Puente

Who the customer is

Row house chefs are contracted food service workers in Stanford’s self-operated and Greek housing system, serving roughly 27 houses through Student Organized Services (SOS). They work about 34 weeks a year, late September to mid-June, with no employment over summer, winter break, Thanksgiving, or spring break. Each chef plans, preps, and serves two daily weekday meals for 55 to 75 people, handling menu planning, ordering, portioning, storage, dietary accommodations, and last-minute guest counts.

Most started in entry-level roles like dishwashing and worked their way up. Average tenure is ten years, so they build relationship with the students, houses, and the University

Then the year ends

In-season wages are $34.39 an hour. Unemployment during furlough runs roughly $400–600 a month, which is functionally meaningless against Bay Area costs.

Finding a job over the summer is never consistent, it’s one of the biggest struggles we have.

Joel, Pi Beta Phi chef

Three barriers to Summer Employment

Sometimes it is difficult to communicate with students because I don’t know English very well, especially if they’re talking fast. That’s why I always end up speaking Spanish with the kids who know even a little bit of it.

Ana María, Kappa Sigma chef

Sizing it

We assumed a 10% take rate paid by the employer, well below the staffing industry’s typical 25%+ and on-demand competitors like Wonolo at ~45% since Puente is not a full staffing agency. Chefs keep their entire wage.

Existing Gaps in Market

Every existing option either targets the wrong user or is inaccessible because of language, tech, or design.

Across all of these solutions, what was missing was a low-friction way to find seasonal work quickly, without tech fluency, without threatening the fall position, and without starting from zero.

Word of mouth was a promising lead that we could develope. The chefs can leverage surrounding community, meaning residents, alumni, local families and nearby businesses to vouch for them at scale.

Constraints we wrote before we designed anything

Crazy 8s, then a matrix

We generated fifteen concepts, then plotted all of them on a 4×4 matrix across feasibility and impact. Six landed in the top-right quadrant (realistically buildable and most likely to move the needle) and we built out those 6 prototypes.

The six we built and tested

Each prototype went in front of chefs, less to find a favorite than to find out which layer of the problem each one actually touched.

What testing actually returned

Claudia responded most strongly to Cocina English, connecting it immediately to colleagues who struggle with utensil names and allergen vocabulary. Joel was most excited by Voz Trabajo, calling resumes a weak point and suggesting a feedback loop so chefs who don’t get a job learn what was missing.

But when Claudia evaluated Voz Trabajo, she mentioned the key reason we ended up rejecting that idea:

The hardest part isn’t writing a resume, it’s finding the right opportunity in the first place.

Claudia, row house chef, on the Spanish resume builder

Testing surfaced three strong contenders: Cocina English, Voz Trabajo, and Puente. The two that people liked most were the two that solved the root issue of finding a job. English proficiency and resume building only matter once a chef has found a job.

Why each runner-up lost

The constraint we broke on purpose

Our original viability constraint said chefs do not build their own profiles, but relying entirely on one human coordinator for all the chefs does not scale. So we adapted our constraint. No, onboarding is self-guided by default, and Nick at SOS agreed to build profiles on behalf of chefs with lower tech proficiency.

Why the demand side was defensible

Nick (SOS CEO) confirmed that fall employment has been protected for chefs who take summer work for as long as the contractor system has existed. Private chef demand in California is rising: $38 to $71 an hour in San Francisco, San Jose, and Atherton, with the global personal chef services market projected to grow at 6.7% CAGR through 2030.

Puente is a seasonal job matching platform for Stanford row house staff. The core loop is deliberately small:

Home

• “Your fall job is always protected” sits above the fold. This directly addresses the loyalty trap. Claudia turned down summer work not because jobs were unavailable but because accepting felt risky.
• The stats row uses real interview numbers. $0 to join, a 3-month income gap, $38 average hourly rate.
• The EN/ES toggle is in the nav. To help our ESL users navigate the platform better

Find Work

Shows open roles and gives chefs a way to reach out, with the emphasis on work arriving rather than being hunted.

• WhatsApp match banner. Inbound matches arrive as live notifications with YES/NO buttons.
• “Spanish OK” filter. Instantly narrows to employers where language is not a barrier. Claudia specifically mentioned this as a bottleneck in her interviews
• Cards expand in place. Job details open inline instead of on a new screen, keeping the tech literacy requirements minimal
• Follow-through happens in WhatsApp. Instead of keeping track of another platform, we meet the chefs where they already are interacting.

My Profile

Presents the chef’s qualifications to employers without requiring the chef to write anything.

• “Verified by Stanford SOS: Fall position protected.”
• Skills as tags, not prose. Translates experience without requiring a detailed resume. Claudia called a pre-built profile a major relief.
• Availability as structured data. Dates, hours, and travel radius give employers what they need with zero writing burden on the chef.

How It Works

• “No app download. No password. We do the hard part.”
• Step 1: The conversation can be in Spanish. The entry point to the product requires zero technology from the chef.
• Step 3: Affirms real WhatsApp exchange.
• Step 5: the return guarantee.

For Employers

The demand side: where families and businesses post jobs, browse chef profiles, and request a chef.

• Skill tags over resumes. “60+ daily service,” “dietary accommodations,” “bilingual” translate kitchen experience into language employers actually understand.
• Seasonal acknowledgment callout. Tells employers upfront that all chefs return in September.
• Free to post. Zero cost removes the biggest barrier to first-time demand-side adoption
• Browse before posting. Employers discover chefs by proximity, availability, and skills before committing, matching how trust-based hiring actually works.

The Numbers

At a 10% take rate on a $112 average booking, 25 bookings a summer, and an estimated three-summer employer relationship, LTV lands at $714 and the maximum allowable CAC at $238 on a 3:1 benchmark. Four acquisition channels (Bay Area Stanford alumni groups, Nextdoor, a structured referral credit, and Berkeley Parents Network) model out between $2.08 and $28.57. Even the most expensive returns 25:1, which says the constraint on this business is supply-side trust, not acquisition spend.

Where it stands

Puente came out of MS&E 265 as a validated concept with a working prototype and a launch model, not a deployed product. I’m still working on it.

The roadmap