All they wanted was some mac and cheese. It was late 2010, and Sid Viswanathan, Bowei Gai, and Sudeep Yegnashankaran were outside LinkedIn's headquarters, peering into the cafeteria. The three CardMunch cofounders had just been escorted outside after a meeting at the company, but the meals inside were too much to resist. "There were these huge boxes of food," recalls Viswanathan.
"And we had backpacks," Gai says.
The team snuck back in, started filling their bags with food--and then bumped into one of the senior directors of engineering at LinkedIn, with whom they had just met. And who had just walked them out of the office building. "I have never been more embarrassed in my whole life," Viswanathan says today, laughing.
Of course, the founders of CardMunch, the smartphone app which digitizes business card data from just a quick camera snapshot, have come a long way since stealing mac and cheese to survive the lean-startup lifestyle. After LinkedIn acquired the company for $2.4 million last year, the number of cards scanned daily ballooned tenfold. In November, CardMunch relaunched its service, taking advantage of the data from LinkedIn's 135 million users, who have helped drive scans of more than 2 million business cards. And that's not to mention the other benefits of joining LinkedIn, such as improved company perks.
"There's a lot more food," beams Yegnashankaran. "You don't know how much we love the sushi."
But back in 2009, the CardMunch team would've just been happy to be Ramen profitable. Instead, the startup had just held a "company lunch" at Costco to save cash by running around to all the free sample trays. ("It was a 15-course meal," Viswanathan recalls.) The idea for CardMunch had spawned from attending a TechCrunch event, where the cofounders had collected a huge stack of business cards. Keeping track of the cards proved to be a nuisance, and after a bra...
[Source: Fast Company]
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