Butter was built in a part of the economy where a single order can arrive as a voicemail, a blurry photo, or a half typed text. In early stage companies, that kind of mess is normal. What is not normal is pretending it does not matter. When the inputs stay fuzzy, teams end up debating what happened instead of measuring it, and the story drifts away from the work.
The companies that survive the first real scrutiny are the ones that treat operations as evidence. They build habits that make weekly numbers believable, decisions repeatable, and tradeoffs explainable without rewriting last month. Butter’s success was not only driven by product innovation; it depended on internal decision systems that could scale with growth, funding, and acquisition pressure. That is how a startup becomes investor ready before the investor asks.
Alicia He did that work at Butter, a venture-backed AI startup in food distribution later acquired by GrubMarket. As Butter’s first employee, she designed and institutionalized the strategy, operations, finance, product, and execution infrastructure that allowed the company to scale from 1 to 30+ employees and stay investor and acquisition ready without losing discipline. This was the defining success of her career, because Butter’s ability to grow, raise capital, and withstand acquisition pressure depended on operating decisions that could be explained in numbers, week after week. She also serves as a Stevie Awards judge for Sales and Customer Service, and she runs on a simple principle: if a decision changes the business, it should show up in the weekly numbers, not just in someone’s memory.
Turning Messy Orders Into Auditable Work
Once a startup decides to run on proof, the first place to start is the moment an order enters the system. Foodservice sales are expected to reach $1.5 trillion in 2025, and wholesalers still live with orders that arrive by voicemail, text, and email. At the same time, U.S. ecommerce sales reached $1.192 trillion in 2024, which resets expectations around clean capture, trackability, and reconciliation. Ambiguity does not announce itself. It just becomes chargebacks, rework, and late nights.
Alicia focused Butter’s product around that reality. She designed the AI Orders assistant to extract product details from unstructured orders, including Spanglish, match items to the correct SKU based on names and prior order history, generate structured sales orders, and import them into a vendor’s ERP system after user review. The point was not only speed. It was creating an artifact the business could defend, because a structured order is a measurable handoff between customer intent and downstream accounting. When the intake is clean, the rest of the operations stop feeling like guesswork.
“Order intake is where truth either enters the system or gets distorted. If you capture it cleanly, billing, fulfillment, and forecasting stop turning into guesswork. That is how you make the business defensible,” states Alicia.
Building An Execution Rhythm Before Growth Forces It
Once the work is captured cleanly, the next stress test is whether the organization can stay coherent as priorities multiply. Employees using Microsoft 365 are interrupted every two minutes, and the same telemetry shows that 57% of meetings are ad hoc calls without a calendar invite. That is a recipe for reactive work, especially in a small company where every decision has downstream blast radius. Meetings are not the real problem. Drift is.
At Butter, Alicia owned company planning and execution cadence alongside the founders, owning short and long term KPIs and pushing the team to generate data as they built. She also solved an unglamorous scaling constraint early: HR and compliance. By vetting and onboarding an HR partner, she secured payroll management that saved $1,200 per headcount per year, while also bringing consolidated benefits and on demand HR consultation into a single operating setup. It kept onboarding and employee practices standardized and consistent as the team grew, without forcing founders to become HR specialists. It was the kind of quiet structure that makes a fast growing team feel stable.
“Chaos is expensive, even when it looks like hustle. I wanted a rhythm where priorities survived the week, and where the basics like hiring and compliance did not depend on heroics,” notes Alicia.
Cost Discipline That Extends Runway Without Freezing Progress
As execution rhythm settles, the next leak is usually not a dramatic budget line. It is a pile of small renewals that no one owns. The average number of apps deployed per company grew 4% year over year to 93, a signal that tool sprawl creeps in even when leaders think they are being careful. In early stage companies, that sprawl shows up as a runway problem, and later it becomes a diligence problem. A buyer is going to ask why costs drifted.
Alicia treated vendor spend as part of operating integrity, not procurement trivia. She built a structured vendor selection process, negotiated more than 10 external partnerships, and secured a 25% reduction in annual subscription costs, extending runway while keeping Butter’s operating profile clean for fundraising conversations. In the middle of that work, she served as a Business Intelligence Awards judge, and that evaluator mindset showed up in how she managed to spend: insist on measurable value, pressure test assumptions, and document the decision so it can be defended later. The goal was not austerity. It was keeping flexibility without losing control.
“Runway buys choices, but only if you keep it real. I cared about spending that could stand up to questions, not spending that felt good in the moment,” observes Alicia.
Fundraising Readiness That Holds Up Under Real Scrutiny
When discipline is real, it becomes most visible during fundraising. Global venture capital investment rose from $349.4 billion in 2023 to $368.3 billion in 2024, while deal volume fell to a seven year low of 35,685 deals. That combination matters. When capital concentrates, investors have less patience for fuzzy answers. They want to know whether the numbers are produced by the business, not assembled at the last minute.
At Butter, Alicia led fundraising preparation, financial modeling, investor relations, and diligence operations that enabled the company to secure $12.3M in venture funding at a $39M valuation. She built the valuation proposition, ran projections from scratch, and organized diligence materials so founders could focus on investor conversations while the underlying evidence stayed tight. The fundraising process was also public facing, which raised the standard for accuracy because the story had to match what the business could prove. That visibility reflected preparation she led to make the round close cleanly. The result was a fundraising narrative grounded in repeatable operating signals, not improvised confidence.
I believe the key to our streamlined and clean fundraising process is our well organized data room: clean financial modeling, compliant supporting materials, and day to day metrics that are current and easy to trace. That organization did not just help us answer diligence faster, it gave investors visibility into how we actually operated, and it built confidence that the fundamentals were real,” recalls Alicia.
Looking Ahead: When Buyers Reward Operational Proof
What Alicia built at Butter maps to where the market is heading: more integrated systems, more scrutiny, and less tolerance for operational fog. The supply chain management market is projected to reach $63.77 billion by 2032, and the AI in supply chain market is poised to reach $50.41 billion by 2030. More tooling does not automatically produce truth. It can produce more places for truth to break.
Alicia’s view is that investor readiness is not a deck milestone. It is an operating habit built early, when the cost of discipline is lowest. She also serves as a Big Innovation Awards judge, and that final lens fits the next decade: the winners will be the teams that can prove what changed, why it changed, and what it cost, without improvising under pressure.
“Tools will keep multiplying. The advantage will go to teams that can show the receipts, week after week, even when the questions get sharp,” notes Alicia
