Photo Courtesy of Amanda Pastenkos http://amandapastenkos.com
How did you get your current good food job?
I actually found my two co-founders through the friend that sold them our domain! Fast-forward a bit and we're working together. Domain friends. Pretty awesome.
How did your previous work or life experience prepare you for a good food job?
The restaurant helped me realize how much happiness you can get from giving people a real-life great experience-and how it's rewarding in a very different way than something that's purely on the web. The restaurant also helped give me a macro-view of the food world: how people are paid, how things are shipped around, and what works. When you do a lot of things on the web, you start thinking about how to start small but end up with something that's web scale. We think a lot of what we're doing, at web scale, will be tremendously helpful to people that love to make and grow good food. The food community, from schools, to chefs, to restaurateurs, have been extremely supportive of what we're doing, which has made the Kitchensurfing experience a true pleasure.
What can you identify as the greatest opportunities in food right now?
There are amazing things happening in food: the production of it all the way to the consumption of it - there's so much love going into what people eat. The part that really seems to be missing to me are effective ways to connect more everyday consumers to amazing food to really switch food production away from big, subsidized factory farms to methods that don't deplete the Earth. We really believe that the web is a great way to do that, and there are people working on that problem from multiple angles.
I'm particularly interested in areas where a little monkey-wrenching gets major results. Think about the effect that Etsy had on buying and living handmade, or that Kickstarter has had on fundraising for projects that previously didn't have access to monetary support. We think that's set to happen for food-where various kinds of peer-to-peer models disrupt the status quo.
Disruption happens most effectively when there's an engaged, vocal community that cares deeply about the way things are changed. We hope we will find those people with Kitchensurfing and are able to extend that community to everyone that loves to eat.
I think the obvious answer to your question is food, and the deep satisfaction that comes from eating a great meal, with great friends. Kitchensurfing has never been about the money-it's about change. I think that every single one of us would be doing this work even if we didn't stand a chance to make a dime from it.