Pared: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Category: restaurant staffing
Pandemic layoffs: at least 16 employees in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, including software engineers (Layoffs.fyi, July 2020)
Last updated: 2026-09-25

Pandemic-role map

Reader shorthand: a restaurant shift-staffing app that suspended its gig platform in July 2020 and turned to free job posting.
What Pared did for customers: booked restaurant workers, whom it called "Pros," into individual shifts through a gig platform until July 2020; then it offered free job posting and, by October 2020, a recruiting product, Pared Recruiter.
What broke in the pandemic: restaurant hiring. Layoffs.fyi wrote in July 2020: "there's not much hiring happening in the food industry right now."
Relief role: none on the record; it was not a lender or relief processor.
Own relief: SBA's PPP loan data list no loan to a borrower named Pared.

Founders, Executives, and Investors

Pared was co-founded by Will Pacio and Dave Lu. In a 2017 essay Lu described Pacio as the founder of the Spice Kit restaurants and Pared as his own second startup. Expo's current site says Pacio cooked at Per Se and The French Laundry before opening restaurants of his own. Lu's biography lists earlier work at Yahoo!, Apple, Cisco and eBay and a first startup, Fanpop.

Layoffs.fyi reported in July 2020 that the company had "raised just under $14 million to date." Lu's biography now puts the total raised by Expo (formerly Pared) at $29 million, from True Ventures, Uncork Capital, CRV and Calibrate.

Business Before the Pandemic

Pared ran a shift-staffing platform for the food industry from San Francisco, with staff in the Bay Area and New York City. Its customers were restaurants and other food-industry employers, the businesses lockdown orders hit first.

What the Pandemic Changed

On July 23, 2020, Pared's chief executive, Will Pacio, announced that the company would suspend the product it had been founded on: "So as of July 31st, we will be suspending our gig platform." That week, according to a Layoffs.fyi post of July 31, Pared released a layoff spreadsheet listing 16 former employees in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, among them several software engineers.

The gig platform was the business. Restaurants booked workers, whom Pared called "Pros," for individual shifts; Pacio called it "the first-ever gig platform for foodservice." In March 2020 the homepage still billed Pared as "The Restaurant and Hospitality Staffing Solution," with one button for people looking for work and one for people looking for staff.

Pared's first blog posts on the pandemic went out on March 15 and 16. A post under co-founder Dave Lu's byline passed on advice from "one of the leading hospitality accountants in New York City." Its section on hourly labor began: "Cut hourly labor immediately and deeply." Shifts were what Pared sold. The next day's notice let Pros cancel accepted gigs over COVID-19 exposure "without consequence to your standing on Pared," if they phoned support. It told restaurants they could send home a Pro who showed symptoms and would not be "charged for the remaining scheduled duration of the shift." That was the only billing term it printed; it offered restaurant customers no fee waiver, discount or credit. Its list of federal resources pointed readers to "Small Business Association Disaster Assistance Loans."

By April 26 the homepage carried a "COVID-19 HUB" link beside the staffing pitch. By June 14 the pitch had changed. The page now described "the industry-only network for food and beverage professionals" and asked visitors to "Join Pared for Free."

Pacio's July letter explained the turn. His own restaurant, Spice Kit, was open for takeout and delivery, but "our sales are just a fraction of what they were pre-COVID." He expected reopening restaurants to hire full-time staff and "the 11 million people who work in our industry" to need full-time jobs, so Pared would match candidates to jobs rather than to shifts. The customer offer was a free Job Posting feature: "there is no reason to pay for a Craigslist or Indeed posting like you normally would." The posting form, as it stood on August 3, offered employers "our network of over 100,000 jobseekers in the hospitality industry—all for free." The 100,000 figure is Pared's own. By October 30 the employer product was Pared Recruiter: "You post your staff openings, we send you qualified candidates."

The letter does not mention layoffs. Layoffs.fyi called the cut "a significant layoff" and printed no share of the workforce. Its count of at least 16 is the number of names on the list. Pared does not appear in California's WARN reports for July 2019 through June 2021 or in New York's 2020 WARN list.

Business After the First Shock

After Pared Recruiter, the company left restaurant staffing and renamed itself Expo. Lu's biography describes Expo as using "AI to solve problems for restaurant operators."

Where the Company Is Now

Pared no longer operates under that name. Expo sells an AI platform to multi-unit restaurant operators and other location-based businesses that pulls point-of-sale, inventory, labor and guest-feedback data into one dashboard. Owners can query their data in plain English through Claude and ChatGPT. Expo's site names Pacio as founder.

Pared Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status