YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Kokonas

lines on the record: 218
first: 2024-05-15
most recent: 2024-05-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, finally, he was like, should we make it intentionally worse than we can? Because the recipes were really vague, they didn't call for salt. So in the middle of this pressed dinner where we had like the New York Times there, we had all sorts of these people there, which I'll never do again, right? That was just a genuine error. And we were still arguing out conceptually what this thing would be. And then we served dinner and we were like openly. He'd come out of the kitchen and we would openly argue about it, you know.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing some research, and I may get the exact date wrong because this is eight years ago I did the research, but I believe the Sen flooded in 1908, somewhere around there. And so Escoffier, like the father of French cuisine, was at the Ritz then. And that was kind of like the height of that era of cuisine. And then after the Send flooded, that's where you got sort of your brasseries and bistros because they had to kind of go to a more casual. Opened up for more people. It took the price point down. It made it more approachable. And it wiped out dozens of these fancy restaurants. And so rent got cheap and all of a sudden like, hey, like we're going to get this. And boy, we argued about that too. Like, in their blenders then. So, like, electric blenders. So, I mean, we do like a pretty”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Night, you know, where we went like, wow, look at all these different places we can travel. And what does that restaurant look like? And how do you create a kitchen versatile enough to make all these different cuisines? And how do you make it not feel like Disneyland where one time you have a theme of Paris and the next time you have a theme of Japan? So you have to go with like an austere minimalism, you know?”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazing. And I was like, wow, I had no idea these guys were so versatile, you know? And then it made sense, hey, these are passionate, amazingly talented people. And it kind of dawned on me like, let's change the restaurant every four months. Like, you know, let's do. And then we dwelled on that for like a year thinking like it was kind of impossible to do. And then I said, well, like, let's start with a French menu. And he's like, well, what does that mean? Like there's southern France, there's Loire Valley, there's France that's Nouvelle cuisine. And then there's France from like, you know, 100 years ago. Totally different. And I was like, yep, Paris 1906. I don't need to explain to you what that is. You'd want to eat that. If I just said, like, if someone said, hey, new restaurant opening, what's the menu? It's Paris 1906. I'd go like, cool. Like, I want to do a little time travel and see what that was like. And so as soon as we had a city and a time, we instantly knew that was the idea that kept us up.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did a video where next restaurant was about a restaurant that's always new, essentially. What's one of the big problems of the restaurant industry? Well, when you opened a new restaurant, it doesn't matter what it is, people are going to show up for like five or six months. And then after that, you got to struggle to get regulars and find new audiences and all that. But people like the new quote unquote. The other problem is that our own staff and chefs were the kind of people who I said to Grant one time he cooked this amazing French dish for me at Elenia right in the middle of his sickness because I had driven down from Michigan. I've never eaten before after in the Alenia kitchen, but he whipped up this little French dish for me of duck. And I was like, man, let's open a French restaurant someday. And he went like, we'll get bored after six months. And then I was at one of our chef's homes on a day off Tuesday. And he loves Thai food and he made this amazing Thai meal.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should on display, man. Just tell me what day you could clean my teeth. Show me, and I'll just go online and hit the button.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mike Dentist. I have a great dentist. They only do it via phone call or email. And so I have to play a guessing game. It's like going into a clothing store and going like, yeah, I'm looking for a blue v-neck cashmere sweater. Like, nah, don't have one. Guess again.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They interviewed a grizzled veteran. He didn't use his name and said overbook in a bar to wait in has always worked for me. I was just like, how does that not sound like terrible hospitality to everyone reading that?”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we all know these things. And, like, I think no restaurant wants to raise their hand and go, yep, that's all true. Like, we reigned to our customers and we were not going to really see you at 815. And so I think when I said that, like you can look back through some articles, I remember that there's an article, I think it was in GQ.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's crazy, right? And it's amazing to me that no one did that beforehand because ultimately people can't buy what they don't see and people don't want to be upsold inside of a restaurant. There's nothing worse in my mind than, you know, some places that today's special is today's special and it's real and you kind of know that. But sometimes it's just the old fish.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we would subtly have one book near the restrooms that people could peruse, but it didn't say buy the book or anything like that. So typically we'd sell like one or two per night. Now on checkout, when you book a linear, it says, hey, would you like to buy an book personalized and 20 people a night get it? That is $400,000 in revenue a year.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, that happens too. And then there's a whole bunch of tools that over time we built on top of that to sell wine pairings or sell books. We sell 20 linear books a day on checkout with the booking process. That's a ton. Because we're not going to exit through the gift shop at Olenia. It's a Michelin three-store restaurant”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By a lot, by 80 to $100 a person And you know what happens, and this is now we have hundreds of restaurants doing this on our software called Talk. What happens is people buy the most expensive seeds first and the cheapest seeds first. Which is exactly what you'd expect actually. Because there's some people who are price conscious and go like, wow, this is a really expensive meal, but holy cow, I don't really care if I eat at five o'clock on a Tuesday. Great. Like I can save 400 bucks. And then there's some people that go like, I only eat at 8 p.m. on Saturday. Well, okay, that's fine. Pay a little more.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there were hundreds of years of that long before there was a telephone and people called and said, yep, I'd like to eat at your restaurant. Sure, we'll let you in. And so as the technology for the telephone is morphed into what we all have in our pockets now, I just wanted to update that whole transaction. And so I also wanted to acknowledge that Tuesday nights should be cheaper than a Saturday night. So it has to work in both ways. I always thought Uber could have fixed their surge pricing issues by having discounted pricing when there was no demand. Just move pricing in two directions. And if you move pressing two directions, then that whole argument goes away. So we did that. We priced out different prices by day of the week and times a day. So 5 p.m. on Wednesday at Alinia is still cheaper than 8 p.m. on a Saturday.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the time that we were starting to do this, the telephone was dying. And I didn't know that at the time, that was eight years ago. But I have a computer in my pocket. And if you ring me and I don't know your number, I don't want to talk to you. I don't answer it. I'd much rather receive like a little piece of text letting me know what's going on than a phone call. Similarly, like calling a restaurant is an antiquated thing to do at this point. But long before the telephone, people got room and bored. And what room and bored was literally, it was like you go to an inn and you get a room for the night. And then do you need food? Okay, well, you get a board of food. Was literally it, and you'd prepay for it.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which weirdly cost, you know, I mean, from an emotional family standpoint, all bad all the way around, right? So I thought about it and I was like, wow, what if people put down a small deposit on times when demand exceeds supply? Like, right. So Saturday night, 8 o'clock, great. That's the best seats at the Opera House. Let's see if people prepay for that or put down 20 bucks for it. That's fully credited at the end of their meal. It's not a cover charge. I'm not trying to squeeze people on the actual cost of the meal. I'm just trying to go like, yeah, let's see if people make a commitment. And everybody told me, no, no one's going to do that. Like, this is not the way it works. But if you look back historically, and this is the interesting part, again, it's about like digging in deep on something. If you look back historically, restaurant reservations started with the telephone.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, we're going to this movie that I don't want to go to. And I literally irrationally made everyone go to the movie”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I would have easily paid that $60 to not go to the movie, but once I had the sun cost of paying for the movie. Psychology totally flipped.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then let's go to that movie. So I go on Fandango. I buy four tickets, 60 bucks, whatever it was. And at like 5.30 nights, pouring rain and everyone's napping. And they're like, yeah, I don't want to go. And I'm like, get your asses in the car. We're going to the movie, man”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, huge. So that came to me one day because my kids wanted to go see a movie at night that I did not want to go see. And I was really, really like, I would have easily paid 50 bucks to not go to this movie.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because again, you asked about Professor Thaler. One of the key tenets is a little bit of skin in the game, right? When people have small vested interest in something and the outcome of something, or even if I gave you a pencil as a gift and then 30 minutes later, I want to take it back, you will get so mad, even though you didn't care about that pencil.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pop culture references and entire sitcom episodes built around someone trying to get into a restaurant. It's absurd. It's completely absurd. And I looked at our no-show rate at a linear data-driven, tracked it. I looked at what we call short-seated tables, like the number of tables that were four people, but only two showed up. And the dirty secret there is like people would go like, well, what do you have available? Well, I have an 830 for four. Okay, we'll take that. And they never intended to bring the other two people. Well, that's just as bad as a two-top no showing. We only have 74 people in there. And so it's a yield manager 74 seats. So it's a yield management problem. And so we, five to eight percent of our revenue every night was being lost to that transaction. That was a non-transaction. And so I wanted to figure out ways to do two things. One, I want to figure out ways to make it transactional.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then they tell you, yeah, yeah, we'll have a seat ready for you at 7 30. And then when you get there, they go, oh, you know what? Go wait over there for 30 or 40 minutes because we're running a little behind tonight. The reason that they're running behind is because they overbooked because about 15 to 18% of the people just don't show up. So they overbook. They also know that if they tell you that they'll really seat you at nine and you wanted an age 15, you'll just go to the restaurant down the street from them that will lie to them Right So they do that and ultimately it's just bad all around. It's bad for the restaurant. It's wasteful for food. And it's bad hospitality. There are so many.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I get a lot of grief for this saying this in the industry and in the press, but basically, whenever you make a restaurant reservation, one of the two of you talking is lying to each other. If you think about it, nor other industry form of entertainment, which dining out is a form of entertainment, I know it's sustenance. I know there's so much culture embedded in it and all that, but you could eat at home, right? No other form of entertainment. You just call them up and say, hey, hold a seat to the Bears game or the Cubs game or the opera. And I'll show up around 7.30.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know and the POS systems told me no. I called theaters and went, like, what ticketing system do you use? And all of those told me no. So I heard a single programmer and he and I in six weeks built a really rudimentary booking system. But the first day we turned it on, we sold $562,000 of tickets to a restaurant for the first time. For the first time”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It, I would just be like, well, that's stupid. You know, which cut some of the normal social filter off, and I'm sure it wasn't a pleasant time to be around anybody. But I also think it was accepted within that environment at that time because everyone knew what we were going through. And so when we, you know, years later, when we finally like were kind of like, hey, we've got some ideas to build next in the aviary, that's when I kind of went like, well, we're going to do things totally differently here. And anyone who's not on board, even though they work for us, like if you're not on board all the way in, like on getting rid of normal reservations and not using telephones and doing all these things, I'm not, you know, we don't have a place for you here. And man, it really works. You know, that was the basis of, you know, I talked to every software company in the industry asking for their APIs, asking to build essentially what's options pricing software on top of reservation systems. And OpenTable told me.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do we do 74 people on a Wednesday, but 86 on a Saturday? And the answer was because our incentives were misaligned. You know, the service industry as a whole can't run at 100% every single day of the week unless they're incentivized to do so. And you could go like, well, yeah, but every server, they'll make an extra $100 a night or whatever. But they're kind of going like, look, if every night was Saturday, I'd be dead. It's really hard work, you know. So you need to figure out ways of load balancing that and making every day the same and you end up way ahead. So from a business perspective, that's when my sort of self-education in this industry came forward and it came forward in a way that I think I was less patient with everything because we were also going through this really difficult emotional time. And so consequently, when I didn't get answers that made any sense instead of being diplomatic about it.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He felt like that would be his legacy. He thought he was going to die. He was told he was going to die. So In the midst of managing a self created, self-published book and trying to do that differently and then keeping a dwindling staff motivated, trying to let him know that it would still be there when he got well, all of that. I started going, this place is run in strange ways, man. This industry is not run right.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And given six months to live. And so weirdly, that was the moment where after he was going through treatment, where I started going into the restaurant at night, because remember, I'm not a service professional. I was running the business of the restaurant. I was checking in at night and asking really dumb questions again. And, you know, weirdly, our goal was to keep Alinia open for when he came back. And mind you, he only missed like, you know, 12 days, 14 days of service during really intense chemo and radiation, but he was given six months to live. And when people are in that situation and their livelihood is tied to this restaurant, even despite their loyalties, oftentimes they just need to find another job because they're like, hey, in four months, this place is going to be closed. And in the midst of that, we decided to do our first book really to chronicle what he accomplished. Because for him,”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he was like, Dear God, can you let me enjoy it for like a minute? To you, yeah, yeah, yeah. He generally mad at me. I was like, that's terrible. Yeah, I was happy, but I was also like, oh, no, now what do we do? We need to find another artificial construct here to like go after. And enough of this, I need to find happiness and get this other happiness out of my face. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, it's about, I really do believe that, actually, that it's often the process is so rewarding that when you get something done, it can be a letdown. And I wanted that process to go. And then unfortunately, six months later, Grant was diagnosed with stage four cancer. Hell yeah. He didn't really mad at me. I was like, that's terrible. To find another artificial construct here, they're like, go after, and enough of Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having someone that he respected so much because Ruth is just a great writer. She's one of the unimpeachable food critics in the history of America. And having her write that in New York Times propelled that restaurant to its permanent status. I think that can't happen nowadays, honestly, for other reasons. But this is kind of pre-internet, pre-Yelp, all that. And then all of a sudden we got that. And I was like horrified because, you know, one of the goals was completed so early. We would have we wouldn't have our like our lodestar, you know.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did well, but we didn't make a ton of money. Olinia cost 2.2 million dollars to build. I put up a little over a quarter of that myself and found investors for the rest, all of whom I knew. And, you know, in the first year, we did, you know, we made about $450,000 to $500,000 on four or five million dollars in sales. Not a great return. Not a terrible return. We then won best restaurant in America from Gourmet magazine. And I was horrified that we won that, frankly. I remember Grant called me and said, yep, I just got a call from Ruth's Reichl. And like we had some stated goals of like, how would we know if this is a success? And one of the things we wrote down was Ruth Reichel declares it best restaurant in America. And we wrote that because in 1997, she wrote the most exciting place to eat in America is the French laundry. And Grant was there and cooked that meal and said that the energy”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask, like, where can people start to start a business? Start in the back of an envelope. Like, one of my favorite exercises is to shit in a restaurant or a small business of some sort and just literally do the back of the envelope. That is the kind of calculation my dad called it the two shoebox method put me through college, right? Like money coming in in one shoebox, money going out in the other, whatever's left is profit. Start that basic. And we did that. I didn't really think about the”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Insurance cost, you know, your lease, your rent, like all those things, right? And I had enough experience with most of those things to at least give good estimates to it. And so what I started doing is I started modeling other restaurants using the universal restaurant calculator. And I had, again, this goes to the transparency of data. I had real data for only two restaurants. And from those two, I would then make assumptions about restaurants like the French laundry where Grant used to work, one of the greatest restaurants in the history of America certainly. And, you know, I came up with a number that Grant went, there's no way the revenue is that high or they make that much money. That's impossible. And it was really funny because years later, I now work with Chef Keller and he's a friend all these years later. And I literally pulled that out one day with Grant, being there and went like, how close am I on this back in 2005? And he's like, oh, you're within like two or three percent. And we're talking about back of the envelope stuff. And so, you know.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. But it would be very unimpressive if they could. But it was basically like how many covers per night? I mean, this is back of the envelope stuff. How many covers per night can you do? What's the track average for food? Trek average for beverage. What are your food costs, beverage costs, labor costs?”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The open source movement in that way was a good model for what we were trying to accomplish. And part of that was people would say like a restaurant like this can't make money. And I wrote this little spreadsheet that I called the Universal Restaurant Calculator.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, you don't want to be a dill temp, right? You know, my biggest fear is that it would work in an artistic way, but wouldn't work as a business. And so the answer is at the beginning, I didn't do much. I handled all of our marketing and PR. Like I wrote everything myself, really thought about open sourcing the building of the restaurant. You can still go online and see the original business plans and what logos we were considering using and the test kitchen, which was in my house. We didn't tell anyone at the time, but that was my house at the time. And see the development of this restaurant. And I felt like.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we really fought with the architect and designers and all of that because people would tell us the practical reasons why you needed to do this or that. And we would just go, nope, no host stand. Like, you know, we want to greet people in an open way. And so just little things like that. And then we've taken that on, you know, through everything that we've done where we took seven years, six years to build our next place because we didn't have that idea that kept us up at night again. And so, you know, when we did, then we did it. And I think editing yourself and each other in an open way is really, really painful, but really, really important.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fantastic, yeah. He was not yet a chef then, 2005, and he was the first guy through the door. And he wrote this giant blog post and he got it with pictures and everything. You can go see it. And every single thing that we hoped would create an emotional trigger, an emotional reaction. It's almost all there. Like I remember going home and seeing that the next day and going, wow, that shit actually worked. And, you know, and it's like right down to the front hallway that was a reverse perspective, stolen from Shark Cathedral and inverted. So all of my interest of architecture and art and science and all of grants, you know, food and all that.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That become part of the art of the place, that some of them start from like a really practical thing, like, hey, we want to have a quality table. And then all of a sudden you need a little pillow that the Silver Roar goes on that Martin designed because you can't put, we didn't want to have place mats. That's too cheap. So all of a sudden, we had to design like a silverware holder. So it just became this cascade of like interesting little art projects that were there for good reasons. and really created a unique atmosphere. And it was like one of those things like we never tested it until the day we opened. Like you couldn't test those things. And the very first guy through the door was now a famous chef, Chef Sean Brock of Husk.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you've been at weddings and stuff where you feel under the table and you're like, oh, it's plywood. But if you go to a really fancy restaurant, you feel under the table, guess what? Also, plywood, just a little thicker. And he's like, you know, when you rest your arms on the table, even if it doesn't come forefront in your mind, you kind of subconsciously know that they're kind of fooling you. And he's like, why can't we just have like black, beautiful tables? It'll show the food grade. It'll show the plateware grade. And then I kind of went like, well, yeah, but the health department doesn't let you put in Chicago, doesn't let you put silverware right on the table. And if you put a glass there, the condensation will form a little ring. And then you have a wear issue. But you'll save $70,000 a year in laundering linens. And so we started going like, well, how do we solve the water problem? Well, you create a fridge that's just above the dew point 44 degrees, you know, in the winter, maybe a little warmer in the summer because it's higher humidity in Chicago. And you just get rid of ice. So you have these cascading decisions.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, Grant set the tone for that in our first meeting, not really knowing me. And we started talking, but we didn't even know where to start, right? And he said, well, I know one thing. I want to have wooden tables. Like I want to have bare wood tables. And I said, why? He said, well, why do tables, why do fancy restaurants have white tablecloths? They literally call it a white tablecloth restaurant if it's fancy. Why? And I couldn't really, I came up with dumb answers. Like, oh, it feels good or it absorbs like a spill or whatever it may be. And he said, no, it's because the table underneath is a piece of shit. He goes, and you know that, like, as soon as you say it, everyone goes, Oh, yeah, I knew that.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a helper. Over time, I certainly contributed a great deal to it, not just, he contributed a great deal to business. And then I also contributed to the art. But that took time. But I could tell that he was all in. And that was fun. I mean, it's fun to work with somebody who is basically like, okay, man, if you're not in, like, get out of the way because I'm still going.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These folks are like, they're all in. They're 99%, and that's what they do often to the detriment, frankly, of other aspects of their lives. And I guess you get better at noticing them. And I mean, now that's like, boy, I live for that. Like I love meeting people that even if it's not something I'm interested in. That are all in. That's an interesting weirdly. I've never really thought about it that way. But it was just very clear to me that Grant was all in. If he wasn't going to do it with me, he was still going to do it.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think you've written a couple books about that. It's definitely intangible. Think it's different in every case, but it's interesting because You can tell when someone is fully committed, I guess, to their craft or their art or their business or whatever it is that they're doing, their sport. And it's not because they talk it about it all the time, though, of course, if you push a little, they're happy to do so. But it's more that like if you look around like the vast majority of people are not fully committed to whatever. And I think part of what you do is you try to steer people to find those things that they can commit to or you can try to lower a barrier to show them like, hey, the commitment's not as hard as you think in this particular area, right?”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Grant had every aspect of being that at 28 years old. And in hindsight, like it looks smart, but I got to tell you, it was years before it felt smart.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's not good. Like, I didn't want to be that duicy guy that built the restaurant because my ego was needed to host a party. And so whenever I would kind of later on broach that subject and people would say, like, well, I could almost hear their brain whispering. Well, of course, that's what he's going to do. And so that was, again, not the best of motivations in the world, perhaps, but the honest one, that was hugely motivating eventually. But when we first started, it was this nagging thing like I'd wake up in the morning and I would go, you know, I'm not really into what I'm doing right now. And I've just met somebody who's the best in the world at what they do. And no one knows it yet. That's probably happened to me. I'm really fortunate that that's probably happened to me seven or eight times in my life. And when it happens and I meet that person, whoever it may be, no matter what they're doing, I pause, I kind of acknowledge that directly. And then I just go like, can we grab a glass of wine or coffee or something? And that's something worth marking and going like, wow, this person's really invested in something.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there are occasional times when you wake up in the morning and that thought comes back to you that, hey, I'm really sucked into this, right? You know, and for about three or four months without telling anybody, even Dagmara, like even not telling her, like telling no one, I kept going like I should build a restaurant with this guy. It would be the best restaurant in the world if it was done all the way. I recognized my inner voice saying that's a really dumb idea, you know, and you don't know what you're doing. I'd never worked a day in my life in a restaurant. And I also recognize, and this is also critical, I recognized that so many people built their living room after they made some money. So they went like, oh, well, I know how to host a good dinner party. And I know good wine. So I'm going to build me a restaurant. And then they sit there like it's their living room.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just if you're at someone's house, what does that feel like if you're at a restaurant? What shouldn't it feel like? Well, it shouldn't feel like a computer in front of your face saying, what's your name, you know, and all that? So we went through every aspect of that. And I lost almost 20 pounds that year, not in a healthy way, just like GC seeing the construction. I laid tile in the basement like three days before we opened.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out. And we just talked it out, like right down to what kind of tables, what kind of glassware, what kind of this, like we wanted to rethink the why again of everything. Like, why do you put a candle on a table? Why is it candle romantic? That's a question we ask. Do we need candles? That's kind of like, why is that romantic? Why do people put a little bud vase on a table? Why shouldn't that be an edible thing? That'd be cool. So we did all that and we designed the experience to create emotional responses from the moment that you walked in the front door. So we didn't have the podium. We went, what is a good greeting feel like?”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT