I slept on a freezer so I could pay staff – you need to do everything it takes to succeed
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Feature writer
Mon 26 January 2026 at 1:00 am GMT-5
6 min read
In this article:
Do you want to know the cold and hard truths of starting a business? Just ask serial entrepreneur Roy Shaby, who was forced to sleep on top of a chest freezer in the back kitchen of a London kebab shop as he toiled to keep his fledgling sushi business alive 15 years ago.
Shaby is thoroughly honest and engaging as he charts the story of starting his food delivery service with £3,000 savings in Camberwell, losing both parents and who has since followed a logical, purposeful career path in setting up workspace company Tradestars to cater for the modern day entrepreneur.
In 2011, Shaby was looking for potential business angles and one evening ordered from delivery service Just Eat. “I was super determined to run a business but I had no capital and £3,000 wasn’t enough to live on expenses,” 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 believed he could do the same online and without the restaurant overheads. He walked into a kebab takeaway across the road from where he was living and realised a back kitchen was hardly in use. He struck a £200 deal in weekly rent with the owner who offered little hope of success.
Shaby hired a driver and sushi chef, who both agreed to be paid in arrears, and he was quickly listed on Just Eat. On the first day he turned over £500 from 25 orders. Within one year, he had generated £300,000 revenues. However, he admits that it “wasn't a straight line curve success story.”
A few months into the startup, Shaby endured a serious cash flow issue and only had enough in reserve to either pay his living rent or staff. After buying a duvet and pillow from a market, he took the option of sleeping on the kitchen freezer for several months until he was able to rent a flatshare room.
“There are moments of realisation where I would stare at the ceiling after a 16-hour shift wondering what I was doing and with nowhere to go. But I knew something good would come out of it,” Shaby says.
A few years later he was able to secure office space in a nearby business centre 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 out in three shift intervals over a 24-hour period. A market gap had now been spotted. “I 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.
Story Continues
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Shaby still hadn’t taken 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, he opened a first site in Bethnal Green and by 2017 there were nearly 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 into the UK.
Shaby won’t reveal the financials of the subsequent deal other than “life changing”, as he remained part of the takeover for three years to scale the business.
Born in London, Shaby had grown up in Tel Aviv before returning to the UK in 2011, the year his insurance broker father passed away. “My mum went into survival mode but the bond we had was incredible and a lot of the values I have today are from her teaching,” he says.
In 2015, his mother died suddenly and the entrepreneur recalls: “I gave myself two options; either to crash and burn or go as hard as I can.”
He took the latter and the only respite in the last decade occurred when he exited the kitchen rental business and undertook a long-held dream for a beach holiday.
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 the flip flops and went into a Tel Aviv shop to buy a new MacBook.
Shaby immediately started to research the e-commerce space and, from his own startup learnings, how more businesses could be supported.
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With Tradestars, the co-founder says he is taking under-utilised spaces and providing a practical way of building the environment people operate from. Rather than landlord focused, Tradestars is more founder orientated and it is certainly more than just a co-working concept with desks, chairs and breakout space.
Tradestars pitched to 400 investors and has raised £60m in equity and debt financing. The first site launched in Hackney Wick in 2022. Islington came next, its biggest offering with 90 studios and where Tradestars' headquarters is based. As Shaby puts it: "We’re staying close to the product.”
A third opened in Southwark last year and Shaby is eyeing up to 25 sites by 2028. Currently, the space houses a variety of industries: from digital marketing agencies 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 fulfilment areas where orders are couriered out daily.
Shaby also realised there was a broader industry with aesthetically-pleasing spaces. One customer even decided to rent studio space after inspecting the cleanliness of the restrooms.
As Shaby takes me on a tour, it seems a vibrant, colourful and engaging place to work. The owner has a monthly haircut at one of his tenants, while one TikTok production business is busy setting up for an evening’s work which Shaby says could turnover “tens of thousands of pounds in one streaming session”.
Tradestars, which employs 13 staff, has 210 studios across its three sites with 75% occupancy. The London start-up has current revenues of £3.5m as it continues to act as a service built by founders for founders.
“We are looking after the modern day entrepreneur like no one else does,” says Shaby. And it’s hard to disagree with him.
CEO Says: Roy Shaby on…
My biggest business lesson
You need to do everything it takes to stay in the game, even if it's a personal sacrifice. It’s going to be hard and every day there is a risk you will be out of business.
Learning from Uber’s founder
Apart from the exit, I learned from the best in the world in 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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