Kitchensurfing

» see kitchensurfing.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Kitchensurfing started in 2012 as a marketplace. Chris Muscarella and Borahm Cho built it in a townhouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, and the idea was that you could hire a working chef the way you hire a plumber. You picked a menu, you picked a date some days out, the chef showed up at your apartment and cooked a dinner party for your guests. Depending on what you ordered it ran anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred dollars a person.

That is a lovely business and a slow one. Booking a chef for next Saturday is an occasion, and occasions do not happen often enough to build a venture-scale company out of. So in 2015 the company rebuilt itself as an on-demand service. You opened the app in the early evening, a chef arrived at your door within a set window carrying the ingredients, cooked in your kitchen in about half an hour, cleaned up and left. Roughly twenty-five dollars a head.

Tiger Global and Union Square Ventures were among the investors who had put close to twenty million dollars behind it, and Jon Tien came over from Zynga to run it during the on-demand phase. Neither shape of the business found the volume it needed. On 15 April 2016 the site carried a note thanking its supporters for the past four years and saying that service was ending.

~ the record ~

~ the model that would not settle ~

The pivot was arithmetic rather than nerve. A marketplace takes a cut of a transaction that happens rarely, and an on-demand service takes a smaller cut of a transaction that has to happen constantly. Kitchensurfing tried to move from the first to the second, and the thing it discovered is that dinner in your own kitchen is a strange middle ground: more work than delivery, less of an event than the dinner party the company started with.

Meanwhile the money was going somewhere else. Blue Apron and Plated had raised enormous rounds selling boxes of pre-portioned ingredients with no human attached, and DoorDash and Caviar were spending to make restaurant food arrive faster. A chef standing in your kitchen with a pan is a beautiful product and an expensive one, and its labor cost does not fall as the company grows. Every one of those dinners needed a whole person for an hour, in a way a box of chopped vegetables did not.

~ thirteen days later ~

Kitchit was the San Francisco version of the same company, founded around the same time, doing the same thing with the same on-demand pivot. TechCrunch reported its shutdown on 28 April 2016, less than two weeks after Kitchensurfing's note went up. Two companies with different investors, different cities and no relationship to each other reached the same conclusion in the same fortnight.

This was the American on-demand wave at full height, and I watched it from Ankara with the mild bafflement of somebody whose city already had the service. Ordering food to your door was not new here, it was 1990s infrastructure with a phone number, and the only genuinely new part was the stranger cooking in your own kitchen. Both companies found out inside a fortnight how few people wanted that.

~ what took the domain ~

kitchensurfing.com answers with a 200 and a site full of cookware reviews. Somebody re-registered the domain and filled it with affiliate copy about the world's best cooking products, researched round the clock by a team it does not name. Nothing on it has anything to do with the company that spent four years sending chefs to Brooklyn apartments.

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