YouSaid · the spoken record

Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman

lines on the record: 65
first: 2020-04-13
most recent: 2020-04-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We sat around and we told ourselves we can't think about rebuilding our business the way we were building it before. And honestly, it felt like we were sitting back in our dorm room at Georgetown and we literally took a whiteboard out and the question was if we were starting Sweet Green today, what would we build? Let's go do that right now instead of just going back to our old plans or we need to be proactive around this and start to plan for the rebound and the new normal. And so we've always believed that with crisis comes opportunity and this is a crisis like none of us could have ever imagined or any of us have ever experienced. But with this will come opportunity. And so we've really tried to think about how we can use this time to invest in the business and to come out stronger than we went into it.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're giving the food away. We're giving the bowls completely free to people on the front line when we announced it. We got 10,000 hospitals reached out to be part of the program. So just Response was overwhelming and it, I think it just made us realize that during these times while you want to save your business and that's important, first let's take care of your own people, but then figure out how you can use your company for the greater good of the community.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've had to shift the way we operate all of our restaurants. So all of our dining rooms have been closed. All of our front lines have been closed. And we've shifted to a digital-only operation. So we take orders via pickup, which is done contactless as well as contactless delivery on our app and through a few marketplaces. Because of where our restaurants are physically located, our business is especially just we're being impacted in a very, very dramatic way.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm also at home at my home in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. Also in a guest bedroom turned makeshift office where I'm spending all of my time now.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean it's so much luck went into this. The fact that I walked into Georgetown and met Nick the first day, the fact that the opportunity to go to Georgetown in the first place, there's so many things that were lucky breaks for us. But to Nick's point, it was then using that momentum when we were lucky and also having the resilience for all of those times that we almost failed. Because in this 13 years, it's just like being able to survive, to live another day to get another chance for a lucky shot.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want to have a really big impact. We want to create a global, iconic, enduring brand that changes people's relationship with food and changes and has an impact on a sustainable impact on the future of food. But what I like to think about a lot is what if every McDonald's was a sweet green? How would agriculture be different? How would the environment be different? How would the health people's health be different? And that's what gets me really excited. And whatever number of restaurants that is, like let's just keep going. And what we've always said is go as far as you can see once you get there, you'll be able to see further.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that was very much part of it. It was going from a place of hey, we have this one thing that works, let's just keep doing it to let's create a culture of where it's safe to fail and okay to try things and some will work and some won't. And outpost, for example, is one of those things that was a little trial that now has almost a thousand outposts in less than a year. We want a culture and a company that continues to innovate and evolve and not that just does the same thing. Because with the companies that we look around the world, the ones that we admire are not doing the same thing that they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago. They're continuing to evolve.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you know, while the whole leadership team left, not the whole team left. And there were so many people that stayed with us and are still here with us and stepped up. And it also gave us the opportunity to bring in fresh blood with this vision in mind. And so at the time, it was so painful. But looking back, it was such a blessing.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was like eight people, I think. And then our flight is canceled, and we're sitting in the Boston airport, and we're just like, oh, God, what are we going to do?”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit of both. Each one was its own situation, but I remember the last one where we thought it couldn't get any worse. And I remember being in Boston. I was Nick and I and our assistant at the time JY, and we're in the Boston airport after visiting all the stores in Boston. And I get the, you know, you get the text from someone. And it's always like the worst text when someone says, hey, can you talk, pick up the phone? And it's like, you know, Nick looks at my face. He's like, another one. And I'm like, yeah. And then the last person quits. And then like,”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly right. We just saw things differently. We really saw things differently and that to Nick's point, we want to build something for generations. And we knew we had to not only change now, but build a culture of being able to continually change. And we felt like we were becoming one of those restaurants that just copy-pasted. And that's never what we wanted to build. What we wanted to build was something that constantly evolved.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think there was a lot of people here that were less open to the change. And it was a very challenging year for all of us. It was”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slower growth up front. It was the vision that we established was let's slow down to speed up. We're going to slow down build a new model, and then we're going to speed up.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was one of the most challenging times in our history. They didn't see the world changing as fast as we did. And what we saw required a lot more risk and a lot more time versus the path we were on.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we don't think the going and eating in store experience is ever going away, but people are craving convenience in addition to, and there are certain occasions where people may want delivery or may want something direct to their office, and brands have to evolve to that consumer's expectation.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So partnerships with office buildings, hospitals, universities, and you can pre-order your food. It's waiting for you on a shelf. And the beauty is it's completely free for the customer. So you're not paying any sort of delivery fee and you have the convenience of delivery.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A healthy bowl. Yeah, we just knew that the experience had to evolve. You know, the world is changing. The question is always how fast. When does what you do become stale? And we were always like, we just have this constant fear of being disrupted. And so what we always have tried to do is disrupt ourselves so someone else does not disrupt us.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were everything, right? And it was about going and getting your videotaped. And the story goes that they had an opportunity to buy Netflix and they didn't. But what happened with Blockbusters, they didn't evolve. And we kind of saw that happening in our world. We saw that restaurants were very much at risk to this disruption, even though we were ahead from a technology perspective. There was more we could do. And there was so much more we had to do to stay in front of the customers.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were starting to see delivery takeoff. You're starting to see online ordering takeoff. You're just starting to see how data could be used differently in operating a restaurant. And you started to realize that just opening brick and mortar restaurants was not going to be sustainable. Just the nightmare for us was always thinking about Blockbuster. That was the one.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we started to see the industry shift. You know, when we started Sweet Green, people used to tell us, you know, you're lucky you're in food because it's the one thing that Amazon will never touch, which is funny now because Amazon owns Whole Foods and they're trying to tackle food. But it was the industry that wasn't been disrupted the way media had or travel had or you name it. But clearly that was very clearly changing.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And gave everyone a really nice offer to come move with us. And what was amazing that I'm so proud of that time is every single person came with us, all 35 people at the time moved across the country. And it was such an incredible cultural bonding moment for all of us to pick up and start over in a new city together.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was a few reasons. The company was growing at that point. We had, I want to say like 50 or 40 or 50 restaurants. We had about 35 people working in our support center at what we called the treehouse. But we started to think about the real long-term future of Sweet Green. And it was a few things that one is what you talked about was being closer to our farmers. The second was from just a brand and conversation standpoint. While it was cool being the outsider in DC, we wanted to be in the center of action where people were talking about health and wellness. And then the third was from a talent perspective. It started to get challenging recruiting people in our world to DC. And so we realized it was probably this point we had while the company was still relatively small to move to LA. But we wanted to bring the whole team with us.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're friends first, no matter what the disagreement may be at work, we remember that like there's that foundation of love and trust, and we always just remember we have the same vision. We really do have shared value system in terms of how we operate and make decisions. And so any disagreements are usually the stupid things. I remember some of the biggest disagreements were about who should play Sweet Life Festival. I don't know. It's one of our, I think, the greatest blessings in our life is that we really get along really well.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe this is our opportunity to go to New York. It seems like this could be it. But it also leading up to that, we rethought Sweet Green. We redided the brand. We redeem the menu. We introduced technology into the experience. That challenge of going to this place that we were so scared of.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were so scared to go to New York The competition and the level of brands and how people show up there. We didn't think we were ready. And it was a very opportunistic situation that led us to New York where one of our friends was helping develop the Nomad Hotel. And there was this one space next door that they wanted to bring something that was more of a fast food restaurant, but elevated fast food. And they called us and they said, hey, can you help us find someone? And we started thinking, we were about to introduce him to a bunch of other companies. And then I remember we looked at each other and were like,”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what's Steve, that capital allowed us to do was not plan for the next year, but plan for the next three or five years and to build a team to start investing in technology and to really invest in our brand and platform in a way that created a sustainable business.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, go to like Monsanto and get all your whatever. Daddy, it was those fears of like, we've always had this thing where we said from the beginning is how do we get bigger and get better, the food get better? And we were very scared that bringing in capital was going to force us to take shortcuts. It was going to force us to grow too fast. It was forced us to lose control. And in Steve and in all of our partners that we've brought on since then, they know that what makes us special is that we're so protective of our culture and our product. Steve understood that. And he was more a partner in helping us accelerate that than trying to help make us cut corners.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we were 2013, so it's six years into our business. So for six years, it was almost felt like we were bootstrapping the business, getting to this point and just doing it with the three of us. We were always very scared of institutional capital. We were scared of raising money from VCs and private equity because that's what it felt like. It felt like we were going to maybe lose our soul or...”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not going to franchise it because Control freaks It's never been part of what we wanted to do because you just can't control what we do and what we do from a supply chain and scratch cooking perspective. We were just always scared of franchising our business and have never done it.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not quite, and it came from someone on Steve's team, a guy named Evan Morgan. And Evan Morgan reached out to us. We're sitting down and he's like, I have this great idea. Let me franchise your business.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The risk we took the first year especially the fact that there was not much of a business foundation just in case it didn't work was kind of crazy, but it kind of felt similar to that first restaurant where we just knew that it was going to be successful.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would have been crushed by the competition, but it gave us, we were there, we were DC only brand for over five years. And it led us really tinker with the model and almost get ready for going to these other cities. We got a lot of attention. We were kind of like a big fish in a small pond.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're so lucky that we started there. We got to make a lot of mistakes. And the sweet green that we started in DC would not have been successful in New York or LA. We needed a lot of sweet.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. You know, when we started the first restaurant, it was really just one, let's do one restaurant for ourselves. But after we started doing all the research and kind of like peeling the onion back on the industry, we realized that this problem that we were having in our lives was a major, major problem. There is no healthy place to eat. And the fast food brand of our generation, or the generation before us, was McDonald's. And it just didn't make sense that there was no brand to replace that. And so very quickly, about a year in, we started to think about, all right, this can be bigger.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That started its work. We realized very early on that it was just like trial was so important, especially for a new concept. We just had to get people to try it. And then they would get hooked.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we'd give them little old school paper coupons and just like little buy one get one campaign, simple like classic promo stuff. And that works?”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, pretty much. We got killed in that winter, but we learned how to run a very lean restaurant and build an operation that was very, very lean and so could survive off of making a few hundred dollars a day. And as soon as the weather started to get better, in that time we started to learn how to market. We realized that there was this huge connection between fitness and eating healthy. And so it was partnering with a lot of the run clubs and the yoga studios and anything that was part of that.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, almost half of our food is warm food. At the time, it was all cold salads with zero seating and very much student driven. So as soon as the winter hit, it's just our business just. Disappeared”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had left the door unlocked. We come back and someone had robbed the apartment. And one of the things they had taken was Nick's laptop. Which had everything on it, it had all. So, there's nothing backed up in the cloud. This is like on your hard drive, on your computer. We're just like, holy shit. What are we gonna do?”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, back up a little bit. So, a few days before we're opening, our focus was just get the restaurant ready, right? The menu, the construction, get it ready, and we were really excited for this big opening party. We start hiring employees and we're like, let's just go get Georgetown Kids to be employees, which we thought was a great idea. So kids show up, they show up to our apartment for training, and we decided we were going to have a big opening party. And so we invited lots of friends, family. We were going to have this big party. So we're all hustling to get this restaurant ready in time for the opening. And it was the day before we were supposed to open, and we were running back and forth from that restaurant, getting ready, and we had left the door open or unlocked. Of our office, of our office slash apartment, which was”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we graduate. We're building the restaurant, and it was a really weird time because all of a sudden all your friends leave. Everyone leaves DC. Everyone graduates. Everyone goes home or goes on vacation and gone on to their jobs. We were just there. And the three of us were living together then, like actually living together and building this thing. And I remember my brother came and lived with us to help us. And he helped us with construction. And we were all doing everything. We were just on site every day doing whatever we could.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It takes a lot of time. And we didn't realize back to this being a concrete box in order to get electricity and water and sewage to the space, we had to rip up the street. So the permitting was a complete nightmare, and beyond that we didn't have enough space in the restaurant, we found out, to do everything we wanted to do. We didn't have enough storage space. And so what we figured out what to do was right behind us was a parking lot. So we went to them and we said, can we rent two parking spaces? And we'll build a storage unit within the two parking spaces, and we'll put all our refrigeration, our extra refrigeration, and all our dry goods in these two parking spaces. And then we would get a cart. Our idea was we're going to get a cart and we're going to roll down the parking lot for the food.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In like January, February, we signed the lease. But again, we had no idea what we were doing. We thought building a restaurant. We didn't understand that you had to get permits. We didn't understand to build an”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the first menu and part of why we call it sweet green was the first menu with salads, wraps, and frozen yogurt. It was really important for us for it not to just be the make your own, but to have these chef-crafted combinations. And I remember one of the very first things we made was the guacamole greens.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They wanted to see us be successful because we weren't approaching it the same way other restaurants were. Like from the very beginning, we went in and we asked for local and organic food. And they're like, wow, that's different. What's going on here? And so I really think that people wanted to help us from the very beginning.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were really good partners from the beginning. There's something I think that when you're 21 years old trying to start a business. I feel like people were kind of rooting for us. And we always went in very honestly and said, we don't know anything. We've never done this before. Can you help us?”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ended up raising almost $300,000, and it did cost about $350,000. So we were short. $50,000 or so, which means we owed the contractor $50,000 at the end, which means the contractor owned a piece of our company at the end.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you just needed a few people to say yes. And once you found a few people to say yes, they knew a few friends that would then say yes. We probably spoke to 250 people and we got at the end, we got 50 people to say yes.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did take it. You did take it. We asked everyone we could. Was really hard. I mean, I think the raising money piece is something that you come with no experience. People are looking at you, they're like, okay, so what have you done before? And everyone knows the fact that 99% of restaurants fail in their first year.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I remember when we got the first bid back from the architect who just did like a projection of how much this was going to cost. And we thought $100,000 was pretty conservative. Like that's a lot of money Get it back, and it's like $350,000. And I just remember looking at each other like, oh shit, this isn't going to work.”
2020-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT