The Power of Persistence
Grubhub cofounder Matt Maloney, SM ’00, MBA ’10, reflects on his journey since winning the NVC in honor of its 30th anniversary.
- By
- June 03, 2026
- Entrepreneurship
To kick off a celebration of its 30th anniversary, the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation held a fireside chat with Matt Maloney, SM ’00, MBA ’10, cofounder of Grubhub and 2006 winner of the NVC’s Rattan L. Khosa, ’79, First-Place Prize. Moderated by Mark Tebbe, adjunct professor of entrepreneurship and entrepreneur-in residence at the Polsky Center, the conversation offered a candid look at the evolution of Maloney’s startup journey—from bootstrapping in Chicago to leading one of the top food-delivery platforms in the United States.
Initially, Maloney’s plan was to generate advertising revenue from restaurants through premium placements on the company’s website. But traction was slow, and it quickly became clear the model wasn’t working. After revisiting the plan, he pivoted toward delivery, aligning Grubhub’s business model directly with restaurant performance.
“Once I could say, ‘I make a dime when you make a dollar,’ that’s when everything changed,” Maloney explained. When he came to Booth and entered Grubhub into the 2006 NVC, he was a part-time student who “had never taken a business or finance class” before. “I had a business that worked, but I didn’t know how to run it properly and communicate it to investors,” he said. “That’s the reason I came to Booth.”
During the competition, Maloney leaned heavily on Booth faculty and Polsky Center mentors for feedback. “We bombed our first pitch,” he admitted. “After that, we went to every faculty advisor we could.”
Running a growing company while pursuing his MBA gave Maloney the opportunity to apply classroom lessons in real time. “I was in a marketing class when the professor said the easiest conversion is a repeat customer,” he recalled. “Later that day, I sent an email to all our customers asking them to order again—and it ended up being the biggest day we’d ever had.”
“Being an entrepreneur is about persistence. There are massive highs and lows. The successful ones are the people who stick with it longest.”
— Matt Maloney
The classes and program gave him the lessons and framework to refine his pitch—and ultimately win the NVC. “We won first place, and I immediately went all in,” he said, but the validation didn’t instantly translate into funding.
“We spent the whole summer pitching and got nothing,” he said. “One investor told me it was a great idea, but it would take a lot longer than I thought—and they were right.” Maloney and his team continued to refine the business, eventually closing their first round of funding in late 2007. Expansion from Chicago soon followed—first to San Francisco, Boston, and New York—as Grubhub began proving its model across major US cities.
As the company scaled, Maloney leaned heavily on data to drive decisions. “We had a lot of data that strongly supported our scaling,” he said. “Because of that, we knew early on that Grubhub could be a good public company. And at that time, that was the typical goal for a startup like ours.”
That intuition proved correct: In 2014, Grubhub went public following its merger with Seamless, cementing its place as a leader in the expanding online food-delivery market. Maloney led the company until 2020, when Grubhub was sold to Netherlands-based Just Eat Takeaway for $7.3 billion in stock.
Now exploring new ventures, Maloney reflected on two decades of entrepreneurship. “Being an entrepreneur is about persistence,” he said. “There are massive highs and lows. The successful ones are the people who stick with it longest.”
When asked what advice he’d offer the next generation of NVC teams, Maloney didn’t hesitate.
“Just do it. If you believe, go all in,” he said. “It’s a hobby until you make it your job. Once you take that leap, you can’t ignore problems anymore—and that’s when real progress happens.”
A modified version of this story first appeared on the Polsky Center’s website as “NVC@30 Fireside Chat with Grubhub Cofounder Matt Maloney Highlights the Power of Persistence.”