Christine de Wendel, co-founder and U.S. CEO of sunday, traces her approach to entrepreneurship back to a career spent scaling established companies in Europe, including Zalando and ManoMano. Those roles taught her how growth actually happens: building strong teams, keeping operations tight, and staying resilient when the pace is intense. She says the desire to start a company was always there—something her father talked about constantly—but the “right” idea didn’t arrive early. Her entrepreneurial path began later than the stereotype: at 40, while raising three children, when she finally had a problem she couldn’t stop thinking about.
That problem was restaurant payment friction. De Wendel describes sunday’s origin as a simple observation: nobody enjoys waiting for the check. Her longtime friend and co-founder Victor Lugger, who runs restaurants through the Big Mamma group, had lived the pain point from the operator side, which meant the idea came with a built-in testing ground. Seeing sunday work in one of those restaurants became the moment she knew it was worth pursuing. Her advice on validating ideas stays grounded in that experience—start with a recurring problem you can watch in real life, talk to the people who feel it most, and adjust based on what they actually do rather than what you hope they’ll do.
As sunday grows, she says the constant balancing act is scale without losing the simplicity and speed that made the product feel “magical” at the start. She also ties sales and marketing back to that same discipline: understand the customer’s problem so clearly that selling feels like a practical conversation, and speak to restaurant operators as a hospitality partner instead of presenting the company as “tech for tech’s sake.” On leadership, her emphasis is consistent: resilience matters, teams matter, and leadership skills are learned—by doing the work, leading by example, and pacing yourself when ambition starts to outrun capacity. “You can’t do it all… at the same time. You have to pace yourself.”
