- I remember waking up the next day
subsequently feeling
very empty and very depressed
because that big moment that I had been chasing
ever since I was a kid left me empty.
(calming guitar music)
So I got to New York at 22 years old
and started my first business six weeks in.
It was a digital media company.
And I remember very specifically
about the culture that we had created
because it was very much a sales oriented culture,
it was very much focused on this notion
of dialing for dollars and nothing
was rewarded more so than actually landing
a new client or driving top line revenue.
And I remember the day that I sold the business
and waking up the next morning thereafter
feeling very empty for a couple of reasons,
number one the money didn't change
and didn't fill that hole that I had inside of me
or inside of my heart, and I couldn't
necessarily share the victory
with every single person that helped
get me there, and it was about three years
after, I had an opportunity to really
hit the pause button and take some time
and think through, okay, if I'm going to
start a new company, and if that company
is gonna be based on my core values,
and if that company is going to do
some good in this world, how am I gonna execute
against that and when I thought about
an industry to do that in, I wanted
to find one of the most human industries
that existed on the planet Earth,
which of course was food.
And so in building and pizza, I was extremely
nervous going into an industry
that I had zero experience in
and then going into an industry
and changing policy, basically
doing the opposite of what most companies
in that industry have done for the last
five or six decades, the business model
was completely upside down because
we were paying too much, we were providing
ingredients that didn't make sense economically,
and I remember when we opened up
our first pizza shop we had one of the most inflated
both food and labor costs I'd ever seen, right,
in an actual restaurant because
we were paying a living wage, we were
literally making everything from scratch
from the highest quality ingredients
that we could find, but fast forward
to six months later, the word got out
in the community that there was this
really cool pizza shop led by an amazing
group of people that really cared
about wage and humanity and community
and what it meant to be a good neighbor
and the lines started forming,
and then the line started going around the block
and all of the sudden we couldn't
make enough pizza to sell, and that
was the springboard to what brought
us from a single location,
8th street northeastern Washington D.C.,
to well over 35 locations and six different markets,
doubling the size of the company for the next 18 months
was the fact that we did the right thing
and we got rewarded for it not just internally
but externally, and nothing makes me
more proud to tell the story
because I want to share inspiration
to others, it's worth doing the right thing,
it's worth putting a tremendous amount
of humanity into a company.
Because what you get out of it,
is you get the day in day out reward
of feeling good, and the day in day out
support of all of your people
wanting you and wanting the company
to win and having your back through
thick and through thin.