Pandemic Darlings The pandemic economy, in original documents
Home Profiles Matt Maloney

Profiles · Principals

ProfilePerson

Matt Maloney

Executive

Type
Person
Role
Executive
Updated

The profile

Grubhub co-founder and chief executive through the pandemic and the company's $7.3 billion sale to Just Eat Takeaway.com. His March 2020 offer to restaurants was a deferral of up to $100 million in commissions, repayable in four weekly installments.

Identity and role

Matthew M. Maloney co-founded Grubhub in Chicago in 2004 with fellow web developer Mike Evans. He was its founder and chief executive through 2020. After Just Eat Takeaway.com (JET), based in Amsterdam, bought Grubhub in June 2021, he joined JET's management board and was succeeded as Grubhub chief executive by Adam DeWitt, the company's chief financial officer for nearly a decade.

Biography / career arc

Maloney holds two degrees from the University of Chicago, an SM (2000) and an MBA from the Booth School of Business (2010). Booth's alumni profile says that before Grubhub merged with Seamless North America he led the company through five rounds of investment funding, the acquisition of DotMenu and the 2012 launch of OrderHub, and later bought the delivery services DiningIn and Restaurants on the Run. Grubhub went public in 2014 and added its own delivery service in 2015, as Uber Eats and DoorDash took market share.

Pandemic-relief / PPP-EIDL role

Grubhub's restaurants were the small businesses the relief programs were written for, and Grubhub offered them credit of its own. On March 13, 2020, with the mayors of Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Boston and Portland, Grubhub announced it was "temporarily suspending collection of up to $100 million in commission payments from impacted independent restaurants." "Our business is their business — so this was an easy decision for us to make," Maloney said.

The program terms said what the release did not. "This is not a waiver of the Marketing Commissions," they begin. Commissions not collected in a relief period starting March 16, 2020, expected to end by March 29, would be withheld from later restaurant payouts over four weekly cycles, starting no earlier than April 13. Grubhub could end a restaurant's participation at its discretion, and a restaurant that left Grubhub owed the balance at once.

The same release set up a Community Relief Fund fed by diners rounding up their orders through Donate the Change, with Grubhub matching donations only from Grubhub+ and Seamless+ members. Grubhub said the program had been raising more than $1 million a month.

Their own relief

The SBA's PPP data show no loan to Grubhub Inc. or Grubhub Holdings. The rows under the Grubhub name belong to self-employed people. One is a $3,207 loan approved May 1, 2020 through Cross River Bank to a self-employed borrower in Chicago listed simply as "GRUBHUB," with one job; others are listed as "GRUBHUB -DRIVER" and "GRUBHUB COURIER." No relief loan to Maloney personally appears in the documents cited here.

Maloney has not been charged with any crime. On March 21, 2022 District of Columbia Attorney General Karl A. Racine sued Grubhub Holdings, Inc. and Grubhub, Inc. The suit alleged hidden fees and deceptive marketing "during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic." It cited the "Supper for Support" promotion, which advertised "Together, we can help save the restaurants we love." The Attorney General alleged that Grubhub passed most of the cost of the discounts to restaurants and charged its full commission on the undiscounted price. These are allegations; the release does not record an outcome.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

The JET acquisition closed on June 15, 2021. Grubhub stockholders received new JET shares, about 30% of JET's share capital, and Grubhub's NYSE listing ended after trading on June 14. "I couldn't be more excited to enter this next chapter," Maloney said in the completion announcement. On October 8, 2021 JET said he would step down from its management board effective December 1, 2021 "to pursue other opportunities." Booth's profile lists him as an advisory board member of the university's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and a member of ChicagoNEXT.

Sources

Back to top