Roy Shaby, co-founder of Tradestars, started his career running an online sushi business.
Want to know the cold hard truths about starting a business? Just ask serial entrepreneur Roy Shaby, who was forced to sleep on top of a vat freezer in the back kitchen of a London kebab shop as he struggled to keep his 15-year-old sushi business afloat.
Shaby is completely honest and engaging as he describes the story of starting his food delivery service with £3,000 in savings in Camberwell, losing both parents, and then following a logical and purposeful career in setting up workspace company Tradestars to cater for the modern entrepreneur.
In 2011, Shaby was looking for potential business angles and one evening ordered from delivery service Just Eat. “I was very determined to run a business, but I had no capital and £3,000 was not enough to live on,” he says.
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“On Just Eat, I had ordered food from a restaurant I had never heard of and the whole experience was virtual.”
Shaby thought he could do the same thing online and without the restaurant overhead. He went into a kebab takeaway across the street from where he lived and realized that a kitchen in the back was hardly used. He struck a deal of £200 in weekly rent with the landlord, who offered little hope of success.
Shaby hired a driver and a sushi chef, who both agreed to be paid in arrears, and he was quickly listed on Just Eat. On the first day, he delivered over £500 from 25 orders. Within a year he was generating £300,000 in revenue. However, he admits it “wasn’t a straight-line success story.”
Rather than offices with desks and chairs, Tradestars offers workspace to tattoo artists, hairdressers and TikTok shops.
A few months after starting up, Shaby ran into a serious cash flow problem and had enough left over to pay their rent or staff. After buying a duvet and pillow at a market, he opted to sleep on the kitchen freezer for a few months until he was able to rent a room.
“There were moments of realization where I was staring at the ceiling after a 16-hour shift wondering what I was doing and nowhere to go. But I knew something good would come out of it,” says Shaby.
A few years later, he managed to secure office space in a nearby business center and converted it into two kitchens; one to continue the sushi business and the other acting as a “dark kitchen” to rent out as a side hustle.
It proved popular. Shaby quickly had to rent it in three-shift intervals over a 24-hour period. Now a market gap had been noticed. “We had everyone from ex-bankers who wanted to start a food company as a life journey to family businesses and it was an interesting mix,” he says.
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Shaby still hadn’t made a proper salary until he handed over the sushi business. He then successfully applied for £25,000 funding from Virgin StartUp and launched Foodstars, a dark kitchen concept.
In 2015 it opened a first site in Bethnal Green and by 2017 there were almost 50 dark kitchens in operation. Shaby then received a call “out of the blue” from Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber ( UBER ), who was looking to expand his own kitchen rental business for delivery apps in the UK.
Shaby would not disclose the financials of the subsequent deal, other than “life-changing”, as he remained part of the takeover for three years to grow the business.
Born in London, Shaby grew up in Tel Aviv before returning to the UK in 2011, the year his insurance broker father died. “My mom went into survival mode, but the bond we had was incredible, and a lot of the values I have today come from her teaching,” he says.
Roy Shaby of Tradestars says his company is based on everything he needed as a founder.
In 2015, his mother died suddenly, and the entrepreneur recalls: “I gave myself two options: either crash and burn, or go as hard as I can.”
The latter caught on, and the only respite of the last decade came when he quit the kitchen rental business and took on a long-held dream for a beach vacation.
However, it didn’t take long for Shaby to become restless, and he freely admits that not having his phone constantly ringing “was too much to bear”. He ditched his flip flops and walked into a store in Tel Aviv to buy a new MacBook.
Shaby immediately began researching the e-commerce space and, from his own learnings, how more businesses could be supported.
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With Tradestars, the co-founder says he’s taking underutilized spaces and providing a practical way to build the environment in which people operate. Rather than focusing on the owner, Tradestars is more founder-oriented and is definitely more than a co-working concept with desks, chairs and workspace.
Tradestars pitched to 400 investors and raised £60m in equity and debt funding. The first site launched in Hackney Wick in 2022. Next up is Islington, the largest offering with 90 studios and home to Tradestars. As Shaby says, “We’re close to the product.”
A third opened in Southwark last year, and Shaby is targeting up to 25 sites by 2028. The space is currently home to a variety of industries: from digital marketers and beauty companies to hairdressers, tattoo artists, fashion designers and dance studio operators.
The company has also built podcast and photography studios at the facilities, while each site has logistics and fulfillment areas where orders are shipped daily.
Tradestars aims to have over 20 sites up and running by 2028. ·Phil Hutchinson
Shaby realized that there was a wider industry of aesthetically pleasing spaces. One client even decided to rent studio space after inspecting the cleanliness of the restrooms.
As Shaby takes me on a tour, it looks like a vibrant, colorful and engaging workplace. The landlord has a monthly haircut at one of his tenants, while a TikTok production company is busy preparing for an evening’s work that Shaby says could run “tens of thousands of pounds in one streaming session”.
Tradestars, which employs 13 people, has 210 studios across its three locations with 75% occupancy. The London start-up has current revenues of £3.5m as it continues to operate as a service built by founders for founders.
“We take care of the modern entrepreneur like no one else,” says Shaby. And it’s hard to disagree with him.
My biggest business lesson
You have to do whatever it takes to stay in the game, even if it’s a personal sacrifice. It will be hard and every day there is a risk of going out of business.
We learn from the founder of Uber
Apart from the exit, I learned from the best in the world how to scale and grow a business globally. It was like university – I didn’t go into higher education – and it shaped where I am in business today. Working with Travis was better than a master’s degree in any business school.
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