About

Founder’s Story

Jack Zante Hays, CEO & CTO

Formerly a competitive rower for the Pacific Rowing Club and US Rowing Junior National Team, I became a contract bike courier at age 16 so that I could earn money while exercising. I delivered in downtown San Francisco for different delivery companies, mainly Uber Eats and Postmates. During my delivery shifts I came to notice several inefficiencies with the instant delivery model they all used. These inefficiencies were so foundational that they resulted in me witnessing multiple blundered attempts to expand instant delivery beyond the food industry. In summary, the main problems stem from a lack of communication with the couriers: they work for corporations directly as one of thousands and thus receive no special attention whatsoever. Any improvements to their system have to be made at a systemic level, which brings the ultimate limiting truth: A courier mega fleet with thousands of couriers processing millions of products is too large to be managed by a single entity efficiently, at least for instant delivery. Sadly it was the only delivery option for local retailers at the time. My first engineering attempt to step past them and independently start my own smaller scale food delivery service resulted in Google temporarily shutting me out of their office tools for violation of their terms of service. It was at that moment that I realized the proper decentralized delivery market solution had yet to exist, and it needed to be made. I founded Shmoodle shortly after while programming at a hackathon in downtown SF on March 3rd, 2018. 

I believe that instant delivery retail can be so much more than it is now, and Shmoodle is my solution.