Kong CEO Talks Sleeping on Travis Kalanick’s Couch and Living on $1,000 a Month

Before Kong CEO Augusto Marietti co-founded the API company, he traded his pasta-cooking skills for a spot on former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s couch.

“Travis gave me his place to stay for a few weeks on the condition that I cook carbonara for his better half once a week,” Marietti told A16z general partner Martin Casado during an episode of the company’s podcast.

Marietti detailed how, after spending months coding in a garage in Milan, he and his co-founders spent the last money they had to travel to the United States on tourist visas in a last-ditch effort to secure funding for the company, which was then called Mashape.

“We had 90 days to make it or break it,” he said. “We knew that if we didn’t manage to restart, we would go back to Italy broke, and that was that.”

In an interview with Business Insider, Marietti said breaking into Silicon Valley would be very different today. Mashape got his first big break after Marietti obtained a list of hundreds of emails from a Stanford entrepreneurship event and cold-called them.

“There are about 100 types of networks in the Valley, and you meet a lot of investors and the flywheel is much bigger,” he told Business Insider.

Although it may be easier to start a business today, Marietti said he and co-founder Marco Palladino have benefited from the lack of competition. Now, Marietti said the spaces are much more crowded.

“It’s much harder to hire, to recruit a team, to grow a team, to hire leaders, to build a management team – like building a business that lasts, rather than just building a pump-and-dump business, it’s much, much harder,” Marietti told Business Insider.

Two weeks before their visas expired, Marietti said they raised the funds needed to survive through an investment from some members of YouTube’s original management team, including Kevin Donahue, YouTube’s vice president of content.

The deal was negotiated at Kalanick’s jam pad in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, he said. Marietti said the Uber co-founder did more than just give him a place to sleep after the initial offer wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“I don’t want to take this deal, ‘Screw it,’ I say, ‘OK, OK, we’re going to leave.’ And I was very naive, 20 years, OK, OK, they’ll come back,” he said.

Marietti said Kalanick then came to him and told him that if they left, they would never see the investors or their money again. Marietti claimed the Uber co-founder even went so far as to lock the door to the house to make sure the YouTube bigwigs didn’t leave.

Marietti and his co-founders eventually struck a deal and secured $51,000 in funding.

$1,000 a month, a workspace at Starbucks, and eating way too much tuna pasta

Marietti said he and his two co-founders returned to Italy and came back on B1 visas, which do not allow employment or wages. The trio managed to live on $1,000 a month for a little over a year, he said, and the company wrote promissory notes to the co-founders for funding.

To save money, they all shared a mattress in an Airbnb.

Marietti said his office was a Starbucks.

“We were buying rice, beans, tuna and pasta,” he said. “And the reason is we needed to find the right amount of carbs and produce in the cheapest way possible.”

They ate so much tuna pasta that Marietti said that, to this day, he and Palladino can’t stand the sight.

Marietti said he had no choice but to ride it out in the startup’s early days, contrasting his experience with how it has become fashionable for many current founders to limit parties and other outside influences. At the time, San Francisco was also cheaper.

“Now it’s more of a vibe, it’s more about fashion,” Marietti told Business Insider. “We would just do it out of necessity.”

Marietti said today’s founders will likely have to work even harder if they want to succeed.

“So I think today’s founders will probably have to put in the same intensity, if not more, because it’s very competitive and there are probably 50 other startups trying to do what you were doing at the same time – just to work, to stay ahead and make it happen.”