Juan Pico had eight side hustles. He only needed one to work.

Seven failed side hustles would give most people a respectable excuse to acquire a quieter hobby. Juan Pico kept going. His own tally is eight attempts, seven disappointments and one business that changed his life. It is a rather less tidy introduction than the usual founder biography, which tends to arrive with its failures discreetly removed, like prices on a gift.

Pico is the CEO and co-founder of Fox Ordering, the restaurant technology company established in 2014. He is based in New York; the company is based in Boca Raton, Florida. The business helps restaurants take orders directly through their own websites. Behind that practical proposition sits a founder whose public advice repeatedly returns to the same concern: getting someone to buy.

The interesting part of his account is how he remembers the attempts that went nowhere. He credits them with lessons, friendships, fresh opportunities and personal growth. The disappointment remained real. So did the possibility that another attempt might work. His arithmetic allowed for a good deal of losing before it required a winner.

An idea meets the cash register

There is a stubbornly commercial streak in Pico's thinking. He has argued that founders should test their ideas against revenue from paying customers rather than reassurance from friends. Affection is a delightful thing to receive. It is an unreliable way to settle an invoice. His preferred judge has to make a purchase.

Read alongside his account of failed ventures, that preference gives his persistence some definition. Continuing to try does not require treating every idea as sacred. A customer can reject the offer; another approach can follow. The useful distinction in his remarks is between remaining willing to build and remaining attached to a particular attempt.

He has also described the first few hundred dollars from a side business as feeling disproportionately valuable. The amount matters because of what it proves: someone outside the founder's imagination has agreed to participate. A modest sale brings an argument into contact with the world. For a founder who talks so often about traction, that is an understandable pleasure.

Three years before the slowdown

Fox Ordering's early chronology gives this outlook a less abstract setting. The company dates its foundation to 2014, product development to 2015 and its minimum viable product launch to 2016. These are separate entries, which makes the passage of time visible. An idea, a product under development and a product ready to meet customers occupy different years.

Then comes the entry for 2017: a slowdown. It is an unexpectedly useful detail in a corporate history. Even the neatly arranged version allows a pause into the proceedings. The sequence resists the temptation to turn founding and growth into adjacent moments, with all the waiting edited out between them.

Expansion into new markets appears in 2019. Taken together, those early dates describe a business developing over several years. They also give context to Pico's enthusiasm for another attempt. His company history has room for product work, a launch and resistance before the more photogenic business of collecting rankings begins.

The sale after the sales demo

Pico can be very specific about what to do when a buyer has watched a demonstration and still has not bought. His advice is to ask for a follow-up phone call, confirm the number and, with agreement, send a short text confirming when that call will happen. This is the kind of instruction that fits on a small piece of paper.

His explanation is equally practical. A buyer who is comfortable joining a video meeting may still prefer an ordinary phone call or text. Agreeing on the next contact opens those channels with permission. The seller leaves with a scheduled conversation rather than an optimistic interpretation of a pleasant goodbye.

That detail is revealing because it concerns the unglamorous middle of selling. The presentation is over. The purchase remains undecided. Someone must still ask what happens next. Pico's attention goes to that awkward interval, where enthusiasm has to become an arrangement and an arrangement might eventually become revenue.

“Be a pro.”

Juan Pico, on following up after a sales demo

His public persona can be forceful, but this recommendation is procedural: ask, agree, confirm, follow up. It suggests a salesman interested in the mechanics of staying in touch. A confident presentation may command attention for half an hour. A mutually agreed next step gives the conversation somewhere to go once the screen closes.

A restaurant's own front door

Fox Ordering applies a similarly direct sensibility to restaurant commerce. It offers a way for diners to order from a restaurant's website, with a published convenience fee of 5% of the order subtotal. It also advertises website creation and an arrangement without restrictive contracts. The proposition is easy to describe across a table.

Consider a purely illustrative $40 food subtotal. At the advertised percentage, the convenience fee is $2, before any other applicable charges. This calculation explains the stated rate; it does not establish what a particular restaurant will save or earn. Those outcomes depend on the actual orders and terms. The point is that the offer comes with arithmetic a prospective customer can inspect.

For Pico, whose advice gives paying customers the deciding vote, that is an appropriate arena. Restaurant ordering puts software close to a purchase. A menu must become an order, and an order must become something a kitchen can act on. The product's purpose can be understood without requiring the diner to become interested in software.

When the scoreboard started noticing

By 2021, Fox Ordering had reached No. 830 on the Inc. 5000. It moved to No. 218 in 2022 and No. 120 in 2023. These positions describe a company's growth ranking. They do not measure Pico's personal wealth, and they are not a score for the quality of an individual restaurant's service.

In 2023, Deloitte's North American Technology Fast 500 placed Fox at No. 41, listing 4,143% growth and naming Juan Pico as CEO. The award adds another concrete marker to the company story. It is a considerable distance from the small first payments that he describes with such affection, even if the underlying preoccupation with revenue remains recognizable.

Pico celebrated the two 2023 rankings together and thanked the community and team. His response combined pride with an appetite for more. It reads as the reaction of someone who likes a scoreboard but has little intention of treating it as a retirement announcement. An award is a satisfying interruption to the work.

The later Inc. positions published by Fox were No. 630 in 2024 and No. 1,581 in 2025. Keeping those years in the picture makes the record more useful. Rankings move. A founder's career continues through the less flattering positions as well as the celebratory ones. A sequence is more informative than a single number selected for a slide.

The Fox Pack has a face

The company calls its team the Fox Pack, a nickname that turns up in its public expressions of thanks. In May 2025, Fox published an appreciation message for Pico, accompanied by photographs of him speaking, meeting colleagues and standing with a group holding fox-shaped trophies. The pictures bring an otherwise numerical story into a room full of people.

Delta Sigma Pi connects Pico with Florida Atlantic. In 2022, Fox Ordering sponsored the Marshall chapter's twentieth-anniversary event. This is a small, specific link between the business and a professional fraternity community. It gives the career a connection beyond customers and growth lists.

Those public gestures sit comfortably beside Pico's own account of making friends through unsuccessful ventures. Relationships occupy space in the story he tells about work, including the work that failed. They are among the things an attempt can leave behind even when it fails to become a lasting business.

Before the meeting, turn it up

There is a soundtrack to this working life, too. Pico has recommended five songs for getting ready to sell: David Guetta's “Memories,” Drake's “0 To 100,” Kanye West's “Can't Tell Me Nothing,” Tupac's “California Love” and Eminem's “Lose Yourself.” He reserved the last two for bigger meetings. Even the playlist has a sense of occasion.

It is a cheerful glimpse of someone willing to prepare his own enthusiasm. Selling requires asking another person to believe in an offer, and Pico seems quite happy to give himself musical assistance before making the request. The prospect need never know what was playing five minutes before the call.

The playlist, the follow-up text and the seven failed attempts belong in the same portrait. One concerns getting ready, another concerns doing the next small thing, and the third concerns being willing to begin again. Fox Ordering gives those habits a business setting. Pico's account leaves the disappointments in view, along with the pleasure of a customer finally saying yes.