Welcome to Meet Your Manager where you’ll get a chance to learn about the individuals driving Zerocater’s growing sales engine to change a $169 billion industry with technology that helps companies build a better workplace culture through food.
Former engineer turned accomplished business leader
- Prabjot Jaaj
- VP of Product & Engineering
- San Francisco, CA
What did you do prior to joining Zerocater and how did you end up at Zerocater?
I started my career as a software engineer, then transitioned to being an Engineering Manager until I left to do my MBA. After my MBA, I joined McKinsey & Company where I did a lot of Strategy, Technology and Operations work with senior execs across industries. The combination of these experiences really prepared me well to think like a business and a technical leader. I moved to the Bay area in 2013 and spent a little over 2 years in Yahoo’s Ads Product group as the Sr. Director of Business Operations and Strategy and then spent some time working on launching my own startup, which taught me a lot.
My discussions with Zerocater happened right around the time when I was evaluating my future plans with my startup. I started the process with Zerocater unsure of whether I was ready to stop working on my startup, however as I got to know the team and learned about their plans to dominate in the B2B FoodTech space, the decision to join the team became really easy.
What is unique or motivating about the work you do at Zerocater?
Helping companies build a stronger culture through food is a mission that resonates very deeply with me. Food has always been an integral part of my family’s culture and tradition. Serving delicious meals has been one of the fundamental gestures of how we welcomed people into our home and how my extended family came together and built long-lasting memories. Making it easy for companies to build a stronger culture through food is a “delicious” challenge that I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into.
Food is an incredibly complex product … no two dishes are the same and no two people have the exact same preference. Curating the perfect meal for our clients by understanding individual preferences and accurately aggregating them up for a group of people that work together is the challenge we are working to address through data, analytics, and technology!
Since you are fairly new to joining Zerocater, what project or initiative are you most excited about?
At Zerocater, we understand how difficult it is to learn about the food preferences of a group and match those preferences to food in order to curate the perfect meal or snack experience for that group. Doing this consistently at scale across multiple cities makes the challenge 10X more complex. No one has figured out how to do this effectively yet, however, we believe we know-how. We are building products that take this challenge head-on in both Catering and Snacks, which is incredibly exciting. We have made incredible progress in a very short time and bringing the rest of our ambitious product roadmap to reality is what makes every day at Zerocater exciting to me.
Which Zerocater value resonates most with your team?
Our team exemplifies every Zerocater value every day, but if I had to pick one, I would say “Be Customer Obsessed” probably resonates the most. Every Product, Design and Engineering team member comes to work to delight our clients by making it easier for our teams to send the perfect meals and snacks to our clients. We take every comment and piece of feedback very seriously and work together to build and enhance products that address the biggest needs and pain points of our customers.
If there was one word or phrase that describes the Zerocater culture, what would it be and why?
“All for one, one for all”
Our team is what makes it enjoyable for me to come to work everyday. We have a group of amazing people who work hard, love to have fun, care about each other and treat each other with trust and respect. It’s so refreshing to see all parts of the company work together to make each other successful. We all work together to make Zerocater successful and in turn, the team does everything needed to make each individual successful in their role.
What was your least favorite food as a child? Do you still hate it or do you love it now?
I can’t remember one specific food that I disliked. I was generally not a fan of veggies or salad. This has definitely changed now. While I won’t say I love it now, I do like a good salad or a side of grilled veggies.
If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life what would it be?
ICE CREAM! I love desserts, and Ice Cream is definitely my favorite dessert. I’ll just need a lot of Ice Cream to keep me going every day for the rest of my life ☺.
Want to join Prab’s team? Check out the latest engineering job opportunities with Zerocater!
