Wow
@VeeJayBee. Thank you for linking that article. I genuinely never knew this. The article goes on at length about how the REAL founders from Berlin got the company going and launched in 2011. Then this blurb several segments down:
“ By the summer of 2012, as word got out of the coming launch of Blue Apron and Plated in the U.S., the founders decided they needed to open an office in New York City, too--and sent Schmincke.
Following the Rocket playbook, the advance teams were typically made up of other young generalists, often former bankers and consultants, or Rocket's own entrepreneurs-in-residence. To gin up enthusiastic press, these outposts sometimes cast a photogenic local employee as a co-founder. In the U.K., Patrick Drake, an English friend of Richter's, appeared on a BBC broadcast as HelloFresh's co-founder and "head chef." (Drake had previously been a lawyer at Goldman Sachs and never worked full time in a kitchen or restaurant.) When the service arrived in Pittsburgh, the Post-Gazette reported that Marushka Bland, a young mergers and acquisitions lawyer who had gone to culinary school, "helped co-found HelloFresh." In reality, she'd been hired as an intern, although by then she had the title chief brand officer. "They had a pretty relaxed view of what founder meant," says Bland, who left the company in May 2013, after being in that post for three months.”
He always gave me the creeps. But JEEZ.