FORTUNE — One of last week’s big M&A stories was that private equity firm Golden Gate Capital had agreed to buy restaurant chain Red Lobster from Darden Restaurants (DRI) for $2.1 billion. Then came news last night that TGI Friday’s also was getting a new owner, with Carlson Holdings selling the Poppers purveyor to Sentinel Capital Partners and TriArtisan Partners for a reported $800 million.
Because both chains remind me a bit of recently-deceased B-list celebrities, I offered up the following tweet:
That prompted a reply from serial entrepreneur Peter Pham, currently co-founder of Los Angeles-based digital start-up studio Science Inc.
I mentioned that my college nights were spent slinging deep-dish at Pizzaria Uno’s, and suddenly all sorts of successful folks were sharing their own crappy food-service jobs. A sampling:
Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz
Josh Hannah, Matrix Partners
Brad Holden, Tomorrow Ventures
Mark Collier, OpenStack
Dave Morin, Path
Josh Elman, Greylock Partners
Kent Goldman, ex-First Round Capital
John Lilly, Greylock Partners
Jason Shellen, ex-Google
And back to Andreessen who apparently wasn’t as good at corn detassling as was Twitter exec Jana Messerschmidt: