Stefania Mallett had her feet up on the deck railing. Briscoe Rodgers was pacing. Their catering marketplace was growing, but too slowly: they could not recruit restaurants quickly enough to give customers the choices they needed. It was a Friday afternoon, and the business had brought its problems home with it.
The two founders went back through the orders. Somewhere in that history, they thought, was a clue. Mallett later said they found one, made a few changes, and brought 20,000 caterers onto the platform in less than three months. She declined to disclose the trick. An engineer can be generous with advice and still keep the useful drawer locked.
That scene makes a good introduction to Mallett. There is the domestic setting, the impatience with a problem, the return to evidence. There is also another person in the frame. Her career has involved a great deal of building with other people, then deciding how much responsibility to give them. Eventually, that included her own job.
The programmer who wanted to meet the customers
Mallett was born in Boston to parents who had come from Europe after World War II. She grew up in nearby Newton, interested in science and mathematics. At MIT she studied electrical engineering and computer science, earning a bachelor's degree and a master's. The attraction was practical: she wanted to understand how things worked.
Software was becoming a way to solve business problems. Mallett liked the people using it as much as the machinery behind it. While colleagues preferred programming, she was willing to go and talk to customers. That curiosity carried her towards management. A system could be technically sound and still bewilder the person expected to use it.
Her early career included Digital Equipment Corporation, General Electric, and smaller businesses. She accumulated experience in customer service, marketing, sales, product management, support, and accounting. By 1989, when she became a software company's chief operating officer, she had either done the work in its departments or managed people doing it. Her education in running a business had happened one function at a time.
Her later company biography records an operating career well beyond catering: helping National Logistics Management return to profitability and helping reshape IntraNet. Those assignments required coordinating businesses already in motion. Before there was a founder's title, there was the less picturesque work of getting the parts to cooperate.
A kitchen with limited office space
In 1993, Mallett tried management consulting at Symmetrix. She found that she preferred belonging to a company to moving between clients. In spring 1997 she became the founding CEO of InSite Marketing Technology, putting an early internet idea into practice for people who wanted to keep their existing jobs.
The idea involved virtual sales advisers that would help shoppers make decisions online. Its originators included MIT academics Glen Urban and John D. C. Little. Mallett supplied the operating commitment. The business began in her kitchen, and she remembered having seven people working at home before outside investment made more room possible.
Her offer to a prospective employee came with a warning about space: another hire might leave the newcomer working on the deck. The joke had a floor plan behind it. She was advising retailers such as Circuit City and CompUSA as they moved onto the web, at a time when matching the sales of one physical shop seemed a reasonable online ambition.
InSite was sold to Silknet, which merged with Kana. Mallett stayed in the Boston area rather than relocate to California. Then came a small lesson in the fashion industry that calls itself technology. One recruiter considered her too old for internet work. After the bubble burst, another wanted precisely her experience. The vocabulary had changed to gravitas; she had barely had time to age.
The request that outlived the business
Mallett met Rodgers through BuzzPad, a company she was brought in to help. It closed, but she was impressed by how he handled the shutdown. When he had another idea and needed someone to run the business, he approached her. That relationship survived the disappointment of the enterprise that introduced them.
The pair subsequently worked on PreferredTime, a meeting-scheduling business launched in 2004. It closed in 2007. Customers had kept asking for help arranging food for meetings, and the founders took that request seriously. They could lose a company without losing everything they had learned from its users.
ezCater began in 2007. Its founders had identified a recurring task people wanted taken off their hands. In Mallett's account, this differed from building a product and then persuading people to buy it: people had asked them to make it. That is an unusually direct brief for a software business. The customer had already written the opening sentence.
The early service used leased software intended for residential food ordering. By February 2009, the founders decided corporate catering needed its own platform. Scheduled meals for groups came with different requirements. They built proprietary software, and regional competitors subsequently asked whether they could lease it. The answer was no. This time, the kitchen business owned its tools.
Five years is a long lunch break
Asked how long it took to reach a million dollars in revenue, Mallett answered: about five years. Her account leaves room for the slow part of entrepreneurship. A customer might love the service and recommend it to a colleague, only for that colleague to discover there were too few participating restaurants in their territory.
The supply problem on the deck mattered because national coverage made those recommendations useful. Restaurants were charged when an order arrived, rather than simply for appearing. As the business found investment, it could spend more on digital marketing. Search advertising became an important route to customers. Growth depended on making several ordinary things work together: selection, discovery, service, and repeat orders.
One early customer called in alarm because she thought the website had disappeared. She had mistyped the address. Mallett remembered the call because the woman dreaded returning to ordering directly from restaurants. There was an encouraging measure of usefulness: someone noticed when she thought it was gone. The founders also tested ideas and tracked results before deciding where their limited money should go.
By 2019, the scale was different. A $150 million investment round valued ezCater at $1.25 billion. Valuation was a milestone for the business, but the more revealing continuity was its original assignment. A person still needed to feed a group at a specified place and time. More capital did not make that person any more forgiving of a late lunch.
Authority, served in generous portions
Mallett's explanation of her work puts employees near the centre. She described her purpose as creating jobs people would want to have. That ambition came with practical arrangements. Candidates could try exercises resembling the job, including converting a printed menu into a digital layout, before either side decided to commit.
“Give them so much authority they gasp.”Stefania Mallett
The line is funny because the discomfort is recognisable. Hiring capable people does not automatically make a manager comfortable with their decisions. Mallett described delegation as something that could make her cringe. She treated that reaction as evidence that she was actually giving people room, rather than merely saying she trusted them.
In writing about employee turnover, she argued that managers should learn people's strengths and changing interests, then help their work fit those abilities. Employees give a substantial portion of their lives to an employer. She considered supporting their development an obligation. The argument has a practical side, too: replacing people is expensive, and treating their abilities as fixed wastes what they might become.
Her attention extended to both sides of the marketplace. Caterers and customers each had work to do; ezCater should remove unnecessary burdens from both. A restaurant trying to fulfil an order needs a useful partner as surely as the employee placing it. That preference for making other people's work easier connects her early customer conversations to her later management habits.
A promise, kept in green
In 2021, Mallett and Rodgers promised to dye their hair green if the business reached an ambitious revenue target. They expected to reach it in October. They got there in June, and Mallett honoured the promise in July. It was an unusually visible way for a chief executive to acknowledge a team result.
The business was expanding its attention to workplaces such as retail, logistics, and construction. Those settings broadened the picture of who needed meals at work. A company built around meetings could also help feed people whose working day looked quite different from a conference-room calendar.
The green hair sits neatly beside the orderly processes. Mallett could take the machinery seriously without insisting that its operator look solemn. Targets, customer demand, and the economics of a marketplace remained real concerns. There was still room for a joke whose terms everyone could see had been honoured.
The system's final test: someone else in charge
On August 14, 2023, Ashwin Raj succeeded Mallett as CEO. She remained a director. At the announcement, ezCater reported more than 100,000 restaurant partners, customers across all 50 states, and over 850 employees. The little home-based operation had become an organisation with a substantial life beyond its founders' desks.
After the handover, Mallett spoke about helping choose her successor and about a founder's need to share power as a company grows. Her advice about boards was similarly practical: give directors relevant information early, and bring them customer stories alongside financial reporting. People outside the daily work need help understanding the decisions being made inside it.
Her current role is co-founder and director. Nihad Rahman became ezCater's CEO in May 2025. Mallett also appears on the Boston Debate League's board, carrying her experience into an organisation concerned with young people's reasoning and communication. There are other rooms in which an experienced operator can be useful.
Giving people authority had been part of her management vocabulary for years. The succession made that principle concrete at the top. The founder who had once studied orders from her own deck could participate from a different seat, while other people carried the company forward. For someone interested in how systems work, that is a satisfying result: the work continues when someone else holds the clicker.