Michael Saunders is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at The Garage, Northwestern’s hub for student entrepreneurship and innovation. Before coming to Northwestern, Michael founded Dotmenu, an online service platform for food delivery to thousands of college campuses across the nation, and subsequently helped to scale GrubHub after a $50 million merger between the two companies. While at The Garage, Saunders founded Blueprint, a tech consultancy studio that invests time/expertise into up-and-coming Chicago-based businesses to help them scale.
As a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, Michael began his journey of entrepreneurship in 1997 when he decided to order a tuna sandwich from his dorm room.
“I actually called my favorite restaurant to order from. I got a busy signal, [and] I got a busy signal, and they got my order wrong.”
Michael saw a problem, and felt a necessity/obligation to bring order to the lawless frontier of the restaurant delivery business by bringing it online. He spent weeks trying to come up with the perfect domain name, and decided to call his website CampusFood.com. His initial plan was to go from door to door asking local restaurants if he could post their menus online. A customer would place an order, and the restaurant would receive the order through fax.
Upon graduation, Michael and his roommate moved to New York to work on the company full-time. The company grew and had users from six different schools, but he felt like it wasn’t growing fast enough. That’s when he decided in the beginning of the school year, to do what he called, “mega promo,” giving away free pizza for every order made online.
“Everybody got their free pizzas. We were all over campus for two weeks straight. And then after it stopped, everyone kept coming back. And we were like, ‘Holy shit it works!’”
The promotion was a success – Campus Food had forged partnerships with 80 schools that summer, and 150 more schools the summer after that. For the next nine years, the company grew exponentially, generating $100 million in food sales each year from over 2 million registered users. In 2011, Dotmenu and Grubhub joined forces in a $50 million merger, and Michael subsequently helped to scale Grubhub, particularly in a campus setting.
When asked about his opinion on investment and profit, Michael stated, “As long as you’re profitable [and have] customers that pay you, you can do whatever the hell you want.” Although he noted that there are certain companies that require risk capital and need to be venture-funded, he believes that most businesses don’t need that kind of investment to succeed. Michael himself recalled difficulties in getting his say in Dotmenu during its prime due to varying investor opinions on how to run the company.
“[There were] a lot investors, [and] a lot of opinions on a lot of ways to do it, and we were just treading water really fast”
Michael also commented on necessity vs opportunity in entrepreneurship. He believes that necessity and opportunity come hand in hand, and that opportunities fundamentally stem from necessity, whether it be the need for a source of income to support a family, or simply the need to quickly satisfy his late night cravings.
“I had the problem. I NEEDED a tuna sandwich. So I think that’s where the necessity came from. And I saw the opportunity. So I think [opportunity and necessity] are related.”
After leaving Grubhub in 2015, Michael joined The Garage at Northwestern as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence to mentor aspiring student entrepreneurs and to stay in-the-know with emerging technologies and trends in the entrepreneurship space. He believes that he, just as his own mentors did, can guide Northwestern students and local entrepreneurs scale their businesses in Evanston/Chicago area, with the insights and perspectives he gained through his 18-year entrepreneurship experience in the food delivery industry.
