Suna Breakfast: Christophe Gerlach & Pedro Bobrow
Two college athletes team up to help students get healthier/faster food by delivering order-ahead breakfast to college students.
What inspired you to start your venture?
We both had similar mentalities and were convinced that entrepreneurship is a great way to change the trajectories of people’s lives and have a massive positive impact on the world. As we thought about our futures, we decided that starting an operationally-intensive business in college would provide a great hands-on learning experience in managing teams and building a product. We brainstormed several business models and ultimately chose to create a solution lack of breakfast that students were getting in the morning. Since we really understood the experience of being a college student and have access to many other students, we would be able to quickly iterate our product. Since the business was operationally intensive, we would learn how hard it is to build a team, acquire customers, develop a tech stack, etc.
Can you give us an overview of our company?
Suna is an order-ahead food delivery business that tries to solve the problem of students not being able to get good food before classes. Since students know their schedule in advance, the customer would place their breakfast order the night before. We built an algorithm that allowed our drivers to deliver multiple orders in one trip from the food production facility — which helped decrease the delivery fee for our customers.
What is the toughest part of being a student founder?
The hard aspect of starting a business while in college is time. There are so many events happening on campus and you always want to make sure you are maximizing your experience. In the beginning, we did not have a sophisticated method for delivering orders. Thus, we accepted orders until 2 AM and stayed up until 3 AM to map out driver routes, before waking up at 6 AM to go deliver the food ourselves when we could not afford to pay any one. As we grew, we were able to scale, hire drivers, and develop an app. In the beginning, doing all of the tasks manually was challenging and we did not sleep very much, but doing the tasks ourselves helped us better automate them in the future and understand the operations of our business extremely well to optimize even more. On top of our other responsibilities, we also both played sports. (Pedro played sprint football and Christophe played soccer.)
What drives you to keep pushing despite the obstacles that came your way?
We were very driven and wanted to complete our tasks in the correct manner. There were a lot of sleepless nights and restless weekends. We both shared the mentality that if we were going to do something, we would do it right. In the beginning, we worked for each other. In a healthy co-founder relationship, you need to push each other to be the best version of yourselves. As we grew and expanded our team, Suna Breakfast became something that was greater than ourselves. Customers relied on us for healthy meals, Cornell Dining relied on us for extra revenue, our drivers relied on us for income, and our employees needed us for guidance. Feeling responsible for someone else’s well-being drove us to take action and persevere through hard times.
When was a time you failed, and what did you learn from that experience?
During a hackathon, we were supposed to deliver over a hundred orders over the course of a few hours. We had to get up early to start preparing for the deliveries. It was Murphy’s law that morning — everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. There was a one hour delay on the orders, and one of our drivers was pulled over by a cop. That event was a moment that we all questioned if the business that we envisioned was operationally possible. We had enough reasons to quit at that point, but events like this made us stronger and helped us push through even harder setbacks that came our way in the future. We learned so much from these experiences, and viewed every failure as a learning point on how not to do something.
What was a key decision you made that helped you get to where you are today?
One overarching mentality we embrace is being action oriented. We always thought about what we could do to help the business grow. We were very resource constrained, so we had to build and release something even if it’s not the most ideal version of the product. It is so important to learn from your customer and iterate quickly. We definitely made mistakes when we started. For us, implementing an efficient decision-making process was more important than thinking about theoretical problems that could come down the road.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Christophe: Something I am now actively working on is being a better listener of others’ perspectives. I think that the more variety you have on how other people see the world, the more thoughtful and diverse your own thought process ends up becoming. Being open-minded to learning from others, in my opinion, helps one develop a stronger understanding of the world around you.
Pedro: I wish I had tried more things and was more open minded. When I was a freshman, I would just focus on the areas and subjects that I was most interested in. I did not pursue additional opportunities if they did not align with my original interests. Later, I realized I did like a lot of other subjects, but it was too late to pursue those opportunities.
When you were growing up, what was an assumption you had about the world that ended up being incorrect?
Pedro: I thought people were less complacent with where they were in life. I thought if people were not happy with where they were, they would take action to improve their situation. Unfortunately, as I met more people, I realized people were not always doing things to better themselves or their situations.
Christophe: I thought people were more selfless than they actually are. This is not meant to be a cynical take, as there are definitely people out there who help others purely for the sake of wanting to help, but a lot of people do things only when they find a personal benefit attached. People will not take risks on you if there is no tangible benefit for themselves — something we learned the hard way when working with big institutions.
About Christophe Gerlach
Christophe Gerlach earned his Bachelors in Applied Economics and Management with a minor in Philosophy from Cornell University. He is an incoming technology investor at General Atlantic. Originally from Holland, Christophe always enjoyed playing soccer, and dreamt of becoming a professional soccer player. However, he was always deeply inspired by those who created something out of nothing. This inspired him to build something from the ground up and surround himself with people who wanted to mold the world and impact people globally.
About Pedro Bobrow
Pedro Bobrow earned his Bachelors in Applied Economics and Management and his Masters in Computer and Information Science from Cornell University. He is an incoming Associate Product Manager at Lyft. Originally from Brazil, Pedro aspired to be a professional tennis player. However, after watching several motivational speeches as a teenager, he realized that success is measured by helping and motivating people and he became determined to spend his life doing something that would add tangible value to people’s lives on a global scale.
Transcribed by Reva Jariwala, ORIGIN Content Manager
