Kitchensurfing
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Kitchensurfing was a marketplace for chefs that matched personal chefs with people needing a cook - from dinner parties and cooking lessons to 10-course anniversary dinners. Pro and pro-am chefs made their services available for house calls; customers paid hourly rates covering ingredients, prep and clean-up. It was co-founded by Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, with Jon Tien as CEO, and raised about $19.5 million.
02 / Kitchensurfing FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Kitchensurfing never built a devoted enough audience for the at-home dining experience, and folded in the 2016 wave of on-demand meal startup closures that also claimed SpoonRocket in March and Kitchit shortly after.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Kitchensurfing ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
In April 2016 Kitchensurfing shut down its on-demand chef service (reported by Re/code on April 14, 2016 and the New York Business Journal on April 17).
- 02
The shutdown came amid a 2016 shakeout of on-demand meal startups: SpoonRocket folded in March, Kitchit and Dinner Lab shortly after.
- 03
No audited loss figure was disclosed.