Ex-banker likes risk on the menu
Co-founder of OrderIn fled Wall Street’s strictures
DINESH Patel always knew he would not stay in the corporate world for very long. He knew it from his first day at auditing giant Deloitte in New York and the point was drummed home during his years as a banker at Goldman Sachs.
Back in South Africa where he was born, Patel unleashed his inner entrepreneur, starting a company which he hopes will change the way South Africans order food: OrderIn.
Patel says that while he learnt a great deal and loved the experience at Deloitte and Goldman, he always had a gnawing feeling inside that he wanted to start something on his own.
“I didn’t think I fitted in well with the structures,” says Patel. “I don’t do well with rules — when someone says: ‘Don’t do it,’ my first response it so say: ‘Why not?’”
Still, he says, working in a large corporation is a savvy way to learn about structures and processes, the sort of know-how you need to build a business.
Patel teamed up with Heini Booysen, the former chief operating officer for the South African arm of discount deal website Groupon. In June last year, they launched OrderIn, which now has 650 restaurants on the books including Nando’s, Primi Piatti, Simply Asia, Debonairs and Scooters Pizza.
“There’s something in some people that makes them want to take a massive risk and they are attracted to the environment a new business presents. I grew up in Durban in the Indian community where everyone’s a businessman,” says Patel.
To some extent, his company is a rival for Mr Delivery, the takeaway delivery service now
He went to the US after winning a scholarship to play golf
owned by online retailer Takealot.com, and has been around for decades.
But while Mr Delivery has only recently added online orders to its menu, this is OrderIn’s starting point.
OrderIn — which is now available in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban — charges restaurants 8% per order. In some instances the restaurant adds a delivery fee.
Online food ordering, while huge overseas, is still a nascent idea in South Africa.
“Customers want a quality product within a reasonable amount of time, so the challenge has been to build a platform that can process tens of thousands of orders daily, while intelligently guiding users through the ordering process in the most efficient manner possible,” says Booysen.
Patel decided he wanted to launch a business in South Africa after he came back from New York for his sister’s wedding in 2009. “There was something really interesting happening in South Africa and I wanted to be a part of it.”
The idea for OrderIn came from an internet service called Seamlessweb, which Patel “used and loved” almost daily in New York. It lets you order food from restaurants online and is very popular with New York’s financial industry.
He met the co-founder of Seamlessweb, Jason Finger, in New York, and they kept in touch after Patel moved back to South Africa. He joined up with a friend involved in internet strategy at Naspers and spent three months putting together a proposal. Finger invested and put Patel in touch with his tech guys.
To some extent, Patel’s story is one of a South African going abroad to learn his craft, then coming back to launch a business and create jobs. In another way, his story is more unusual than that. He went to the US to play golf at Florida State University, before studying finance and accounting as a route into Deloitte and Goldman Sachs.
So what does he love about what he’s doing now?
“Changing the way people do things for the better. We’re disrupting an entire industry and customers are loving it. You should see some of the e-mails we get from customers once they’ve tried OrderIn — they love it!”
Patel says it is a natural instinct to want to leave a legacy.
“I think in a corporate environment the results are less clear on an individual basis, especially in banking.”