My pop sent me a link of an interview with David Chang on The Paul Holdengräber Show. It’s worth watching if you’ve been to Momofuku, want to go (me), and/or you are interested in failure (everyone). Talking about life in general, Chang said, “Everything boils back down to risk.”
As a chef and as entrepreneur, Chang is accustomed to risk. Maybe more than most. He started with a “ridiculously small” noodle bar in the Lower East Side eight years ago, and now he is a cooking icon. It’s no big thing. As he says, “Who cares if you end in failure?”
Risk, failure and food have been on my mind after reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. The idea of taking a chance on what Ries calls a minimally viable product (MVP) is pretty well known in the food industry. You have got to get something on the plate, and there’s no need to fuss about how that gets done. In the same way, Ries advocates getting a product in front of customers fast and then seeing how they interact with it to help your execution improve. The opposite of this would be working out every bug and glitch in stealth mode until it was time to spring your device/site/service on the whole world. But what if they don’t like it?
One of Ries’ great examples is a startup that offers a web-based recipe search that can take the dinnertime hankerings you have and turn them into a complete, budgeted shopping list. One of the risks for this startup was that when they began the rollout to potential customers, they weren’t actually using their product. Instead of introducing a site that could handle a customer’s requests and spit out a list, they found one person who was open to the idea and went to her house and wrote down what foods she wanted to feed her family that week. Then they would consult chefs they had already lined up and determine what the ideal recipes and shopping list would be based on time-to-cook, cost, health and variety. They also made sure that all of the ingredients included in the recipes were at her go-to grocery store. And then they would collect a check from her for $9.95 a week! This doesn’t sound like a company that Google would swoop in and offer billions for in a few months.
The business partners were learning a lot though. Once they had perfected the system with one customer, they added another. Once they arrived at more than they could handle logistically, they started using their site and email to capture the information and deliver to the customer as promised.
The company, Food on the Table, started in Austin and is now in cities across the country. When you look at what they did, the beauty is in that there wasn’t much upfront risk. Or if there was, it was matched step-by-step by the amount of insight they were gaining. They flattened out expectations and gradually ramped them up based on what reality told them and what their missteps revealed – not on what they heard in a breathless meeting in a windowless room.
It sounds like that same experimental approach that has led Chang to his current level. As he says, “Let’s make some really big mistakes. They are exciting to me. Even bad mistakes. They’re not fun to deal with, but you learn. That’s life.”
The True Gen 