From Pub Trivia to Presto: 10 Years of Business-Building with Romulus
by Rajat Suri
In honor of our upcoming 10th birthday this August, we are publishing a series of retrospective posts about the ins and outs of the last decade. Today, in Part 4 of that series, we’re sharing a guest post from Rajat Suri, the founder of E la Carte and the recipient of Romulus Capital’s first-ever investment.
I was always going to start a company. That’s just who I am. As weird as it sounds, I was born to be an entrepreneur, regardless of the macro economic environment that surrounded me. That’s why I chose to press on with my idea of starting my company, E la Carte, in 2008, even when the Great Recession had turned the investment landscape bleak.
I was lucky then to meet Krishna Gupta, whose foray into entrepreneurship was as inevitable as mine. We were part of similar entrepreneurial circles at MIT, and I finally pitched Krishna on the second floor of the student center, while I was working toward my PhD. Like me, Krishna was starting something new: a venture capital firm that he called Romulus Capital, and which was focused on helping build the foundations of companies out of MIT and Harvard. A few months after we met, Krishna wired us our first investment; in turn, we became the first investment out of Romulus Capital I.
When I started fundraising, what was it about Romulus that stood out to me? What made me take my first check from an untested 21-year-old? I was attracted to Krishna’s audacity and entrepreneurial instincts, and to his firm’s unshaking focus on building rather than betting. Ten years later, those are some of the reasons we still count Romulus as an integral partner to E la Carte.
Building a Foundation for E la Carte
Like many entrepreneurs, I started my company after experiencing a problem I wanted to solve: the frustration of trying to split a bill multiple ways at a restaurant. I realized this was a universal problem, and I thought that if I could solve it, then I could help a lot of people. I took a hands-on approach to company-building, abandoning my PhD and spending a year as a waiter while I tested the first prototype of the Presto tablet, our signature tabletop device for casual dining restaurant chains.
From my first conversations with Krishna, I saw that Romulus was quite focused on helping build companies. Krishna and his firm had the contrarian courage to start making investments at a time when many others were pulling back. Romulus also had a long-term vision of how traditional industries like restaurants would leverage technology to evolve in new ways. That was impressive, and I didn’t see this visionary approach in most other firms. Most people didn’t believe “unsexy” industries would adopt technology, but Romulus had conviction that technology penetration was inevitable, and that product-focused companies were best-positioned to take advantage of this inevitability.
E la Carte was (and is) one of these product-focused, hardware/software companies. We had a vision of leveraging tablets before the iPad ever existed and bringing modern technology to restaurants’ front-of-the-house operations. Romulus backed that vision wholeheartedly.
In the Trenches with Romulus
As soon as he made the investment, Krishna dove in headfirst. He spent months coming in and out of The Asgard, a pub next to MIT, to help me write trivia questions for the prototype Presto (we never realized trivia would be so popular, so we kept running out of questions!) and discuss go-to-market strategy. He helped me bring in other angel investors at a time when few angels existed and joined me at local tech conferences as we sought to connect with customers and venture capitalists. Neither of us had any relevant experience, but we were both learning how to build our respective companies together.
From those days scribbling furiously in a Cambridge booth, through E la Carte’s time in YCombinator, our move to the Bay Area, and the deployment of our Presto tablet to more than 1,800 restaurant locations across the nation, Romulus has continued to be with us in the trenches. Romulus lives its “building, not betting” slogan — and the whole team does whatever it takes to elevate our business to the next stage. Whether they’re helping us close a customer, with our marketing strategy, or in hiring the next executive, Romulus always demonstrates an entrepreneurial mindset. Krishna has helped open doors for us and close important enterprise sales, and he’s counseled us to draft contracts that protect us when things don’t go our way. And, of course, Romulus has backed us financially whenever we’ve needed it, showing us that they believe in our vision and will patiently help it come to fruition. All this is quite different, in my experience, from the attitudes and approaches of most other investors.
It hasn’t always been easy. We both made mistakes along the way that represented our naïveté as young entrepreneurs. In hindsight, Krishna would have structured that first investment differently, and that caused some friction between us. In the early years, I didn’t realize the value of Krishna’s insistence that I interact directly with our customers’ CEOs to help them think of our technology as a highly strategic, rather than just a tactical, part of their futures. We’ve had a few heated arguments, but they’ve been underpinned by a mutual respect for one another’s intellect and resilience, each of which has shaped our respective entrepreneurial journeys. Ultimately, every morning, both Krishna and I wake up thinking about how to grow our respective companies that were launched out of MIT, and that shared experience is special.
Growing Together in Entrepreneurship
Ten years later, Krishna is still on the board of E la Carte and still building with me. In some ways, Romulus looks incredibly different now, with $200M under its belt, than it did when I first met Krishna in the MIT Student Center in 2008. And so do we: E la Carte now has 80 employees, and we count some of the nation’s most recognizable restaurant chains among our clients.
In other ways, though, our partnership is exactly the same. Romulus is still that highly entrepreneurial firm that will do anything it takes to help us conquer any problem that comes our way, supporting us through the inevitable highs and lows of the journey. Krishna and I still come together at odd hours of the day to solve problems in real-time over Gchat (or “Hangouts” as it’s called today) and remains the fastest responder to any email I send — he is always present and able to parse information and advice quickly. And he’ll still challenge me, as aggressively as necessary, to make us better. Romulus helps our company think bigger, and then the team helps us do bigger as well. I talk with people at Romulus almost every other day. We’re trying to build something big here, so I try to leverage as much help as I can.
Since I founded my company, I’ve weathered a number of storms and celebrated some incredible wins. The last decade has been quite a rollercoaster, but I’m not sure how we would have managed to hang on without having Romulus along for the ride, in our car, helping us build the foundation for the next stage of our company.
Missed the previous entries in our 10 for 10 series? Check out Parts 1, 2, and 3.
