David Rabie built Tovala into a rare kind of company. Hardware. Software. Food manufacturing. Logistics. A subscription business that has shipped tens of millions of meals. This is not a simple product story. It is an operating story.
David is the founder and CEO of Tovala, a food tech company that pairs a smart oven with a meal service to make home cooking nearly effortless. He took the idea through Chicago Booth, Y Combinator, a major Kickstarter campaign and one of the nastiest fundraising moments a CEO can face.
His biggest growth unlock was not a new feature. It was pricing.
“The price of the oven was super elastic and a huge lever to influence demand.”
Elasticity Is Not a Theory. It Is a Growth Weapon
David said it took years to land on the insight that mattered most. That should reassure you. Even strong CEOs often miss the lever that is right in front of them.
- They did not price correctly on Kickstarter.
- They did not price correctly at launch.
- It took time to find the structure that unlocked scale.
The reason is simple. The oven behaves like a lever. Demand changes dramatically with price.
“As we adjusted price of the oven, demand changed very dramatically.”
That is elasticity. When you find it, you stop treating price like a static number and start treating it like a strategic dial.
The Business Model Is Razor and Blades, With a Twist
Tovala is a razor-and-blade business. That is the headline. The nuance is what matters.
At launch, the intention was to make money on both and use the oven to subsidize customer acquisition for meals.
Then reality taught them something else. The oven mattered more than they expected.
David explained the shift clearly.
“We moved from a pricing structure of just selling the oven and then subscribing to food to, we’ll give you a lower price on the oven if you commit to ordering a certain amount of meals.”
This is the kind of model change that rewrites growth. You reduce friction at purchase. You lock in predictable subscription behavior. You create a flywheel that can support marketing.
Complex Businesses Break When Founders Try to Scale Alone
Tovala is not one business. It is several stacked on top of each other. That makes the founder’s role harder and the hiring decisions more consequential.
David called out a pattern he sees in first-time founders.
“An unwillingness to hire people who have done the job before in other environments.”
Naivete helps you start. It helps you attempt something hard. It becomes a weakness when the company needs repeatable execution. He described the balance well. You need builders who do not assume something is impossible. You also need operators who have seen the movie before.
“We’ve had people that have been there before be very successful… we’ve had a lot of homegrown people learn their way into pretty significant large-scale roles.”
The takeaway is not “hire only big company people.” It is “hire people who can operate in chaos.”
The Froyo Lesson Was About Connecting With Every Level
Before Tovala, David ran a frozen yogurt chain. It sounds unrelated. It was not. It trained him to manage across very different layers of an organization.
He described the range.
“From a group of owners and board members… to minimum wage college students working at the stores.”
That range exists at Tovala too. Factory floor roles. Supply chain leadership. Software teams. Operations. People at different tenures and experience levels.
David’s goal is unity.
“Feeling that it is one unified team and company regardless of whether you’re assembling boxes or… overseeing a huge supply chain.”
That is culture. Not posters. Not values decks. It is how people experience belonging across hierarchy.
Give Away Your Legos Before You Get Forced To
David uses a simple phrase to describe personal scaling. Give away your Legos.
He introduced it as a long-running theme at Tovala.
“You need to give away your Legos, your building blocks and you need to fire yourself from your job, get other people to do it and elevate.”
When you start, your Legos are your domain. Your expertise. The work you personally do. The decisions you personally make. As the company grows, holding those Legos slows everything down.
David explained the metaphor.
“Those Legos that you hold… are probably very precious to you. And so when you bring someone else on board, you have to get really comfortable giving some of those Legos away.”
The CEO shift is from placing bricks to designing architecture. You still care about quality. You just stop being the bottleneck.
The Series B Collapse Was the Valley
A term sheet for a Series B fell apart at the worst possible time. February 2020. Early pandemic fear. Only weeks of cash left.
David described it without drama. The facts are dramatic enough.
“We had signed a term sheet for a Series B and it came apart at the 11th hour… and we had only a few weeks of cash left in the bank.”
That night almost broke him.
“That evening… was a very, very hard evening for me and probably the one time in this whole journey when I’ve thought about giving up.”
Then he made the CEO move. He recovered. He turned it into a rallying cry. It became a defining moment.
“By the morning, I had kind of pulled myself together and we used it as a rallying cry for the company.”
Confidence Is a Choice You Make for Other People
When I asked how he made that shift, he described responsibility. He did not frame optimism as personality. He framed it as an obligation.
“I felt and still feel responsible for hundreds of people, investors and families. And so I don’t think I had an option.”
Then he explained the leadership tactic. He became the bright spot. He told a story that people could believe.
“I knew if I projected confidence… and created this story of David versus Goliath… that other people would believe it and follow suit.”
A CEO’s mood is contagious. That is not soft. It is operational.
AI Helps Where the Product Is Personal
Tovala already uses AI in expected places. Software engineering. Customer service. Internal champions spreading adoption across teams.
David’s larger vision is personalization.
“Food is highly personal… How can we use AI to deliver that experience when you come through our checkout flow or when you are ordering on a weekly basis?”
He also knows what AI will not change soon. Physical labor does not disappear because language models have gotten better.
“Because we are making a pretty labor-intensive physical product, there are elements of our business where AI is unlikely to have any impact for many years.”
That is a defensibility point. Some businesses remain hard to replicate because atoms still matter.
Data Will Make Choice Easier as the Menu Expands
As the menu grows, browsing becomes painful. People do not want to scroll through 100 options.
David sees the clear AI use case.
“How do you use AI… to surface the right meals for them and deliver this personalized experience?”
He also pointed to oven usage data.
“Using the data from the oven… based on when they’re scanning and when they’re cooking.”
This is how you reduce friction without reducing variety. You still offer a range. You present the right subset at the right time.
Final Takeaway
David Rabie’s story is a reminder that scaling is rarely blocked by effort. It is blocked by the wrong lever.
- If your product has elasticity, pricing is a strategy.
- If your business has layers, hiring experience matters.
- If you want to scale yourself, give away your Legos early.
- If you hit the valley, your job is to project confidence before you feel it.
I am Glenn Gow. I coach CEOs who want to scale complex businesses without becoming the bottleneck. On my podcast, I break down the growth levers that turn chaos into repeatable scale.
Listen to the full episode of The Scaling CEO with David Rabie to hear how Tovala used pricing, culture and operational discipline to scale a complex business through a near-death moment.
