From Illinois Tech Magazine: Delivering on a Tasty Idea

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By Scott Lewis
From Illinois Tech Magazine—Chow Bus 1280x850

One day, when he was a graduate student, Linxin Wen (M.P.A. ’15) started knocking on doors in Chicago’s Chinatown. All he had to sell was an idea, born of his own frustration that many of his favorite “mom and pop” restaurants weren’t listed on mobile food-delivery platforms. What was Wen’s idea? He would deliver the food himself.

“I just went and pitched to about 20 or 30 restaurants,” he recalls. “Only one restaurant agreed to do it. The others just said ‘Go away.’”

For Wen, one was enough, and he asked his friends—and their friends, as word spread—to text their food orders to him. Then he would call the restaurant, place the orders, and make the deliveries. “They loved the service,” he says, “and it just keeps going.”

Read more on the Illinois Tech Magazine website.

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