Kevin Rice co-founded Hathway, a digital agency, in a garage with his college best friend Jesse Dundon straight after graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and spent thirteen years as its President and CMO. After a 2016 layoff nearly stalled the company, he narrowed the firm to the restaurant industry, rebuilt its go-to-market around partners such as Olo and Salesforce and around proprietary IP (the Nom Nom reference architecture), and grew it from roughly 30 people to 250 and $42 million in revenue, bootstrapped, before it was acquired by Bounteous in 2021. He now hosts CEOs & ABCs, a podcast for leaders who want to advance their careers without disappearing from their kids' lives, invests in AI-native startups through Theorem One Capital, and advises consumer and restaurant brands. He is a single father of three boys.
“We didn't have the financial reserves to keep people on staff. It just wasn't, we didn't have that option. We didn't have that luxury.”
“I don't think we went as deep as she wanted to and we went deeper than we wanted to as an executive team.”
“That was half a million dollars of revenue annually that was going to be off of our books. And this was just after we had done a layoff.”
“We needed revenue, but more importantly, we needed the right kind of revenue, the kind of revenue that could be stacked and scaled sustainably over time without leading us towards another cliff.”
“Then something that felt very hard to sell and very ethereal became very tangible.”
“So now instead of selling Hathway, instead of selling Nom Nom, we were selling speed to market.”
“No longer was it about who had the best creative. No longer was it about who's the cheapest or who has the best reputation or who has the most case studies. Now all of a sudden, all they were thinking was who can get me to market fast enough.”
“I don't know if you can ever be too niched because you can always expand later, right?”