The co-founders of Gojee say they landed $1.2 million in funding by Kapor Capital in September because Mitch Kapor understood where they’re headed for the next 10 years.
Mike LaValle and Tian He created Gojee, which curates food and drink recipes from around the world, with a vision of an entirely new online experience. It’s a food site you’ve never seen before and that’s what sold Kapor on the idea.
Users type in what ingredients they’d like to work with, or select photos of dishes or drinks featured on the site, which link to external blogs with the recipes. There’s no actual content on the site.
Gojee created partnerships with 200 recipe writers from around the world, and have partnered with the Manhattan-based grocer D’Agostino’s to figure out what ingredients users have based on their shopping loyalty cards.
A former officer in the infantry, CEO LaValle says he noticed the web changing last year when he was working on a rewards program for a grocery store and wanted to design a platform that enabled users to search much faster and in a more relevant experience. So he brought on his colleague from Morgan Stanley, Tian He, as co-founder.
Gojee
“Big parts of the Internet should run like this, where it should be delightful, it should be emotional, it should be fast, it should be intuitive,” LaValle told us. “Over the next five to 10 years, companies like ours is going to be the catalyst for that kind of innovation.”
“Google’s [search formula] is going to evolve soon. It’s not efficient for the web. But tablets and web — all that stuff — are going to converge at some point. The ability to flip through results is an interesting search dynamic. You can go through those 20 results very quickly. You see a lot of information that you can’t see in a normal web experience.”
LaValle says the architecture of the current web is inefficent because there’s too much useless information, yet most companies and search sites adopt this design.
“Everybody thinks that pushing the most information possible gives users more information so it’s a better method. But our platform is that if we reduce aggressively the amount of information you’re provided, but make it much more relevant, you can help people make a decision much faster. That’s how we build the food dynamic.
