So we had to figure out a way to build a market, drive awareness, and sign up restaurants without having to pay rent. We wanted to be a national company, but we couldn't afford to put an office in every city in the U.S. We didn't know the neighborhoods the way we do in Chicago. Still, expanding to a second market was really difficult, because we weren't living there. We opened in San Francisco in October 2007 and closed our first capital round that November.

People in San Francisco loved it, and investors noticed. The restaurants were really receptive, and the orders started coming in aggressively. So we said, 'Screw it! We're going to do it anyway.' We flew out to San Francisco to sign up restaurants and do guerrilla marketing. The longer they can push you off, the more options they keep open. VCs are slow to say yes, but they'll never say no. We tried to raise venture capital to do that, but it was taking too long. The next step was expanding to a second city. We realized we had a really good product that was scalable. Finally we said, 'What if we take a 10 percent commission on whatever we sell for you?' Restaurants loved that. They had spent thousands of dollars putting up crappy websites that nobody ever found, so the idea of paying for another site of unknown value wasn't appealing. But when we started asking restaurants for money, most of them didn't see the value. We initially charged them $140 for six months of premium placement on our website. We thought restaurants would pay for the ability to capture the attention of hungry people. Mike and I collected hundreds of menus around my Chicago neighborhood, and he wrote some code. That's when I heard the screeching wheels in my head: Why wasn't there something like this for food delivery? At the time, we were working on geographic lookup searches for rental real estate. We were frustrated by the lack of dinner options as well as the pain in the ass of calling restaurants and reading our credit cards. The eureka moment for GrubHub came when Mike and I were working as developers for. Innovation works best when there's a problem to solve.

Did grubhub buy seamless