Impact with John Shegerian · 2022
Spencer & Sophia Rascoff on Impact with John Shegerian: A Common Love of Food
Spencer & Sophia Rascoff, Co-Founders, appeared on Impact with John Shegerian in 2022 — a verified placement booked by Podlink for Recon Food.
Spencer and Sophia Rascoff, the father-daughter co-founders of Recon Food, joined John Shegerian on the Impact Podcast to talk about building a vertical social media app around a shared love of food. The episode page describes how pandemic-era cooking inspired the pair to build Recon Food as an escape from the unhealthy aspects of mainstream social media. In the transcript, Spencer recounts his path through Hotwire, a decade running Zillow, and his 75 & Sunny venture firm; Sophia, seventeen at the time and Recon Food's CEO, describes managing a ten-person remote team around her school schedule. The two discuss the thesis behind vertical social networks, the app's computer-vision food map and smiley-face rating system, the challenge of user growth without paid advertising, and their advice for young entrepreneurs. The episode was published May 17, 2022.
Listen to the episode
Key takeaways
- Recon Food grew out of the family's pandemic cooking and Spencer's investment thesis that social media is unbundling into vertical networks.
- Sophia Rascoff was seventeen and CEO, managing a ten-person remote team around her school schedule.
- The app uses computer vision to pull food photos from your camera roll onto a map, and rates restaurants with smiley faces instead of stars.
- User growth without paid advertising is named as the company's biggest challenge.
- Spencer's advice to founders: people tend to overstate risk — failure is okay, and most founders have a safety net.
Behind this placement
Five placements for a father-daughter founding team
Read the Recon Food case study →Related appearances
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Verified 2026-10-16 — every link above goes to the public episode.