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Adam Zbar is a Webby-winning Bay Area entrepreneur. He is currently the CEO of Sun Basket, a San Francisco-based organic meal kit delivery company, which he co-founded with Chef Justine Kelly.
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Before founding Sun Basket, Zbar was the CEO of Tap11, a social analytics company that served over 500 clients, including Google, Disney and Universal Pictures. He sold the technology company to the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, in 2011.
Prior to his involvement with Tap11, Zbar was the CEO of Zannel, a Webby Award-winning microblogging service. Zbar was also the co-founder and CEO of Lasso, a same-day delivery service for wine, spirits, cheese, and specialty foods, which he shuttered when he launched Sun Basket in 2014.
Early life and education
Zbar was born in 1969 in Washington D.C. His father, Dr. Bert Zbar, is a cancer scientist, at the National Cancer Institute, who along with Dr. Marston Linehan discovered 4 genes related to hereditary kidney cancer. His mother, Dr. Michell Lynn Arnow, is a practicing psychologist. Zbar studied economics at Pomona College and received his MFA in Film Production from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, & Television. His grandfather, George Hatch, was an entrepreneur, communications, and cable pioneer, including co-founding Tele-Communications (TCI) which became a major cable television provider in the United States.
Career
Zbar started his career in management consulting at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles. He then worked as VP of Business Development at kpe, part of Agency.com, a digital media company based in Los Angeles, where his team built some of the early websites for Warner Home Video, Six Flags, and Mandalay Resort Group. In 2001, Zbar moved to Silicon Valley where he worked as technology executive for post-bubble online and mobile companies. During this period, he ran a $100M online hotel booking business at WorldRes, and developed next generation mobile media applications at Moviso/Infospace.
In 2005, Zbar along with co-founder Braxton Woodham, raised $6M in venture capital from US Venture Partners (USVP) for his first start-up, Zannel. Zannel was a real-time, multi-media microblogging platform which won a Webby in 2008 for best mobile social network. In 2008, Zbar raised $10M for Zannel’s Series B and was called by Mashable as the “ultimate microblogging mashup.”
In 2009, Adam Zbar along with Braxton Woodham launched their second site, Tap11, which was a real-time Twitter business analytics platform used by 500 enterprise companies and named a top 6 app by Twitter at their Chirp Conference. Tap11 was the first social analytics firm to ingest and analyze the entire Twitter firehose of 140 million tweets per day. Adam Zbar sold both Tap11 and Zannel to the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, in 2011.
SunBasket
In 2012, Zbar raised $1.7M in seed funding to develop an on-demand food delivery service from Baseline Ventures and Pivot North Capital. In 2013, Zbar launched Lasso, a same day wine & cheese delivery service. Liz Gannes, in AllThingsD, called Lasso the "perfect slice of the market to make same-day delivery work: wine, spirits, and specialty foods."
Realizing that a healthy food delivery service was a much bigger market than wine delivery, Zbar pivoted the business in 2014 to become SunBasket. Launched in beta in March 2015, the San Francisco Chronicle provided SunBasket with a favorable review. Iron Chef America alum Chef Justine Kelly is currently the executive chef at SunBasket.