Hmmm, I don’t know if I’d want to go as far as labeling myself “pizza bitch” but I’m glad you’ve got it covered.

You are absolutely right, it becomes a huge pain in the ass and point of contention. People are upset when there is something, isn’t something, when things aren’t healthy enough or when things are too healthy. What we did at Twilio was have an email address you could send requests to, and we’d batch them all up and try to make it fit in the budget. Once you have a full time office manager, revenue etc. you might as well try to satisfy as many people as you can since these folks are working extremely hard, but it is easy to slip over into taking it for granted too. In the early days cheap, easy food is the way to go and it is pretty much up to whoever orders it. I try to draw the line at full meals, as that seems to set reasonable expectations about the types of stuff. Snacks are just that, snacks to tide you over until the next meal. But it’s still a pain in the ass.

In my experience (of keeping an office stacked with snacks) it seems like snacks & drinks can become a point of contention. EG: “We have all this Coke and Diet Coke, but I only like Coke Zero. Can we get that too?” or “It’s unfair that we keep the kitchen full of nuts, cheese and candy; I dont’ like cheese and would prefer meat snacks – and we should have Skittles instead of M&Ms.”

How far do you go to cater to the individual whims of loads of people?

At PIE, we’ve made it a point to cater at least three meals every week. It keeps the stress levels down, makes sure that folks are stopping to eat, and helps lower the burn rate across the board. But we could still do better on the snacks, so we’re going to put this to good use 😉

+1 to Ahmed and his team for keeping the Startup Weekender’s well fed in SF!

Us lost boys, lost in our toys and forgetting to take care of ourselves.