Today we’d like to introduce you to Sheela Rodrigues.
Hi Sheela, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My story is one of those that only makes complete sense in hindsight.
I started with the credential — MBA in Advertising and Marketing — and moved straight into the corporate world. I spent years in Learning and Development, working as a soft skills trainer and eventually as an AP Head for L&D with organisations including Tesco, CSC, RBS, and McAfee. I was good at it. I understood people, I understood behavior change, and I knew how to build systems that made professional environments work. By every conventional measure, I was succeeding.
Then my son arrived, and everything rearranged itself.
Becoming a mother has a way of clarifying what actually matters and what you’ve simply been going through the motions on. I left corporate to be present for him — fully present, in the way that a demanding L&D career in large organisations doesn’t easily allow. But if I’m honest, the timing also gave me permission to do something I had been quietly wanting to do for a long time: build something of my own. Entrepreneurship was never a plan B for me. It was always where I was headed. My son’s arrival just moved the timeline from “someday” to “now.”
So I did both. I raised my son and I started over — in a kitchen. I trained as a pastry chef and launched a food blog called Corporate 2 Kitchen, which was exactly what the name sounds like: a woman who had spent years in boardrooms, now covered in flour and writing about what it felt like to follow something true. The blog documented the transition honestly — the joy, the chaos, the identity shift that comes with leaving behind a version of yourself that looked successful from the outside but didn’t feel like enough on the inside.
From there I moved into real estate, which was another chapter of building on my own terms. Working with clients navigating some of the most personal and high-stakes decisions of their lives taught me something specific about trust that I’ve carried into everything since — people don’t just want a transaction, they want to feel safe with the person guiding them through it.
Platesfull came from the collision of all of it. The marketing discipline from the MBA. The deep understanding of human behavior from years in corporate L&D. The genuine love of food and hospitality from the pastry chef years. The knowledge of high-trust decisions from real estate. And underneath all of it, the entrepreneurial instinct that was always there, waiting for the right idea.
We built Platesfull in Austin, proved the model, and we’re now launching in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. For me this isn’t just a business expansion — it’s the moment the whole arc feels complete. A city that celebrates, that hosts, that understands food as an experience and not just a meal. Miami was always going to be part of this story.
Corporate 2 Kitchen was how I found myself. Platesfull is what I built with everything I found — including, somewhere in there, the clarity that came from becoming a mother.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Absolutely not smooth — and I think anyone who says their entrepreneurial road was smooth is either very lucky or not being fully honest.
The hardest part wasn’t building the platform. It was changing behavior. I came into this with deep roots in hospitality — I trained as a pastry chef, worked in food service, and spent years in corporate learning and development training people at organizations like Tesco, RBS, and McAfee. I understood people, I understood service, and I understood what a great in-home dining experience could feel like. What I underestimated was how difficult it would be to get skilled chefs to operate like a responsive, professional service business on a digital platform.
Chefs are artists. Getting them to respond to inquiries within hours, send structured proposals, and manage their availability through a system — that’s a behavioral shift, not just a technology problem. We rebuilt the entire platform mid-journey specifically to solve that, which meant a period where revenue stalled and everything looked worse on paper before it got better. That was a difficult period to sit through, especially when you’re a founder and every number feels personal.
The other struggle was building trust in a category that didn’t fully exist yet. Private chef experiences at home aren’t new, but a transparent marketplace where you can browse, compare, and book one — that’s still a relatively new concept for most consumers. We had to educate the market and build the product at the same time, which is twice the work.
There were also moments of self-doubt that came from having such an unconventional background. I’m an MBA with a hospitality soul — not a typical tech founder. But I’ve come to see that as the advantage, not the liability. My years training corporate teams taught me how to build systems around human behavior. My time as a pastry chef gave me credibility with the supply side. My real estate background taught me how clients make high-trust, high-value decisions. Platesfull is genuinely the intersection of everything I’ve done.
Launching in Miami and Fort Lauderdale now feels like the moment the foundation we built is finally ready to be tested at scale. I won’t pretend there won’t be new challenges — but I’ve stopped expecting a smooth road and started getting better at navigating the rough one.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Platesfull is a marketplace that connects customers with private chefs, bartenders, party helpers, and event professionals for in-home celebrations and private dining experiences. The simplest way I describe it is this: whatever you need to host an extraordinary experience in your own home — without leaving it, without coordinating across five different vendors, without wondering if the person showing up is trustworthy — Platesfull handles it in one place.
What we specialise in is the in-home celebration experience. Birthdays, bachelorette parties, anniversaries, intimate dinner parties, family gatherings, holiday celebrations, Airbnb vacation rentals — any occasion where someone wants to elevate the experience but doesn’t want the logistical burden of planning it themselves.
What genuinely sets us apart is that we are not a directory. We are not a lead-generation platform where you submit your details and hope someone calls you back. Platesfull is a fully managed marketplace — customers submit an inquiry, curated chefs send personalised proposals with menus and pricing, and the entire process from discovery through booking, payment, and post-event review happens within the platform. The customer is protected, the chef is professional, and the experience is structured. That combination doesn’t really exist anywhere else in this category at this level of curation.
The other thing that sets us apart is something I’m genuinely proud of: almost everything we’ve built has been found, not pushed. Platesfull now ranks for over 1,200 private chef and private dining keywords on Google — we appear when someone in Miami types “private chef for bachelorette party” or “hire a personal chef for my birthday dinner.” We didn’t buy our way into those searches. We earned them. For a marketplace in a trust-sensitive category, that kind of organic discovery is meaningful — it means the customer who finds us was already looking for exactly what we offer.
Brand-wise, what I’m most proud of is that Platesfull feels credible on both sides of the marketplace. Chefs trust it because it’s built by someone who understands food service from the inside. Customers trust it because the experience is structured, transparent, and professionally managed from start to finish. Building two-sided trust is the hardest thing in any marketplace business, and we’ve done it without shortcuts.
For Miami and Fort Lauderdale specifically — I couldn’t think of a more natural home for what we do. This is a city that understands celebration, understands hospitality, and has a culture of hosting that is unlike anywhere else in the country. The demand for private chef experiences here is real and growing, and the chef talent pool is extraordinary. We’re launching here because Miami is ready for this, and honestly, because Platesfull is ready for Miami.
What I want your readers to know is simple: if you’ve ever hosted a dinner party and wished you could have a professional chef handle everything, or if you’re planning a celebration and want it to feel genuinely special without the stress — that’s exactly what Platesfull was built for. We’re here, we’re local, and the experience is much more accessible than most people expect.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
I’ve thought about this question a lot, and my honest answer is that luck has played a role — but rarely in the way you’d expect it to.
The bad luck came first, and it came early. I built Platesfull in a category that requires two things that are both very hard to establish from scratch: supply-side trust and customer-side confidence. In the early stages, things took longer than any plan suggested they would. Chef behavior was harder to shift than I anticipated. There was a period where we had to essentially rebuild the entire platform mid-journey — pausing growth, suppressing revenue, and watching the numbers look worse before they got better. If you had looked at Platesfull from the outside during that phase, it might have looked like a struggling business. From the inside, it felt like laying a foundation that nothing could shake later. But in the moment, it didn’t feel lucky. It felt hard.
The good luck — and I genuinely believe this — was my own background, which I never planned as a strategy. I didn’t sit down one day and think “I’ll become a pastry chef, then train corporate teams at Tesco and RBS, then become a realtor, and then all of that will converge perfectly into a marketplace business.” It just happened. But when I look back, every chapter prepared me for something Platesfull specifically needed. The chef background gave me credibility and fluency with the supply side in a way no amount of research could have replaced. The corporate training work — years of helping people at organisations like McAfee and CSC shift their professional behavior — turned out to be exactly what onboarding chefs onto a digital platform required. The real estate work taught me how customers make high-trust, high-value decisions. The MBA gave me the marketing and brand language to communicate all of it.
I didn’t engineer that convergence. That feels like luck.
The other piece of good luck was timing, and I don’t take full credit for it. The cultural shift toward in-home experiences — hosting at home, Airbnb vacation rentals, intimate celebrations over loud restaurants — accelerated in ways nobody fully predicted. Platesfull was already building for that world when the world started moving toward it. And the rise of AI-powered search — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — happened to coincide with the moment we had built enough content depth to appear in those results. We didn’t plan for that specifically. We planned to be genuinely useful and comprehensive online, and the new way people search rewarded that.
So my view on luck is probably shaped by all of this: I think luck is real, but it tends to show up for people who have put themselves in positions where it can find them. The bad luck teaches you something every time if you’re paying attention. The good luck usually turns out to be the intersection of preparation and timing. I’ve had both, and I’m grateful for both — including the hard periods, which I suspect I’ll be even more grateful for later
Pricing:
- Casual Dining – $80-$125 per person
- Fine Dining – $125-$175 per person
- Luxury Dining – $175+ per person
Contact Info:
- Website: https://platesfull.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.platesfull/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Platesfull/61561139441687/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/platesfull/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@platesfull
