As the two co-founders told it to Konrad, they settled on meal kits after Papas spent hours hunting down the ingredients for and preparing a steak dinner and-in classic startup fashion-realized there must be a better way. Salzberg and Papas first raised seed funding for a different idea, a crowdfunding platform for scientists, but quickly realized a pivot was in order. There are differing versions of how Blue Apron came to be, as the writer Alex Konrad detailed in a Forbes cover story on the company back in 2015. And Wadiak was a trained chef who more recently had passed the time as the proprietor of a Pilates studio. Papas had spent more than a decade working in software. Salzberg was a former investor at both Blackstone and Bessemer Venture Partners, as well as a graduate of Harvard Business School. The good old days Blue Apron was founded in New York in 2012 by Matt Salzberg, Ilia Papas and Matt Wadiak, three young men who followed three very different entrepreneurial paths. And it all began seven years ago, with a former VC, a software developer and a Pilates pro packed into a tiny kitchen in Queens. Now, the narrative has turned to rising costs, plunging stock, a saturated market and massive losses, a saga of flying too close to the sun. Not long ago, it was a well-funded startup that wanted to disrupt one of the biggest industries imaginable, a company defined by its lofty ambitions, rapid growth and rampant hype. But Blue Apron seems to be in the midst of crashing and burning with a blinding brilliance rarely seen. (We tried asking Blue Apron the company didn't respond to an email seeking comment for this story). What happened? It's a question without a simple answer. The downward spiral has continued in the ensuing months, with Blue Apron's market cap sinking at one point below $100 million.
The latest low point came this June, when Blue Apron was forced to conduct a reverse stock split in order to lift its share price above $1 and avoid being kicked off the NYSE. In retrospect, the peak may have been June 2015, when Blue Apron pulled in $135 million in venture funding at a $2 billion valuation from names like Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital.
Yet as recently as four years ago, some of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley thought the company had a chance to change the world. After an entire emergent industry went from red hot to ice cold. After the steadily shrinking customer base and the stock price that became locked in an inescapable tailspin. That's easy to forget now, after all the losses and the layoffs. There was a time when it really did seem like the next big thing.
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