A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders · Mistral.vc

He moved to the US with nothing. Now he does $750M ARR. | Mateo Marietti, Founder of CookUnity

·56 min·2 clips

I moved to the US with literally zero credibility

Mateo Marietti, founder of CookUnity, joins host Pablo to discuss his journey from Argentina to building a $750M ARR food marketplace in the US. Marietti is a second-time entrepreneur who previously built a large cloud kitchen business in South America. The episode explores his immigrant founder experience and the pivotal insights that shaped CookUnity. Marietti moved to New York in 2016 with his wife and co-founder, Clara, to start CookUnity after running a successful 600-employee cloud kitchen operation in Argentina. His first U.S. funding round was a $600,000 friends-and-family angel investment. CookUnity initially operated as a virtual brand on Seamless, selling ready-to-eat meals to bankers and lawyers using employer stipends. A key discovery in early 2018 was that some customers were ordering four to ten meals at a time to take home, revealing a demand for weekly meal planning. Marietti pivoted the entire business, shutting down the on-demand model to focus on a subscription-style weekly meal plan service, despite doing around $2 million in revenue at the time. He describes the clear product-market fit of his first Argentine venture, where phones were constantly busy and they couldn't handle demand. Marietti emphasizes the importance of constant momentum and "action produces information," quoting Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. A surprising insight was that customers, not the founding team, ultimately defined the product's job-to-be-done as a convenient, high-quality solution for daily meals. He explains his fascination with Airbnb-type marketplaces that aggregate fragmented supply, unlike DoorDash's logistics layer. The model's flywheel effect allows CookUnity to scale quality and selection by adding more independent chefs, now offering over 25 cuisines. Marietti admits his initial naivety about the U.S. market led to two messy years of learning to fundraise and build a team with zero local credibility. The tone is conversational and reflective, blending personal founder stories with tactical business frameworks. Listeners get an educational deep dive into marketplace dynamics and immigrant entrepreneurship. This episode is ideal for founders interested in marketplace businesses, product-market fit discovery, and the realities of being an immigrant entrepreneur. Listeners seeking a highly polished, purely data-driven case study might find the reflective, story-heavy style less appealing.

As heard by us

A cross-border founder story that treats product-market fit as a working problem, not a slogan.

Mateo Marietti's CookUnity story feels like a reset told in real time: entering the U.S. without local credibility, learning the market from scratch, and trying to make meal delivery stick as a habit.

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Why you'd press play

You want the real path from zero U.S. credibility to a repeatable meal subscription.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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