I’m Mike Evans. I co-founded GrubHub in 2004. Prior to that I graduated MIT in 2000 with a pile of degrees(masters & bachelors in electrical engineering and computer science) and an equally impressive pile of debt. Following along the dotcom bandwagon, I moved to Chicago to work at Apartments.com.
Frustrated with futilely searching for delivery restaurants and grumbling through inaccurate orders, I wrote version one of GrubHub.com in 2004. After refining the website, I jumped ship and went full time to pursue making GrubHub.com a real business. Armed with a “Sales for Dummies” book, I bootstrapped the business for two years. In 2006, GrubHub won the University of Chicago’s New Venture Challenge. The company’s rapid growth led to five rounds of investment funding, totaling $84.1 million. Between 2011 and 2014 I led the integration of the three largest online ordering companies: GrubHub, Campusfood, and Seamless into a single entity, and then saw the combined company through an IPO in Q2 2014. I’ve placed well over 1,000 orders on GrubHub.
With the IPO complete, I amicably left GrubHub. The following day, I dipped the wheel of my bicycle in the Atlantic Ocean and then proceed to ride it 4,150 miles across the United States to the Pacific, crossing the Continental divide nine times in the process. I’m currently writing a book that explains that last sentence in more detail.