THE POWER OF 2
COMPANY Tiff’s Treats
CO-FOUNDERS Tiffany Chen Leon Chen
The idea for their cookie business hatched after she stood him up for a date. Apparently, there were no hard feelings.
Tiffany
Chen remembers sitting on a plastic bucket turned upside down over a drain that was spewing wastewater into the kitchen of the Austin-based cookie-delivery company she had co-founded. It was 2001, torrential rain was overwhelming the city’s drainage and sewer system, and Tiffany was trying to do whatever she could to keep the flood level from reaching the electrical outlets. She and her business partner and now husband, Leon, had begun their company out of an apartment as college kids just two years earlier, and this small kitchen, in a storefront they shared with a potato restaurant called Spudnik, was their first official place of business. The two of them had been working day and night since graduation to meet the surging local demand for their service, but they hadn’t managed yet to break out of the cycle of doing almost everything themselves—including flood control.
“We were broke. We were tired. We weren’t making ends meet, yet we were still trying to make this business work,” Leon remembers. “It felt like, if things were going to fail in the normal course of business, that’s one thing—but to get hit with a sewage flood just felt like somebody out there in the universe was picking on us.” The water did eventually recede, and 21 years later the couple’s company, Tiff’s Treats, is worth half a billion dollars and operates in five states, with around 2,000 employees. Company revenue reached more than $100 million last year, and its investors include such boldface names as Andy Roddick and Brooklyn Decker (also a married couple), Dirk Nowitzki, and Kendra Scott.
The Chens look back on the 2001 flood as “a bonding moment that very few people get to experience,” as Leon puts it—one of many that the couple recount on a December afternoon at Tiff’s Treats’ headquarters, where the mansion-studded hills of West Austin unfold outside the panoramic windows of a bright conference room. As with many companies founded by couples, this one wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the Chens’ personal relationship. Tiff’s Treats started after Tiffany accidentally stood up Leon for a date. She then delivered
