It was during a visit to Stanford’s Palo Alto campus to see high school friend and MealMe co-founder, Will Said, that Yassin Alsahlani made a call that forever changed his life. For more than a year, the pair, along with co-founder Matthew Bouchner at Emory University, fueled by copious amounts of caffeine, youthful exuberance, and lofty dreams, had been grinding 120 hours a week on their startup. Now, with a final semester left in his computer engineering degree at The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Alsahlani called his father to break the news he was following in the footsteps of entrepreneurial mammoths like Gates, Jobs, Dorsey, and Zuckerberg and dropping out. “You have to explain the concept of opportunity cost to someone who doesn’t know what that means,” said Alsahlani, who was MealMe’s late co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. “They’re [his parents] refugees from Iraq; they really wanted me to get a job and get paid because that’s what they would have done, but I just wouldn’t feel right with myself. I knew it was not the most I could accomplish, so I left. He [his father] was pushing me just in case weird stuff happens you have a safety net, but I did not want a safety net. I don’t want to rely on something to make me feel comfortable with failure. I’m going to feel really, really bad, and that’s how it should be. Failure must hurt.” Alsahlani realized early in his collegiate career he didn’t want to follow the well-worn path of many of his peers — buckle down in classes, earn good grades, and land a prestigious job at Meta or some other FAANG company. Even internships only served to reinforce his desire for the freedom, flexibility, and autonomy of pursuing something born from your own hands and hard work. “Even freshman year, I realized that computer science was interesting but not really my forte,” he said. “I was more into just building things, bringing things to life, that was what I liked the most. So, I joined certain clubs — shout out to Startup Exchange, they were pretty cool. There was just a band of kids who got together, talked about ideas, and worked on startups.” Today, MealMe has matured into a powerful search engine for anything food-related — delivery, pickup, groceries, and even home chefs. “When you think of watching content you think of Netflix,” said Alsahlani. “When you think of searching you think of Google. When you think of eating, think of MealMe.” [object Object] But it wasn’t always so robust or popular. Originally, it was ideated as a social network for foodies, where users, mainly price-conscious college students, could compare quotes on delivery fees/time (think Kayak meets food delivery) or post photos of food and find related options to order. After two-plus years of development and only relative traction to show, they pivoted. “That [social network] quickly blew up, so we invented the whole Checkout flows,” said Alsahlani, adding the pandemic really accelerated interest and downloads. “So, you don’t have to make an account with other services. You just make one account, on one app, and log in through MealMe. You can order through here, track your order, call your driver, the whole thing right within one app. So now, it’s the super app for on-demand food.” Alsahlani attributes their success to the ability to iterate quickly, spitting out a bunch of ideas to see what would stick. Extensive research was combined with substantial advice from notable, successful mentors — some more helpful than others. What they discovered was even if an approach or idea turned out to be a dead-end, it was still positioned as a positive. “It’s not time wasted, it’s more insight in that domain,” he said. “That’s what happened with us; we gained more insight.” Currently, MealMe aggregates over 28 different delivery services, such as Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash, which allows them to find not only the cheapest and quickest options, but the largest selection of stores and restaurants. According to their app, MealMe offers more than 50 million products across one million stores, and serviced more than 200,000 orders last year alone throughout Canada and the U.S. Alsahlani says their immediate focus is to expand platforms, from only iOS to web and Android compatible, and bring more machine learning into the app. Additionally, they want to dive deeper into enhanced product searches and a significant growth area of universal menus, where items from the same restaurant are often mismatched or mislabeled from delivery service to service. “With product search, we will compare the exact item across different menus and find the cheapest one or whichever one is up to par with your standards and then show you the cost breakdown and stuff like that,” he said. Somewhere on the horizon, there’s also a Series A funding round. They previously raised initial capital from TechStars in 2020, a $900,000 pre-seed round with participation from top venture capital firms such as Palm Drive Capital, Slow Ventures, and CP Ventures, and eventually, three supplemental seed rounds, one of which was filled solely by Tinder founder, Justin Mateen. MealMe has a team of 18, with a need for designers, senior web developers, and DevOps engineers. Alsahlani, who knows Hirect well, will lean into the platform during their search. [object Object] “It’s nice, I get notifications, or I can come back and browse through users, it’s really quick and seamless,” he said. “Now, I think you have a website too [recruiter portal], so that’s cool. Yeah, it’s very convenient.” With MealMe surpassing the one million download milestone in early February, it’s safe to say Alsahlani and his team are just as hungry as ever. “The thing is, we like to do what we do, so I don’t really see it as work,” he reflected. “I see it as play, like having fun. It helps a lot with that mindset.” Download MealMe on the App Store or check them out on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. To see what other innovative founders and startups are revolutionizing their industries, download Hirect on the App Store or on Google Play.