It’s 2 a.m., and I’m in my element.
A quiet hotel room, reruns of Forensic Files on the TV, and the latest iteration of the code in front of me. I keep returning to the same question I’ve asked about every piece of Apollo we’ve ever shipped. It’s never “does it technically work?” or “will it pass QA?” It’s this: would the cashier logging into a kiosk at 7 a.m., or the nutrition director reconciling counts at the end of a long day, find this obvious? Frictionless? Even pleasing to use?
That question has been the north star for everything I’ve built.
Tomorrow morning, in our first go-live district, cashiers will log into their kiosks and start serving students on Apollo School Nutrition Point of Service, while in the same platform we deliver student information capabilities we’ve spent months on. It’s nerve-wracking and thrilling in equal measure.
There will be things to fix. There always are. We’re fortunate to have a partner who understands that and extends grace for the inevitable hiccup, and I never want to abuse that trust. So I’m not delegating day one. I’m on-site for it. A seamless first morning is something I show up for, not something I hand off.
This moment has been a long time coming.
School nutrition has been a passion of mine since the early days of my last company. It meant long nights, obsessing over workflows, and a lot of honest conversations with directors about what actually breaks down during service. Those conversations taught me something most EdTech vendors miss entirely: school nutrition isn’t a feature. It’s an enterprise inside a school district. And the people who run it have been underserved by software for decades.
Most of the platforms they’ve had to choose from were built by people who’ve never stood in a cafeteria at 7:15 trying to move a line. They were built to check compliance boxes, not to serve the human at the point of service. Directors know it. Cashiers know it. They’ve lived with it because the alternatives, and the support behind them, were worse.
I’ve never been willing to accept that.
What I’ve always wanted to build is one platform where enterprise-grade school nutrition and student information aren’t two products bolted together, but a single system where each makes the other stronger. I push our team to think bigger than “an SIS” or “a nutrition solution.” We’re building a student data platform. And that distinction matters.
It would be easier to ship something an inch deep and a mile wide, a hundred features that all work adequately, and call it comprehensive. I want the opposite: real depth in every module. I want a director coming from a standalone nutrition system to feel like they upgraded, not settled. And I want the registrar, the counselor, and the IT administrator to feel exactly the same way.
The intersection of those two worlds shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be the point. A student’s eligibility status flowing straight to the point of service. A director pulling reimbursement data without exporting a single spreadsheet. A platform that anticipates the workflow instead of fighting it. That’s what we’re building. That’s what keeps me up at 2 a.m.
The directors who arrive before the sun, the cashiers who know every kid’s name and order by heart, the managers who somehow make the math work every month: they deserve a partner who takes their work as seriously as they do.
The countdown is on. We’re a day out.
And the people in those cafeterias are exactly who I’m showing up for.
