do you need to plan ahead for a dozen different scenarios, but every piece of your team can’t move in the same way and you have to learn how to best use every asset you’ve got.
Every time we get to see food move, it’s this little rush of joy.
Q: What's one moment you've had from your work where you thought "Yes, this is what I need to be doing. All of this work is worth it."?
A: A few days ago we had an agency in Georgia donate lemons, limes, strawberries, okra, yellow bell peppers and eggplant — All fresh from a local farmer’s market. All of it was claimed in about 15 minutes, and it ended up with a local church and an AIDS services organization, among others. That’s exactly how this is supposed to work. Every time we get to see food move, it’s this little rush of joy. It happens so frequently now that I though it would wear off, but it hasn’t. We get to actually see food find new homes in a matter of minutes, and we’re extra excited when it’s fresh and healthy food like those donations. Every single donation we move solidifies our resolve and confirms for me that this is what I’m meant to be doing at this point in my life.
Q: What makes innovation in Washington, D.C., unique?
A: DC is a study in contradictions. If you stand on the Capitol steps, the literal path to American power, you can see Ward 8 — where the unemployment rate is 25 percent and half of all children live in poverty. We have incredible startups making breakthroughs in healthcare, and an HIV rate so high we would likely qualify for PEPFAR (the government program for nations facing AIDS epidemics) funds if we were our own nation. Innovating in DC is unique because as a city, we are simultaneously so far ahead and so far behind. There is much opportunity in our 68 square miles, to change how we govern, address poverty, practice medicine, get our educations, and so much more.
Q: What would you change about the D.C. tech scene?
A: I wish it was a little more diverse, in every sense of the word — gender, race, class, sexual orientation, etc. I wish it was more accessible for people with lived experience in our field, especially. Some of our best interns and now-staff relied on food pantries in their younger years, and I hope as we grow it will be possible (for MEANS) to add more compensated intern positions to ensure we don’t shut out people with that perspective because we can’t afford to pay them.
Q: What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs in the D.C. area?
A: Get to know people! DC is a small world in and of itself, and we’ve had so many awesome mentors and friends come from incubators, accelerators and meet-ups. Everybody’s trying to build the next big thing, and there’s a good chance some of the people you meet will — and even if they don’t, you’ll have learned quite a bit from them.
