Making Restaurant Life Easier: Our Investment in Pared

Pared Has Kitchens and Chefs Covered in the Bay Area

I like restaurants, a lot. My love affair with the restaurant world began as a teenager while working as a waitress and short order cook, and today it manifests itself in a healthy appetite for tasting menus around the world. I’m also driven to work with companies that leverage technology to help people unlock their potential. So when the opportunity to invest in a market network that helps restaurant pros and restaurateurs hit my plate, I bit. I’m proud to share that I led SoftTech VC’s investment in Pared and have joined the board.

It’s hard to believe that technology has left large pockets of the labor market unserved, but in the case of the restaurant industry, it’s true. Restaurants employ one out of every 10 workers in the US, but visibility into both restaurant gigs and restaurant professionals’ credentials remain largely offline. As an engineering manager in need of a full-stack developer, you turn to places like LinkedIn, AngelList, and Hired to identify talent and understand their skills. But as a restaurant manager in need of a commis with fine dining experience hours before the Saturday night rush, you dial down the call list of standbys tacked to the kitchen bulletin board and pray for a qualified hit on Craigslist. Or you find yourself stuck promoting your bagel girl (yep, me in the 90’s) to short order cook on a moment’s notice when the grill guy is a no-show, the Sunday crowd is lining up out the door, and everyone needs a pork roll, egg and cheese on an everything, stat.

But now, restaurant managers can turn to Pared. Pared is a staffing solution for restaurants and the people who make restaurants run. Pared is solving the problem for both sides of the network. Restaurants on Pared get vetted, qualified, and reliable talent to fill staff shortages in the kitchen. And industry pros earn extra money, have the chance to demonstrate and hone their skills in new kitchens, and some even shift to working gigs entirely to meet the needs of their families or have a more flexible lifestyle. Read on to learn a few of the reasons behind our investment.

Huge, Growing Market Begging for Disruption
The restaurant industry is a massive, fragmented market that does over $780B in sales across 1M+ locations with 70% being single-unit operations. The industry employs 14M professionals in the US alone and will add another 1.7M jobs by 2026. Staffing, particularly in kitchen roles, is a major issue across the country and across the spectrum of restaurants. There is a shortage of talented, reliable labor from coast to coast, to cities in between and abroad. High turnover, inefficiencies in recruiting, and the cost of living in cities all drive the talent shortage. While dynamics vary from market to market, there are enough local and national news headlines to suggest a major trend.

Industry talent is struggling too. It’s hard to earn a living wage as a restaurant pro. Culinary school graduates drop $30-$60K only to land jobs that pay $14 an hour. Additionally, restaurants prefer to avoid paying overtime. As a result, restaurant pros are supplementing income by picking up additional shifts — at their place of employment, elsewhere in the industry, and outside of the industry in the gig economy (driving for Uber, Lyft, etc).

The Chef/Foodie Dream Team.
Together, Pared’s founders Will Pacio and Dave Lu check the box on founder-market fit. Will is the industry veteran — Pared emerged from Will’s real life understanding of staffing challenges. Instead of attending med school post undergrad at Stanford, he followed his passion for cooking to culinary school and upon graduation landed a spot on the inaugural staff at Thomas Keller’s Per Se. From the kitchen, he was recruited to run tech for Keller’s restaurant empire back in California. He then set off on his own to start Spice Kit. Will knows kitchens and restaurant operations; he’s worked in restaurants across the spectrum from fast casual to extreme fine dining. If you go to dinner with him, there’s a good chance he disappears in the back to talk shop.

Dave is a seasoned entrepreneur and tech industry veteran with over 17 years of experience in product and marketing at top Silicon Valley companies including Yahoo!, Apple, and eBay. He later founded Fanpop, a network of user-generated fan clubs that he bootstrapped to a global audience of over 35 million monthly uniques before he helped the on-demand parking service Luxe expand to five new markets. Not only does Dave get growth, he’s also a huge foodie. Want a table at a soon-to-be-Michelin-starred restaurant or to get the scoop on the latest underground pop-up? Dave’s your guy.

Pared is already changing how kitchens staff and staff works.
Yes, there are other online solutions to find restaurant talent. Job listing sites serve as a modern substitute for Craigslist, while horizontal gig marketplaces focused on non-specialized workers. Pared differentiates itself as a vetted network of skilled industry professionals, and it’s starting by solving the “hair on fire” situation when a critical kitchen member is absent or a role is unfilled in the short term. In getting to know Pared, I talked to restaurant owners and managers that told me Pared has fundamentally changed how they think about staffing. Some kitchens are using it weekly, some even daily, to supplement their staff. I talked to a chef who had grown weary of the long hours of fine dining and shifted to Pared for a more flexible work schedule without having to sacrifice earning a living doing work he loved. In the last year, Pared has matched 150+ restaurants and over 500 industry pros.

Pared is uniquely positioned to surface and pressure test the real-life skills of restaurant professionals as they pick up open shifts across Pared’s network of restaurants, in time building a digital record of a chef’s experience, expertise, and working style while providing him or her with access to skill-building experiences across a variety of kitchens.

Ultimately, Pared is on a mission is “to make restaurant life easier”. Will and Dave’s goal is to provide technology solutions to the tens of millions of people who make a living in hospitality — both domestically and internationally. Last minute staffing is just scratching the surface of the tremendous opportunity that exists in the industry. And I couldn’t be more excited to have a seat at the table as they build out the Pared network.