2024 Business as a Force for Good Annual Ethics Symposium

Summary

At the 2024 Business as a Force for Good Annual Ethics Symposium, Sam Polk, co-founder and CEO of Everytable, shared his inspiring journey from Wall Street to social entrepreneurship. Sam Polk spoke passionately about using business as a tool for social change, specifically in tackling issues of food justice and affordability in underserved communities. Reflecting on his own career, Polk emphasized finding a balance between personal ambition and doing good in the world, urging students to pursue endeavors that meld purpose with profit.

Highlights

• Everytable's unique business model aims to make healthy food accessible and affordable by centralizing production. 🌿
• Sam Polk's transition from Wall Street to entrepreneurship underscores the importance of aligning personal values with business goals. 🚀
• The symposium showcased innovative approaches to food justice and business ethics by bringing together diverse perspectives. 🌍
• Attendees learned about the value of resilience and patience in building mission-driven businesses. 💪
• Students participated in creating marketing campaigns, offering insights into real-world business applications. 📈

Key Takeaways

• Balancing profit and purpose is essential for sustainable success in business ventures. Each endeavor should ideally hit a sweet spot between doing good and making money. 🤝
• The journey to impactful business requires resilience and patience. Building something meaningful can take years and comes with its share of hurdles. 💪
• Everytable illustrates how innovative business models can solve real-world issues like food insecurity by redefining traditional structures. 🔄
• Using centralized production and distribution allows Everytable to deliver healthy, affordable meals, showcasing how business strategy can align with mission-driven goals. 🌍
• Converting missions into viable business models can attract diverse investment and foster inclusive growth, highlighted by Everytable's franchise model. 🚀

Overview

Sam Polk delivered an encouraging message to aspiring entrepreneurs: find the intersection between making a difference and making a living. He shared his personal and professional journey, drawing a connection between the lessons learned on Wall Street and the fulfilling work he now does at Everytable.

Using Everytable as a case study, Sam highlighted the importance of innovative business models in addressing social issues. The centralized production system his company uses has challenged the traditional food service model, making it possible to offer nutritious meals at lower costs, particularly in food deserts.

The symposium provided rich insights into the integration of business ethics and social responsibility, urging students and business leaders alike to think differently about the role corporations can play in societal change. The hands-on student projects emphasized that creativity and strategic thinking can drive both impact and success.

2024 Business as a Force for Good Annual Ethics Symposium Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I read and then you and then great thank you good afternoon everyone what a an honor to be together tonight for the businesses of Force for good annual ethics Symposium it's great to see you guys we're wonderfully honored to have Sam p in Naomi Atlantic from every table um I just want to say a brief word of introduction and then introduce Dale
• 00:30 - 01:00 Smith who will give us our welcoming remarks and then I'll speak a little bit more to introduce Sam uh we are honored to be co-sponsoring this event with a number of valuable colleagues um my name is Jeff th I'm a clinical associate professor of management and director of The Institute for business ethics and sustainability and this event is co-sponsored by the department of management of the College of Business Administration with a special shout out to Dr Kathy McGrath and Dr Ellen encher
• 01:00 - 01:30 uh the Pam recor Center for service and action the accounting Society the international business Society LMU match and the marketing Society thank you so much for your sponsorship and your support and now I'd like to introduce our Dean Dale [Applause] Smith good afternoon everyone I love when we talk about who's co-sponsoring um an event because when you're talking
• 01:30 - 02:00 about food Justice and food security and you see the diversity of the organizations that are behind this you really recognize what it means to be talking about business ethics sustainability and business as a Force for good on behalf of the College of Business Administration it's my absolute honor to welcome everyone to be here today um the annual Symposium is always very meaningful to all of us in the CBA particularly because of our mission and if you missed it walking into the building it's sort of hard to miss all of those Post-it notes but what's
• 02:00 - 02:30 wonderful about our mission wall is we talk about the real importance of our mission which is to advance knowledge and build Business Leaders with moral courage and creative confidence to be a force for good in the global community and today's topic of the Symposium goes to the heart of that as a school that believes deeply in the principles for responsible management education we believe in these sustainable development goals and food Justice and food security is such an important part part of that
• 02:30 - 03:00 making this really special but it's not just us and it's not just Prime we're part of a bigger community of the International Association of Jesuit Business Schools and the IBS that that's the short term for the long name the IBS has a wonderful inspirational Paradigm where it really calls out the hungers that this next Generation has for a better world um in the words from the lato SE from Pope Francis this notion of how do we care for our common home and that's not just
• 03:00 - 03:30 about saving the planet from a perspective of climate change it's all of the social justice issues that make that planet inhabitable for our Global community so we're there in that as well and I also come back from a meeting that I was in in Kansas City where I got to share some really exciting news that I'll share with everybody else is that as part of four Global organizations oos International the global movement initiative our IBS our International Association of Jesuit Business Schools and the globally respond responsible
• 03:30 - 04:00 leadership initiative all four of those groups are talking about how do we educate the next generation of leaders to make a difference in This Global community and together those four organizations with the endorsements and support of more than 800 business schools around the globe submitted a MacArthur 100 Grant 1 1700 organizations submitted grants we made the first uh the next round we're now on a group of 500 and in a period of participatory review but why that's important and why
• 04:00 - 04:30 I'm sharing that with you is it's very much to the points that Sam's going to probably talk about shortly and that's the notion of what does it take to be the Tipping Point At what point can we work together as a global community and start to get the things that we care about and that we'll talk about in this room today to make a Major Impact in our community anyway I look forward to hearing Sam speak and all of the different uh interactions that we'll have as a community because I really do believe that this generation is the
• 04:30 - 05:00 Tipping Point and those of us who work to support this generation are the ones that can be the Catalyst for change that really does allow us to advance our mission and make the world a better place and to care for our common home thank [Applause] you thank you so much Dean Smith for our afternoon uh first we're going to start
• 05:00 - 05:30 with Sam speaking with us and after his presentation and conversation with us maybe a couple of moments for question and answer uh and then as part of working with Sam and speaking with Sam we asked what might we do for you and Sam asked that our students think about how to create viral marketing campaigns to Advanced brand awareness for scratched cooked meals so we brought that to three classes of seniors and we
• 05:30 - 06:00 had over 16 projects of student presentations from which we've selected four and those four will present to you this afternoon um and Sam will ask some questions after each of those presentations and then after the four have presented then share some overall feedback and observations so it's going to be a great afternoon of dialogue of insight and really of passion for business for good as Dean Smith spoke of now let me
• 06:00 - 06:30 introduce Sam PK Sam is the co-founder and CEO of every table an omni Channel fresh prepared Food business making healthy food affordable for all and founder and board member of feast a national nonprofit that advances Wellness in underserved communities in a prior life Sam was a senior distressed Trader at King Street Capital he is the author of The Memoir For the Love of
• 06:30 - 07:00 Money published by scribers in 2016 and the viral Front Page New York Times oped of the same title his writing has been published in the Los Angeles Times the Orange County Register The Huffington Post and cnbc.com Sam serves on the leadership board of the Los Angeles food policy Council The Advisory Board of conscious capitalism Los Angeles and The Advisory Board of the resic center for food law and policy
• 07:00 - 07:30 at UCLA he is a graduate of Columbia University and holds the chartered financial analyst CFA designation it's my great pleasure to introduce you to Sam [Applause] pulk hey everybody uh can you hear me okay um so I'm happy to be here with you today um I am as was just mentioned the CEO of every table which is a California
• 07:30 - 08:00 based business that's selling um profitably selling healthy food and underserved communities um we have now 38 locations around Los Angeles and I do think uh actually around Southern California and I do think that we're the only company um in the country that's you know profitably selling healthy food in underserved markets at scale um so I'm going to tell you a little bit about every table and how this came to be but as I was thinking about sort of what to say here I was also thinking about you
• 08:00 - 08:30 know when I was in your seats um quite some time ago and I figured that I'd share a little bit about my story as well I think one of the things that I've sort of come to believe about the world is that we're all on you know a very very personal journey and that journey is really you know to see if we can live up to our potential or to see if we can sort of answer the question you know did you have a good life are you living a good life in a way that you can answer yes to and so you know I've had a lot of
• 08:30 - 09:00 you know success and a lot of failures on that path and I figure that you know sharing stories is probably the best way um to you know help you in in the positions that you were in and also I want to say thank you for putting so much work and effort into um the projects that you did I really appreciate that um so I grew up here I grew up in Glendale um and went to high school in lyad and I basically grew up in a family where it was a pretty pretty stressful chaotic childhood a lot of
• 09:00 - 09:30 issues around money um you know we were sort of like lower middle class but we were always sort of on the edge and running out of money um and then I uh went to Colombia and in my first year at Colombia my entire sort of like life fell apart basically which was that my my parents got divorced there was a big Affair that sort of got uncovered and my whole family basically sort of exploded for a little while and so in that first year of college I went through you know basically in the span of a year I think
• 09:30 - 10:00 I was kicked off the wrestling team kicked out of Columbia for a semester um went and got a job in San Francisco got fired from that job for getting in a fight had quite a bit of drugs and quite a bit of alcohol um and then got back to Colombia when I was probably like 21 and I was I was sort of like at the end of my rope at that point and and so all I all I wanted to do was find sort of stability and so when I was figuring
• 10:00 - 10:30 out what I was going to do after college the one thing that I had in my mind was let me find a job that I can guarantee that I'll get paid $100,000 and that I have a skill set that can sort of make that the case forever and so um at Columbia they you know Wall Street recruits on Columbia and so I got a job in the analyst program at Bank of America and I went on to the trading floor there and it was really like the first time time um that
• 10:30 - 11:00 I had seen sort of what Wall Street was like and what sort of true wealth looked like which was you know I would walk into a trading floor and guys had you know just huge wads of cash and you know shirts like I'd never seen before and you could just tell like people had a level of money that I had never seen and I loved it like I loved Wall Street because I loved how intense it was I loved the culture of it the it was sort of like this big sort of sports team and
• 11:00 - 11:30 almost like I wasn't a part of a fraternity but it was sort of like that it was like this culture and tight-knit and you were competing with each other but you also really close friends with people and it was really intense and that first year you know I made you know I forgot what it was it was like $50,000 in salary but then a $40,000 bonus and $120,000 bonus and and I spent the next 10 years basically trying to climb up the wall Street ladder as fast as I possibly could and I didn't really sort of
• 11:30 - 12:00 I I would I guess I would say I didn't really become conscious of what I was sort of trying to get to until I was about 30 when at the time I was in the head of distress trading at one of the largest hedge funds in the world and it was this weird thing where I guess I had always just been climbing and trying to beat the people next to me and see how much I could get and where I could get to and for the first time I got to this job that it wasn't the top of Wall Street but it was sort of like you could see the the top of Wall Street like I
• 12:00 - 12:30 was um you know I I was reporting directly to these two billionaire guys who had founded this hedge fund and it was like for the first time I could see what a life like this looked like and for the first time I started to feel like like I don't know like maybe something was missing and around that time for whatever reason I started to read a lot of um sort of books about life I guess is how I would put it so I started reading thorough I started reading um Gandhi's autobiography and then I picked up this um three-part
• 12:30 - 13:00 series uh by Taylor Branch about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and um in this you know very very thick books he just goes into such detail about every single important happening in the 60s around civil rights and I was fascinated by all of it during this time it was sort of 08 and 09 and the um Market was crashing Leman Brothers was going down all of Wall Street was sort
• 13:00 - 13:30 of falling apart and so at work everybody was freaking out although we were one of the hedge funds that was short the market at the time so we were actually making quite a bit of money during that time um but I would go home at night and I would read about the Civil Rights Movement I would read about the Freedom Riders um and if you guys don't know that story these are basically um activists who would board buses in uh the North and both white and black and head down um on basic basically transcontinental buses into
• 13:30 - 14:00 the South to protest segregation which was illegal at the time but still very much in practice and you know they were practicing principles of nonviolent resistance and they would ride these buses down and people in the towns they were going into it hear that they were coming and so they would pull up to bus stops in Montgomery Alabama or mobile and and be met with a crowd of people carrying bats and um bricks and in
• 14:00 - 14:30 Chains and they would open the door to these buses and just file out to basically take a beating without fighting back without resistance um to stand up for what they believed in and there was something so sort of like jaw-dropping about that courage and that conviction that you know I mean a was inspiring but b in a weird way I think now sort of like I
• 14:30 - 15:00 think it started to hold up a mirror to me on some level um not that anything that I've done since then can even approach the intensity of that moment but to see that there was people that were choosing to live a life and to put their lives at risk for something that they believed in not for themselves but for what they thought was right and what they thought was good for the world and so there was something about that that just sort of stuck with me and um it stuck with me enough that it sort
• 15:00 - 15:30 of itch became a a problem and I started to realize that there was something like on Wall Street where I felt like I liked it but there I guess there was something missing like I felt lonely and I felt I felt sort of exhausted but not exhausted like like I was working too hard because the the a job of a hedge fund is actually not sort of investment banking hours um but more just exhausted about the sort of like constant chasing and trying trying to get this bonus and
• 15:30 - 16:00 trying to get this and so in a you know what what ended up being a pretty consequential decision at the end of that year I ended up resigning from that job and really not knowing what I was going to do um but just knowing that you know I guess on some level like we all have this One Life to Live and we all have this choice and for the first time I felt like instead of just chasing this thing that I had been chasing for a long time I needed to sort of think about it and figure it out and so I ended up leaving uh coming back to Los Angeles
• 16:00 - 16:30 and then you know really sort of I spent a little while writing and not knowing what I was going to do and then my wife and I um we sat down one weekend and watched a bunch of Netflix food documentaries and one was called a place at the table and it was about the intersection of food and poverty and it was the first time that I had ever seen um I'd never heard anything about neighborhoods that they called food deserts and um the idea of food Justice and to me it
• 16:30 - 17:00 seemed like this idea like you know a pretty simple idea I guess that healthy food should be available and accessible to everyone and should be a human right instead of a luxury product and you know the next morning I sort of woke up and my wife and I started talking and we just had an idea to see if we could figure out how to do something about that to maybe buy uh you know some groceries for some somebody in a food desert in Los Angeles and so you
• 17:00 - 17:30 know we started making phone calls to people and started talking to people and soon this idea for a nonprofit that would help parents and underserved neighborhoods who were trying to get themselves and their families healthy you know came to be and we started you know reaching out to organizations and before I knew it I was running a group of eight parents in South Los Angeles who were dealing with sickness in their family and wanted to get them their their kids and their and their parents and their families healthy and so I was
• 17:30 - 18:00 running these groups um and you know keep in mind that I had no idea how to run a group or start start an organization or how to do any of that um but I just remember being with these folks and coming up with a curriculum and talking every day and about about how to sort of deal with this world and you know I I loved that work and I loved um you know I loved the relationships that we were building and I loved the work that we were doing and I did that for about 3 years and about 3 years in
• 18:00 - 18:30 you know there's this um there's this idea if you ever you guys ever read these um screenwriting books um there's this idea it basically says that all stories sort of follow a standard path and there's one terrible moment after you've sort of like gone into this new world and you're trying to figure it out and there's a moment called Dark Knight of the Soul where you're way in a worse place than you had been when you started the journey and I sort of woke woke up one day and I realized that I was there
• 18:30 - 19:00 on some level and what I realized was that first of all nonprofits were really hard to grow and really hard to scale and I was running this nonprofit and I I I thought that it was going to be about helping people in underserved communities but now what I ended up doing was having to raise money from wealthy people all the time which was fine but you could just see that my life was going to become this donor meeting and that donor meeting and this big you know event and this big Gala and this
• 19:00 - 19:30 big Gala but it was more about the fundraising than it was about the work and really doing anything and so it felt like it wasn't going to scale and at the same time my wife and I were starting to think about kids and have kids and I started to realized that you know Wall Street for me had all been about you know how much money can I make and how much can I get for myself and now I had gone to the complete opposite side of the world and I was doing all this work to help and I was really proud of what we were doing but there was also
• 19:30 - 20:00 something missing I had that same sort of loneliness that I had when I was on Wall Street because it felt like something was missing and you know it took me a couple years to realize what it was but I think the truth of it is for me and this is just personal is that I think that I have sort of two sides to me um one is this sort of like deep ambition to make money and take care of my family and build something really big and then I also have this equal part
• 20:00 - 20:30 that feels like but I also want to do something good in the world and I want to help people and I want to I want to make the world a more just and Equitable place and and the problem with Wall Street was that there was no sort of doing good and the problem with nonprofits was that there was no way to build anything and build wealth and build success and build um stability and I think that you know one of the things about you know where you guys are in the world is like it is I I don't know you're thinking about it but it is like
• 20:30 - 21:00 a tough position to be in because you know when I was 19 I was pretty or I don't know how old you guys are 20 22 but I was pretty um idealistic and I wanted to help a lot of people um but I also like I didn't think at the time where I didn't understand how hard it is to live in Los Angeles you know how much things cost and how much rent is and how hard it is to buy a house and you know when you're in your 20s you don't have to deal with kids and family
• 21:00 - 21:30 but pretty soon it happens and then you have these big responsibilities and so I started to think like well what if I could figure out a business that would do both of those things at the same time and we had this idea for a business that would basically dramatically reduce the cost of food by changing the way that effectively a restaurant is structured so if you think about any restaurant think about any like big restaurant chain like sweet green for example great
• 21:30 - 22:00 business but each sweet green is a is is basically a a salad production factory where they're taking in you know fresh produce and protein and chicken and they're doing all the cooking themselves and that's great the problem is that if you've got 30 different sweet greens that means you have 30 different food production facilities that each have their own kitchen which is very expensive to build their own team which is very expensive to hire their own sets
• 22:00 - 22:30 of equipment which are very expensive um and not enough volume to really get the efficiency that you can get in a big Factory and so every table the simple idea with every table was can we create a single kitchen that we run with Incredible efficiency so that you can significantly drive down the cost of food um and and and and bring bring food into neighborhoods that don't have
• 22:30 - 23:00 access and so we we raised some money to do that we hired our first chef and we opened the first store in 2016 in South Los Angeles and let me tell you like opening the first every table was a terrible moment I mean just absolutely terrible because it was this like you know first of all the sales were not good the food was not good but it was also this thing about like you know we had worked for a year to come up with this idea and then this like terrible moment of vulnerability sort of opening
• 23:00 - 23:30 the doors of of the store but you know after that first week you know we started to stabilized we started to grow we started to build and frankly we've been working on the same thing for you know 10 years now and I think what we've learned sort of along the way is a lot we've learned that it's um way harder than we thought um that starting a business is really hard um figuring out how to effectively run a manufacturing
• 23:30 - 24:00 facility is really hard figuring out how to open stores is really hard but at the same time and this is what I love about business is that it just compounds over time and so we learned how to make a good salad and make a good dressing and cook a good chicken and figure out the labor model in the stores and the labor model in the kitchen and figure out how to raise money and and then as we started to get better and better we figured out how to do different things like we started this franchise program where we raised a bunch of money from
• 24:00 - 24:30 foundations so that we could have our store managers who basically what we had in our store managers was these really talented people that cared about the business and for a lot of reasons they were relegated to 1725 an hour and then if they were successful to getting a $60,000 a year job as a district manager and for us it was like you know we want to create a big business but we want to do it in a way where um everybody can
• 24:30 - 25:00 share in the upside basically and so we ended up going and raising a bunch of money from foundations and what are called cdfis so that we can take these talented store managers and lend them the money to start their own every table businesses and so now increasingly every tables are owned by folks from the communities that we're trying to serve um who now own these stores if you go to every table Englewood and every table Long Beach and soon every table and every table watts and every table
• 25:00 - 25:30 Monterey Park all of those will be owned by entrepreneurs that had a ton of talent and a ton of hard work but didn't have sort of access to Capital in the way that they needed it for a first-time entrepreneur and so you know I'm I'm sort of getting to the end of my talk but I I will say that you know the good thing about I think every table and for where I am in the world is that the the the thing that I'm most grateful for I guess is what I would say is that I
• 25:30 - 26:00 found a a a way to I found a I found a career where I could both spend a ton of time trying to build this thing into a multi-billion dollar business and at the same time you know have the basically like quench that other part of my sort of Personality that says I want to figure out something that helps people and I do think that that's like for me at the end of the day like and not that anybody here ask me for
• 26:00 - 26:30 advice but this idea of like if you can figure out a way to do something that you love and that you deeply care about that touches you as a person and at the same time build a business and build something that can grow and compound over time so that you can you know you guys are in your 20s and you're about to work so hard um you know in those 20 years uh you know in your 20s to get ahead in the world and the thing
• 26:30 - 27:00 that I think is the most valuable on that is if you can do that in something that as you work hard that that work compounds and builds and grows over time um you know to me I think that's the uh at least that's the answer that worked for me so thank you guys so much for your time thanks for your interest in every table um thanks for um the work that you did on the project and I'm happy to take any any questions [Applause]
• 27:00 - 27:30 any questions I was yeah she I mean yeah she was very
• 27:30 - 28:00 helpful in that because I think that her and I are sort of the same on some level which is like we do think that it's not about how much money you make it's about like where whether you can figure out your place in the world and whether you can figure out something that fits um and when I thought about it I could just you know and I see this every day which is like first of all the money on Wall Street is great it is 100% great and the
• 28:00 - 28:30 people that stayed that I worked with they all have a lot of money but I would say 90% of them didn't make as much money as they wanted and and feel like and I don't want to speak for everybody but this is just a conversation that I have like they feel like something is missing and so I think the the thing that I was sort of starting to Grapple with is like you make this decision when you're 20 because because you know credit s comes
• 28:30 - 29:00 and holds a recruiting thing at your school and then you go there and all of a sudden you're 60 and that's what you've done with your whole life and so I think for me it was like okay well I think that at the end of the day like at the end of the day none of this really matters like we're all going to die it's all going to be gone nobody cares and so you know the question is not to me is like how can you accumulate money and live a safe life and hold on to the seat that you've got but I read this book once that a guy said like it was called
• 29:00 - 29:30 your life is a story and it's like live your life as a as if you're going to tell somebody that story years later and the story of like well I got nervous about when I was 28 but I decided to hold on to that seat so I could clip a coupon for 30 years I don't think it's a great story personally L if you stand up
• 29:30 - 30:00 right now it's kind of local to Southern California do you see that expending to California yeah I think it's going to be bigger than Subway for us and I think that's like 30,000 loc like I think that we like one of the things that I've realized is like you know the food business so so some of the some of the biggest businesses in the world world are retail businesses and and they're
• 30:00 - 30:30 very hard and they take a lot of time to build but the the trick is that once you get effectively a box a a model that works and if you figure out enough things that you can keep replicating that model it's very challenging to do that it's like it looks like Starbucks is like so easy to do and chipotle is so easy to do but these are like one in a million Concepts that figured out how to break through but once you do
• 30:30 - 31:00 that and it compounds and the and the learnings and the brand and the supply chain and the logistics all it becomes this snowball that just can't be stopped on some level and so like you know it's taken us 10 years almost to get to 38 stores but that's that's a lot that's actually faster than a lot of those guys that I mention because what H it's basically like one of the things I got from Wall Street was this deep belief in the value of compound interest and like
• 31:00 - 31:30 you know it goes like this and so I think that we've got a model that's not I don't say it's perfected yet but it's so economically powerful that I think it's going to be everywhere yeah the question is about our supplier relationships and the good
• 31:30 - 32:00 new this is sort of easier to say because we're in California which is the greatest producer of Agriculture basically in the entire world um but we Source from local farms and because we don't have to go because we're only getting the food from um The Farms to the to our single kitchen and then we handle it from there we can just go directly to farms and so that is a really it's not that important in terms of the cost structure but it's definitely important in the freshness and the quality of the ingredients um to
• 32:00 - 32:30 go direct to Farms thanks want to do the day before how do you with a roock when it comes your way or any adversity thanks thank you Ibrahim the question is how do you deal with adversity so I've learned so you know I I I don't want to sort of like lionize
• 32:30 - 33:00 running a business and being an entrepreneur you know I think it's I think it's great if you don't want to do that you know I think people have their own things but you know Elon Musk which I'm sure I don't know if he's pop probably not popular these days but you know he he has this saying that like that that running a company is like chewing glass and looking into the abyss and and he's 100% right like basically when you're the head of a company from
• 33:00 - 33:30 the very earliest days all of the worst news in the business comes to you and all and and you are also they say you know heavy as the head that wears the crown but it's like you are wearing the existential risk of the business sort of like every day and it is I mean I'm telling you it is grueling and so I have learned over time to go to sleep like when when I have terrible days
• 33:30 - 34:00 which I do I would say two out of every five days is terrible and then two out of every five days is like good and then one out of five days is just spectacular but on the two out of days that are terrible I just I I tell my wife it's a terrible day I'm gonna go to sleep at 8:30 um and then get up and fight again the next day it's easier with coffee
• 34:00 - 34:30 anding direct reports what are maybe three or things that oh gosh that's a good one um so I I would say so I so one of the things about starting and running a business is that there's a thousand books to read about how to do it and I've I've I think I've read sort of all of them basically and a lot of them will
• 34:30 - 35:00 say like hire great people and tell them what to do and let them be and after having done that 20 times I've just come to believe that that is completely the wrong thing to do and so what I have what has worked for me over many years of failing at this is to myself figure out so one of the things about running a business is that you You' got to understand sort of like all parts of a business which includes
• 35:00 - 35:30 Finance HR legal Logistics supply chain retail operations technology Etc and I have found that if I first of all hire great people be very close to them and I think the when I say be very close to them what I mean is like sit next to them and attack the problem together but also be in every single detail and do not leave
• 35:30 - 36:00 anything to chance and you you'll see like running a business like people are very challenging to manage they are very challenging to manage we so on some level we got really lucky on that and I think because you know it was this time time of like very low interest rates and very high
• 36:00 - 36:30 interest in the impact investing world and and then just a few lucky things fell our way and so we raised a seed round that was like $2.7 million um I would say yeah I have a bunch of advice on sort of fundraising which is like make a really really good deck have a really really good financial model and and I'm not saying like that doesn't take that long but just like work on it and work on it and work on it long than you think you should 3 months something
• 36:30 - 37:00 like that and then put your helmet on and get a list of 200 people and then go call all of them and the the hardest thing about fundraising is that you know somebody told me that there's somewhere in the ether is a number of NOS that you have to get through to get to yes and that is not a single digigit number like it is a it is often a triple I'm doing it right
• 37:00 - 37:30 now again and we've raised you know $150 million something like that like it is so hard and it is it is like talking about like the N the days that you go to bed is like you're trying to raise money you're running out of money somebody you thought was going to come through calls you and says no it's not going to do it and it it is so brutal because the whole thing about like raising money is that you have this like you have a vision for something that that you think is going to help the world and you think is going to work and nine out of 10 people think
• 37:30 - 38:00 that you're wrong or crazy or that even if you're right you can't execute it and so you have to have like the fortitude to withstand all of that brutal nose and it is just it is so hard section of low inome and food and
• 38:00 - 38:30 nutrition yeah I mean I think there is there's probably sort of I would put it at least for me like more than you think and less than you think so I think the more than you think is like especially doing a sort of mission driven business and not being from a low-income Community myself is like there is a tremendous amount of Suspicion of well-meaning white people coming in to help a community basically
• 38:30 - 39:00 um and so there's like you know a lot of sort of like work and relationship building has to go into that for sure and then on the other side you know the people are just people and it's like you know we don't have a different marketing message for Watts than we do for montere park or belflower or West Hollywood like there's cultural sensitivities for sure but it's
• 39:00 - 39:30 also just dealing with people you know ask do you you mean like exhausted or person like in this place where you're chasing the business and growing and GR not I mean the the thing that we so
• 39:30 - 40:00 here's my answer to that is like when we when we started the big company was Toms at the time um and you know I mean I'm just going to be honest like I never liked that I I never liked Tom's and and the reason was is because to me there wasn't enough sort of like respect for how hard business is so I mean when what I mean is like you know if you think about like what business is like you've you got this product and you've got to figure out how
• 40:00 - 40:30 to get people to buy it or this service you got but you also have to figure out the entire backend that supports it in a way and there's never enough people to do what you need to do there's always too much cost and you've got to make profit back to pay your investors Etc it's like it's impossible on a and it's and it's impossible for startup companies facing McDonald's and Starbucks it's just so hard and so the idea that you can also sort of donate cost a good sold to somebody else
• 40:30 - 41:00 because that makes people feel good about to me both seemed like a disrespectful to the laws of business but also there was something about and now I'm just going off on a tie rate on Tom's not even answering your question but but there there was also something about like they knew who their customer was right and their customer was the affluent wealthy person that was going to feel good and feel charitable but every table's not like that like we everything that we've done has driven
• 41:00 - 41:30 the mission into the structure of the business so and I mean the franchise model like if you think that the franchise model sounds great and well-meaning it's also great capital for us right great return on inves great risk abdication for us on some level um and and also like you know if you think about the opportunity in every table it's like I promise you like there's you know you go into Brentwood like what we haven't opened a store in Brentwood because real estate is really expensive
• 41:30 - 42:00 and there's a you know creation and a pressed juicery and a Whole Foods and a Tender Greens and a sweet green and to and there's nothing like that in watts and South La and there's way way way more people and so what I'm saying is like the mission is the business for every table and so for me it's like what's grueling about it is how hard it is because I think business is really hard I think food businesses is really hard and then I think healthy healthy food fresh food at fast food prices is really really hard but the light at the
• 42:00 - 42:30 end of the tunnel is like I I do have this belief that if like if I ever end up making a huge amount of money on every table which I think is very possible no one everybody benefits from that the workers who own Equity the franchisees the customers who get that the you know the there's no there's no tradeoff as far as I'm concerned
• 42:30 - 43:00 Mission driven aspect do they see it as a distraction or do they see it as like a product Market fit opportunity that's a good question um yeah so so the question is dec's who are trying to return Capital um do they see the mission as a good thing or or just a distraction and I think the the answer is I think there's sort of a couple things to say about this like
• 43:00 - 43:30 um Peter theel actually has this has this he sort of doesn't like social Enterprises and he and he B what he doesn't like is he doesn't like doing a business that is also like esteemed by the world as good because he thinks that that's a recipe for tons and tons of competition what he likes about Mission driven businesses is and this is what I like about it is when you find a problem that nobody else is really trying to
• 43:30 - 44:00 solve and you say I think I'm going to solve that I'm I'm going to work on that for a long and that is a good thing because that means that you're sort of like alone in a market trying to figure something out so in general VCS don't care they really don't care but if you but but everybody knows that when you have a mission that galvanizes people recruiting is better uh retention is better customers are better you can go
• 44:00 - 44:30 through hard times with more fortitude Etc so it's really like can you find the thing that is different that you're going to figure out because you care about that even if the world like he he uses this example which I think is probably right about like you know is SpaceX I'm I'm sounding like Pro Elon Musk I'm sorry for that but you know is like is SpaceX like a a social Enterprise well maybe not at the time but it was to him right like he that's what he cared about and he said I'm going to figure out this problem and I
• 44:30 - 45:00 think if you can find that then you can Galvanize a lot of you get all the benefits of a social Enterprise and then you get VC's pretty interested I want to askal IDE to me I feel like already difficult to be successful as a startup and then on top of that also have this goal of doing good for the world what do you say to the the naysayers and and how
• 45:00 - 45:30 did you sort of how were you able to like shift your perspective that okay I can do good for the world and make money I think was a great question is about about conscious capitalism and I don't know how to um summarize it but like is it and is it distracting on some level like and I think the answer is kind of yes to be honest and and what I mean is like sort of like what I was saying like you know when you're I I I I have come away from 10 years of this
• 45:30 - 46:00 with like a deep respect for Business and Entrepreneurship and a belief that um yeah that that it that it requires sort of like intense focus and so all of the sort of like excess window dressing sort of like has to go on some level and the thing that for us like going back to the earlier question is like if you can build it into the if you're like a I don't know what a good example of is you're if you're a pest control company
• 46:00 - 46:30 that also is donating to blah blah blah blah blah that I think is like you know when push comes to shove that's always going to be jettison but if if your mission is the business then it can carry you forever I mean I think that's sort of like my message which is like figure out like you know we've all got this one life like what are you going to spend it on you know and and I think it's a good thing to find a problem and attack it and see if you can solve it and of
• 46:30 - 47:00 course you got to pay people well of course you got to be environmental but it's like is the business your mission then it'll carry you a long way like where you see the overlap from your nonprofit work and like where maybe that kind of every table and maybe where yeah great question actually and it's you know Steve Jobs has this Stanford speech I don't know if you guys have read it but he talks about all the
• 47:00 - 47:30 different things he was interested in including like took a calligraphy class one day and he never really figured out why that was meaningful to him until 10 year 20 years later that's why the Macintosh is so beautiful and has such great graphics Etc um and so I think the point of that for me is like you know the only way that we were able to pull off this social Equity franchise model is because a I had sort of a good understanding of Finance from Street and then B I had the ability to um raise
• 47:30 - 48:00 money from foundations and understand how to speak that language and then the only way that we were successful opening in Compton and Watts Etc was because we had experience sort of operating there basically so it all you know like I said like I think that life is this like very personal Journey that we're all on and at the end of the day it all sort of worked out together I've got a couple questions if I might
• 48:00 - 48:30 shoot could you describe one of the ways that I've spoken to students about the problem that you're trying to solve and if this is inaccurate if you could help them understand I got it wrong and if I'm pointing correctly if you could just unravel that for them why is a salad more expensive than a hamburger and you analyze both of the business models of the fast food Industrial food system and then you created a
• 48:30 - 49:00 different system could you speak about that and maybe give some examples yeah kind of flush that out for them yeah so the it's funny because it's I think it's sort of counterintuitive to sort of like popular understanding basically but people think like if you ask people that question like why is a hamburger more expensive than Sal usually what they'll say in in my opinion is like the ingredients of a salad are more expensive and then why is that probably because the government subsidizes a lot of commodity crops Etc blah blah blah
• 49:00 - 49:30 but I don't I don't find that to be true and what I mean is like I think if you went to a grocery store and bought the ingredients for a burger and fries and cooked it yourself and went to the grocery store and bought the ingredients for a chicken salad it would basically cost the same thing the reason that it's different all comes down to the idea of perishability and Manufacturing efficiency and so the thing you have to understand is that the people use this word food system and
• 49:30 - 50:00 they they say you know we have a messed up food system and that's true but the if you think about what the food system is it's basically grocery stores liquor stores convenience stores restaurants and fast food that's basically it and the companies that have dominated the last 60 or 70 years so if you think about like the middle of a grocery store the cereal the chips all that all the stuff that's for sale in the grocer stores and for sale in the convenience stores and also fast food
• 50:00 - 50:30 all of them are characterized by basically non- perishability so think about like how long does it take Pop-Tarts to go bad how long does it take Pringles to go bad you know and and so if you think about the difference and if you think about why that matters what it means is that you can produce Pringles in a single Factory at incredible efficiency with Incredible automation incredible robotss Etc and then because it never goes bad
• 50:30 - 51:00 you can send it all over the world well imagine trying to do that with a salad you just can't do it you have to make the salad right there because it goes bad very fast and so the entire food system that we have the reason we have this crazy obesity crisis is because non- perishable food is much more efficient to produce and distribute and we didn't understand that it was fatal until it was too late basically and so to go back to your question fast food is basically a non- perishable
• 51:00 - 51:30 supply chain if you think about like what you get from McDonald's it's going to be like the bun which never goes bad fries which never goes bad soda which never goes bad beef which is frozen maybe you have a little thin layer of iceberg lettuce which by the way is like the least perishable lettuce and that's it and so all of these fast food places are basically they're basically locations where you fry or microwave a non- perishable product that was made in a huge Factory with Incredible
• 51:30 - 52:00 efficiency and salads are not and so then your plan was around the manufacturing efficiency in that one facility so that you could be competitive from a price it was about the manufacturing efficiency yes but then because we're dealing with the perishable product that is much harder then we have to take it to our stores ourselves and sell it very very quickly and then man manage that inventory at the stores with a crazy algorithm that
• 52:00 - 52:30 keeps waste incredibly low despite the unpredictability of consumer Behavior do you have Place yeah that's a that's a that's a great question like it you know and and it's happened like our fridges have gone
• 52:30 - 53:00 down it's like it's it's it's terrible I mean the good news about every table is and this is like not exactly the question you asked but because we have a centralized facility when we we are much more Dynamic than a standard R like if you think about like Wing Stop right think about like if chicken wings if there's a shorter chick Wing Stop is screwed because they can't they have the equipment that can only make chicken wings but every table we have all kinds of ovens and so if if Beef goes out we can
• 53:00 - 53:30 put chicken in we can put turkey in ETC but you know if electricity goes out we're in trouble I got two more thank you for your patience can you describe one of your most popular items yeah um let's see I think the uh the one of the top sellers is a pretty new one it's a uh uh chili crisp sesame noodles with sesame chicken
• 53:30 - 54:00 incredible um we've got a a turkey taco bowl that does really well a chicken schwarma that does really well a salmon superfood salad that does really well um a home we've got a whole bunch of collaborations coming out we're doing uh I don't know if anybody knows the South La hip-hop artist named G Paro and we're doing a collaboration with G Paro we're doing a collaboration with rup Paul um so you'll see some fun uh some fun new items coming your way
• 54:00 - 54:30 than that's a good so he said what's your favorite and least favorite part about being your own boss I think the the favorite part is sort of easy on some level like it's two things like you know when I was leaving Wall Street everybody would you know Wall Street is very arrogant place you know and people would be like well how is you know is it going to be as intellectually challenging and but then you know like I was saying like running a business is is almost infinitely complicated because you have to learn all these marketing
• 54:30 - 55:00 brand Logistics operation how to manage people how to run te so it's like I have a very sort of frenetic curious mind that running a business helps but the the the the thing I like most about it goes to this question about like your own personal journey and like at the end of the day and I don't mean like this sounds sort of like self-aggrandizing and that's not how I mean it because it is true like you need every single person and like one of the things I love most is like being part of a team like a
• 55:00 - 55:30 high functioning team but at the end of the day the person making the decisions for every table is me and so it's both an expression of like my values but it's also like the compet strategic competition that I'm sort of playing and I love that like I wanted to be the guy sort of like doing that um what's the worst thing about it I don't know man like I think those like it's it really you know there there
• 55:30 - 56:00 is the number of existential threats that come up and like the number of sort of like adrenaline spikes on a regular basis that I have to deal with is like very high and that is very hard my last question and then we're going to move to students okay are you incorporated as a public benefit Corporation or how did you incorporate your bus and what was the thinking about that
• 56:00 - 56:30 structure so we incorporated is what's called a public benefit cor which basically means it's basically like a for-profit company but instead of just having a fiduciary duty to our shareholders we also have a fiduciary duty to the public benefit that we claimed when we incorporated and I think that to me that one of the things that you do see in in business is to the question of like Venture capitalists is like as you raise more and more money
• 56:30 - 57:00 you get less and less control of the business and people have different agendas and venture capitalist agenda is to get their money back at a much higher rate period and at the Timeline that suits them not what the business needs and I don't blame them for that like I you know that's great and we've got a lot of great money from them and that was helpful but to be able to have the ability to fight off invest s or shareholder lawsuits Etc by defending
• 57:00 - 57:30 our decisions by saying it was for the long-term benefit of the public mission is I think I think it's I think it's sort of good strategic thinking and how to deal with corporate challenges but it's also true and right like we should be making decisions for the long term of the public benefit not just what is best for XYZ Venture Capital fund okay some Applause