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The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

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Letter to the editor: UW ripe for start-ups

Letter+to+the+editor%3A+UW+ripe+for+start-ups
Joey Reuteman

I started the successful EatStreet app my junior year at the University of Wisconsin, after a game of beer pong.

According to Facebook, I moved into the dorms on Aug. 29, 2007. Facebook says this is the same day I became friends with a guy named Matt Howard, who lived next door. A week earlier, I became Facebook friends with Alex Wyler, another incoming freshman.

The first couple weeks of college introduced a lot of impactful friendships. But the friendships I made with Alex and Matt had the most significant impact on my future.

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My name is Eric Martell, and in 2010 I started a company called EatStreet with Matt and Alex. EatStreet is an app and website that allows you to order from restaurants for delivery and pickup.

We power online ordering of 200 restaurants in Madison, and 15,000 restaurants nationwide. We process millions of dollars in sales a week, and employ nearly 100 people full time. We’ve raised $13 million of venture capital investments.

The business exists because we jumped on an opportunity we hadn’t fully thought through.

As freshmen, you form your own new social circles, and coincidentally, I spent a lot of time with Alex and Matt going to football games, parties and studying at College Library. We also made new friends. Matt worked at the Union and had a circle of friends there. Alex founded the UW E-Sports club. I joined a fraternity. We never talked about starting a business, or the future in general, until the summer of 2009.

I was working my first internship as a software developer and it was my third day on the job. Alex had landed a job in the same office. I ordered a sub online from Silver Mine Subs. The delivery driver told me the website I ordered from charged me extra money to use the service and recommended I call in my order next time.

That felt wrong to me. It was the year 2010 — if there wasn’t a website we could order food from, why not make one ourselves?

Alex and I went home from work and called Matt, who was selling cars for Russ Darrow. He liked the idea. We got together to talk about it and because we were entering our junior year at UW, we drank some beer. And then we played beer pong. And we talked about a name for the website: BadgerBites. And we played some more beer pong.

I woke up the next morning with a bit of a headache and the memory of buying a three-month subscription to a web server for $2,000. It wasn’t a great feeling. The three of us had been so excited the night before we prematurely pulled the trigger on buying web hosting, much more expensive than we needed.

After some discussion, we came to the consensus we dug ourselves into this hole, let’s dig ourselves out by making this thing. We often joke that our first two Google searches were “how to register a business” and “how to make a website,” but it’s the honest truth.

Seven months later, we launched BadgerBites.com with the goal of boosting our resumes for jobs after college.

The rest has been a whirlwind of awesome moments, terrible crises and unrelenting growth. We rebranded the service to EatStreet. We won the business school’s business plan competition.

We expanded to Milwaukee, then Iowa City, then 151 more cities. We hired our friends; Matt’s from the Union, Alex’s from E-Sports Club and mine from the fraternity. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Why am I telling this story? Because as I see freshmen hitting the streets of Madison, I’m remembering the first time Alex, Matt and I went out together, and how two years later we’d start a business that changed my life forever.

If I have one suggestion to get the most out of UW, it’s this: embrace everything. Say hi to your next-door neighbors in the dorms. Get a job at the Union. Start a club. Check out fraternities and sororities, even if you don’t think you’re the type. The friends you make today could dramatically change your life years down the road. And if a delivery driver tells you to order your food over the phone, drink a couple beers and start a business.

Eric Martell ([email protected]) is the co-founder of EatStreet.

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