Hurricane Sandy Threatens Launch
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A story about how Hurricane Sandy almost destroyed Plated during their launch in October 2012.
"We were getting ready for our big launch, doing what we thought we should do - trying to get press, getting the website ready, and getting inventory in order. Nick, my co-founder, got Thrillist in DC, here, and Boston to do city-specific pieces on us. We were excited, thinking this would be it - they'd write these pieces and we'd be successful overnight.
About 3 days before the launch, which was on Monday in October 2012, we started hearing noise about a storm coming. That turned out to be Hurricane Sandy. It hit overnight Sunday into Monday and devastated the area - no power, no internet, no cell phone service in most parts of the city.
We came within about 3 inches of our one sad little warehouse being flooded out of business, which would have completely ruined us. We had absolutely no backup money at that point. We survived thankfully - it's a fun story now in hindsight, but it definitely came very close to killing the business. After that, we were able to continue growing and eventually raise proper institutional capital."
Josh Hix
Best known as the co-founder of meal prep delivery service Plated, Josh Hix is a serial entrepreneur with several successful tech startups under his belt. The 2003 Georgia Institute of Technology graduate embarked on his first startup endeavor directly after graduation. Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering freshly in-hand, Hix co-founded ZeeWise, a database aggregation and rollup tool for franchise and retail businesses. He served as the company’s CTO for five years, and continues to sit on the board.