QMi Systems [Founder] - Increasing University Food Service Revenue through Pre-orders

Read time: 6 minutes

2012 (San Jose, CA) - While still a student at San Jose State University, I co-founded my first startup. QMi Systems was focused on a simple problem: university food services were inefficient, and students hated waiting in long lines.

Our solution? A pre-order system that would let students order ahead and pick up their food without the wait.

The Problem

Anyone who’s been to a university dining hall during peak hours knows the pain:

Long lines during lunch rush
Wasted time between classes
Unpredictable wait times making it hard to plan

For the food services, the problems were equally frustrating:

Uneven demand causing staffing challenges
Food waste from over-preparation
Lost revenue from students who gave up and left

We saw an opportunity to solve both sides of the equation.

The Solution

QMi Systems was a mobile pre-order platform for university food services. Students could:

Browse menus from campus dining locations
Place orders ahead of time
Pay through the app
Pick up at a designated time — no waiting

For food services, this meant:

Better demand forecasting
Reduced waste
Increased throughput during peak hours
Higher customer satisfaction

What We Built

We developed a working prototype and piloted it with food service locations on the SJSU campus. The technology worked — students could place orders, and the kitchen could fulfill them.

But building the technology was the easy part.

The Challenges

University bureaucracy moves slowly

Selling into universities is hard. Decision-making is distributed across multiple departments — dining services, IT, procurement, student affairs. Getting alignment took forever.

Changing behavior is harder than building technology

Even when we had buy-in, getting students to change their habits was difficult. The app worked great for those who used it, but most students defaulted to their existing routine of just showing up and waiting.

We were too early

Mobile ordering wasn’t yet mainstream. This was before Starbucks mobile order, before DoorDash, before the pandemic accelerated contactless everything. The behavior shift we needed hadn’t happened yet.

Key Takeaways

Timing matters as much as the idea

QMi Systems was solving a real problem with a viable solution. But the market wasn’t ready. A few years later, mobile food ordering became ubiquitous. We were right about the future — just too early to capture it.

Learning: Being early is often the same as being wrong.

Startups are the best education

Despite not becoming a massive success, QMi Systems taught me more about building products, talking to customers, and taking risks than any classroom ever could.

Learning: The lessons from a failed startup compound for the rest of your career.

Start lean, learn fast

We kept the team small and moved quickly. This allowed us to test ideas without burning through resources.

Learning: Speed of learning is everything in the early days.

What Came Next

QMi Systems didn’t become a billion-dollar company, but it set the foundation for everything that came after. The experience gave me:

Confidence to take risks
Pattern recognition for startup challenges
A network of people who believed in building things

It directly led to my next venture, Connect’d, and shaped how I approach every project since.

Your first startup probably won’t be your last. The point isn’t to succeed immediately — it’s to learn enough to succeed eventually.