Founder's Story - He had a 9-Figure Exit (Then Almost Lost It All) | Ep. 412 with Steve Salis CEO of Catalogue.co

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

Daniel and Steve Salis dive into what it really takes to build restaurants at scale, from creating a brand people love to delivering hospitality every single day. Steve explains how restaurants become cultural beacons inside communities, why &pizza was built to recreate the feeling of a local mom-and-pop pizza shop, and how he turned a simple observation inside a Qdoba into a scalable fast-casual pizza concept. The conversation also goes deeper into risk, COVID, personal sacrifice, underdog mentality, and why Steve believes the ability to execute is what separates real builders from people with ideas. Key Discussion Points Steve explains that restaurants are difficult because they require a great brand, great product, great experience, and an extraordinary hospitality model working together consistently. He describes restaurants as cultural gathering places, saying the best ones connect people, communities, and memories far beyond the food itself. Steve shares the origin of &pizza: he wanted to recreate the mom-and-pop pizza shop experience for the modern consumer, using pizza as a conduit for community and belonging. He recalls moving to New York City at 21 as a college dropout, living in a one-bedroom apartment with four other guys, and entering food and beverage just to support himself. Steve explains how opening a tequila taqueria bar during the financial crisis shaped one of his core principles: premium and approachable can coexist. He breaks down his approach to risk through three categories: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, arguing that founders need to quantify risk instead of letting fear stop them. Steve says ideas are common, but execution is rare, and what makes him dangerous is his ability to take an idea and actually operate it into reality. He shares how COVID became one of his hardest entrepreneurial moments, with lenders calling about $47 million while revenue collapsed to zero and he was financing payroll. Steve explains why endurance is the most important attribute in business, because when you are going through hell, the only option is to keep moving one day at a time. He reflects on being an underdog from New Hampshire, growing up lower middle income, watching his father lose his business in 2008, and having to fight for everything he built. Takeaways Restaurants are not just food businesses; they are emotional, cultural, and community-driven experiences that must earn attention every day. Risk is not something to avoid blindly. Steve’s framework is to quantify what can be known, prepare for what might happen, and accept that some unknowns are just life. The difference between dreamers and operators is execution. Plenty of people have ideas, but few people can turn those ideas into scalable companies. Premium does not have to mean inaccessible. Steve’s hospitality philosophy is built around delivering extraordinary experiences through premium and approachability. Endurance beats hype, timing, and even talent when the business gets hard, because founders have to survive long enough for the wins to compound. Closing Thoughts Steve Salis’ story is the founder playbook for turning pressure into vision and vision into execution. He built through financial crisis, scaled through category disruption, survived COVID, and kept pushing into what he calls his second act. This episode is a reminder that the restaurant business is brutal, but for the right founder, it can become a platform for culture, community, and legacy-defining brands. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I moved to New York City with no money. I put every dime I had into the business. Then to see what came of that by opening that first store up was unbelievable. We had lines out the door every single day. Steve Salas built one of the most scalable restaurant brands in America, achieved a nine-figure exit at 35 and lost it all to COVID. This is how he rebuilt. When you're going through hell, you just have to keep going.

I think I'm very dangerous because... Everyone I know is like, I want to open a restaurant. I want to be in hospitality. But I don't think they understand the grind, how hard it is to open a restaurant, to own a restaurant chain. What is it really like? It's a lot of work. It requires really a few different ingredients, no pun intended.

It requires building a great brand, having a great product, driving a great experience. And then there's an, then you wrap it, with an extraordinary hospitality model. You know, it's funny, when you're building something for scale, I think a lot of people don't recognize, in order to get scale, you have to have a lot of people that like what you do, otherwise you can't scale it because there's not enough excitement about what you're doing. So when you're able to define your business with those principles

and then have the model that can work, you can then scale it from there, it's a hard business. but I have a lot of friends that love it. They go in. They enjoy restaurants. They go out to eat every day. And, you know, they talk about getting into it. But the reality is, is it's a really challenging business to be in.

But, you know, I think a lot of businesses are challenging to be in. So we just happen to have chosen that as one of the things we do. What do you think people are so fascinated with restaurants? I don't know what I feel like, I feel like when I think of, okay, hey, I want to go meet somebody. I'm going to go to the restaurant. Like, I feel like we wrap our lives around going to restaurants because that is like the place where we meet our community, where we meet our friends, our family. Why do you think that is? Well, I think in a lot of cases, in a lot of cases, they have cultural resonance, right?

They're beacons to the communities by which they serve. And so the energy is a byproduct of creating a great environment. And a lot of times the people within the environment is what makes the experience. and so unbelievably great. When I built pizza as an example, I wanted to recreate the mom and pop pizza shop experience because that very thing was so essential to the DNA of building that company.

I remember as a child how important that local pizza parlor was to my life. What was funny was as I got older, the pizza wasn't actually that great, but it was a conduit for connecting people, connecting community, Inside of one place, it didn't matter what you did or didn't do. It didn't matter how much money you did or didn't have.

It didn't matter what ethnicity you were or weren't. Everyone felt like they belonged in this environment. I think that's emblematic of what a restaurant can provide to its community is that. And, you know, to be candid, our pizza business was built off of those origins, those very origins. It was, how do I create or recreate the mom and pop pizza? the shop experience for the today and the going for a consumer. How do I tap that zikist, right? How do I tap into that bringing you back to your, you know,

your formative years as a child where you're fighting with your brother over that last slice when you're engaging with your parents and connecting with them about your day at school or whether it's your, they're with friends or other family members or you run into others that you know from school or from the neighborhood. Like that's, that's what a restaurant can. can do. It's the power of that. And I think that, you know, it shows out to be try time and time again, the thing that definitely is a is a critical component to being successful in the business.

So what did it take to scale your pizza company to a point that it was a nine figure valuation and you're able to exit it? I saw an opportunity in the pizza industry. Taking a step back. I was in New York city. I moved there when I was 21 years old. I was a college dropout. I was a scholarship athlete. And I moved to New York because I had a different vision for my life. And I started out getting into the food and beverage industry, largely to supplement myself because, you know, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with four other guys. And even then back 22 years ago when that happened, rent was very expensive coming from New Hampshire to New York. And so I worked in the food and beverage industry, I then got into the nightlife industry, and I learned a lot about it.

Street guy, I just started learning the business by doing, seeing, and eventually that got me into opening up my own bar in the West Village. I wanted to open up my own business. I was about 24 years old, and that happened. It was a tequila taqueria bar, and it happened right when the financial crisis took place in New York City. At that very time, I actually pivoted the business model because the financial crisis happened right before we opened the business. And it was at that time where I said, okay, we need to deliver a premium product and experience, but we have to price people in because I saw firsthand with all the bravado and the Mazzi that New York had, how vulnerable became so quickly. And so I felt like if I could create an environment where people could sort of

lead their lives at the door and then come in and enjoy themselves in a premium experience, but having a really good value proposition, I felt I could have a business that work, and it was working. And then I had this idea because below me, this was a second story bar in the West Village, below me was a Kudoba Mexican Grove. And I happened to be sitting there eating, I think it was a casadea, and I'm watching people line up.

And at the time, you know, we call it the walk the line business model. You know, we come in and you choose your, you know, and build your product and whatnot. And I was sitting there. I literally had an epiphany. And I said, why is no one doing anything like this for pizza? And I started doing a lot of homework. And long and behold, no one really was doing anything like that for pizza.

At the time, you know, being in New York, you have buy the slice on every block, right? And the barest entry are low. It's highly bastardized. And frankly, I got to tell you, like I felt a lot of the bite of slice pizza shops are pretty gross. You know, I really do. I thought they were gross. They're sitting in a case for a long time. you know, you come in, you say, okay, I want this slice. It takes you five minutes to reheat the

slice anyways. And so I felt like if I could make that experience better, but bring some semblance of quality and sophistication that I was starting to see happen in sort of the fine casual or the fine dining side and sort of bridge this proverbial aisle, if you will, I thought I had a model and a positioning of a business strategy that could be really successful. And then, of course, we had to drop in the brand over it, which was, to recreate the mom and pop pizza shop experience. And that's how Ant Pizza was started. I mean, and Pizza was every sense of what I stated a moment ago, which was pizza was the conduit to connecting community in place. And that's why I was called Am Pizza. And so when we opened up our first store,

which by the way, I left New York City. I traveled to the United States for six weeks. I went to all these emerging markets back in 2011. And Washington, D.C. was the last place I came. And Washington, D.C. was the last place I came to. I never came here in my life, not even for a field trip or anything. And I got in the back of the broker's car. I took the train from Penn Station to Union Station, from New York, you know, to D.C. traveled the market, got back to the train station to head home. I looked around and I said, I think I needed to be here. I got here. It was a real struggle and a real grind to open my first door. Matter of fact, I opened in an area where my brokers told me I was playing Rush Russia L.A. and I had a bullet in every pocket. And I said, I don't really give a hell. I'm doing

it anyways because I can't keep losing opportunities. I got to open this business up. I was, I mean, I put every dime I had into the business. So I was, you know, I was broke. I had no income coming in. I put all my money into it. And then to see, you know, what came of that by opening that first door up was unbelievable. We had lines out the door every single day. And that's really how it started. And then from there, you know, like I said earlier, you know, product, brand environment, right are three really important ingredients again no pun and tex and then wrap by a quality model and that became what was very scalable so let's break this down because huge risk like you're going into like you're saying there's a pizza place on every corner everywhere

like every city every state you can always find a lot of pizza and it's been it's like a something I don't think it's really changed in a long time so one part formula is maybe it's a good thing if it hasn't changed in a while, you have some way to come into the market. It seems like you look at high value, so not cheap, not cheap pricing, but good value for the money. At the same time, you're doing something that is different, which is massive risk. And on top of that, it sounds like you might have an idea for something. You might build a restaurant. It might take time, but the whole world might change.

change. Like there might be a recession by the time you open. There might be a collapse or something, which obviously puts even more risk. How do you weigh the risk? Because that's what I'm hearing is restaurants come with an inherent large amount of risk. And you're doing it also in a space where, at least before, it had never been done before. I've taken a lot of risk in my career. And, you know, the word risk is a funny word because it has a negative connotation. You hear the word risk. It, hits anybody, even people who make a lot of decisions, it innately hits you in a weird way. And then what ends up happening, by the way, present company included, you go to the worst place you could ever imagine when you think about the worst case scenario that has like a

less than a 1% chance of happening because we're conditioned to go there. What has been really helpful for me is then able to say, okay, if that were, to happen, that very sort of doomsday situation. I got bigger problems, as I suspect many others do too. And that happening is so remote. And so what I then do is I walk myself back and back and back and I get to a place of quantifying risk. We put so much stock in risk and I think it deters people from doing things when in reality, I think it's important to quantify the risk. Understand what you're getting yourself into. There's three things that we do. We look at the known knows, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. We can quantify the known unknowns. What are they?

We can lay them out. We can quantify the risk. We can quantify the known unknowns to the extent of, you know, tabulating what things could happen and just getting comfortable with that. The unknown unknowns are just life. So you made the reference of, hey, you're building something and then you have an economical event or something like that. I can't control. control that. But what I can do is I can put a proactive strategy in place so that as life happens, we can act reactively in a thoughtful and pragmatic manner. And that's a principle that I've adopted across all my companies. And it's something I've been able to develop over many years of building business. I started the pizza business when I was 26, 27 years old. I sold it

when I was 35. I tell people, I stub my toe a lot, but I never broke my foot. Okay. And there were a lot of things that went into that. And look, you know, there's luck. There's timing. You know, I can never build a business like that today. It would not resonate to the extent that it did when it was launched. And that's where preparation, timing, luck, and execution, you know, and perhaps some other things come together. And those forces enable you to take the lead. but quantifying risk is a really important thing in business and in life. And I would push people to really think about whether it's something in the personal or the professional side to really try to understand what the risk is because, you know,

some of your greatest breakthroughs come by taking those risks. And so I take a lot of it, but it's risk that is quantifiable to the extent it can be. And then I make the decisions pursuant to what I think I need to. do the higher the risk the higher the reward sometimes so sometimes you think because we hear a lot about timing right we hear a lot about timing from a lot of people like if i was to do what i did then it might not work now well what i think i see is visionary where a lot of people come up with ideas around the same time but they didn't do anything i almost feel like the most successful people and this is what i'm hearing from you is you really are a vision

You're sitting inside a restaurant. You're envisioning something that is missing in the market somewhere. You go to these cities and you find a place and you're like, this is where this place needs. Like, you really are a visionary. Do you think that is the biggest separation of highly successful CEOs? I think that a lot of people have ideas. You know, you've ever heard someone say, hey, that person took my idea or, hey, that was my idea. A lot of people took my ideas, Steve. Yes. Well, but here's the thing. There's a difference between having an idea and actually doing something about it. And the reality is the successful executives, I think, are generally have the innate ability to have an idea and execute on it. Like, I think that's why I'm really dangerous. And I say that humbly. I think I'm very dangerous because I know how to execute. I know how to operate. So I can take an idea and I can actually, in a lot of cases, make it come to life. And I think that is the secret sauce, right? The secret sauce is bringing an idea and taking sort of the, I don't know, pick the one side of the brain that's the creative side, we'll call it. And bringing the other side of the brain, which is the tactical side, and bringing them together to formulate an opportunity to take a leap in doing something. So, you know, ideas are great. We have a lot of them. We stress tests a lot of different ideas.

But the biggest thing is being able to execute on them. And I think that we've been able to do an extraordinary job on that. And that's where you can really sort of see substantial breakthroughs as a result. When did you have to change your mindset? Now that you created a luxury restaurant empire, I'm making the phrase up. It sounds, I feel like that's what you are. My skill that from you. Pretty good.

I'm defining that as you. When did you change your mindset? Because I imagine it's a huge mindset shift owning one restaurant, two restaurants, like locations, to then owning multiple restaurant companies and brands. What was that mindset shift? And when did that happen? I made a comment earlier when I said prior to opening my restaurant bar in the West Village, if you recall, right when the financial crisis happened.

And I opened it right after that. And I made a very specific business decision. If you recall, I said, hey, I went and took this premier experience and I decided I'm going to bring my prices down so that I can support, let people leave their lives at the door, right? Remember? and that business model was successful. Well, innately, that's what I thought I needed to do. I made that decision when I was 24.

What's fascinating is that actually has evolved into a principle that I think is so crucial in so many of the things we do, which is this idea around premium and approachability. It's the very juxtaposition that actually makes a lot of sense for us. It's historically taking what premium is, premium experiences usually come at premium prices and approachable experiences generally come with a price. approachable prices and actually stress testing them sort of, you know, and bringing and developing

and designing and putting out these very unique outputs that I think are so crucial to our success because it acts as a beacon as a principle to so many of the things that we do. So why am I able to own a bunch of brands and scale them out? It's because we come back to the singular principle of delivering extraordinary through the lens of premium and approachability, and then everything else cascades from there. And so by doing that, we're effectively in a belief system business. And then we leverage that to then, you know, build out multiple brands through acquisition and through development.

And we scale them in a very thoughtful and pragmatic manner. And, you know, that's how we've been able to build our business. You know, you made reference to luxury conglomerates. A lot of those guys are in the singular belief system too. I mean, you know, to own 80 brands and five, you know, five verticals and to do all that, I mean, you have to have a rubric for being able to do that. And, you know, we have ours and they have theirs. And once you have that rubric and you have that flywheel going, it can be pretty powerful

as to what you can do. But one thing I just have to say, you still have to take care of your P's and Q's. Like, you still got to drive great experiences. You got to deliver hospitality. You got to offer extraordinary products. And you've got to be able to deliver it every day. yesterday's wins don't entitle you to today's successes. That is something I got from being an athlete.

You have to win every day. There's a game to play every day. And you go to play the game and you go to try to win. Otherwise, don't play the game. And when you do win, that gives you an opportunity to come the next day and prepare for the next game. It's no different than in sports. We were talking offline about the finals last night.

You know, great example of, you know, like you have to earn it every single day to be great in this business. you have to earn it to have an opportunity to play for an NBA championship. You have to earn in enough times, win enough times, have enough of the right things happen to get to that place. And yesterday was a great example of a team that you thought was down and out that just kept going and going and going. It's emblematic of entrepreneurship and business at its absolute finest

that game last night. What was your down and out situation during your whole entrepreneurial journey? When was your moment like you were the New York Knicks? losing 35 points, but you came back to win with one. I've had a lot of them, but the one thing that comes to mind is, you know, COVID. You know, COVID was such a, you know, it's interesting. There was no playbook to deal with COVID. You talk, I said earlier about preparation, quantifying risks, no knowns, no unknowns, right?

And that was an unknown unknown, right? That falls squarely in unknown, unknown bucket. That was a very challenging time. rooted with so much, so much going on innately in my mind from the public health and life safety situation, my family, my friends, my colleagues, my associates, making sure they were safe and dealing with this once in a lifetime situation. Meanwhile, I have thousands of employees and trying to ascertain how to deal with that. Also having lenders calling me, Mr. Salas, she owe me 47.

million dollars and I'm like well I have no business right now and they're like great well we're going to look to proceed to take over your business oh you have a personal guarantee you know um that wasn't awesome um that wasn't awesome at all and you know like I look back at COVID and I contend that everyone tried to do their best no one knew how to deal with the situation you know that lender while they were very aggressive with me inevitably stood down they knew I had no business. I had a business doing hundreds of millions of dollars that went to zero. You know, that's not easy to deal with. I mean, and I actually financed payroll for multiple pay periods to our staff. This was before government subsidies and all the things that they come out.

We were fortunate to, you know, potentially, you know, get those opportunities. But that was really hard. You know, imagine having lenders knock on your door. You're putting out money to a business to cover people's livelihoods while having no revenue. Not sure if and when you're going to have revenue, having a lender thinking they might take over that part of your business, which is a massive part of my business at the time, you know, it's hard to say stay safe and well. When you have all these sort of extracurriculars going on, while also dealing with the personal strife of just everything happening around myself and others around me. So it was a really complicated time. But look, you know, like you just have to keep going. It's one of the

things I've learned in business and in life. When you're going through hell, you just have to keep going. Every day, one foot in front of the other, every day you do your best and you try over many days that end up becoming weeks, months, and ideally longer, the more days you win of those days, the more they compound into things. Nothing is generally as bad or as good as they seem. And that's one of the disciplines I've had to, I think, develop over the, you know, I'm in my early 40s now, so I'm by no means old. But like, I've had so many experiences at such a young age that are informative. I guess, you know, our experiences drive our views and our realities like we all have, right, those things. But I just think that like, you know, you just got to stay at it.

Nothing's as good or as bad. Try to stay even keel to the best your ability we're human and just keep going. to keep the name of the game. It's the most important attribute in business is endurance. I mean, you could say to me grit and tenacity. None of them would be wrong. It's just if I had to pick one thing, it would be endurance. You have to be able to outendur everybody else. This sounds like we had David Grutman on. Okay. And before, he mentioned something very similar because he does a lot of hospitality, restaurants and such. And he mentioned about every day waking up if he was in the red, which even to this day still worries him, which was kind of shocking to me. But I could see it's a very unpredictable business. If a war happens,

all of a sudden people might not go out to eat, right? Like if something happens, you have so many uncontrollables within the business. What's been your personal sacrifice? Because I imagine, Like you said 26 to 34, you were able to exit. You kept going. You continue to open more. Like you're continuing, continuing, continuing. I imagine there had to be a personal sacrifice. Yeah, I think that, just I want to, if I can go back for one second,

I just want to make it the first or the point you were making in regards to David. You know, our business is relying on emotional beings. Okay. Right now, we have sentiment that's fairly low. You have inflationary dynamics that have increased. Anytime a consumer has to increase their spending on the staple side, like with gasoline or things like that, it reduces the amount of money they spend discretionarily.

Generally, rule of thumb. So what does that mean? Well, that means that's less money for them to go out and eat, less money to go out and have discretionary experiences, leisure, anything of the sorts. Restaurants squarely, like I say, fall on that. So you're right. Things are happening all the time and we're relying on emotional beings. We're also relying on a climate where the attention spans are lower and people are being pulled in all kinds of directions. And so to stay front and center and to stay rooted in and to be, you know, constantly thought of and be

at the forefront of people requires you to just really continually do a good job and try to focus on the things I said. In regards to what I've spared, look, I think this is not for the fate of the heart. You know, there's a lot that goes into being an entrepreneur, being in business. And one of them is, you know, dealing with the mental dynamics that come with it and the stamina that comes with doing this. This is hard stuff. And, you know, just trying to make sure you stay. close to yourself, check in with yourself, give yourself a little grace. You know, I'm very hard to my, I tell people like, no one's going to be more harsh on myself than myself. Like, you could say something. You could say anything you want. You'll never move me more than I move

myself as far as what my expectations are for myself. But that comes with a lot of demands and a lot, a lot of responsibility. And so, you know, I just try my best. to give myself a little grace because that's good for everybody. I'm a human being. I'm going to make mistakes. I'm not going to be great all the time. Sometimes I'm going to show up in these situations and I'm going to be great and ready to rock.

Hopefully I'm showing out that today. And in other times, I might not. You know why? Because I'm a human being. That's why. And that is the reality of dealing with a lot of stuff. You want to come in. You've got to be professional.

You've got to be on your game. being at the top is thankless and it's lonely and you have to be understanding of that if you're going to want to be great at what you do that's the trade off for that and also there are other trades too family personal stuff etc that comes with leaning in at the level that you know myself's leaning in or david or others that you have interviewed that are running companies and building things, that's, that's what comes with it. When you think about motivation, if somebody tells me I can't do something or if somebody doesn't want to like partner with me and I are collaborate and I want to, I get really,

really motivated to prove them wrong, right? I don't know what it is. It's probably bad. I probably need to go to therapy and change this, Steve. I don't know what it is. But what motivates you? Are you proving, did somebody at some point say you couldn't open a restaurant? Or was there, are you trying to prove someone right that believed in you?

What's the bigger motivation for you? Listen, I've always said that you need to have both in your life. I think to actually accomplish what you want. You need to have the doubters that are in your head. And ideally they're the ones that are also close to you that could be objective. So you respect what they're saying. And if you don't like it. And you need the people that are going to support you too.

You need both because this stuff is really hard. But look, I'm an underdog. Okay. I grew up in New Hampshire. Okay. I grew up in a lower middle income family. I grew up not having a lot of money. My mom worked four jobs until she had three kids. My dad ran a gas station. My dad lost his business in 2008, okay, during the financial crisis. Okay, I had a scholarship. I dropped out of college. My entire,

most of my family, not all, but most of them didn't know how to deal with me. They thought I was engaging in illicit behavior. This is 22 years ago. It wasn't very in vogue to drop out of college 22 years ago. So people think the worst. You know, I dropped out. I moved to New York City with no money. You know, I lived in a one bedroom apartment with four guys. I had to fight, block, scrape, scrap, tackle. You need it to get everything. I have, I, every, nothing has come easy in my life. You know, sometimes I joke.

I said, you know, I hope at some point maybe some of the things that happen around me will be a little easier. Nothing has come easy for me. But that's how it's been drawn up. And that's how it is. And that's how I go about it. Listen, doubters are, you know, a lot of people have a lot to say. And they don't really know much about,

what's really going on. You know, I just, I just try to do a good job every day and try to bring it every day. I stay focused on the things that matter. And, you know, I, you know, I try to, I try to appreciate what, like, what I have. I, you know, I'm just getting started in a lot of ways, right? So, like, I really believe that. Like, I look at, like, life like acts. Like, so I'm, like, starting my second act. You know, I have so many experiences to my first act that I think you're going to be highly applicable in my second act and my third act and so what and so forth. But that's how I think about it. I like that.

New Hampshire, man. Represent New Hampshire. Yeah. They don't get a lot of people from New Hampshire. There's not even a lot of, like a lot of people don't even know. What the motto? Everybody that you was your camp in New Hampshire. I mean, this is an opportunity.

You're now on air. You got to tell me you want to live free or die. Live free or die. That's exactly. I mean, when I tell people that, they're like, what? I'm like, it's honest. the license plate like the man in the mount or the face it's not even there anymore but you know like like yeah this is new hampshire new hampshire is a different adam sandler i don't know you know there's

other people i think from new hampshire but you and adam sandler that's all i know hey this is a great company to be in company with adam sandlin it's it's it's good i'll tell you oh steve i like that i love your story i love your story down and out you come through i mean second act you're still at it. So you've taken companies public. You've IPOed, which IPO right now is like what everyone's talking about. And you've done all this success. And you're talking about a second act.

What have you not accomplished? Like, what is it? What are you chasing now? Like, what is it that you want to accomplish? What I want to accomplish, I'm going to keep to myself. But here's what I'm going to tell you. Like, I kind of feel like I'm here. And I'm here for a reason.

And I feel like I've had a lot of things stacked against me, but I'm still here and I'm still going. I want to see, I want to see how far I can push the boundaries. Okay. Like, I want to see like, like, I'm looking to push the boundaries stratosporically. Let me say that. And why not? You have one life to live. And I want to challenge myself to be the best I can be.

And I want to do it in a way where I can, I can, you know, build, develop, own. create, you know, category or legacy defining businesses. But I also want to make sure, you know, I'm a good dad to my kid. I want to make sure that I'm a good, you know, husband to my wife and I'm good to my family. But I'm, look, I want to push the boundaries, okay? You know, I've been the underdog and that underdog mentality hasn't been lost upon me. if anything, it's, it's never been so strong. I don't think anything for, you know, so that's, I'm inspired.

Like, yeah, it's like, I just, you know, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. I'm ready for that too. Hey, look, the guy behind me was one of the great underdogs, you know, like as an exist. So, um, I think that's the appeal. People, that's, I think, why people love Tom Brady. Is that under, underdog story of you and, there you go. You and Adam Sandler from New Hampshire. you and Tom Brady are just the same from an underdog perspective.

Yeah. But Steve Salis, CEO, founder of Catalog, among other things, you have, you have your hands and a lot of things. Man, I'm fired up though. Like, I'm fired up today. I'm going to go out and start a whole new pizza company. Now, I'm only kidding. But.

Good luck to you. It's going to be called, and that pizza. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But I do have a lot of ideas at other. people took but man this has been great today i'm going to go do something i'm going to do something tomorrow that i've been thinking about because that's how fired up i am but thank you so much for joining us today i appreciate you having me on today thank you so much