YouSaid · the spoken record

Ron Shaich

lines on the record: 112
first: 2025-11-11
most recent: 2025-11-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Things go on, they change. I don't think 50 years from now people will be talking about me. I think what my legacy is frankly what matters most is my kids and the things I show them that live on in their lives and in their hearts and in their souls and in their kids and those are the kinds of things that matter and as I look back of this my seventy one years on this earth I just feel so blessed to have had the chance to do work that I've loved to love to touch people and I hope in some small way I've done this in a way that is worthy of all those blessings”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self respect ironically to me success is looking at myself and knowing I have built the best life that I know how to build whether it be my role as a father, my relationship with my kids, my role as a spouse in relationships, whether it be the kind of boss I'd been in and the difference I've made in the lives of people. Very important to me the lives I've touched all over this country and many parts of this world, guests who've come up to me and said, thank you for what you did. I love being in your places and knowing I was the best version of myself. I'll say something to you. People always say to me, what's your legacy? Somebody said to me yesterday at this, Tony. Robin's event. You know, what do you want your legacy to be? And I think about it and I realize there is no legacy”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“such a way that they have a better sense of what's going to hit them in the future, and they're prepared to handle that tonight.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he's growing immensely. He started as my student. And I learned from him all the time watching him do it. But we share the same diocese and we share a common thought process about what's going to work. And so the way you get there is through taking the time to think about things in a deep way. And again, goes to my book, Know What Matters, Knowing What Matters. I think that the board in Kava, which I chair, would say we understand our role, which is certainly to ensure financial integrity, to ensure risk assessment and to fill that. But most importantly, we don't help that company flying in on some basis and telling them what they do. We help them by bringing to bear our experiences and helping make them think.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we can take kava. I think, you know, if Brett Schulman, who is the CO, were here, he would say our relationship has evolved and grown over the six, seven years we've known each other. I think there were times along the way, you know, that were really hard. I think he's come to know we are really on his side Were really with him? And I think he would say the most powerful thing we brought to him and our relationship changed for the better when basically my role has been to challenged his thinking and let him deal with the implications of it as opposed to be directive.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand about boards. The job board is not to run a company. Our job in Act three is not to run it. It's actually to ask good questions that make the people that are running it think. And that's where the power comes. It's in the quality of the question and the quality of how it helps impact other people's brains that actually matters. The discipline is not in micromanagement. The details is not in micromanagement. The detail is in actually helping driver, powerful and profound understanding that allows you to do a better job.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The future is going to be, making sure we arrive at that future before the rest of the world gets there, figuring out what those categories are, and then helping wonderful management teams build the dominant player in those categories. And, you know, it started as a $200 million investment is now nearly, you know, it's a $2 billion portfolio. And it's delivered 55% returns. And mostly we're just having fun. I mean, we are not, yeah, we work hard, but it isn't like running a company. The guys that are running the companies are doing the heavy lifting, and we're there trying to make people think. I love it. Shane, we talked about something before I just want to mention. I sit on any number of boards. I lead the boards of most of these companies. I was on the board at Whofu's when we sold it to Amazon. To me, one of the things that people miss.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“technology, which is trying to really be the source for unified commerce in restaurants. These are all strong public companies where we've been able to help them. And in the case of BJs, the stock is more than doubled since we got involved in the case of Bar, it's held very strongly. And so, again, what we really are in the business of doing is doing what we love to do, help figuring out.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“exciting. That business is now thirty odd restaurants in Spain and Portugal on its way to the UK and France next year. Again, we think that there's a powerful opportunity to bring some of these disciplines to Europe. But to do it right, we also have another business that we're involved in with Act three came out, began in COVID, but we have lots of connections with institutional capital. And the capital has asked us to get involved in companies. And typically we can't, with public companies, we can't take a carry and get paid. So we do a deal with the company with the support of their investors to take a percentage of the company warrants. So we have an interest with a company called BJs out on the West Coast where we provide some strategic guidance. We have another involvement with a company called.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a brewery. We opened the first one in Nadick, Massachusetts at the Natick Mall. I have never been involved in a business this powerful as this. Blew me away. We've since opened in Providence, Rhode Island. We're opening in Tyson's Corner in DC in four weeks. We're opening in Disney World down in Orlando in the coming year. It's going to be at a location close to you anytime soon, but sometime soon. But there's another one of these powerful businesses. Last year we made an investment in a business in Barcelona, Spain called Anis Greens, again, very high volumes. It's basically chefs in every restaurant, real vegetables, greens, salmon, chicken put together in a way that lots of the young Spaniards have found.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love this business. We've been in it eight years. I can tell you that Plan Forward is a tailwind that is powerful. Somebody is going to win in it. We've now produced stores in Boston and DC producing very high volumes, surprisingly high volumes for positive eating for this kind of food, and a really powerful team and concept. And we have a ton of excitement in that. We have another company called Level 99. This is a guy who I was introduced to, had an idea. He'd come out of MIT and had been involved in the entertainment business for many, many years, engineer, and he had a vision for taking a space forty thousand square feet, all kinds of different things. We said to him, let's drop a farm to table restaurant in the middle of it.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't have real culinary skills in the stores. Our ability was simply to assemble, so we were limited. We took Antate and I originally bought Tate for Panera. I saw it as a better version of Panera in certain neighborhoods. I then converted one of our stores in Harf Square actually. We popped the sales volume by more than twofold. Yeah, exactly. And materially changed the EBIDA. It left me in a place where I said, wow, this is powerful. And when I sold Panera, I negotiated the right to take Panera's interest in Tate. That time it was a dozen stores or whatever, to take that interest with me as part of my package, and I ultimately did take Tate with me. That's how it became part of Act three. Similarly, another business life alive. Again, plan forward, positive eating”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we've got to get back deck three. But yes Every one of these businesses are defined by their structure, structure matters. For example, I can't tell you how many conversations over the years I had with Howard Schultz about Starbucks and their desire to do better food. But they could never. Why couldn't they? Because they have a frozen food system. They manufacture in one place, they freeze it, They ship it into the store and they defrost it. They spend a hundred million dollars on an acquisition Belingerie. Great little bakery, could they bring it to Starbucks? No, because the system defines what they're capable of doing. Similarly, at Panera, we were an assembly business. We started as a sandwich place. We put together sandwiches.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Act three. So, you know, we start with Tate. Know it's got authority and bakery, it's got authority in third wave coffee, it's got chefs in every store, it's got real food. We're doing breakfast. We're doing lunch, we're doing gathering place. It's rooted in this powerful aesthetic. They're beautiful. They're a mix of antiques.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything in between, and can you offer people something of quality and substance? It's a different environment to compete in. New York City costs are three to four times higher. If you're in really good, you can make it, but it's very difficult.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the funniest thing. People come from Europe all the time. They all go to New York. It's the worst market because it's not the rest of the country. It's not representative. I'll tell you a quick story, and we'll go back to the Act III thing. One of the first discussions I remember having with Brett Schulman, our CEO, Danicava, I said to him, Brett, right? You know, you and the sweet green guys, you all went out, you know, you started in DC and then you went out to LA as your second market. I said, here's the deal. I said, what really matters is not how you do in LA, in Malibu, in West Hollywood. What matters is how you do in Fredericksburg, Virginia. You make it in Fredericksburg, Virginia, you do two to three million a unit. I'll show you a thousand locations in America. That's the key. And I will tell you that if you're building a business a mass scale, it isn't New York City that matters. It isn't LA that matters.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The single most competitive market. We're not yet in, we'll be in New York next year. We're in Ridgewood, New Jersey. We're going to Scarsdale, Garden City Summit, Milburn. Because we started in Boston, they built out substantially in Boston. We went to DC, did great in DC. New York is in the middle of it. You're absolutely right. New York City is about as competitive a market as ever. But this is a concept that's good enough to really compete.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does that mean? We invest where we know something and we know how to build dominant players in very specific categories. We're now Act III, as you know, is the largest independent investor in Kavai serve as the German there. We're also in a company called Tate, which is in Boston and DC and now the New York market. It's 50 restaurants doing about $5 million a unit, two hundred and fifty million say powerful cafe. It's got a bakery there. It's got artists in third wave coffee and it also has authority with real chefs. It's a fascinating concept because it brings the attitude and voice of the Levant of the Middle East, the founder, woman evens read or Israeli Powerful, powerful chef, and our bacuds are really third wave. They're differentiated. They're worth actually eating.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Noah Elbogen. Yeah, I had 300 people chanting F-U Noah. And later I ended up respecting the guy, but I couldn't tell anybody. I liked him. I made an investment in a hedge fund he had and ultimately asked him to join me in this endeavor. But he says he's now a reformed activist. We don't practice activism. We help people. And then obviously third we only at Act three invest where we have competitive advantage.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know I'll follow on round to capital, have never turned it down, and essentially have enabled our founding teams to feel confident that they have unlimited capital behind. Secondly, we practice what we call Sherpa management, not venture capital. When we're in the boardroom, we're not looking at the next liquidity event. When we're in the boardroom, we're actually in there helping solve real problems. Typically, and most often we're saying you need to put more overhead here, not there, what comes first, second, and third. And each of my partners are serious C sued operations folks that have experience. And our 25 people, we have only one that's really financially driven or thinks financially.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we're trying to do is build the next generation of great companies. And we're doing that based on an understanding that building better competitive alternatives is everything. And we want to enable and help companies become the best competitive alternative in categories that have extraordinary power. We have a couple of principles. Number one, we believe in founder-friendly capital. So when we go in, we hope it's the last investment capital that gets taken before an IPO. Generally, we will come in as common stock, not preferred same place as the management team, and we will typically take a writer first refusal.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's thoughtful, as opposed to simply obsessive. Being obsessive isn't enough unless you're right you know, being right isn't enough unless you can get it done. And I guess what I'm trying to argue for is not micromanaging, not getting into the detail because that's the only place you know how to operate, but being able to use the detail to extract and learn. Like I'll tell you a story, Shane. I go to visit restaurants we own all the time. I'm not going to check out the people who work there. They all think I am. But I'm not going to catch somebody doing something wrong. I'm actually going to check out myself and our senior management. And how are we doing in projecting a vision of how we compete and then delivering that down through an organization and a group of people to actually get it done?”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally true. I think that you can't have an effective strategy if it's not informed by an understanding of what actually is going to touch your customer and how it's going to get executed. On the other hand, the most powerful strategy in the world means nothing if it can't be executed. And so the ability to understand how you're doing on both levels simultaneously has been an essential characteristic that served me particularly well in my career.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is that floor material working in a way that it's bouncing sound around and the sound is the wrong thing for the experience we imagine. It's the totality of both sides of it in these complex businesses that's essential. Some people want to just be strategic, others can't get out of the detail. It's the ability for both. You get a strategy from the detail, and frankly, no strategy is worth anything if it can't be executed.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're not risk takers, they're actually risk avoiders. They see that opportunity, an opportunity to serve somebody, to make a difference, to do a job better for somebody. And in the context of that, their risk avoidant. They don't want to take risks that get in the way of their getting there. And for me, when I can see a better way to do something, when I can see a way to make a difference in somebody's life, be it a guest or even a team member, I want to do that with all the energy I can, and I want to protect it. And that to me is what an entrepreneur is. It's somebody who sees opportunity and then seizes that opportunity. I share with you something else that I think is important. You have to be both strategic and detailed. So I can operate out of what are we trying to accomplish in five years level.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not doing Act three because it's going to change my life or my kids' lives in any way. I'm doing it because I actually love The process of having challenges and figuring it out. So I would say to you and I say to people all the time, don't do it for the for the outcomes, do it because you actually love it. We should talk about another concept about entrepreneurship. I think it's often misunderstood. Here's what entrepreneurs do. This is what my business life's been about. Entrepreneurs see a better opportunity.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't understand, you're not going to get the byproduct if you don't build something that's a better alternative. And that's hard work. And I would share with you this too. I'll share with you two things. One, I often say to entrepreneurs, I said it yesterday, Tony Robbins event. And I said to the folks, I said, listen, if you don't enjoy the people in your business, the people in your life, if you don't enjoy the doing of the doing, you're never going to get there. If you're doing this to make money, you're never going to make money. If you're doing this for the glory of it all, you're never going to get it. If you don't love the doing of it, you're going to fail. And for me, it was never about the end. It was about the doing. I love the figuring it out. I love the people that I work with to this day.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm pretty focused. And, you know, I work hard. I always have. I love it. I enjoy it. I love when we figure things out. I like to think that I protected the people around me. And that, but I'd like to think I'm willing to pay the price, and by that I mean I'm willing to do what it takes to do the hard work.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and a relationship with my own spirituality, and my own personal integrity. You take all of that and you try to put that together and you try to build a life understanding. There is no balance. You can't have it all. You make choices and there are trade-offs and you try to do that as well as you can. I just encourage your listeners to be clear what it is that they want and what it is that they're going to respect. But you don't want to do is wake up one day and say, I wish I had and miss it.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been married twice. It's not something I'm proud of. I feel like it's a failure. Is that a failure because I was committed to my business? I don't know. But I sometimes I think about that. The biggest fallacy of life is that you can have everything and that all there are are choices and that you want to make your choices with a clear head and your open eyes as to what you value, what you respect. And then you want to build your life around that. Just as I try to build a business around what it is we try to, a consum essence and what we expect. I try to build my life around what is it I'm going to respect. And that's why I really try to think through on a regular basis what is it I need to do for my own self-respect in the context of my relationship with my body, my relationship with my family and my spouse, my friends, my relationship with my work, and what does it mean to do that well?”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're doing anything that takes powerful commitment. That commitment, anjou, you don't own it. I've never owned a business. The business is on me. It's with me in the shower. It's with me on vacation. It's there with me. And in fact, some of my best work is done when I'm on vacation. I'm not actually thinking about it in a conscious sense. And I have the ability to extract and understand. But listen, doing anything in the world, whether it's working out every morning, whether it's being in a relationship, requires commitment, and it requires a commitment to the long term, and it requires responsibility. I would simply say I've been committed to these businesses, I've been committed to the people that have believed in me, I've been committed to my team members, to my investors. And I want to give them something worthy. I want to build something. There's a very real personal price.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That value creation is the by product of the very real decisions we made in Kava about staying disciplined, staying focused on consubescence, building something that really delivered for our team members first, for our guests second, and by doing that that our investors would end up doing well and always taking the long-term approach”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a different headset. Let's get this thing off the ground. You saw a lot of very instant gratification for some of the folks involved in the IPO. I think you see in Kava a very different approach we took a slower approach to that IPO, a much more disciplined approach to it. And I think we were much more disciplined in the consistency of the brand and the brand integrity. Consubescence, as we call it, I think that you see the byproduct of it today, I would gather that kava is going to market cap five times what Swedish means is worth something in that order four or five times. Depends on, you know, but it's stayed in that range. And I think that”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I publicly spoken to this. You can look at the difference between the way Cava went public and Sweetrene went public. These were two companies that emerged out of the DC market about the same time. One was out there with a ton of press and a ton of built up expectations. That was Swigreen. Kava was slower, more disciplined. You know, I think Swigreen went in one direction with its real estate kava stayed much more disciplined as it went forward. Ultimately, they both went public. I think that in the Swede Green IPO, we see a case where A number of the investors sold fairly quickly now.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just makes sense to me. I mean, it just seems logical, right? Like if I want to start out and figure out where I'm trying to be in five years and ten years and what's it going to take me to get there? And that's what we mean by future back thinking. And what seems stupid to me is to do what's short-term expedient and long-term stupid. I have an expression. I'm long-term greedy, not short-term stupid. And I really want to build something of value. But the way you do that, whether you're talking about a business or a relationship or your own life is to focus on those things that have meaning and self-respect and those things that when you get down and get to the other side of it, will have touched other people and most importantly touched yourself.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the means versus the byproduct. So when you focus on driving The bottom line You misunderstand that the most important thing is to drive the customer experience and the reason they want to come in I give you an example I was involved with a company that remained nameless They had a little E. coli scare their immediate reaction was to cut labor I looked that message. You're nuts. If you do that, you're going to destroy what you've been working on for years, which is telling your people that what matters most is running great stores. In fact, when you run any enterprise, what you do is much more important than what you say. And so when you focus on very short term metrics, even though it seems like a desirable thing, it actually costs you far more in the long term. How do you know?”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That actually creates the wherewithal to have the byproduct. Only I can tell you is those companies, those CEOs, those leaders that focus on the byproduct, the outcome never get there. It's rare because they actually miss the mark on what creates it. You know, it's like saying I want to be happy. You can't create happiness. You can create the conditions in your life that leads to a feeling of happiness. And if I were talking to my kids, I'd be telling them, do the things that lead to your own self-respect. Do the things that you will respect, and if you in fact do that as your end, your byproduct will be that happiness.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that is not something he can control. It's a byproduct. What is it a byproduct of? Of a simple end, keeping his blood sugar between eighty and one hundred eighty. When he does that, the byproduct is life. What's his means? Diet, exercise, and insulin control. It's literally the same thing in business. Do I want value creation? You better bet on it. But the way I get value creation is by creating a better competitive alternative, a place that people want to come visit you in, that they're willing to walk past your competitors to come to you. What's the means? It's everything I do every day in a business. It's how I spend my time. It's focusing on the aesthetics, the operations, the structures, the processes, the way in which we engage with our team members, the way in which we engage with our customers. That's the doing of the doing that drives the end, a better alternative.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it starts with life, so so much of what I've learned about building companies starts with life shane. I think in much of our society, much of our lives, we've confused byproducts with ends and means. I have a friend who's a type one diabetic. His goal life is to stay alive as long as you and me.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Follow on rounds of capital at a pre agreed to multiple so we're all in alignment. It's an easy thing, and the truth is we have yet to ever turn down a follow on round of capital, other up to an IPO. And for our companies, they've never ever worried about capital they call, pick up the phone, and we get there because we're of them and we're with them. And we recognize that capital raising is not something they should be doing, but rather they should be worrying about building a better competitive alternative. Similar kind of thing with the many skills that my partners bring to it, whether it be strategy, whether it be real estate, whether it be technology, our guys are available to the companies we invest in. Again, we don't push it, but on a cost plus basis, and we want to protect our management team to focus on building a better company and not have to worry about”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have financial people. We're not ever worrying about the liquidity of that. We're in the business of building companies, not selling them. And we're not looking at the balance sheet. We're not looking at the numbers so much as really trying to help that management team know what's going to hit them and how to protect them. I would say, for example, we at Act three believe that financing, which is at the core of so many companies, should not be seen as a life cycle event. You know, so many companies are raising money in an annual or more frequent basis as if it should be done every birthday. Our view is running a company is hard enough work without having to continually be out there selling. And so when we invest in a company, we're going to put an investment in it. And then we're going to agree and take a right of first refusal on all.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the truth is, we have a playbook. We know how to do it between me and my partners, we have built dozens of companies and a number of successful ones, and we know what works. And the mantra here at Act three is simply this. You know, it's tougher to build a nationally dominant company than it is to climb Mount Everest. Nobody goes up Mount Everest without a guide because the risk of falling off the side is huge, death. Our challenge is why go up and try to build a nationally dominant company without somebody who's been there before, has done that route three, four, five times what we call Sherpa Management. When we're in the boardroom,”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's everything. You don't just come for food. You come for the totality of that experience, the people that serve you, the environments that you're in, how you feel when you're there. But at any rate, so I just want to continue with this. We're in immersive entertainment, powerful category. We're in healthy eating in Europe, another powerful category. So first at Act three, we bet on the category. And I'm trying to take a forward look and say, what's going to be the categories that are going to be dominant in five or ten years? I don't want to be fighting against headwinds. I want to be sailing with tailwinds. That's number one. Number two, I only want to invest and I only want to play in that nexus of building the dominant player in that category because the rewards fall to those that are the dominant players in these categories.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building bakery cafes in America between Old Bumpen, Panera, these were the dominant brands. Well, I can tell you the future is in upscale bakery cafes where you have real chefs, where you have food that's worth going out of your way for.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does it have tailwinds? Does it have power? Is this a category that's getting struck? Look at Mediterranean. It's the number one diet in America. Every time we go to the doctor or you read an article, they're giving you a commercial for our diet. It's bold flavors. It's ambitious flavors. And yet it feels safe. It's food that you can eat, lamb and chicken. It's cravable wellness. It's healthy. And yet it's also tasty. That's a category that's got power. Where we have another business implant forward. We call it positive eating. 3% of Americans is vegetarian beforety percent are eating more plant forward. They want that in their diets. Somebody's going to win in that category. We intend to be those people. You can think about bakery cafes.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, the financial statements are a byproduct. They're not the end. So I'm often not looking at the financial statements as a leading indicator. I'm looking at the financial statements as the trailing indicator. What we always start with at Act three. Is does that category?”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At first I have a rule I that will not talk about competitors because that always gets me in trouble But I would say this to you, doing this as long as I've done it. You know, I've done this now over half a century. And I've been in this industry. And the collective leadership of factory holdings, my group, we probably got two or three hundred years of history. There isn't a day that goes by that we don't have on our private chat some interesting commentary on what folks are doing. You can see these patterns over and over and over again.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want something that sustains and lasts for years and decades. You want something that built a competitive moat and is a better competitive alternative. So to me, marketing is never the end. To be cuter or better is never the end. The end is to actually sustain, is to build a better business that's sustaining and powerful in its own right and then figure out how to make sure its target customers actually know about it and it's on their short list.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketing is the wrong phrase in my book. I think the right phrase is amplification. By amplification I mean if I've got something that actually touches people, then I've got to let them know it's available. But the idea that I'm going to somehow come up with something cute or better tactic or better technique that may work in the very short term, but it doesn't sustain a business. And when you're building fixed assets as we are”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While my reaction to it is I know the polls. I've been there. Look at the world pays, the marketplace pays for something that's getting bigger, larger, and better. So how do you do that? You add things, you improve things, you make it better. We all want that. I mean, we're susceptible to that by human nature. And the unfortunate truth is oftentimes, many times, it doesn't make it better. It actually just makes it worse, more complicated. And so my view is we don't want to do, we don't want to beat everything for everybody. We want to be something special for somebody, and that's the essence of what we mean when we say being a better competitive alternative, to actually standing for something and being something better.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source