Employees at startups often have their own entrepreneurial aspirations. Just ask Jenna Tanenbaum, president of GreenBlender, a subscription service that delivers recipes and fresh ingredients for smoothies. Tanenbaum left her job as marketing manager at ClassPass during the summer of 2014 just as the fitness startup was on the verge of success. In fact, she vividly remembers standing in a Bronx warehouse at 3 a.m., her hands stained pink from chopping beets. The day before ClassPass announced that it had raised several million dollars but Tanenbaum no longer worked there.
“All I could think was what am I doing here,” she says. “I have no regrets about leaving. But there were times when I wondered what am I doing with my life and that moment really sticks out.”
The idea for GreenBlender came from her husband, Amir Cohen, the company’s CEO. “I picked up a blender from craigslist and started making smoothies every morning, and I would give him the leftovers on my way out the door to ClassPass,” she says. So while she was working at ClassPass, Cohen was working on their passion project, building a website, developing the concept and figuring out pricing for GreenBlender. During a weeklong visit with her parents, Tanebaum discovered she spent the entire time working on recipes, content and photos for GreenBlender. “This made me realize it was more than just an idea and it had legs,” she says.
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