Kyle
Recipes find you with Washington DC startup Mor.sl. This new startup in the recipe space has turned the traditional recipe website model on it’s head. Sure they have hundreds of thousands of recipes but rather than have you searching and sifting through thousands of recipes, their intuitive algorithm matches you to recipes based on a quiz you take when joining.
The quiz is fun and practical. It’s multiple choice and you can answer questions about your cooking habits with answers like “the microwave is my best friend”. The quiz also mixes up a bunch of “this or that” questions, like tacos or creamy soup. At the end of the quiz it actually served up results that I would find appealing. With my “the microwave is my best friend” answer, the recipes that mor.sl offered were relatively easy to cook. They also asked how well stocked my pantry was. Indeed I need to do some more shopping but I think me and this mor.sl could get along.
We got a chance to talk with Milli Mittal one of the co-founders of mor.sl. Check out our interview below.
What is Mor.sl?
mor.sl is a personalized recipe recommendations engine. We’ve developed a powerful algorithm which learns your tastes, allergies and cooking skill level and recommends recipes that will work for your lifestyle. No more searching for the perfect recipe – with mor.sl, it’s right there waiting for you. You can share your favorite recipes with your friends and save them to your library for easy reference. All of our recipes are hand-curated from top food bloggers and publishers like fresh365 and Williams-Sonoma, so you can count on them being delicious and doable.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds
mor.sl was founded by Mili Mittal, Graham Wallis and Tony Baldascino. Mili Mittal is the CEO of mor.sl and jokes that she is its #1 customer. In fact, she conceptualized mor.sl because she was tired of eating out all the time and longed for the fresh home-cooked Indian meals of her childhood. And Mili knew she wasn’t alone – all her friends complained about not having enough time to cook meals at home. She was inspired by her mother, who worked night shifts when Mili was a child, came home at 8pm for her 30 minute break, made dinner, fed her family, and rushed back to work. If mom could do that in 30 minutes, Mili felt, any of us can do it. We just need her mental algorithm to reduce the time required to plan. Prior to founding mor.sl, Mili was a management consultant at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) in Washington, DC. In her tenure at CEB, Mili helped the company launch a new business, then called the Infrastructure Performance Improvement Lab, which measured clients’ IT delivery and support service quality. During this time, Mili also cofounded the Rhythmaya School of Dance, a metro-DC Indian dance school and performance company. Mili holds a BA in Public Policy Studies from Duke University and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where she also attained a Certificate in Entrepreneurship.
Graham Wallis is mor.sl’s Chief Technology Officer, responsible for technical strategy and back end development. Graham brings 5 years of experience developing Business Process Management projects for Fortune 500 companies. As Director of BPM Professional Services at Perficient, an IBM Partner, Graham grew the BPM consulting practice from scratch to $8 million run rate in one year. Graham previously founded Polar Consulting to provide simple, fast access to BPM optimization. Before that, Graham was a lead on the professional services team at a start-up, Lombardi, which was acquired by IBM in 2010. Graham holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University and makes a mean English crepe.
Tony Baldascino is mor.sl’s Chief Web Officer. As a UI/UX expert, Tony is responsible for all things front-end at mor.sl. Tony’s expertise lies in Flash, HTML, and CSS, but he codes in 9 different languages. Tony also brings SEO and digital marketing expertise to mor.sl. Prior to working at mor.sl, Tony was CTO and cofounder of Razolution, a digital media and marketing start-up. Here, he helped build websites for large companies such as deBeer and Gait Lacrosse and for celebrities like Aubrey O’Day. Like Graham, Tony began his career as a software engineer for IBM. Tony holds a BA in Computer Graphics with a concentration in Information Technology from Syracuse University.
Where are you based?
Washington, D.C.
What is the startup culture like in DC?
D.C. has a vibrant and growing tech start-up scene. Thanks to folks like Mike Mayernick, Zvi Band and Peter Corbett (among others), D.C. is becoming an east coast hub of start-up activity. It’s exciting to be on the ground floor of that! I find it pretty hard though to balance time spent contributing and learning from the community and time spent on the business – even though I want to go to as many meet-ups and events as possible, I find I often have to say no in order to focus on mor.sl. It’s a culture that is eager to stay current and to innovate, and even boasts a new incubator called the Fort. I’d say it’s a collaborative culture in which people are trying to help one another succeed and build the reputation of D.C. as a start-up ecosystem. The only downside is that it’s a little bit harder being a consumer tech startup in D.C., as there simply aren’t a lot of consumer tech giants in the region to learn from.
What problem does mor.sl solve?
You know when you get home from work and look in the fridge, and that feeling of desperation sets in? Not knowing what you can make that will satisfy your craving, and too hungry to figure it out, you heave a big sigh and call for takeout, decide to meet a friend out for dinner, head to the nearest Chipotle or face another bowl of cereal. You feel defeated – you want to be good to your body and save money by cooking at home, but it seems that you just don’t have the time to prepare delicious dinners at home.
mor.sl solves that problem. Cooking isn’t hard or that time consuming – it’s figuring out what you can actually make that is hard. Mor.sl makes it easy to find meals that are delicious and doable for you. We help you eat better so that you can live better.
What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?
Well it’s definitely tough to build a company without funding. But bootstrapping mor.sl has forced us to have razor-sharp focus on both the product and marketing sides. When building our MVP, we were forced to cut out a lot of ‘cool’ features and just build the heart of the product. When marketing, we have to focus our limited resources towards the channels that have the biggest bang for the buck. And, not having money ensures that you build a super passionate team that’s committed and entrepreneurial – it’s a great way to screen people in the early stages. In the end, while not having funding is a disadvantage in many ways, we’ve found ways to turn it into a strength.
Who are your mentors and role models?
Well, my mom is my biggest inspiration for the product itself – – as I mentioned above, she worked night shifts when I was a kid and came home during her 30 minute break at 8pm, whipped up a fresh made Indian meal, fed us and went back to work. I thought she was super mom (she is!), but now I realize she had a set of mental tools that enabled her to be efficient in the kitchen. I didn’t inherit them, unfortunately, but I’ve built mor.sl to help myself and others become super human, too.
I’ve drawn a lot of great lessons for entrepreneurial success from my professors at UC Berkeley Haas, as well, including Sara Beckman, Steve Blank, Eric Ries, John Danner and Jerry Engle. Without these folks, I’d have no clue how to build lean, build what my customers want, build a pitch deck… I’d be running in the dark. It’s still pretty dark as an entrepreneur because you are forging a new path that’s not been traveled, and there’s no ‘one way’ to do it, but under the guidance of these mentors, I’ve definitely gotten a head start on the journey.
I look up to entrepreneurs who persist and who are grounded – like Ben Silberman at Pinterest. If you recall, Pinterest was stuck at 10,000 users for about a year, but that didn’t make Ben give up. People are always going to tell you that you’re delusional when you’re building a start-up, (to some degree you have to be!), and they’ll try to dissuade you because they don’t want you to toil and suffer. But those that believe in their vision, those that keep going and don’t take no for an answer, those people are inspirational to me.
Finally, I’d say my dad is my biggest mentor. His motto is, ‘there are no mistakes made in life, only lessons learned.’ That is a mantra that I repeat every day, inside and outside of mor.sl.
What’s one thing the world doesn’t know about you or mor.sl?
I’ve never been in the same room as Tony (my Chief Web Officer), but I’ve probably talked to him more than all my best friends combined over the past year.
What’s next for your startup?
We’re just getting started. Stay tuned for new curation features, lots more recipes and more tools to make cooking a cinch.
Here’s the links you’ve been waiting for
Go ahead cook up something grand with mor.sl here
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