Hamilton, who serves high profile clientele in fashion, beauty, food and lifestyle categories considers herself a “pioneer of the future of PR,” merging technology and social media with traditional PR methods. “I do a lot of social media for my clients,” she said. For example, “that means working with their Twitter handles and helping them come up with different ideas for contests, etc. and advising them on the best ways to put information out there to the general public using new social media platforms.”

Industry insiders suggest that Hamilton’s strategy is consistent with the changing PR landscape. Mark Schwartz, community editor at PR News notes, “For PR pros Twitter is like oxygen. It’s a way to breathe life into new PR campaigns, cultivate relationships with media reps, stakeholders and consumers and handle crises with more alacrity.”

Over the last decade, Hamilton has worked with an array of celebrity and industry giants including Juicy Couture, White Label, Nike, Tom Ford Beauty, Bob Mackie, butter LONDON, and most recently, celebrity chef Candice Kumai –  a rising star featured in E!’s docu-series Playing With Fire.

Learn how Jenelle Hamilton leveraged coveted industry experience to start a public relations consultancy and why she believes that entrepreneurs should never give up.

How I Got Started:

I got into PR because, actually, back then there was no Internet in 1996, it was just coming online. I knew that I wanted a job where I wasn’t stuck in front of a computer all day; I wanted to be mobile. I couldn’t see myself doing a typical nine-to-five job. While I was doing research in the library, I came across a book about different careers [where I first learned about] public relations. It was something that I wasn’t really familiar with, but it sounded like a really interesting profession.

I decided to get my Bachelor of Arts degree in public relations and communications. I later got my first job out of college at a non-profit with Her Royal Highness Princess Anne; she has a charity in London. From there, I started working in fashion PR because that was where my passion was … I did that for many years.

Then I moved to New York, NY; which is the capital of beauty, where big brands like L’Oreal and Estée Lauder, etc. are based. That’s when I decided that I wanted to get more into the beauty side of things. So I diverted my career into a mix of beauty and fashion, and from there it has evolved.

Starting a Public Relations Consultancy & Landing Legendary Clients

I left my last PR agency … to take a break for a while. But the thing about PR is: you get to meet so many people (from coworkers to clients to press) and they hear about a lot of people who want help with PR. So while I was taking a hiatus, someone approached me about doing a project for Bob Mackie, (an American fashion legend famous for his collaborations and projects with Cher and the infamous Oscar outfits he’s done for her). Bob has worked with a lot of A-Listers like Beyoncé, Katy Perry, PINK, Diana Ross; he drew sketches for Marilyn Monroe — he’s just an industry legend.

Someone referred me to meet with their team in New York and I started consulting with them on an art project. But it organically carried on for two and a half years and I became their global PR director, heading up all events and activities associated with Bob and his brand. I was kind of lucky in that way because I didn’t have to pitch for this amazing account which people would die to work on.

They were my first client. The caliber and the level of what he does is highly respected in the fashion world, so to have a good, stable, amazing client like him opened up many opportunities for me to be recommended for other projects and clients. My business grew from there.

Playing with Fire! The Truth About Public Relations

Today, Jenelle Hamilton’s PR consultancy has grown in scope to deliver PR strategy, branding, social media, product launches, event management, editorial placements, collaborations and partnerships to current clients and most recently, celebrity chef Candice Kumai, featured on E!’s new docu-series Playing With Fire.

For a client like Candice Kumai, we work together on the branding aspect [of her business]. So we look at how we want to position her, what kind of brands we want to work with; and we [consider various like-minded brands] to do collaborations, partnerships, and events that will offer them, and her, a lot of exposure.

With TV shows like E!’s Playing With Fire, which I’m actually on, they followed the life of my client (Candice Kumai) for about nine months last year. It shows what I actually do with her on a daily basis. And with other shows like The City and The Hills the networks endeavor to show what people actually do in the world of public relations. Public relations is becoming more widely known as a result. It’s even gotten this glamorous connotation associated with it. Obviously in real life it’s not like you’re going to parties or to Fashion Week every night; that’s a small aspect of the job.

I’ve noticed that starting a PR business is more appealing these days — the younger generation seems to like the idea of working in public relations, but I still don’t think they understand that a lot of writing and communication techniques are involved. It’s not the glamorous side 24-hours a day.

Identifying and solving problems on a large scale breathes new life into the age-old concept of humanitarianism. “The role played by entrepreneurs in advancing positive social changes” has shifted, according to New York Times columnist David Bornstein. “I don’t mean businesspeople solving social ills, but people spreading new approaches — through nonprofits and businesses, or within government — to address problems more successfully than in the past.”

“Today, as problems have grown increasingly complex, a big question is how can we reorganize the problem-solving work of society so it is more responsive to needs … Today, our societal challenges — in education, health, or the environment — demand innovation from many directions,” said Bornstein.

Entrepreneur, Tyler Merrick decided to become a benefactor for good and address seven areas for good around the globe. In 2008, Merrick launched Project 7, a socially conscious company dedicated to making “products for good.”

“If people are going to buy things. Lots of things. Then let’s use those things they purchase to help change the world around us. Let’s make everyday products for everyday people to solve everyday problems around the globe,” Merrick notes.

After finding himself at a professional crossroads, Merrick decided to help more people through his business endeavors and be a catalyst for change. Partnering with nonprofits to help provide financial support, Project 7 raises awareness for their partner organizations and aims to educate consumers about global issues. Today the company focuses on seven areas of need: Feed the Hungry, Heal the Sick, Hope for Peace, House the Homeless, Quench the Thirsty, Save the Earth, and Teach them Well.

Learn how Tyler Merrick connects consumers and non-profits, landed Whole Foods as a customer and why he believes new entrepreneurs should always moonlight their dreams.

How I Got Started:

I grew up in a family business within the pet food industry in which I worked for seven very successful years following college. While it was a great opportunity both personally and financially, I still was not satisfied and felt that I needed more of a purpose. Specifically, I was making and selling pet food that was better and more than many people in our own country were able to eat or afford.

With that thought, as well as my love for marketing, consumer goods and retail, I decided to create a brand that would give people the power to help others through their purchases. Long story short I thought, why don’t we build a brand around 7 issues that when people buy them they help out one of these areas of need: FEED The Hungry™, HOUSE The Homeless™ and SAVE The Earth™ . People were going to buy “everyday products” anyway so why not give them a buying vehicle where they could choose who and how they wanted to help?

So I started to map out what would become Project 7. I wanted to apply the things I had learned in the pet food world to a new world of consumption, I wanted to create a system where people could feel good about helping someone in need at the same time they were getting something [in return] (i.e. gum, mints, etc …). I also wanted to build a brand that was “always on” when it came to giving, not just a campaign that was off and on during certain times of year.

My ultimate goal was to create 100 items in the grocery store that would be dedicated to issues in our world and each grocery cart purchase began to add up when you added one town with another town and one state with another state and so on.

In 2010, Lighter Capital was created to address the unique needs of business owners with a new form of growth funding. Instead of lending money at fixed rates, Lighter Capital decided to offer loans in exchange for a percentage of future revenues. Therefore, payments start small, and only increase as the company is able to grow revenues.

Two years later, BJ Lackland, former CFO of Power Efficiency Corporation, was appointed by Lighter Capital co-founder and executive chairman, Andy Sack to steward their mission of financial liberation for small businesses.

The unique loan service aims to remove the hassle, costliness, and fine print of bank and venture capital loans for tech and software startups. Comprised of entrepreneurs and former venture capital, data, and software experts, Lighter Capital seeks to pioneer a new way for aspiring entrepreneurs to finance their businesses and launch their ideas.

“We provide financing to small, growing entrepreneurial companies,” said BJ Lackland, Lighter Capital CEO. “We do that with a very unconventional loan. We provide between $50,000 to $500,000 in loans to small, growing (particularly software) businesses. We do that very, very rapidly. We want to provide entrepreneurs with rapid access to capital so that they can grow their businesses.”

Lighter Capital credits their technology platform for thorough but quick credit analysis of startups that wish to be funded, enabling the company to provide investment funding much more rapidly than traditional financing options.

Learn how Lighter Capital capitalized on three growing trends to successfully market their unconventional loan product and why Lackland believes a “one size fits all” approach to small business financing is not feasible in today’s economy.

How I Got Started:

Lighter Capital was founded with the idea that there were only three major trends. One was that banks had retreated from financing small businesses, so there really wasn’t capital available for small businesses.

The second trend was that you could use technology to evaluate businesses and evaluate their credit in new and interesting ways that banks weren’t doing. Essentially you could use that technology, a form of next generation credit analysis, to evaluate these businesses and fund them really quickly.

The last trend was that it takes relatively little capital now, especially for a software business, to get up and going. In the old days, it would take millions of dollars to launch a software product, but today it takes very little money.

We founded Lighter Capital to liberate small business owners from the onerous demands of banks and VCs. It’s time to use technology to remake credit analysis. It’s time for investment structures that work better for investors and entrepreneurs. In short, it’s time for some serious innovation in the financial services industry.

We primarily target software companies that have at least $200,000 in [annual] revenue. It can be online businesses or anything web-based.

Our loan products are sort of unconventional.

In June 2012 Paul Berry (former HuffPo CTO) launched RebelMouse to solve that problem by creating the social web’s front page.

The social aggregation platform boasts a real-time publishing system that lets users connect social accounts (i.e. Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.) and creates a web page that features the latest content they’ve shared. “Based on the idea that people’s personal websites are often neglected, RebelMouse takes your social presence across the major networks and organizes it into what it calls a “beautiful, dynamic and social site.”

“It’s meant to be extremely easy with very quick instant gratification, but it also has depth,” said Berry.

“We have people using RebelMouse at the ‘mom and pop’ store level, making their blog and company website suddenly really beautiful and something they love, all the way through to the Wall Street Journal social media team using it to cover the fiscal cliff … We’re getting quite a bit of traction because the world needs a publishing system for the social, real-time web.”

Learn how Berry developed the social aggregation startup and why he believes entrepreneurs should create companies and products that are a direct reflection of themselves.

How I Got Started:

Before starting RebelMouse I was the CTO at The Huffington Post. When I joined [in year one] there were two people on my team and the Huffington Post had about 3 million unique visitors a month.

On a traffic level it felt big, but when I left there were 300 people on my team and we had 145 million visitors a month. As CTO I ran product and design as well as engineering. I was asked somewhere around 20 times a week how to [develop] a better website. It was clear that the solutions that were available [at the time] weren’t solving their problems. That became very clear to me [and led me to my] next step in my life.

I am m very happy and proud of the initial investors and the board, which includes some of the most influential people in media and tech, including Eric Hippeau (partner at NYC-based angel fund Lerer Ventures) and Ken Lerer (former chairman and co-founder of The Huffington Post), and Jonah Peretti (CEO of BuzzFeed).

[We have] incredible investors like First Round Capital, SoftBank, Oak, and Betaworks, and angel investors like Chris Dixon, John Battelle, Howard Lindzon, and Greg Coleman. Now, the team is about 25 developers and about eight of us in New York [with various backgrounds in] media and publishing and helping big brands.

Developing good study habits contributes to long-term success in college. However, like many students Andrew Grauer realized that there had to be a better way to study like a pro, become a master memorizer and beef up his resume.

In 2008 Grauer, along with his brothers David and Jared, co-founded ed-tech startup Course Hero, a knowledge marketplace and community that facilitates information sharing between experts and learners. Attracting over 30,000,000 visits per year, Course Hero has become a massive online learning platform democratizing fast access to quality educational resources: materials, experts and courses.

Grauer initially set out to create a platform where students and experts could share and access the academic content they needed to succeed, at any time, from anywhere. Their goal to provide 24/7 access to course information, study guides, peer help and other tools to assist students when studying soon gained traction as they developed partnerships with various schools across the country and internationally.

“We’re an online learning platform and we provide tools and resources for basically anybody to come and learn from an expert,” said Grauer, Course Hero CEO and co-founder. “So it’s essentially a marketplace where you’ve got experts or educators on one side, providing information and different project formats like flashcards, quizzes, study materials, videos, question and answer formats so that learners on the other side can come in and try to endive that knowledge.”

Learn how Grauer and his co-founders developed an idea to change the way students learn and why every entrepreneur should focus on long-term growth to prevent burnout.

How I Got Started:

My brothers and I got started while I was still in school at Cornell University. We knew that if we could aggregate, organize and then distribute knowledge in general (or information in general) that would be valuable.

So we came up with this idea that was essentially a Wikipedia for academic knowledge, focused on student-generated academic content. We launched the website, and we learned over time to build up the supply side first and then get the users and the demand side. It really grew from there.

Next we had to figure out how we could really scale beyond Cornell. As a student there I really understood the problems of not having access to a teacher’s assistant, a professor or even students in your own class when you needed it.

So connecting people through content was clearly valuable in the sense that it made learning more accessible and we started expanding from Cornell to other schools and then over time adding more and more types of categories in academics and beyond.

In 2010 EAT Club co-founder Kevin Yang — along with Rodrigo Santibanez — aimed to change that fact by creating an online service dedicated to doing lunch differently; providing restaurant quality food, no fees or minimum order and free delivery.

The personal lunch delivery service offers curated menus from a rotating list of local restaurants. Office workers of small- and medium-sized companies order lunch by 10:30am and receive it at their front desks by 12:30pm. Meals start at $8.95, and there are no minimum orders or additional tips or fees.

In June 2011, the founders received $1.5M in seed funding to further refine their technology and focus on expansion. Today, the Palo Alto-based company serves most of Silicon Valley with plans to expand nationwide.

“We are solving the lunch problem for office workers. What that means is that we create daily menus, daily crafty menus and deliver it to office workers at an extremely affordable price,” said Yang.

“You can order online by mobile. What we’re trying to do is make lunch so easy to do online that you always use EAT Club instead of going to a drive-in or walking to a restaurant, similar to the way people use Netflix instead of driving to Blockbuster to rent a video.”

Learn how co-founders Yang and Santibanex were inspired to take a Mumbai-based food delivery concept and develop it domestically, despite being told by their Stanford Business School professor that it would never work in the U.S.

How I Got Started:

We started EAT Club because we had a personal experience working places where there wasn’t any good food. People would raid the vending machines, walk to the McDonalds across the street, or if they were desperate they would go to the terrible deli in the basement. It was really a shame because there was so much good food in the area.

When Rodrigo and I were at Stanford Business School, we studied the dabbawala in Mumbai, India; [a person who is employed to collect freshly cooked food in lunch boxes from the residences of office workers (mostly in the suburbs), deliver it to their respective workplaces and return the empty boxes back to the customer's residence.]

Basically, they developed a really sophisticated system where deliver food from people’s homes all the way to their offices through the mass transit system. “Mumbai dabbawala’s deliver and return 130,000 dabbas, or ‘tiffins’ every day. According to Forbes magazine, they have a Six Sigma rating of 99.999999 which means less than one out of every six million deliveries goes amiss.” What the school tried to teach us was that it can’t be done here; that is was something unique to India.

Gupta believed he and his team had the answer.

In 2012, Gupta co-founded Curalate to help brands understand how their images resonate with consumers. The platform applies advanced image analytics to social media conversations to give businesses the most robust insights available for Instagram and Pinterest.

A year later, Curalate has developed a client roster that boast over 350 major brands and agencies including The Gap, Campbell’s Soup, Michael’s and Michael Kors and global agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather and Edelman. “We have brands that have taken things that have done really well on Pinterest and posted that to Facebook and they found that those were their most engaging posts on Facebook ever,” said Gupta.

“One of the things that’s been so powerful about Curalate is that the insights that we deliver around images have implications that go well beyond social media itself and start to impact display advertising, e-commerce, email campaigns, as well as social media in general. I think it’s really interesting for brands to understand what they can ultimately do by understanding how images resonate with consumers.”

Learn how Curalate CEO Apu Gupta found success after failure and developed a social media analytics tool that has helped brands cash in on the power of photo sharing.

How I Got Started:

Curulate is a marketing and analytics suite that applies advanced image analytics to social media conversations to give small businesses robust insights for Instagram and Pinterest. We help the world’s largest brands strengthen their stories and turn pins, likes, hashtags, and followers into revenue.

When we first got together, our team was pretty excited about building this company called Storably, which was the Air BnB of parking and storage. We saw the success of Air BnB and we felt like the same model of this kind of sharing company could be brought to the world of parking and storage, so we as a team went out and built this company.

We had fantastic press; we were on Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC all in Philadelphia all in the same month. But we quickly realized the idea wasn’t working. We were just not getting very much traffic. In fact, we never got more than 3,000 unique visitors to our site in any given month. For a consumer company, obviously 3,000 visitors is just not enough.

A few months into that business, we recognized that [it] was just not going to be successful. Given all of the things we had tried, it just wasn’t going to work; or we just couldn’t figure out how to make it work. So we decided that we would shut that business down.

But our investors had already invested in us, and came back to us and said: “We invested in you and not just in your idea. We think you are a talented team. What do you want to do next?” We said, “Okay, we’ll get back to you.” We took a month off and during that month we generated 70 different ideas and tested a handful of ideas. Out of those 70, about 7 bubbled up to the top and we test marketed a handful of them. But one of the ideas that we really, really loved at the time was what became Curalate.

The genesis of that [was our observation of] brands clamoring to take advantage of Pinterest. They were all developing Pinterest boards (keep in mind this was late 2011 when we started to notice this). We saw that all these brands were trying to do things with Pinterest, and it felt very similar to what Twitter was like in its early days where brands were trying to get on Twitter, but were confused.

Before they could spend real money to grow their presence on Twitter or in this case, Pinterest, they needed to be able to measure their presence. They basically needed analytics. We had seen that story unfold before on Facebook and on Twitter, and we felt it was only natural that that the same story would unfold on Pinterest.

Once we started, we were really excited because nobody at the time was doing anything around it. There aren’t a lot of opportunities that you have where it’s a complete white space opportunity (a good opportunity) that nobody has really tried yet.

As we got into the problem a little bit more, what we recognized was that the issue wasn’t just analytics around Pinterest. It was that consumers were increasingly engaging with brands using pictures rather than words. As consumers started to speak to brands using pictures, what happened was that they didn’t use very many words and therefore all of the traditional social media analytics tools fell short because almost every single social media analytics tool is built around the ability to recognize text. Curalate is the first platform that was built around recognizing pictures.

As the founder of Hitman Inc. Competition Removal and Limelight—the world’s first patent-pending online Branding Course for startups, entrepreneurs, and aspiring individuals, Brazell is not only an ideator but he has been equipping companies around the globe with an arsenal of marketing and branding expertise to help them create winning brands and remove the competition.

Learn how Brazell became an architect of competition removal and why you must love what you do.

How I Got Started:

I launched an advertising agency years ago in Las Vegas.  We grew that to a mid-sized agency.  I sold that.  Took a little bit of time off to determine what was next. Then I decided to launch Hitman Inc. with a different business model.

One thing that I found challenging with the traditional hire-grow model is that you’re stuck with whomever you hire.  Sometimes that can be a benefit, and sometimes not, for a small business.  What I found that works better for my small business is bringing in outside expertise; it dramatically speeds up cash flow and I can hire the very best when working with a client that requires specific expertise.  That’s made a real difference for us.  It’s been a very successful model for 17 years now.

[I realize that] today’s hyper-competitive market is saturated with choice – and not just choice, but good choice – and the biggest problem that businesses, products, and individuals face is truly differentiating themselves so they become the first and obvious choice with their customers.  Hitman Inc. helps our clients discover and develop perceived and real differences that set them apart in the market, and make them the first choice of their customer.

[As the next logical step, I created] Limelight, to walk startups, entrepreneurs, and individuals step-by-step through the critical process of category development, brand positioning, differentiation, and brand messaging. The result is a simple and powerful brand strategy that helps companies and individuals stand-out, get noticed, and become the first choice for investors and customers.

Best Success Story:

A hundred percent of our business today is referral-based. Our best success story is inclusive of not only our clients’ success stories, but really our own. For 17 years, we’ve been successful. We are highly referred, of course, by all of our clients, which means our clients are very happy. The bottom line is we make money for our clients.

One of our success stories is probably America’s largest privately-held therapy management company. It’s not a very sexy category. Their target is hospital CEO’s; they go into hospitals and manage their therapy departments. Not very sexy, but it’s really hard to get a meeting with a hospital CEO.

Learn how they launched a multimillion dollar brand, fell victim to trademark infringement by one of the world’s largest beauty companies and won an $8.5 million dollar settlement against all odds.

Mixed Chicks’ Founders Build Multi-Million Dollar Brand

Several years after being introduced at a family gathering, Wendi and Kim instantly hit it off. They both shared a common problem as women of mixed heritage: frustration with using a concoction of several different products to tame their curly locks.

Mixed Chicks founders Kim Etheredge, pictured left and Wendi Levy pictured right.

As their friendship developed they soon realized that their common problem could become a viable business. The two entrepreneurs then set out to start a curly revolution and develop specialized hair care products for women of mixed race.

Armed with a new business idea they contacted a lab to develop their new hair care product. “We made lots of samples and shared them with friends,” said co-founder Wendi Levy. ”We knew that it was a hit based on the feedback from all of our friends.”

In 2004, Wendi and Kim debuted their new company Mixed Chicks, a hair care solution for women of mixed heritage. Using a grassroots advertising approach they built awareness of their e-commerce website and it soon took off.

“I’m sure at first we were happy with two sales, three sales a week,” said Wendi. “We would be like – ‘Oh my gosh! We got a sale!,’ she fondly remembered. Then our first retailer was a natural health food store [that became aware of our product due to our sampling efforts].

Their savvy sampling strategy drove word-of-mouth and demand. “People started to ask retail outlets for the product and that made them come to us and ask us about the product. Fortunately the grassroots approach worked for us,” Wendi noted.

When Small Businesses Face Trademark Infringement

As their business grew, by 2005 both Wendi and Kim realized they needed to move more product and started exhibiting at trade shows. Two years later, in 2007 the founders were approached by Sally Beauty Supply, the world’s largest retailer of professional beauty supplies.

When a Business Opportunity Knocks

“They were very interested in our product [at the time],” Wendi explained. “In 2009, they came to us again and said ‘it is a great day for Mixed Chicks.’ We were like really? Why?”

The beauty retailer was interested in carrying Mixed Chicks’ products in their retail outlets. For a small business, the prospect of partnering with a large retailer (boasting 4,000 stores) represented a big opportunity. Both Wendi and Kim were excited given they did not have a distributor and were selling directly to salons at the time.

However, after further discussions — learning more about the retailers buying policies — they realized the partnership was not feasible. “At that time we were working out of my garage,” Wendi explained. “And if they had a 60 thousand unit order, they [could] return it whenever they wanted. Trying to resell that product and just house it would have broken us as a small company.”

Also “because they were such a large distribution channel they wanted deep wholesale discounts. We were so small that we didn’t have enough margin to give them that kind of discount.”

Over the next couple of years, Wendi and Kim continued to nurture the business relationship in hopes of one day doing business with the large retailer.

What they did not know is that during the same period, Sally Beauty Supply had developed their own product line for mixed race women which came in packaging that looked all too familiar. With a cheaper price tag, the retailers’ imitation brand threatened to ruin everything both entrepreneurs had built.

All is “Not” Fair in Beauty and Competition

In 2011, Wendi and Kim learned through other retailers that Sally Beauty Supply had infringed the trademarks of Mixed Chicks’ products. Their retail partners were unknowingly furious that the entrepreneurs were selling their products so cheaply — however, it wasn’t Mixed Chicks at all. The new brand, Mixed Silk, launched by the beauty retailer was eerily familiar to the general public and the co-founders.

“Our customers were questioning our integrity and everything else; people were so confused,” co-founder Kim Etheredge explained.

“We got the call immediately, because it was advertised in their circular that goes out to salon professionals and individuals that are our customers.”

“Many investors describe their gastronomical pursuits as part of a larger movement,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal post. “Food has become so industrialized, people are interested in going back to the basics,” says Todd Masonis, Plaxo founder, now owner of Dandelion Chocolate–a boutique-chocolate company. “Once you look beneath the surface, it’s another area ripe for disruption.”

In fact, “a new group of food-based startups are applying tricks learned from the technology industry to grow a new wave of businesses to cash in on the growing foodie movement across the U.S.,” according to Reuters contributor Neal Ungerleider.

Here are four of our favorite food startups to watch:

1. Hungry Globetrotter, Vijay Rajendran, Founder and CEO

An international gourmet food of the month club for busy professionals and families.

Hungry Globetrotter, an international food of the month club, aims to deliver an international culinary adventure right in your own kitchen. The online gourmet club is developing international meals, which busy professionals and families can make at home.

The company provides an ever-changing mix of products and flavors, selected from emerging and renowned international cuisine brands. Their goal is to help members of their World Dinner Club cook meals at home that are more exciting, less time consuming and not as intimidating.

2. EAT Club, Rodrigo Santibanez, Founder

Personal lunch delivery service for busy corporate professionals at work.

EAT Club, Inc. aims to revolutionize lunch by providing a personal lunch delivery service that offers curated menus from a rotating list of local restaurants. Office workers of small- and medium-sized companies order lunch by 10:15am and receive it at their front desks by 12:30pm.

Meals start at $6.95, and there are no minimum orders or additional tips or fees. EAT Club is based in San Mateo County and currently serves most of Silicon Valley.