A Girl and Her Dragon Summer Party

Last I wrote, we’d just wrapped up my first event, the Nueva School Quest night. Lots of people, lots of pizza, lots of fun (I know, I know, a bit clichéd, but very true!). Little did I know that that night was nothing in comparison to my next function: the Foundation Capital Summer party!

Foundation Capital is the venture capital firm where my dad (Paul Holland) works. They do as VCs do: invest in companies, go on business trips, fight crime in various animal themed suits…no, wait, that’s Batman. Well, you know how the old joke goes. I’m not saying my dad’s Batman; I’m just saying that no one’s ever seen my dad and Batman in the same room together.

Anyway, Foundation Capital has a summer party every year in June for the partners and the CEOs/Executives of the various start-ups they’ve invested in.  And because it’s the Silicon Valley, (and because traditional catering is really expensive), they always hire mobile food vendors. *Sigh,* yes, my father and his compatriots are a bit hipsterish, but hey, no complaints here.

The coordinator, Meg Sloane (VP of Marketing), said that, aside from myself and the bar (a vital part of every corporate function), there would be a taco truck, a burger truck, and some sort of Asian fusion vendor. That sounded like overkill, until she dropped the numbers on me. 700-1000 people. Many of them fresh out of college. I mentally added a suit of armor and some tranquilizer guns to my prep list, just under cheese and pineapple. (Hungry post-adolescents? I’m taking no chances.)

The prep itself went fine. We still weren’t set up with US Foods, so it was a whole lot of dough making for us! I’ll spare you the endless hours of making, shaping, possibly eating an entire pizza’s worth of raw dough (I regret nothing), and skip straight to the actually party.

As corporate events go, it was pretty awesome. We arrived early, set up our tables, started the fire, and received the most amazing signage I think anyone’s ever had (the best part is, they let me take it home afterwards!).

The party began, so we tossed in our sacrifice dough just as people began wandering over to the fire. At first things were rather manageable; two or three pizzas in the oven, keeping the crowd circulating…but 700 hundred people leads to some long lines, so soon they were snatching up slices as quickly as we could churn them out.

One thing I’ve noticed, no matter where we go, is the curiosity a mobile pizza oven provokes. People want to talk about it, learn about it, get close to it (if anyone reading this is a liability lawyer then yes, the cold sweat that just broke out on your forehead haunts me too). So I made pizzas with my head turned a good 120 degrees, answering questions and trading quips.

Like something out of an early bird Cinderella, all of the other food trucks packed up and left at 8 o clock, leaving us with a crowd of hungry and mildly intoxicated people. We’d planned on serving around 100 pizzas, and had budgeted for around 120.

So you can imagine our consternation as we came up on our 135^th pizza and realized that the crowd had barely abated. First the meat ran out, then the vegetables, and before we knew it there was just sauce and dough left.

That’s when my dad got up and said,

“All right. We’re out of everything. It’s going to be a little bit like North Korea now, you’re getting bark on the pizzas.”

That provoked a nice (if mildly inebriated) laugh, but it wasn’t far from the truth. As our supplies ran low, we finally just took the remaining dough and made several giant loaves of bread with the dying embers, just managing to feed everyone before calling it a night.

Over 140 pizzas. Not half bad, if I do say so myself.