Maple, the food delivery started founded by David Chang has finally shut down. Maple was incubated inside of Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner’s well-regarded venture capital firm. The company’s other investors included Greenoaks Capital.
Maple might have done better if it hired a co-founder with food or delivery experience, if you check out Caleb Merkl’s linkedin profile, you’ll see that his only food experience comes from a Panera Bread internship that lasted two whole months, the rest of his experience comes from managing what appears to be a single furniture store location, DucDuc, and the an internet only furniture store, The New Traditionalists.
Not sure how he was able to convince any sort of VC companies to give him money, obviously a Panera Internship and furniture store background is more than enough experience to run a food delivery startup.
We’re writing to let you know that as of today Maple will be ceasing operations in New York. We’re sorry to bring you this news, and want to take some time to explain why we have come to this decision.
We set out two years ago with a big idea about a new approach to food delivery and the lofty ambition of turning an industry on its head. Since then, we’ve accomplished many things we’re incredibly proud of.
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That all said, and as with most maturing businesses, the Maple of today still has many challenges to overcome. Over the past several months we’ve been spending most of our time thinking about the future of our business—what comes next for Maple? The more time we spent trying to answer this question, the more evident it became that of all the paths we had contemplated, the most compelling next step in Maple’s story involved a shift from our current approach. While an incredibly difficult decision for us given the effect on our core operations, it became clear that we needed to close the Maple operation here in New York and look for a partner with scale—one that would allow us to leverage all that we had built across a broader platform.
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We wanted to close by thanking all of you one last time for ordering—for telling your friends to order, for rating us, and for telling us how we were doing so diligently and so often. We showed up every day for all of you and we hope you enjoyed the journey as much as we did.
Sincerely,
Caleb Merkl & Akshay Navle
The imploding of startups is finally here, it’s going to be a bloodbath.
