Fresh into Jill Erber’s budding career in software development, things went a little sideways. In the early 2000s, Tysons business software firm MicroStrategy misstated its earnings and subsequently closed its subsidiaries, including the one Erber worked for. The dot-com bubble was bursting, Erber was out of a job and about to get married.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do next,’” Erber remembers. “Let me go and get married and come back and I’ll figure out what I want to do next.’”
After returning from her honeymoon, she took up an offer to work at her brother-in-law’s food importation company. She began working very closely with chefs — selling them everything from flour to seafood. She found it was cheese that the chefs were most interested in and wanted to learn more about.
“If you want to know what’s coming up next, you kind of look at what chefs are doing,” she says.
She found a small boarded-up space on Mount Vernon Avenue in Del…
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