Back in the Office
Some companies are going fully remote. Some are doubling down on hybrid. And some are all in on the office.
There is no one-size-fits-all. And for each company, the choice has serious and lasting effects, from recruitment to revenue.
That’s just for office space. But what if a company leases both office and industrial space? In that case, as they say, the plot thickens.
Tovala Founder & CEO David Rabie discusses the role of real estate in his company’s next chapter.
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Max Chopovsky:
Welcome to the Future of Work, back in the office. My name is Max Chopovsky. I help companies around the country find and negotiate the leases for their office space, ensuring that the space they have is the space they need and supports and reflects their company culture. The Future of Work is a series exploring our evolving relationship with work, the how, where, and why, the trends and tech disrupting and improving the workplace and perspectives from thought leaders on our new normal. When the pandemic hit in 2020, offices went from fully occupied to completely empty. And then over the course of a few years, companies tried to bring people back and we've had some false starts. Now, three years later, unless companies have decided to go fully remote, they are coming back to the office. Now, of course, every company's approach is different, but we've settled into a kind of routine. Attendance is like a bell curve with Tuesday, the highest day of attendance during the week and Friday, the lowest. And many companies. people come in about three days a week. Meanwhile, companies like Facebook, Salesforce, Tyson Foods, Uber, and Publicis are among some of those trying to shed excess office space, contributing to a record high 12.1 million square feet available for sublease in Chicago, which is actually up nearly 20% year over year. And those subleases sit on the market for an average of 18 months. More telling, Chicago's overall vacancy, which is the amount of vacant than available space, is at 15.4%, a new record high. have been fairly flat despite the lower demand, but it's not the whole story. Landlords are so motivated to keep their tenants that incentives packages have grown to include TI allowances of over a hundred bucks a foot, generous rent abatement, and more. Unfortunately, not all landlords can afford to write these checks and those who cannot are in trouble. Meanwhile, tenants like Molson Coors continue the flight to quality, but not all tenants are ready to double down, sometimes unsure of their own need for space and taking the conservative approach. So today we're gonna hear from the leader of a company that that has a fascinating model on many levels, one of which is of course, its approach to real estate. Tovala, which manufactures a smart oven and makes an app for the oven, which by scanning a QR code makes it easy to prepare fresh meals, which are designed, cooked, prepped, and shipped to customers every week. So this means that Tovala is in the software, hardware, and food businesses, and as such, a participant in office and industrial markets, each with wildly different dynamics. Office, as I noted, is very tenant-driven, but warehouse has one of the lowest vacancy rates on record in buildings, for example, 3,800 Golf Road and Rolling Meadows or the Allstate headquarters in Glenview are being torn down to redevelop as distribution centers. Juggling all of this, and the real estate is just a small part of it, is co-founder and CEO, David Rabie, who had the idea for Tovala while earning his MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Inspired by the pain point of minimal time to prepare and cook fresh meals at home, David combined his passion for food and technology to solve the problem. category to finding business with more than one million meals shipped nationwide. The company has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, fast company and tech crunch. Prior to business school, David worked in a variety of roles directly under the co-founder of the veggie grill, the largest chain of plant based restaurants in the country and ran a chain of frozen yogurt stores in California and Ohio. He learned about the startup tech industry by launching Draftpedia, the first sports encyclopedia built exclusively for mobile. David graduated with high honors from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a B.A. in history. At Booth, he worked part time for Foundation Capital, led the Entrepreneurship Club on campus and completed an internship at Google. David speaks four languages, lived in China, London and Madrid, and has been passionate about clean eating since attending a health retreat at age 18. He currently lives in Chicago with his wife, Jessica. course, his hardest job of everything and what keeps him busiest are his two daughters, Elizabeth and Penelope, girl dad shout out.
David Rabie:
Thank you, thank you.
Max Chopovsky:
Welcome to the show, man. Uh,
David Rabie:
Yeah, excited to be here.
Max Chopovsky:
what are the four languages?
David Rabie:
Girl that of young kids, you know, my brain doesn't fire as quickly as it used to.
Max Chopovsky:
I hear you.
David Rabie:
English, French, Spanish and Farsi. Yeah,
Max Chopovsky:
Farsi!
David Rabie:
yeah. My parents were both born in Iran and emigrated here around the time of the revolution.
Max Chopovsky:
That is an entirely separate conversation that we have to have
David Rabie:
different
Max Chopovsky:
offline.
David Rabie:
podcast.
Max Chopovsky:
So fascinating. Okay, so let's jump in here. So let's talk about the employee experience. What is your head count now and how does that sort of break down between office and non-office? So assembling meals, et cetera. And how did that change during the pandemic?
David Rabie:
Yeah, we're about 375 people and at a high level, two thirds work in our production facilities and one third work in our, you know, on the corporate team. That shift happened, you know, we've always been majority production basically like by year two, I would say. And then when we found true product market fit, like when the business really started to grow super fast, which was Q3 of 2019, that started to become more and more dramatic. And then over the course of the pandemic, like same kind of model, like more and more, I'd say relative hires on the production side, relative to the corporate team.
Max Chopovsky:
Q3 of 19, man, the timing.
David Rabie:
Long time ago, yeah.
Max Chopovsky:
Uh, so you've been able to compete effectively in this very crowded, you know, meal delivery service while defining a new and pretty complex category. And at the same time, you've managed to establish this great culture. So 4.8. Uh, rating on Glassdoor is a rare find, not to mention 99% CEO approval. How do you approach the culture at Davala and why is it so important to you?
David Rabie:
Very timely, we just had our all hands where we shared out the results of our annual culture survey. So I'd say first and foremost is we have taken culture seriously at Tovala since day one. It was not an afterthought of, well, let's figure out a business first and hire a bunch of people and find product market fit and raise money and then we'll think about what kind of culture we want. It was really from day one, what kind of people do we wanna have? What kind of behaviors do we wanna incentivize? How do we wanna work together? How do we want decisions to get made? Who's going to get promoted? Who's going to get fired? All those questions were questions we were asking ourselves in the early days. And so I think that's kind of the first step is like it actually mattered to us. And that was true in our actions. As we've scaled, we've had to do a lot differently, I would say, than we had to do in the early days of. When everyone is in one room together, you don't necessarily need values on a wall, and you don't have to spend a ton of time talking about your values when it's very clear what is accepted, what is promoted, and what is not. And so there was that kind of shared tribal knowledge. And then as we've grown, as the team has become more distributed, as we've opened facilities outside of Chicago, we've had to get a lot more deliberate about the values and what do we want to prioritize, what's really important here, what's not important here, on those things, but all the while I'd say the consistent thread is that it has been a super important thing for us.
Max Chopovsky:
What a, it's interesting you mentioned having the idea before you even start the company, a friend of mine and a client, Godard Abel, I'm sure you know him at G2, they did the exact same thing. They started with the kind of culture they wanted to have, the kind of philosophy they wanted to have, and that's sort of been central to their approach throughout the growth of the company. Let's talk a little bit about employee experience. How do you define that at Tuvalu, and why do you focus on it?
David Rabie:
Yeah, we... We've invested a lot more in that now than we did early on. And sorry to keep comparing to before, like I think there's so many different phases of a startup. And in the early days, like we didn't have anyone that was focused on employee experience. Like we couldn't afford that. It was kind of everyone's job. Like obviously as the founders, you're the true cultural torchbearers, but in many ways that's true for many early employees as well. And so it was kind of on all of us to like ensure employees would have a good experience, but there was no time to like do proper onboarding. and structured onboarding and process around onboarding and you know structure events and all that stuff. that a lot of that just happened organically. And then as we've scaled, we have a chief people officer, there's a people team that is focused on the employee experience, all of these touch points from like the first time someone hears about us through the interview process, through getting an offer to joining Tovala, then you're onboarding, and all that is now like really, really thoughtfully architected in a way that it wasn't before. And I think where it's become even more complex is like, how do you do that? in a hybrid work setting and do that really effectively and help those employees that are remote feel connected to the folks that are in Chicago and in our HQ. It's a challenge. We don't have the answers necessarily and in this culture survey some of the challenges came out but it's something we're really focused on.
Max Chopovsky:
Now the employee experience is different between your in office workers and the sort of offsite workers, right at the, at the, um, at the plants. So, um, how do you think about those different employee experiences? And as you think about hybrid work, which is obviously not available to people that have to be there to do their job, uh, does that ever create friction?
David Rabie:
Yeah, I mean it used to create a ton of friction. It's gotten a lot better as we've thought about what are all the like actual friction points, how do we eliminate them, change them, improve them. But
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
David Rabie:
there was definitely a period. during COVID where the whole corporate team had the luxury of staying at home and being safe and taking off 45 minutes in the middle of the day to go on a walk outside. And not only was our production team forced or obligated to be in the facilities by nature of their job, but they were risking their lives to some degree,
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
David Rabie:
especially before we knew much about COVID. So certainly there was a ton of friction and challenge. and stress involved with managing that dynamic during the pandemic. It's gotten a lot better, I would say. I think we've been really deliberate at trying to kind of push on the parts that were causing a lot of stress and friction. And I think obviously the easing of the pandemic has made it a lot better as well. But it is a very challenging part of running a business like ours that has a corporate team and a production team and then obviously a lot of team members that are fluid between and have to spend a lot of time in the facility, but are also on the corporate team, especially people on our operations department. So yeah, I think it's one of the things that I was personally not necessarily prepared for in running this company. And there are not great models to follow out there of companies that have done an amazing job that we've found, we've seen some, but especially with Slack, I think a lot of this has changed with the connectivity that we all have today. years ago, like these two different cultures could be a little more separate where corporate team and the people in factories, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles away, like had very few touch points.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
David Rabie:
And now with technology we have tons and there's a ton of benefit to that but there's also a lot of like negatives that come out of it.
Max Chopovsky:
So let's talk about your real estate for a little bit. So you have the headquarters in Chicago, you have multiple warehouses, you have a cooking prep facility, you have the oven manufacturing facility in China. Talk a little bit about your real estate portfolio.
David Rabie:
Yeah, so we don't own any real estate to be clear. Like we're leasing all these spaces. We lease an office in Chicago. We lease an office slash like R&D workspace in Urbana. And then we've got three facilities, one on the South side of Chicago, one in Carroll Stream, Illinois, and then one in just outside of Salt Lake City in Utah. That's kind of the portfolio, you know. all kind of very different leases and especially the facilities, each of them has kind of their own unique story as to how we occupied it, when, what we paid, why, length of lease, all that stuff. But that's kind of the construct that we've got right now from a real estate standpoint. And then our oven manufacturer, that's not our space. We work with a partner in China that manufactures the ovens.
Max Chopovsky:
make sense and how many people even sort of ballpark are using your office now and and how did they use it and when did they generally come in?
David Rabie:
Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say on an average, well, there's actually no average. Let's say Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, we probably have like 10 to 20 people in our office.
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm.
David Rabie:
And there's some people that kind of have to be in the office. We have some chefs. And then we have a few folks on the hardware team that sit up here in Chicago that like the nature of their work is just much, much easier to be in the office. So relatively small percentage compared to how many people are in Chicago on the corporate team. And then Wednesdays, we have a lot more people in the office. I'd say more like. 20 at the low end, 50 at the high end. And we'll do a team lunch those days. Often a lot of cross-functional meetings will be that day. And then Fridays tend to be the lowest traffic, I'd say like five at the low end, 15 at the high end. And then there's a ton of off-sites that get done now that weren't getting done in the past where teams will intentionally get together. They'll use the office space to do that. But that's a quarterly or twice a year kind of thing.
Max Chopovsky:
How prescriptive are you around who has to come into the office and who doesn't have to do it? Or do you leave it up to managers?
David Rabie:
Yeah, we're very unprescriptive, I would say. Like, we encourage people to come in on Wednesdays and think it's a good time to gather, but that's all it is, is an encouragement. The rest of the days, it's kind of up to each team to decide what's right for them, what's the nature of their work. And then the other encouragement we've given is for really complex kind of... longer lead cross-functional projects, starting those with a kickoff in person or ensuring that when there is like a lot of work that has to be done together in a group that's complex and requires a lot of communication, try to get together in person. The odds of success are a lot higher in that regard.
Max Chopovsky:
100%. Have you made any changes to your space as far as redesign or adding any features or even reducing the amount of space since the pandemic began?
David Rabie:
A few, not much. We've got a couple phone booths. I'd say that's like the largest structural change we've made. We added two phone booths just because so many people are here taking Zoom calls just like this. Aside from that, not much. Like I guess, you know, we invested a little bit more in the cameras and screens and things like that in our conference rooms and a bunch of air purifiers and things like that during the
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm.
David Rabie:
pandemic. But no, I'd say no structural changes to the layout of the office, no additional build out. And we did at one point consider subleasing parts of it, but ultimately didn't really make sense for us.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah, because you got the additional costs required.
David Rabie:
Yeah, the additional cost, there is an excess amount of office space in the city, so we didn't feel like there was just demand bursting at the seams to come and lease space from us. There's a lot of sensitive things that get discussed and information that gets shared here that there wasn't a clear section of the office we could just carve off for another small company.
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm. And what are your plans for it going forward?
David Rabie:
The intent for now is to stay here, you know, when our lease... runs out, like we'll have to talk to our landlord and figure out what we can negotiate and see if we can reach an agreement. But our hope is to stay, like there, even though this is probably too much space for us relative to where we are, it works really well and I think there's there's a lot of switching costs to finding a new space, especially for us where we have a test kitchen that was
Max Chopovsky:
Thank
David Rabie:
pretty
Max Chopovsky:
you.
David Rabie:
custom built and a hardware space, so it's not just a kind of basic office design.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah, which is tough in the sense that it doesn't really help your leverage with the landlord. You, know, moving's not gonna be cheap. So you define your approach to your office as remote first. So talk a little bit about what that means.
David Rabie:
Yeah, the truth is that most people's day-to-day experience of Tovala is remote. It's on Zoom and it's not in the corporate headquarters. And so we try to approach a lot of things within that lens. So even though I'm in the office every day, because that's where I like to work personally, I just like to get out of the house and I like the human interaction. for things like an all company meeting, even if we've got 10 or 15 people in the office, often I'll take it on Zoom behind my laptop. So I think little things like that where we are, you know, kind of putting the people working from home and co-working spaces and whatever first is how we've started to think about the day-to-day experience here.
Max Chopovsky:
Have you had any sort of challenges associated with implementing this remote first approach sort of systematically?
David Rabie:
Nothing huge. I think the biggest challenge is helping new employees, especially ones that are like a little earlier in their career, that join us remotely, really connect with the rest of the company and even sometimes the rest of their team. That's probably the hardest part of this whole thing is for people that don't have the experience to know how to navigate an organization, especially an organization that is distributed, and if they're distributed, it's just hard. It's hard and that's something we're trying to figure out.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Training and career progression are two of the two of the biggest reasons that even a couple of years ago, people are advocating for coming back to the office.
David Rabie:
Mhm.
Max Chopovsky:
But it's tough. I mean, if you try to push people to come in when they don't wanna come in, the employment rates still low, right? I mean, they have options. So it's tricky. Now, you mentioned earlier that Slack is a tool that you use quite a bit. because of this multi workplace arrangement, right? The office, the plants, et cetera. And also the fact that you are remote first, I've gotta believe that digital tools play a big role in keeping people connected and engaged. So can you talk about what tools those are and what success you've seen with them?
David Rabie:
Yeah, Slack is the biggest one. Slack and Zoom are probably the two biggest. So we're like Slack first company, we do very little internal email. I'd say the only times we use email are for really long form, asynchronous communication that maybe needs a lot of structure. But even those, often those become Google Docs that just get shared over Slack. So very little email gets traded internally. That's been true for many years pre-pandemic. So that was not a hard adjustment for us. Lot of comms on Slack, like that's the main mode of communication, lot of video conferencing. And then I'd say the negative is like probably too many workplace collaboration tools. So like some teams use Asana, some teams use Google Docs, some teams use Confluence, our engineering team uses Jira. Like there's too much. So it's like a little hard to navigate if you're new here, what should you use when, where do you find information? Google Sheets, Google Slides, those are the ones that we probably use them most often.
Max Chopovsky:
Were there any sort of cultural experiences that you've had to try to do digitally or any sort of tools that you use less on the operational and more on the cultural front?
David Rabie:
Interesting. We now use Lattice. That's relatively new. It's a kind of performance tool. So people use it for their one-on-ones. We use it for performance reviews. We use it for cultural surveys, things like that. We used to use 15.5 at one point. Those are the two tools that come to mind.
Max Chopovsky:
Uh huh. Okay. Always curious because, uh, when I had, uh, Mike Gamson on the show, he talked about, you know, one of the biggest mistakes people made was trying to digitize previously in-person processes and expect the same success from that.
David Rabie:
Mmm.
Max Chopovsky:
And what we learned is it's, if you ever tried doing a virtual happy hour, you're just sitting in front of your computer drinking by yourself.
David Rabie:
Right,
Max Chopovsky:
Doesn't exactly translate.
David Rabie:
right, right. That's interesting. Yeah, I don't think we've done too much of that. Like, there's a lot that's done over Zoom. Like, on, you know, I used to do, you know, it's a great question whether I did this before. I did do it before COVID. I sit down with every new hire and walk them through the company story. That used to be in person, now it's over Zoom. I think very little is actually lost in
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm.
David Rabie:
doing that over Zoom. I think we had our period of Zoom happy hours during peak pandemic, but we don't really do that anymore. I think there is kind of an open question on how do we engage socially with teams that are hybrid and remote. We don't do a lot of that, frankly. It's like when those teams fly in for their off-sites and then within those cities. In most places where we have remote teams, there's at least a couple team members. Not all, but some. So those teams will sometimes get together in person. and translate great.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah, totally. Let's talk a little bit about lessons and advice. The last few years have been unpredictable to say the least, right? Information was coming at you fast and furious. You had to adapt. You had to really abide by rapidly changing regulations and market conditions. So what lessons did the last few years teach you about the role of real estate?
David Rabie:
That's a really interesting question. learned a lot in the last two years, the role of real estate. I think like a lot of things in the last two years, it wasn't something... I don't know, it's a really interesting question. I think we took for granted the in-office experience and the fact that, well, you have an office, that's where everyone goes, and it's pretty simple in that regard. We took that for granted. And I think it was hard enough to forecast real estate needs from an office standpoint for a startup pre-pandemic,
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
David Rabie:
when, okay, where are you gonna find a one-year lease? Are you willing to pay a premium for that? Any idea how much space you're going to need in 18 months is so contingent on how fast you're going to grow and it's just impossible to get those things right. We thought that was hard and I think... Now it's even harder. Like there was a period of time in the pandemic where it was like even harder. Like what are we actually gonna need? How much space are we gonna need? And now I think we're at a reasonable point where it's like we have a good sense of how much space we'll need for what period of time. So it's been a, I'd say an evolution on that front. And you know, the approach to real estate on our kind of the two parts of the real estate portfolio are very different. Like what we're looking for from a food facility standpoint is so different than what we're looking for from an office standpoint in terms of size, build out. length of lease, location, all those things are totally, totally different.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah. What about leadership lessons that you've learned over the last few years? I'm sure there's a long list.
David Rabie:
Yeah, made a lot of mistakes in the last two years, undoubtedly.
Max Chopovsky:
Everybody dead.
David Rabie:
Yeah. learned a lot. We have had, you know, what's been interesting for us is we had a number of existential crises before COVID. And so as a company, we had a pretty good, playbook's the wrong word, but way to respond to crisis that I think served us really well during the pandemic. when there were like innumerable crises that many companies had to go through. And, you know, it continued, like we were a casualty of the SVB banking crisis where I think similarly, like we knew how to respond to like, okay, all these things that are out of our control have happened that are pretty bad. Like, what are we gonna do? Let's keep our heads cool. So I think that served us really well during the pandemic. And... Personally, whether this is pandemic induced or not, like it's very hard to separate the growth of our company from the pandemic in a lot of ways. Like we reached much larger scale during the pandemic and the type of leader I had to be for a company of 300 was super different than the type of leader I had to be for a company of 50 or 75. And that happened over the course of the pandemic, plus we went more hybrid. So it just changed a lot of like how I had to communicate with the whole company and impart lessons and lead. versus how I was doing it pre-pandemic, pre-like truly finding product market fit.
Max Chopovsky:
Well, and also your new employees outnumbered your existing employees five to one during the course of the pandemic. So if you just think about the impact that had on culture, you had an existing
David Rabie:
Mm-hmm.
Max Chopovsky:
culture with 50 people, all of a sudden, 250 people get hired that a lot of whom never even stepped foot in the office during
David Rabie:
Mm-hmm.
Max Chopovsky:
that process. So was there anything that happened there that you had to adapt to that you're going to sort of keep as a part of your philosophy?
David Rabie:
I think that's when we realized we had to formalize a lot more of our culture and our values.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah. Yeah.
David Rabie:
That was the trigger when it was like certain things were happening. We're like, why is that happening here? Like that's not Tovala. And it was like, well, people joined remotely, they met two employees, and then they're just kind of doing their thing. And maybe they're working with a few other teams, but like they're not really, they haven't been absorbed into who we are, how we operate, how we make decisions, like how things work here. And so people will just kind of go off on their own and figure out what's right for them. And if we don't help them. And so this was probably like mid 2020, Q3 of 2020, we're like, okay, we need to formalize some values. And so we went through that exercise So we still didn't have a large built out people team. And so we did a poor job, I'd say, of embedding those values throughout the organization. Like we would talk about them and try to elevate them, but they weren't everywhere the way I think they need to be if you want values to really play a significant role in driving behavior within a company. And that's what we're doing now. Like our values are in everything we do. We talk about them all the time. They're part of performance reviews. They are on the wall, but they're a lot more than that. And I think that was something we should have done earlier that we did a poor job of.
Max Chopovsky:
I find it so interesting. I find it so interesting that there is, if you squint real hard, a silver lining to this whole thing, you know? I mean, as you said, and you're not the only one to say this. Companies got a lot more intentional about. what they were doing, how they were communicating, what their processes were. And that may have happened without the pandemic, it probably would have taken it a lot longer, but it certainly didn't hurt that they were forced to do business differently.
David Rabie:
Mm-hmm.
Max Chopovsky:
What advice would you give to companies that are looking to leverage their real estate to support and optimize their employee experience?
David Rabie:
That's a really good question. I think if we could start from scratch or if we think about another office for us, I would think really, really hard about how your employees are using the office, would use the office, and how you want them to use the office. and try to design around that. And I think there's
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
David Rabie:
a lot of new office spaces that are trying to do this as well, but I think it's somewhat culture dependent. The kind of culture you have should feed into the kind of office environment you want and what an office build out and design should look like. So that's probably the one piece of advice I would give. I think for us, a new space would probably look a little different than the space we have today. We've made this work certainly, and it's a pretty good space, but we would do things a little differently, I imagine, if we were starting from scratch.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah, that's a really good advice. And I think it's salient because a lot of companies might not really appreciate the kind of effort and sort of thought and time that goes into a well thought out. you know, office design process, you know, it
David Rabie:
Mm-hmm.
Max Chopovsky:
just takes a while and it's, uh, and it's iterative and it's difficult, but it's certainly worth it in the long run when you know that your people are using the office exactly as it should be. And it sort of removes friction,
David Rabie:
Mm-hmm.
Max Chopovsky:
you know? Um, so is there anything else that you, uh, want to talk about or mention with respect to, uh, you know, the role of your space, uh, coming back to the office or anything like that.
David Rabie:
I mean, unique to Tovala, I think, is that food is like at the center of our space, which is part of the differentiator for us of, you know, you walk into our space, there's a test kitchen with 30 ovens on the wall and chefs just cooking things at all times and all parts of the day,
Max Chopovsky:
That's cool.
David Rabie:
which is super cool. And I think it's like part of what makes our office environment pretty fun and differentiated. And you know, I think. Probably the thing that has most stood out about our office since the beginning was like the food was in the middle of it, the same way the food is kind of the core product that we're selling to people.
Max Chopovsky:
Are you having your chefs make lunches for the team that's in the office?
David Rabie:
We had a very short era where we did that in like 2016.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
David Rabie:
And then quickly the chefs are like, we don't have time to make food for everyone. Like that's crazy. So it didn't, I think it was like a once a week thing was what I was hoping for. And that lasted for a few weeks and that was the end of it. But because they're testing so many things and creating new dishes all the time, like de facto there is a ton of food to try and eat over the course of most days. So they're not doing that for us, but we get to be the beneficiaries of it.
Max Chopovsky:
That's awesome, man.
David Rabie:
Yeah.
Max Chopovsky:
That's awesome. Well, that's all I had, man. Thanks for joining.
David Rabie:
Yeah, my pleasure.
Max Chopovsky:
David Rabi, co-founder, CEO of Tovala. Again, man, thanks for joining and sharing your wisdom.
David Rabie:
My pleasure, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Max Chopovsky:
Of course. That was Future of Work. Back to the office. Thank you for joining. We'll talk to you next time.