Before Kong CEO Augusto Marietti cofounded the API company, he was trading his pasta-cooking skills for a spot on former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s couch.
“Travis gave me his place to stay for a few weeks as long as I would cook carbonara for his better half once a week,” Marietti told A16z general partner Martin Casado during an episode of the firm’s podcast.
Marietti recounted in vivid detail how, after spending months coding in a garage in Milan, he and his cofounders spent the last money they had to fly to the US on tourist visas in a last-ditch effort to secure funding for the company, which was then called Mashape.
“We had 90 days to just make it or break it,” he said. “We knew that if we couldn’t raise, we would go back to Italy broke, and that was it.”
In an interview with Business Insider, Marietti said that breaking into Silicon Valley would look very different today. Mashape got its first big break after Marietti obtained a list of hundreds of emails from a Stanford entrepreneurship event and cold-contacted each one.
“There is a hundred type of networks in the Valley, and you just meet a lot of investors and the flywheel, it’s way bigger,” he told Business Insider.
While starting a company may be easier today, Marietti said he and cofounder Marco Palladino took advantage of a lack of competition. Now, Marietti said spaces are much more crowded.
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“It’s much harder hiring, recruiting a team, scaling a team, hiring leaders, building an executive team — like building a company that lasts, versus just building a pump-and-dump thing, it’s much, much harder,” Marietti told Business Insider.
Two weeks before their visas expired, Marietti said they raised the necessary funds to survive thanks to an investment by some of the original YouTube leadership team, including Kevin Donahue, YouTube’s vice president of content.
The deal was brokered at Kalanick’s jam pad in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, he said. Marietti said the Uber cofounder did more than just give him a place to crash after the initial offer wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
“I don’t want to take this deal, ‘Screw that,’ I say, ‘OK, OK, we’re going to leave.’ And I was very naive, 20 years old, OK, OK, they will come back,” he said.
Marietti said Kalanick then came to him and said that if they were to leave, they would never see the investors or their money again. Marietti claimed the Uber cofounder even went so far as locking the door of the house to ensure the YouTube bigwigs didn’t leave.
Marietti and his cofounders eventually made a deal and secured $51,000 in funding.
$1,000 a month, a Starbucks workspace, and eating way too much tuna pasta
Marietti said he and his two cofounders went back to Italy and returned on B1 visas, which don’t allow for employment or salary. The trio managed to live off of $1,000 a month for a little over a year, he said, and the company wrote the cofounders promissory notes to secure funds.
To help save money, they all shared a mattress at an Airbnb.
Marietti said his office was a Starbucks.
“We were buying rice, beans, tuna, and pasta,” he said. “And the reason is that we had to find the right amount of carbs and product at the cheapest way possible.”
They ate so much tuna pasta that Marietti said that, to this day, he and Palladino can’t stand the sight of it.
Marietti said he had no choice but to grind away in the startup’s early days, contrasting his experience with how it’s become fashionable for many current founders to limit partying and other outside influences. Back then, San Francisco was cheaper too.
“Now it’s more a vibe, it’s more like a fashion thing,” Marietti told Business Insider. “We would do it just because of necessity.”
Marietti said today’s founders will likely need to work even harder if they want to be successful.
“So I think the founders today, they’ll probably have to put the same intensity, if not more, because it’s highly competitive and there is probably another 50 startups trying to do what you were doing at that same time — just to grind, to stay ahead and make it happen.”
