Starting up with Dilip Rao

On Tuesdays, we get into the weeds with the founders of HR tech startups. Want to tell us about your company? Get in touch here.

Dilip Rao is the co-founder and CEO of Sharebite, a startup that seeks to drive retention, engagement, and connection through the power of something essential to humanity: food. The meal-ordering platform works with companies to offer lunch as an employee benefit. In doing so, it intends to beef up retention and foster community by allowing employees to eat together. Since starting in 2015, the company has raised almost $63 million from a variety of investors, including RiverPark Ventures and the London Technology Club. We spoke to Rao about how something simple, like lunch, can be a means of tackling important HR issues.

What product or service does your company offer? We’re the leading food benefits platform that’s built exclusively for the workplace and for the modern workforce. It helps companies provide a meal benefit program for all their employees, and have these benefits utilized, no matter what their workforce strategy is…[Employers] provide a daily subsidy, employees get a daily email saying, ‘Here are some really nice restaurants that you can order from’...All the food arrives in your building in one delivery. And it really brings employees together.

What specific issue in HR does your company intend to solve? The number one thing that we hear a lot [that] CHROs, heads of people, even CEOs lose sleep about is employee engagement…We hear a lot of companies saying, ‘Look…we’re spending $1,700 per employee per month maintaining an office space…but they’re coming in twice a week or three times a week.’ We want to make it so that they can use their Sharebite allowance, they can use their meal benefit…Especially in this environment, every dollar helps.

What kind of companies are your primary customers? When we started, most of our  companies were enterprises—asset management firms, investment banks, law firms, professional services. Today, it really runs a spectrum. We have every type of company that you can imagine, from those global financial institutions all the way to tech companies that we all know and probably read about. We have pretty much every single industry vertical out there—healthcare and biotech is something that we recently dipped our toes into, and a lot of biotech companies have signed up for our system.

How do you think the HR tech field will evolve over the next 5 to 10 years? People have largely exhausted the conversation about the future of work, because the future of work is happening right now. The way HR tech is going to evolve, there’s going to be a lot of creativity when it comes to the type of benefits that companies provide their employees…the most creative organizations, when it comes to HR and culture, are going to start thinking outside the box when it comes to compensation.

How do you think your company will help drive that evolution? The HR generalist or the office manager at any given company that was tasked with figuring out how to order trays of catered food is probably one of the most stressed-out people working at your company. Maybe you have specific dietary restrictions, maybe I want vegetarian food, but Jackie’s gluten free. That’s very hard to do. Then there’s food waste, you’re probably spending $20 to $22 per employee for every time you order. Employees want you to give them an option, some subsidy. But what they want is the ability to dictate for themselves and choose for themselves what they want to eat every single day. We’re already seeing results that this is going to become a common practice. And it’s gonna be a standard ask at any given company…That’s like the next frontier and one of those things that can really expand the pie.

Want to be featured in an upcoming edition of Starting Up? Click here to introduce yourself.