Tovala Founder David Rabie on the Persistence of Entrepreneurial Fear

The seed for Tovala was planted in a business school kitchen, where Rabie found himself exhausted by the manual labor of prepping weekly meals. He envisioned a system that could automate the process, eventually launching a service in 2015 that pairs a proprietary oven with fresh, scan-to-cook ingredients. His drive to build the company was fueled by his family’s immigrant history, having watched his father navigate the American business landscape after leaving Iran. This background instilled in him both a reverence for the American dream and an unusually high tolerance for the volatility of startup life.

That resilience was tested repeatedly. Following a $70,000 victory at a University of Chicago venture challenge, Rabie struggled to bridge the gap between concept and capital, eventually relying on a lean team and a successful $100,000 Kickstarter campaign to stay afloat. The company faced existential threats during the 2020 pandemic—when a Series B funding round collapsed at the final hour—and again in 2023, when the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank left the firm’s cash reserves in limbo for three agonizing days. Having weathered these crises, Rabie views his current profitability as a hard-won milestone, even if the anxiety of his early years refuses to dissipate.