Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Scott Norton - Seek to Learn That Which Cannot be Taught - [Invest Like the Best, EP.43]

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Starting point is 00:00:30 The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent the views of CFA Institute. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfield guide.com. Patrick O'Shaunicey is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaunicee Asset Management, all opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guest. are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy asset management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment

Starting point is 00:01:14 decisions. Clients of O'Shaunossey asset management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. If you told me a year ago that I'd be learning critical life and business lessons from the founder of a ketchup company and that 30 to 50,000 people would listen to our conversation while I'd have told you that's impossible. But the fact that it's true proves many of the points laid out by this week's guest Scott Norton, co-founder of Sir Kensington's, which was recently acquired by Unilever. Sir Kensington's, which makes, quote, condiments with character is no ordinary ketchup company and Scott is no ordinary founder.

Starting point is 00:01:48 We talk about the most elemental aspects of business, product, relationships, sales, marketing, and culture. I love that we can do so through the lens of such a seemingly simple product, something that we all use all the time with our families at a barbecue. Scott's observations on culture, the importance of relationships within sales, and competitive edge are all memorable. But above all, I'll remember his line, seek to learn that which cannot be taught. And I will continually return to the mental image of the Temple of Poseidon.

Starting point is 00:02:18 Oh, and as a bonus, we also talk about biking around Asia, which like all of Scott's stories, comes complete with thought-provoking lessons. Enjoy this unique conversation with one of the most interesting people I've met on this journey. We begin with the history of ketchup. I realize I don't know anything about the history of ketchup, whether then it's ubiquitous and you grew up with it. But where did it start and what was the, maybe what are your kind of favorite aspects of the story?

Starting point is 00:02:44 Well, it's a wonderful question because I love the history of ketchup because it's one of those kinds of things where we take America for granted in a lot of ways. And we think things are American, but we're a melting pot of a country. We're a very diverse country. Ketchup is actually a Chinese word. It comes from the southern min dialect of what is now food. in China. And ketchup was originally a fermented fish sauce that was used to put on things like

Starting point is 00:03:12 tofu and rice that didn't carry much flavor. Of course, back in the day, you know, meat was rotting, all these kinds of things, you know, weren't fresh. So you needed powerful flavors to cover it up. That's why pepper, all-spice clove, these things were so coveted by the Europeans. The British and the Dutch that were traders in, you know, Canton, in the South China, the sea in Malaysia, in Indonesia, they discovered this sauce, ketchup, this fermented fish sauce. And they were like, this stuff is great. So they brought the concept back to England. And they started using other ingredients that were high in glutamate other than fermented fish. Like oysters and mushrooms. And glutamate, by the way, is what creates the savory flavor.

Starting point is 00:03:52 It's what kind of gives the meat sensation. Like if you've ever kind of bit into like a perfectly roasted portobello mushroom, that's like great flavor of rumami. Around the same time, this is about 400 or 500 years ago, Hernan Cortez, the Spanish explorer discovers new to the Europeans the tomato. Outside of the capital of what is now Mexico, Mexico City, tomatoes came in all sizes from tiny little berries to the giant ones that we know today, the heirloom varieties that the Mayans would revere. And so he brought that back to Spain.

Starting point is 00:04:29 that then trickled into Italian cuisine, which of course gave to red sauce pasta, which is a relatively new thing in Italy and in Europe. And at some point, and this is where it gets hazy, at some point, either in Europe or America, somebody said, let's make ketchup with tomatoes and birthed this tomato ketchup that we all know today. It then started showing up in prairie cookbooks in America in the early 1800s, And then over time, it became something that became part of American food culture, became part of fast food, the hamburger, the French fry, things like that. That's a fascinating fact story.

Starting point is 00:05:06 Were there other moments, catalytic moments in the U.S. history of ketchup? Yeah. That are interesting. Absolutely. So I'd love to hear that. So obviously, Hines, there's always this human tendency to extrapolate back and forward what currently exists, to having always existed and will always exist. in the future, but everything has an origin story. So maybe with Heinz specifically or just generally,

Starting point is 00:05:31 what were the kind of the big milestone moments in the history of ketchup in the U.S.? Well, Heinz actually did something really amazing and they transformed ketchup because I don't have the dates on this specifically, but I believe it was the early 1900s. Sodium benzuate was a very commonly used food preservative. And it came out that sodium benzate would cause all these health problems. And So instead of using sodium benzodia and ketchup, what Heinz did is we said, we're going to dial up the vinegar, which is acidic and which is a natural preservative. And so our ketchup is going to be pure. It's going to be free of sodium benzodia and it's going to have this more vinegary, acidic, tangy taste instead. And instead of putting it in an opaque copper bottle, we're actually going to put it in a glass bottle to show the purity of it.

Starting point is 00:06:20 And so really, kind of the approach that we have to food now, using a whole real ingredient. using real food, not using synthetic preservatives or anything like that, that was really Heinz's big position. And that was Heinz's big innovation back, you know, nearly 100 years ago. It was that same ethos. And it's funny how things change over time and how things are cyclical. But that was really a very important part of the evolution of catch-out. I would love to begin by hearing your story of the brand itself, by telling us what exactly the story of Sir Ken's, Islington is. People often ask me, especially when I have my big mustache, oh, is he your grandfather? And the truth is that in any consumer market, and in food in particular, in 2017, this year, or even 2008, 2010, when we first getting started, it's a, it's all about an attention war. And you need to win the attention war if you want to, if you want to win customers and if you want to bring a product to

Starting point is 00:07:25 market because we were not as, you know, as a couple of young, scrappy college kids and entrepreneurs, we didn't have any reputation, we didn't have any marketing budget, we didn't have any experience in advertising or any way to do that. So we knew that our packaging would have to be what attracts that attention. And in the blink of an eye, it would have to immediately make people do a double take and recognize this is different, this is better, and I want to give this a shot. And so we said to do that, to attract that attention, let's be dramatically different. So whereas the big kind of commodity catch-ups were all in the exact same squeeze bottle with the same shape and the same positioning and made of plastic, we said, well, actually,

Starting point is 00:08:08 let's make ours glass and let's go a little bit more premium. And let's use the language of a high-end European preserve in our packaging to signal this sort of premium elevated nature. And And likewise, too, every other catch-up, you know, especially the big one, Heinz, was really synonymous with Americana and the roadside diner of the 1950s. And if we said, okay, well, if they're synonymous with Americana, let's be British. And let's tell the story of Sir Kensington, who is this Victorian naturalist, a botanist, a spice trader, a knight, a philanthropist, kind of a most interesting man in the world who had a really quirky and eccentric side and an obsession with condiments. And so I think creating that

Starting point is 00:08:57 and bringing that story to life and being able to tell the story through a character was really important for building the brand. And I think specifically for your listeners and really going back to this conversation about the sort of entrepreneurial angle of all this, our mission as a company is to bring integrity and charm to ordinary and overlooked food. And I think that this is something specifically in the ordinary and overlooked area that really fits into an investing framework and an investing mindset, understanding, okay, what is the contrarian view on this? When everyone else is zinging, how can you actually benefit by zagging? And it's ultimately, when you're looking at the things that are ordinary and overlooked, that you

Starting point is 00:09:42 avoid the crowded trades, so to speak. You know, there are a million different snack companies out there. There are a million different beverage companies out there. And you see absolutely very successful beverage companies grow and exit. And there are a lot of rewards if you get it right, but there's a lot that you don't see too. And it's in those areas where it's more competitive to get shelf space. It's more competitive to get mind share to get the buyer's attention. And so by working in the ordinary and the overlooked in condiments and things that people thought couldn't actually be any different or get any better, that we were actually able to carve out a nice niche for ourselves and really compete not in a highly efficient competitive market, but in a market that

Starting point is 00:10:23 was dominated by monopolies that were really ripe for some disruption. So you can already tell in your first answer, and I hope people kind of listen for this, where, yeah, we're talking about ketchup, but really we're talking about entrepreneurship and business and strategy. And this idea of contrarian or like a mismatch between supply and demand, I'm so enamored with just this simple idea of think about supply and demand and build products that address some weird mismatch in those two things. And I think your early experience was, okay, there's this kind of tidal wave of demand in the food world in general for better quality, more interesting, better tasting in kind of all areas except this one. Like for whatever reason, this one area just wasn't getting the same support.

Starting point is 00:11:11 Maybe it was the dominant player in Heinz or Helmonds and Mayo or. whatever the case may be, but it was an opportunity. So I would love to hear with that as sort of the framework what the early days were like. So what was your mindset in terms of creating the product, testing it, getting it into the first shelves that I think we're here in New York City? The early kind of story and struggles is, I think, really important in all this because any good contrarian idea is going to likely be wrong for a while or appear wrong from the outside and hard to get convince people to buy into. So the early days are fascinating. So let's go there. Absolutely. Yes. It is very much a time of challenge. And the framework I think about for myself and that I

Starting point is 00:11:54 that I urge other entrepreneurs to think about is you're wrong. It's just a matter of degree of how wrong you are and how quickly you can get less wrong. And when we started though, we recognized to that we were not experts. And so to mitigate that, we didn't take the approach of saying, okay, well, we're going to make the world's best catch up and we're going to put it on the shelves and put it in every store overnight and try and market the hell out of it and force it out there. Instead, we really took an approach and I've done a lot of just thinking about sort of what business sort of means in our culture and a lot of the narratives around it, a lot of the narratives around corporation and career and all these kinds of things.

Starting point is 00:12:37 And I think people may think that business is fundamentally competitive or competitive elements to it, but I believe that business is fundamentally creative. And one of the mental models that I really enjoy is the design thinking process. And design thinking is really a field of thought that starts with, well, let's actually look and understand what are the problems that people have are, and then how do we prototype solutions to solve those problems. So not just diagnose and prescribe, but actually do some investigation. So what we did was we actually learned about the history of ketchup, and we created eight different ketchup that were different by ingredients, different by recipe, different by flavor, by color, by texture. And we threw a party, we put

Starting point is 00:13:23 invitations in our friend's mailbox that said, Sir Kensington invites you to a ketchup tasting. And people thought we were crazy, but they came over, they listened to music, they tasted all these different ketchup in sort of a blind tasting scenario. And they gave us... What was the medium for the ketchup? Was it fried? Well, it's funny, because we wanted to make sure that the quality of the carrier didn't dictate whether people liked it or not. So we did a sampling. We had French fries from a local restaurant. We had French fries that we baked. We actually, we found like those dinosaur-shaped fries or just sorry, dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, all sorts of different things that people could dip in. We probably also got them thoroughly tipsy too, which probably

Starting point is 00:14:02 increased the scores on these. But afterwards, we were able to see, okay, well, what were the catchups that people didn't like, and what were the ketchup people did like? Because we knew that if we had one and we invited all our friends, they would be like, this is amazing, I love it, it's so special, this is great, you know, go for it. But instead, we were actually able to get them to sort of force rank it, tell us, did it taste good? Did it taste healthy? Did it taste like ketchup? That allowed us to bring something to market that we could at least feel confident. And also very importantly, now we've co-created it with an audience of our friends that can all point to it and say, oh yeah, I helped build that. I helped give them feedback. I helped rank that catch up. That sort of

Starting point is 00:14:41 effect is very powerful of co-creation. And when your customers are also your creators, that builds a very important tribe and community. One of the most interesting aspects of this book on negotiation called Getting to Yes is that an exact idea, which is one of the most effective ways to negotiate is to include your counterparty in structuring the terms and basically create like a buy-in from the beginning, because there's that sort of endowment effect that is incredibly powerful, right? And it sounds like you've harnessed that for ketchup. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:15:13 That's part of, I think, the design thinking process. And there were these researchers, and I wish I had more specifics around this, but they gave people in this experiment a chair from IKEA. And a month later, they went back and they said, hey, we'd like to actually buy this chair back from you. Will you sell it to us for $20? And people said, yeah. You gave me this chair. I have it now. It's not doing much. It doesn't match anything else in my house. Here's the chair back. Give me $20.

Starting point is 00:15:42 They gave the same number of people, the IKEA chair flat packed. And they sat there and they said, build this chair. We'll give it to you for free. A month later, after these people had built it, put it in their house, the researcher says, okay, well, can we give you $20 to buy this chair back from you? And people said, what are you talking about? I love this chair. I built this chair. You know? Now they, and this is kind of gets to a very important notion, which is we like to think that we're rational people, but we're actually really good at rationalizing. And when we put our emotions into something, we value it that much more. When we're emotionally invested in a decision, as you call it that endowment effect, or what was dubbed now the IKEA effect after this, is that people, when they help build something, they want to participate in it. They want it to succeed. So we talked about the very first, the eight catchups. So I think this idea of iteration in startups and new businesses is a really interesting one, getting feedback,

Starting point is 00:16:42 incorporating it. So how many stages to that were there? And maybe as an example, within the eight catchups, how different were they? Like, as I understand it, ketchup is a couple of basic ingredients. And so what were the levers that you're able to kind of pull and push to make the range wide enough to actually get real feedback versus kind of just all flavors of the same thing. That's great. And we're getting now to the technical kind of organeleptic questions. ketchup is one of the few foods that has all five basic tastes in balance. So that's sweet, salty, savory, bitter, and sour. And if one of those is off, then it doesn't taste like ketchup or it'll taste like marinera sauce or it'll be too acidic.

Starting point is 00:17:23 And so we played around a lot with that balance to find the right balance there. texture is an extremely important one. But I think more to the root of your question about iteration, we're still not done. You know, we have always taken this approach of Kaizen, of continuous improvement, not only in our products, but in our processes and in our people too. You know, I think fundamentally we have a growth mindset when it comes to the philosophy of the business. We have changed our ketchup recipe in non-insignificant ways, probably three or four times since, starting this business. And we were lucky to get extremely valuable and critical feedback from chefs who were the customers that we had that wouldn't hold back. And specifically, we had to get it

Starting point is 00:18:09 to stick to fries, right? Because fry stickiness is one of the very important utilities of ketchup. And if you dip it into fry and the viscosity is not enough that it carries a lot of ketchup, well, it doesn't really seem like ketchup, doesn't. And people love fries as a delivery device for ketchup. So it had to stick to fries properly. Even bottle shape is an important thing there that helps signal in a supermarket context what is ketchup and what is a sort of a special higher-end sauce that maybe you would only buy it once a year. Because if you want to actually earn your place in culture, you can't just be a niche

Starting point is 00:18:42 product or something that's only brought out at dinner parties. You have to be something that's part of a daily use item. So we've always been working towards how do we bring that familiar, how do we bring nostalgia and novelty together, such that something is an item that people enjoy in their daily lives, but also feels like special and feels like a bit of an adventure. Could we take a quick aside, and you mentioned a term, which means a lot to me and governs kind of my behavior as much as I can make it, which is Kaizen. Can you describe how you came to that principle and maybe for listeners describe what that means?

Starting point is 00:19:16 Sure. Well, Kaizen is, and maybe you know more about this than me, but to my understanding is basically the Japanese concept or Japanese word of continuing. continuous improvement. When I was in college, I read the Toyota Production System book and learned about their approach of asking why five times. So if something breaks, don't just say, okay, well, why did it break and solve that problem, actually find the root cause of something by asking why over and over again until you can find the overarching reason. And I think that approach of Kaizen is about noticing and recognizing that everything is a work in progress, that we are all

Starting point is 00:19:53 works in progress. We are all in beta. And there's a forward motion that you can put in to your work and to the culture of team building that will allow you to always be asking this question, what's working about this and what's not working about this and how do we make it better. And I think that's fundamentally part of the agile or iterative development philosophy that a lot of Silicon Valley companies espouse. And I've spent some time working in software as well. And so we bring a lot of these either maybe Japanese concepts or something I'll talk about a little later, more Scandinavian business principles or Silicon Valley business principles to a category like condiments that maybe have been dominated by a more sort of Ameriocentric way of thinking. So you piqued my interest. So I want to go straight there.

Starting point is 00:20:39 So describe the Scandinavian because that one I'm going to be completely unfamiliar with. Wonderful. Well, it's, and I think this is universal, but I think the Scandinavian companies tend to be a bit more progressive about that. this. And, you know, in working in finance, in working at Lehman Brothers, and recognizing the limitations of the cultural impact and just the general impact that I could have in that role, and thinking about how we in, you know, we've chosen to organize our society implicitly or explicitly around capitalism and around economic activity and economic framework. And what really dominated the 20th century was shareholder capitalism.

Starting point is 00:21:19 maximizing shareholder returns, an understanding of capitalism that basically it's the shareholder that you're maximizing benefit for. And I'm still a young man, but the longer I spend in business, the more I realize that the model that I think works for us and the model that I think is good for society is stakeholder capitalism. That's a longer term perspective. And I think stakeholder capitalism simply put is that shareholders are one of many groups that will be providing resources to a business to succeed

Starting point is 00:21:53 and that actually receive the benefits of a business. Obviously, in capitalism, they are providing their lion's share of those resources, but upstream, meaning whether it's ingredients are purchased or services are rendered, there is an environment that's providing resources to a business that succeeds as well. And if you overfish an ocean or you overfish a river or a lake, you're going to run out of fish, and you have to think about the long term. So that environmental context of the upstream is that they're an important stakeholder. You also have the downstream, which is actually the customers of a business, especially in food. And what we do, we make something

Starting point is 00:22:33 that becomes part of people's physical bodies. And it gives them the energy that they need to live their lives. It's part of what they espouse an identity to. That's a really big responsibility that we have. And our customers, our consumers, absolutely stakeholders in that. And then of course, there's our team, the people that devote their passion and their time to making this realization happen to executing this vision. And we owe them more than a paycheck. You know, we owe them development. We owe them challenge. We owe them the ability to achieve mastery and self-motivation. And I think that that stakeholder mindset, that is something I think that the Nordics have a bit more progressive approach to. And a Japanese as well. And I think now in America, as we see that businesses that are purpose-driven, both for-profit and for-purpose, tend to grow faster than businesses that are only for-profit and really espouse that shareholder model, that I think is starting to wake people up to a new way of doing business, especially with a younger generation of millennials.

Starting point is 00:23:36 As you've grown and are now pervasive, you know, since we met a while ago, now, obviously I noticed the products everywhere I go, right? So you're kind of everywhere that I shop anywhere or that my family shops. Well, Patrick, you live in a bubble. I'm well aware, but products can thrive in a bubble. Have you noticed now that you have been acquired by a big food company and have wider distribution, more penetration across different markets and geographies, that there are downsides or challenges to that stakeholder model when you're arguably up against other players, your direct competition literally on the shelves in the same product category. I don't know that this is true for sure, but my guest is Kraft-Hines is more similar

Starting point is 00:24:21 to the shareholder model than the stakeholder model, knowing a bit about 3G. Any challenges that you've noticed or changes now that you've scaled up so much? It's a wonderful question. And we, so last month we were acquired by Unilever, a company that was founded over 100 years ago with a focus on this stakeholder model. You know, this is a company. that was making soap and pioneering new ways to make soap at the exact same time where Victorian England was recognizing that actually bacteria caused infection. And with every bar of soap that they sold, with every time they educated a hospital or a doctor to actually wash their hands before performing surgery, with every bar of soap they sold, they were making

Starting point is 00:25:09 a net positive impact on society and the stakeholders downstream. They also, in founding, lever soaps, the Lever brothers actually built a town for their workers. This is a time where workers' rights and worker protection, of course, in the industrial revolution was something that is famous, you know, from Triangle Shirtwaist factory to, you know, Upton Sinclair's the Jungle, this is a very progressive company that built a city called Port Sunlight, built a town for their workers. While I can't say that we have, you know, we were acquired last month, We have grown, it hasn't been a massive explosion yet because things in consumer goods don't happen that quickly.

Starting point is 00:25:52 But what I'll say is that we've learned that the more we lean into that sense of purpose, the more we lean into the stakeholder mentality, the faster our business grows. And I think that's because that when people, and I'm not saying that's always going to be the case. I'm not saying that people don't care about price at Walmart. And I'm not saying that people don't care about price in a restaurant scenario. But what I will say is that there's plenty of ketchup and mayonnaise out there. There's even an organic version, a natural version of pretty much any food that you can think of.

Starting point is 00:26:25 But what we've realized is that when people are inviting something into their life, when they're choosing to buy a product, they're making a statement about the me I want to be. You know, you think about, I use the analogy right of Tesla. and Tesla has, obviously there is some challenge that they have a limited range on the automobiles that they sell. And you need to be able to have a special charger where you go to charge your Tesla. Now, if they came out and all of a sudden says, you know, actually we're going to make these hybrids, we're going to make Tesla hybrids. And it's going to solve this problem of range. You're going to be able to fill up your gas tank. And you're going to be able to charge when you have a charger.

Starting point is 00:27:06 That would be devastating for that, right? It would be devastating for their incredibly lofty valuation and stock price. It would be devastating for what everybody participated in when they bought a Tesla of saying, this is me at my best. Not only am I in this sexy car that represents contemporary techno luxury, but also I was doing something in a progressive way that communicated what I believe the planet deserves, which is a future with less carbon footprint, less carbon impact.

Starting point is 00:27:35 when people see that they can purchase a product that in purchasing that product they're participating in a flywheel of conscientious business of actually contributing to society that is a form I think of very very micro activism that actually can create growth for your products you know would tombs have taken off if they didn't give a shoe for every shoe that they sold I think there are plenty of businesses that have examples of a way to either to give as a fundamental part of their business model or even a related foundation that I think people, customers and consumers respond to very well. You bring up a topic which is very interesting to me in the kind of the sales and marketing world, which is an appeal to identity, that doing that basically saying, if you buy this, you will be more of what you think you are. I think that's kind of how you phrased it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:33 The me I want to be. Right, the me I want to be. It's a good way. Better when it rhymes. Is far more powerful than a list of rational, logical reasons for doing something. And that simple idea is a powerful one in any business, right? Extremely powerful. I'm always fascinated by the use of outside capital.

Starting point is 00:28:52 So at what point did you realize you needed it? What was it for and did it work out kind of the way you expected? Well, when we started. we didn't really have any money personally. So we went to the three Fs, friends, family, and fools. I'm sure that's when you've heard before. Haven't heard the fool part. And, you know, it's actually the fools that, you know, wrote in those first early years, kind of the bigger checks, right? Because there were kind of friends of friends of friends or friends of family, people that had, you know, that are in the investing community, that are angel investors. And the way that I always

Starting point is 00:29:27 thought about it was, yes, you're selling a piece of your business. Yes, you're diluting yourself, but ultimately you're getting more people invested in your success. So from the very beginning, our approach was, yes, we need to capitalize this business and we need to invest ahead of our growth, make sure we have the right people in place, the right programs in place that we can grow. But also, in bringing in this capital and bringing in these individuals, what is the strategic insight that they might bring? Might they have connection to us? other retailers or an insight into how to sell to restaurants or how to recruit people. So we did as much as we could to kind of gain a brain trust around with that.

Starting point is 00:30:07 And slowly but surely that involved into a board that we put in place. And then two years ago, we raised our first institutional round from a family office called Verl Invest, who's been extremely helpful in bringing sophistication to our business, to our governance, to our planning. and they've invested in great businesses and brands like Vitico, that's famous for coconut water, hint water, brands like that that are in the space. And that was at a point where we said, okay, we are willing and ready to bring on this institutional capital because we are past the concept risk phase. We're kind of getting through the market risk phase. And we know that we have

Starting point is 00:30:51 a model that when we put resources into it, those resources generally, a return and those resources can actually grow to create durable growth of high quality revenue. That was the decision that we made that ended up allowing us to bring an outside capital. So you find this opportunity, you know, nine years ago, there's this sort of stale, evergreen brand that you disrupt in your own way. What was the most memorable story or narrative from those early couple of years as you guys are aggressively learning, incorporating what you're learning into the product, into the sales process. And maybe we could even focus on the sales process because I have no idea how one might

Starting point is 00:31:31 get a condiment into a store shelf like Whole Foods. Yeah. So what were some of the memorable ideas from those early days? Well, I think to get a little vulnerable here, there's, it comes a time in I think every entrepreneur's life where they go, oh crap, I'm actually a sales guy. You're like, I need to learn how to sell. I'm a salesperson because that is what is growing a business. Now, of course, if you have a platform business or anything like that, maybe it is more marketing

Starting point is 00:32:00 driven. But I think in most businesses, it's about getting people's, other people's customers' minds from point A to point B. And that's really friggin' hard. So we would get these introductions from people. You know, oh, yeah, you should meet this chef, going to this restaurant, it's a perfect fit. You know, they serve local produce, better burgers, they charge $20 for the burger. They should serve a better ketchup.

Starting point is 00:32:21 Makes a ton of sense. Better food, better ketchup. And we'd go in there and we'd be like it's made with whole tomatoes and it has less sugar and it's verified non-GMO and it's all natural. And yeah, it's more expensive, but that's because the ingredients are more expensive. Want to buy it? And they'd be like, we'll get back to you. And they never got back to us. We would send these emails, hey, hey Jake, just checking in. No response. We'd leave voicemails. And I'm like, this is crazy. Like people that we were introduced to by a mutually trusted source are just ghosting me. Like, what is wrong? Like, what am I doing wrong? And that's when I realized that, again, it is really about this emotional connection and that you're not going to be able to achieve a sale by pointing out the rational

Starting point is 00:33:07 features. Benefits are important, and that's a different story, but you can't justify your pricing based on features. It's got to be on benefit. Very importantly, people are not going to be willing to hear the benefit unless they trust you first. And that trust is a very human thing. And this goes back to Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It goes back to that co-creation mentality and the IKEA effect. And it taught me to recognize that even if something makes sense for someone, you can't just skip right to that logical point. You have to spend the time building trust, building a relationship, building common ground, and building an emotional bond, develop an open pathway of communication, and then start learning about how you can solve their

Starting point is 00:33:54 problems. So sticking with that example of a restaurant or a chef, so what does that actually look like? How does one do all those things you just described with someone that's making a better burger? I intuitively don't know what that process would look like. Is it more about asking them questions, what matters to them and then trying to fill that hole. What was the sales process that ultimately started working? Yeah, I think, you know, we're a team, a company of food lovers, and you don't go into the food business, especially in restaurants without being a food lover. It is a really tough business. It's a 24-7 business. It's highly competitive. If you're a chef, especially, you're working in a windowless room at weird hours, and you've made a decision to kind of

Starting point is 00:34:42 reject a sort of a normal path in life. And so there's a, there's a misfit, a bit of a misfit or an outsider attitude that I think we very much have and we have as food lovers. And we had to train ourselves to go in there and actually be our true selves to talk about a love of food, to have a curiosity, to understand why it is they do what they do and have those conversations before we got to the meat of the benefits and the features. So it's really about, you know, finding that common ground, developing that relationship, asking the right questions, and understanding what are the challenges that are actually facing this chef or facing this business? And then how does that open doors for me to talk about solving this chef's problems? It's still,

Starting point is 00:35:29 you know, we still haven't cracked the nut. It's still very difficult to this day. It's still a longer sales cycle and very high touch. But it's extremely powerful when we get it right and when someone can sit down at the table of a restaurant and see Sir Kensington's ketchup, mustard, or mayo, because it says a tremendous amount about both the restaurant. The restaurant cares about what it's serving, that it cares about the details, that it signals quality. And it also shows really well and rubs off really well on us that this chef has chosen to feature and to curate our products. I think what you just described is kind of the way to sell anything, right? I'm always, I still underestimate how important relationship and trust are in any sales process.

Starting point is 00:36:14 And I think everyone does. And as someone who's sold on things by others all the time, it's amazing how infrequently someone starts with you, with asking, you know, what do you do? What do you care about? What are problems in your life versus like, here's my product. Here's the list of features. Do you want to buy it? It's kind of shocking how badly that works, but how common it is.

Starting point is 00:36:36 It does blow my mind. And it's like I have to stop myself sometimes if I do get like a telephone call from a, you know, a telemarketer or if someone like shows up at my door or like someone's on the street handing out something. I have to like actually stop myself from being like you're doing it all wrong. Like you need to start with questions. You need to think about this because I don't want to be that guy. But that's it's again, one of those things that's like persuasive communication is fundamentally extremely valuable skill to have that's not taught in schools. That concept of relationship development is crucial, but it's not taught in traditional education. And frankly, a lot of startups that are sales-heavy don't have robust sales training programs,

Starting point is 00:37:19 and I think a lot of them fail because of that. I think great organizations and developed organizations of Fortune 500s are known for having really robust sales training programs that talk about the value of emotions and relationships and all that, the flight school, so to speak, of sales. but most of the startups that I've seen tend to have pretty bare bones programs, and it's only the people that are naturally talented that actually rise to the top. You referenced culture before, and it's a good, the sales process given it's not just you and your partner. It's not just you guys doing the sales anymore.

Starting point is 00:37:52 You have a sales force, et cetera. I've obviously scaled up the organization in terms of people. So I'd love to hear your thoughts philosophically, practically on culture, how you thought about it in the early days when it was just the cost. couple of you and how you think about it now, and what competitive advantage that can or has created for you? It's an excellent question. Culture is this word that's thrown around a lot. Everyone gives lip service to it. Everyone thinks it's important. People define it differently. People say, it's like, oh, it's like ping pong tables and beanbag chairs. But really cultural, culture is about

Starting point is 00:38:27 values. Culture is about values and it's also about a shared sense of purpose and mission. and that we've gotten really intentional about. In terms of a journey, we've had to really surrender the ego. You know, I'll admit, you know, when I was starting this business as an entrepreneur, I thought it was the center of the universe, right? It was all about me and it was all about my vision. And I failed at a lot of things because that mindset hindered me. And what I came to realize over time was that my role was it was to be a high priest

Starting point is 00:38:58 of what we're doing, but to train my team to be the clergy. to bring more people into the community and into the flock. And it wasn't just to teach them what the vision was, but it was to teach them how to teach others about what this vision was. And so for us, we've now become very intentional about culture and about what is the behavior that we actually promote, what is the behavior that's unacceptable, and how do we link that to a really codified form of values.

Starting point is 00:39:28 We, for the longest time, felt like we were a mission-driven company and a values-driven company, but we hadn't written down that mission. We hadn't written down those values. For you and for those out there, our values are really simple. There's four of them. The first is that our secret ingredient is people.

Starting point is 00:39:45 The second is that we act with honor, even when no one is looking. The third is that we make condiments with character, and the fourth is that we think long-term. And what we try and do is every major decision, every policy, every inflection point, we try and illuminate how these values actually guide us to the right answer and to the right decision and we encourage people to use these values to make decisions in their everyday professional life.

Starting point is 00:40:13 Even they don't sound like they have anything to do with, you know, the business of making condiments specifically. But coaching people in a framework to think about what are the shared things that we look at together and how do we make decisions? I think that's a really fundamental part of culture. The best part about culture and the best part about all of this is that it's free. As an entrepreneur or as a manager, as a leader, it's free for you to show up to work on time or 15 minutes early. It's free to give extra effort. It's free to write down your values and teach them to people. It's way cheaper than beanbag chairs or ping pong tables.

Starting point is 00:40:53 And that's something that I think a lot of people forget. They think about marketing or culture as or anything to grow a business is like money in, kind of money out. Like what are we allocating to this? Are we marketing better if we're marketing more? The great thing about culture and values is that it exists in this very emotional, interpersonal space and it requires a lot of leadership commitment, but it's very powerful. And I think the great organizations have great culture.

Starting point is 00:41:18 I think the unifying theme between your answer on culture and the idea of Kaizen is this, potential for great positive, unexpected outcomes. So in any business, there's some component that you can plan for, right? You can think long term. You could even invest in very long term projects as a source of competitive advantage. But in my experience, I'd be curious to see if you agree, a lot of the most interesting outcomes are unplanned and are a function of mindset versus or culture and or culture versus tactics and strategies. And it's become a very common theme. We were talking about my conversation with David Salem before we started recording,

Starting point is 00:42:04 which has been really popular, I think, for good reason. And one of the key insights I think that he had about David Swenson at Yale, and the perversions of the endowment model is that people tried to mimic his tactics, whereas what really worked was his mindset. Yes. And he calls it in a phrase that's used as reasoning from first principle. is, and that's again, looking at the ordinary and overlooked means thinking independently and thinking for yourself and not just pattern matching and copying what other people do.

Starting point is 00:42:34 I think a good rule of thumb that I'm learning is true more and more is you want to look for things where there's no manual, where there's no playbook, where someone hasn't figured out like here's the process for how to do it. Yeah. Because usually that means there's too much competition. Usually that means this area is colonized. It's not a frontier. And it sounds like from your stories and when we've talked before that you realize that

Starting point is 00:42:59 early on, right? That there's a frontier here. You said it's hard in the physical space. It's not like AWS where you can just click a button and have your cloud service and infrastructure set up. It's much harder. And you have to learn kind of on your own. There may not have been a playbook.

Starting point is 00:43:14 I'm curious, therefore, having now been, now you're part of this big company. what that frontier is now. So assuming that you agree that the real competitive opportunity is kind of feeling your way at the frontier, what is that frontier for you guys now? What has you and your partners and your team most interested? What are you exploring and learning about today? Yeah. Well, I'm going to answer your question, but I also want to just kind of make a note on that.

Starting point is 00:43:41 But I think that's a really important thing that you touch on. and I have this mantra in life, which is seek to learn that which cannot be taught. You know, figure out what it is that you can teach yourself or that you can invent. And that just, I think for the listeners out there,

Starting point is 00:43:58 I'm going to share what it's like to work with Unilever. But I think one of the really challenging things is actually having the cognition to know when you're going into an area that is unknown and noticing the fear around that and recognizing, wait a minute, am I trying to avoid this fear and trying to go where it's safe, or am I actually pushing through this fear? And a great analogy for this, a friend of mine is a sailor, and he

Starting point is 00:44:26 sails summers in the Mediterranean. And in Greece, when you leave the port of Athens, you go for a while in a very safe sound along the land, and then right before you pop out in the Aegean Sea, you pass the Temple of Poseidon. And the Temple of Poseidon was the this place that's right on this promontory point that the ancient Greek sailors would, in the ancient Greek Navy, would recognize. And at that moment, they realize, okay, now we have to pray to Poseidon, the god of the weather for clear sea, for clear skies, the god of the ocean. And it's at that moment when you recognize, I'm going from the unknown into the unknown. I'm passing that temple of Poseidon and sort of saying a little prayer there. I try and encourage myself and others to like be aware

Starting point is 00:45:12 and recognize when are you pushing into that unknown? When are you finding that Temple of Poseidon so that you can mentally prepare yourself to not be afraid or to be the right amount of afraid and to push on? And that's very much, you know, right now is a Temple of Poseid moment because here we are this 29-person company and we are now part of this giant global organization with many, many different product lines with a hundred plus year lineage in history. They have multiple departments for every employee that we have, right? So like there's no like single marketing department there. There's no single operations department. It's highly complex. And it's a lot for us to think about what are all the ways that we can actually unlock value here. And very importantly, we're aligned

Starting point is 00:46:02 on them, not in the question, we're aligned on them and that our question is not, what's the playbook here? It's how do we write the playbook? How do we write the playbook for how a big company and a small company can work together to unlock this value? Because they're as a values driven company and as a sustainable living driven company, they recognize that if they break our culture, then they break the business. That's one of the reasons why we decided to partner with them that they recognize that. But luckily, there is a shared understanding that this is about critical thinking and independent thinking from first principles about what to integrate and what not to integrate so that we can have the right amount of

Starting point is 00:46:41 independence and autonomy, and that we can ultimately give our customers what it is our customers want and not lose sight of something because of operational efficiencies. How often in your history have you experienced periods of complacency or comfort, which are sort of the antithesis of this idea of past Poseidon or the frontier or fear? So how often did you need or do you continually find yourself needing to course correct and kind of push yourself towards fear in the unknown? And how do you do that? Like how do you monitor that in yourself? It sounds like it's a key component of your culture at your firm. So are there ways of doing that or is it just something like that you build with experience? That's a wonderful question.

Starting point is 00:47:25 And I'm a very happy guy. Like I feel like I'm one of the luckiest people in the universe. Sometimes I'm really hard on myself, but it can be easy for me to be complacent. And I'm, I think that's all relative, but I'm actually really lucky that I have a tremendous partner in Mark, my co-founder, who has, obviously he's a very optimistic person as well. We're both incredibly optimistic, but he has an extremely critical eye for seeing around the corner and seeing around the bend and bringing things up that are challenges of saying, hey, we pat ourselves in the back for doing this thing, but that was just the plateau we're on now.

Starting point is 00:48:02 Let's get to that next plateau. So I've been tremendously lucky to have someone that pushes me and pushes the organization in the way that I think we do actually need to grow because the potential is that much higher. I would also say surround yourself with inspiration. Surround yourself with inspirational people. Read books and understand

Starting point is 00:48:23 what the creative process has been like for other people. and recognize, too, what other people have done that have made a lasting impact on the future of our society on generations and ask yourself this question, what is the impact that you want to have? Because when you start asking this question, how do I want to use my life? What is my purpose? What's the impact I want to have? What's going to live beyond me? You stop thinking small and you start thinking about, okay, if I'm here now, who is the person that I need to be? What is the mindset that I need to have in order to achieve these things? And the point, point of that is not to say you're inadequate or I'm inadequate or I'm not good enough. It's

Starting point is 00:49:02 that there is a growth mindset and a possibility for here's what I can achieve, here's what I can learn so that I can have the impact that I want to have. It can be a double-edged sword because you don't want to have that negative self-talk. You don't want to feel like you're inadequate, but you want to also recognize that there's still head room and there's still room for growth. Several things you've said are going to make me ask one of my usual questions out of order, which is to ask you what the kindest thing anyone did for you in the nine-year process to this point outside of the company. So someone that wasn't partner or an employee, what was the kindest thing that you experienced in the first nine years? That's a good question.

Starting point is 00:49:44 So I think the kindest thing that someone's done for us is one of our now board members and a very, very early investor in Sir Kensington's really took a bet on us. And his name is Keith Miller. And I often refer to him as the godfather of our business. And here's someone that had no business meeting with two guys making catch up. He works at a private equity firm and a fancy office in midtown. He's been, you know, his entrepreneur, CEO, board member of public companies. And when you walk into his office, he's got pictures of that he's taken on Polaroids of like Kanye West and like the Olson twins. And here's someone who before we had any social proof, before we had any really evidence that we were going to be successful, he saw something in us and that was very

Starting point is 00:50:40 personal to him. And I think he took a shot on us. And through thick and through thin, you know, whether we were beating budget or whether we were missing budget or whether things were looking up or things where we're looking challenging. He was just relentless in helping us get to that next level above and beyond what the responsibility that he would have as an individual was. And witnessing that kindness was inspirational and has been inspirational for me because it goes along with this great piece of advice that my grandfather says, which is if you want to be successful, don't be a go-getter, be a go-giver. And it helped me recognize. is that not only do you get a personal benefit and sort of an emotional satisfaction from being

Starting point is 00:51:26 able to provide for others, but it's really, I think, necessary to help create the future and to be in innovative categories and innovative businesses where there is no traction or proof or when there is, it's kind of too late to be part of that early stage. So Keith's been tremendously kind to both of us and he's been a role model for me. It hints at something. that a lot of people have said, which is that the go-getting mindset is kind of a short-term type investment that can, you know, it can yield certainly results, but that sort of not unconditional, but somewhat unconditional giving is often a fantastic long-term investment. Again, back to this idea that it will produce unexpected positive outcomes that you can't

Starting point is 00:52:13 plan for ahead of time. You just kind of have to have a leap of faith that that will happen. And it's the idea of karma, whatever. There's a lot of ways of formulating the same idea. But it's just true. Like, it just seems to be a rule of the universe. It is. And the only way to know that, because it's not the most rational or logical idea at face value, is to start doing it just kind of randomly, like random acts of kindness or whatever you want to do.

Starting point is 00:52:38 And then you'll realize it. It may take a couple of years, but you'll get that feat, that experiential feedback loop. And then you realize, like, this is literally the best. investment I can make. Absolutely. Is helping other people without like what's in it for me right away. Exactly. And that's part of surrendering the ego and that's that's creating community.

Starting point is 00:52:58 That's welcoming people in as family and friends and not seeing it as a tit for tat moving away from that scarcity mindset. Patrick, have you seen this movie Super Mench? They call me Super Mench. So I've read the book. Oh, you've read the book. Okay. So I think Shep who I actually met last weekend is a great example of that mindset.

Starting point is 00:53:17 which is he calls them coupons. But when you deliver these benefits for people and you help them out, you create this karma and you create this positive energy and everybody wants to be around him. And that's sort of one of the fundamental paradoxes is like the best thing you can do for yourself is doing good things for other people. And that's why I've loved having a baby, having a baby boy and kind of moving my sense of self and my sense of value from like within my body to now like, part of something that's shared between like my son, my wife, and myself, moving to that family

Starting point is 00:53:52 unit. That's part of, I think, surrendering the ego. And it also goes all the way, you know, back to Buddhist philosophy, right? Surrendering the ego, recognizing that we are all this collective energy. It's the same kind of thing. And I think there's a lot of truth to it. Can you describe who Shep is? Just for people that don't know? Yeah. So Shep Gordon, he randomly, after basically, you know, he was in Southern California in 1968, and he was selling drugs in a motel in Hollywood. And Jimmy Hendricks asked him, you know, who's one of his customers, asked him, well, if the cops come, what are you going to say that you do? What's your cover? And he's like, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:54:32 What should I say? And Jimmy Hendricks says, well, are you Jewish? And he goes, yeah. And he goes, Jimmy says, you should be a manager. Here's some bands to manage. So starting his career, he began managing and really creating. created the act of Alice Cooper, briefly managed Pink Floyd. And then later in his career, as he began producing independent films and representing acts like Luther Vandross and Teddy Pendergrass,

Starting point is 00:54:58 he discovered that he had a love and a passion for cooking the culinary world and food. And so he created the concept of the celebrity chef. And he started representing chefs like Emerald Lagassee, who, you know, he was his first manager and started getting. chefs and culinary figures remunerated for the work that they were doing on behalf of companies, brands and things like that. And so to this day, he represents, well, he only represents Alice, but he's known for representing musicians and chefs and being, as people call him, the supermensch. Fascinating. Must have been a fun conversation. So you did something which is like one of my dreams, which is... And he's a big fan of Sir Kensington's, by the way.

Starting point is 00:55:42 That's very good. Good fan to have. which is that you biked around Asia on a foldable bike. Yes. For how long was it? Ten months. Ten months. So when we first met, I knew you had done this because a mutual friend who introduced us told me.

Starting point is 00:56:00 And I love traveling. Specifically, I love that part of the world. And I've had some of my favorite life experiences there. But the way you did it is kind of the way that someday I hope to return and do it. And when we first met, I intentionally said, let's not get into this because I want to hear about it for the first time here. So I would love to hear that story, why you did it and maybe some favorite stops along the way, but more importantly, kind of what you learn through that 10-month process. Yeah, that's a lot. And it's great questions.

Starting point is 00:56:32 But I've always loved riding a bike. I think, you know, riding a bike is an amazing way to see a city. And it's the right pace to go. You know, when you're walking, it's a little too slow. when you're in a car, you're very removed. Bicycles are a great way to get around. It's a friendly way to transport yourself, and it is a great way to work up an appetite

Starting point is 00:56:51 and get some exercise too. And a friend of mine, a guy named Woody Schneider, was one of my best friends. In college every Sunday, we would get on our bikes in the morning, and we would ride around Providence and go outside of Providence, Rhode Island, and have these weird adventures and discover things.

Starting point is 00:57:07 And at some point, I was telling him about my experiences with an internship that I had, in India, working for a social entrepreneur in my time in China. He was telling me about his time in Russia. And so we said, you know, we should, and what we call what we did biking around, kind of meandering and wandering, we call that wheeling. So we were like, oh, we should go wheeling in Asia after we graduate. We did that really briefly. Then we went, you know, to take full-time office jobs. And after doing that for close to two years, we said, you know what? That was so amazing what we did. You know, at the time we

Starting point is 00:57:42 went from South India to South Korea via Western China. And our approach was, it's not about stamina. It's not about distance. It's not about miles traveled. We wanted to explore cities as magnets of culture. So we had bicycles in these cities. Then we would get on trains, occasionally planes, boats. And then we'd go from city center to city center and then ride a bike around there. And so we said, let's do a bigger trip. Let's make it last 10 months. We'll brand it Asia Wheeling will create a website that's a blog that has all of our stories and pictures and all the food we eat and our itiner and everything like that and explore an area that was very new to us with really open eyes. Asia is roughly 60% of the population of planet Earth currently.

Starting point is 00:58:33 As geographically defined, most humans are Asian. And in our lifetime, Asia will go from relative poverty to relative abundance. And there's going to be massive. There already is massive cultural shifts that we've seen in China and in India across Asia. It's a really, I think, important thing to understand and to learn about. And on top of that, what we learned, what we didn't expect, but what we learn was that when you're in one environment, when you're in one city one day, and you bike around, you get to know it, you don't necessarily have a map, you don't speak the language, but you learn how to get around, how to pantomime and facilitate yourself. And then the next day, you move on. We would spend very little time in each city,

Starting point is 00:59:19 you know, maybe one days, two days, three days. But we were on the move. We went to 23 different countries, 100 different cities over 10 months. What you realize is that you start to be at home with the world and at home without having a routine, because there is no kind of morning routine. There is no ritual to that. There's no morning commute. And by getting really familiar with the unknown and kind of inventing your own luck every day, I think you start to become more and more comfortable

Starting point is 00:59:50 with that Temple of Poseidon moment of, okay, I'm in the unknown. And yes, you have algorithms and you have ways to tackle these things. And we luckily had these amazing what we call bureau chiefs that were individuals that were sort of partially responsible for helping guide us in each country. How did you set that up? We just, what we did is we called up our friends and we called up friends of friends.

Starting point is 01:00:11 And we were like, hey, if you bureau chief for us and you help us know what we should do, we'll print you some sweet business cards that say bureau chief on them. And we would like send people these business cards and they would look so cool, you know, and they had Asia Wheeling and all these languages. And then people would say, okay, eat here, don't go here, do this, take this train, beware of this, meet this person, go to this restaurant. and that was really cool. I think some of my favorite places, it breaks my heart. But when we were in, this was 2010, we went to Syria before the war. And Syria was an amazing place. Damascus, Aleppo, beautiful ancient cities with the nicest, most welcoming, warm people.

Starting point is 01:00:53 And it's such a travesty what's happened there. So Syria was really amazing. Also, we went all the way, you know, west as far as Turkey. We started into Indonesia when all of it. the way west to Turkey, we went north to Siberia, you know, again, geographically in Asia, and we took the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the summer, which was an amazing experience, because in Siberia, it's cold for like 10 months out of the year. So in July and August, people are thrilled. They're dancing in the street, you know? And so Siberia was an incredible experience,

Starting point is 01:01:27 as was, I love traveling in China, and I love experiencing kind of the deeper, parts of China, you know, ancient sort of capitals and seats in, you know, southwest of China specifically, there were some great places there. I'm trying to think of the name. Jenshui, you know, right in between like the border of Vietnam and, you know, as you go up towards Kunming in Yunnan province, you know, this sort of would be unknown to foreign tourists, but an awesome experience where restaurants that have these communal grills, where you use an extra large pair of chopsticks to grill and sort of flame broil your own blocks of tofu

Starting point is 01:02:10 on this giant shared grill. These experiences, you know, and the whole thing like cost a dollar, really special things. But I highly encourage people to check out the website and to spend some time in the unknown. So you have accomplished, and I know obviously your journey is continually unfolding

Starting point is 01:02:29 and you're not going to stop. But you've accomplished what, I think, a lot of young entrepreneurs think of as the ideal, right? And I've had success, there's a ton of people, I think, that listen, looking for insight into mindset, right, which we've talked a lot about. But in closing, if you could offer just a bit of orientational compass-like advice for, say, someone in their early 20s, that's maybe the person you were in your college dorm room 10 years ago or whenever that was.

Starting point is 01:03:02 What would maybe some closing thoughts be for that kind of person? Every day is really meant to be enjoyed. The journey is the reward. You know, I don't really feel fundamentally different now than I did, you know, before I had sold my company or even before I had started my company. You know, the growth and the true happiness that I've had comes from family and comes from these giving and surrendering the ego. And in any entrepreneurial process, or really I think in the process of life, there are going to be setbacks on the journey from point A to point B.

Starting point is 01:03:39 You think it's a straight line, but it's going to be all over the place. And you've got to learn and have the perspective to enjoy that journey. I think that's the other thing that I recognize in traveling across Asia and spending time in India that if you're listening to this podcast, you are one of the luckiest people on the planet. And you have to keep that into perspective. You have to realize that you have been given an incredible gift and you're very fortunate. Get in touch with that sense of gratitude on a daily basis. Whether Google gratitude meditation, you know, keep a gratitude journal. And if you remember and you write down like why you're so lucky what you're so happy for,

Starting point is 01:04:23 you will naturally enjoy the journey that much more. Well, Scott, this has been the by far the best conversation. on ketchup that I've ever had and likely we'll ever have. It's just a vehicle for something greater, Patrick. Exactly. This has been extremely fun. So thank you for your time. Can't wait to continue the conversation.

Starting point is 01:04:40 Well, I really enjoyed this and I'm honored. So thank you so much. Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest like the Best, go to Investorfieldguide.com forward slash podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldgide.com forward slash book club. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away,

Starting point is 01:05:03 and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Oshag, OSHAG. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover invest like the best. Thanks so much for listening.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Scott Norton - Seek to Learn That Which Cannot be Taught - [Invest Like the Best, EP.43]

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