I poured my blood, sweat and life savings into my restaurant. It ruined my life.
torontolife.com
torontolife.com
His lack of preparation is mind boggling, but completely deliberate: the less he knew, the more room there was for fantasy. Beware working with people like this, who want to skip straight to the end.
That said, the community is to die for. I can’t recall ever being close to my coworkers in that way since moving into tech. Nothing tastes as sweet as a cigarette, liquor, and stories after your shift. Kind of necessary with the hours you work!
Of course, you almost never have enough capitalization.
But, I frankly can’t imagine a restaurant business not taking on some debt in some seasons, at least at first.
And then began borrowing money from family and in-laws.
Chancing your family's meager nest egg on a long shot gamble when you have a wife, kids and a mortgage is shockingly negligent.
Though honestly, the first big red flag for me was that he wanted to open a restaurant because he loves to cook. This is a little surprising, the way people don't distinguish between the art and the business. It's as if a screenwriter decided to open a production studio, or a guitarist decided to open a music venue. The only finally successful guy I know in the music business (he got into booking and organizing) loves to jam, but he's not very good. Me? I love playing music, but I know that opening a cabaret wouldn't be the way to fulfill that. Honestly, sounds like the best way to ensure I'd never have time to play music again.
The funny thing is, I actually kind of like the financial and operational concepts in restaurants. I studied industrial engineering and ops research, and I loved the examples of restaurant queuing, batch processing, methods to reduce lead time, even supply chains, the way one decision cascades through he others. The idea of discovering that the marginal cost of one dish is much lower than the average cost because it can be prepared using the idle time during the prep and machinery for expensive dishes, that interests me.
No, not that I should open a restaurant, ha. But the guy who wrote this article does mention that he had a copy of "kitchen confidential", and in that book, Bourdain specifically talks about this, recounting the successful restauranteur who lives for these sorts of operational and financial challenges, takes a kind of joy and fascination in them, kind of how a tax lawyer loves finding ways to profit in the details, and that's why he's well suited for the business.
But yeah, anyway, your "big red flag" raised a big red flag for me too. Phoning it in on the pre-reqs and a learning opportunity is certainly a bad sign.
I'm talking about this because the issues are fascinating - I don't want to harp on the dude who write this, though, cause he clearly paid.
Tech is easy money compared to what it takes to create a profitable restaurant from scratch. The author made the same mistake I’ve seen people make before.
This guy did no research at all and sadly this is extremely common.
Not much has actually changed regarding this structurally, the surveillance has been there for 30 years and the legal aspect forever. Desperate and or stupid people, do desperate and stupid things. What has changed, is Walmart now has dramatically less cash flowing through it at the point of sales (due to cards or Walmart Pay et al). Merchandise theft is by far the bigger problem these days for Walmart. The same goes for places like liquor stores (which used to be an extremely cash heavy business, but now are mostly cards).
EDIT: I've also known of places that switched to cashless have all their good staff quit, and be stuck with only completely useless people
I'd tend to agree at restaurants (anecdotally). But, when I tip at a bar with cash, it's a buck a drink, even when it's a 2 dollar coors light. If I pay with credit card, the 20% thinking kicks in and that's what I tip. 40 cents on a 2 dollar beer.
Tech is mentally exhausting. Really short but painful hours. Food & beverage is not exactly tiring, but the hours are very long. With tech consulting, you might be working 4-6 hours a day, with restaurants, expect around 14 hours/day. One involves a lot of slow, deep work, the other involves lots of rapid, shallow work.
With tech, you can get away with 0 employees, and everyone you hire is smarter than you. With restaurants, you regularly hire idiots who sleep while at work, don't show up, can't read simple instructions, steal from the charity jar. It's highly frustrating. It also drains a huge cut from your daily sales, which might seem like a lot until you look at profits.
It's really tempting to do a restaurant, because it's sort of "stable" source of income. But tech is much better and once you get tired of it all, you can just sell everything off at a higher price.
... huh? Which tech company is this?
Funnily enough, if he wanted to be successful, spreadsheets could've been the key to his success. He would've known his Cost of Goods Sold, he would've known his staffing costs, his rent, and how much money he had and could spend.
It seems like he actually did have his processes in order in the end, he got to a point where he was running a bit of a profit, and was on track, until he decided to close for a week, which managed to quickly suck his funds dry and plunge him back into debt. This could've been easily avoided.
Obviously that wasn't his only problem, but it's one of many. The fact that the restaurant succeeds today, without him, is interesting, because it sort of proves that he was the failing factor in the restaurant. Often it's external factors that doom a restaurant, poor location for instance.
And it was the week before 'the slow season'? They came back to the start of a slow period. It's almost comical how little thought/planning he managed to put in to things, and after getting a 4 star review, and things picking up, he decides to close things down "for a week"? Closing down during a known 'slow period' - that makes sense. I know seasonal/tourist places that do that. This was just... yet another misstep that, as you said, could easily have been avoided.
It became painful reading this. And it makes me think... this whole notion of '80% of restaurants fail' stuff is partially due to just really poor planning or non-critical thinking ability by people up front. Of course, more planning and analysis up front may just stop people from opening in the first place, which may bring the % rate of failures down, but the overall numbers would be lower too. It's hard not to read this and think "I'd be smarter than that - I wouldn't make those mistakes" (having worked in restaurants, I wouldn't make those mistakes - I'd likely make other ones!)
Especially cafe/restaurant owners.
I don't think he did nearly enough research into how much it costs to start a restaurant.
Low end estimate is $150k required up front, and high end of $320k. However, in that low end - $85k estimate for leasehold improvements. $15k for initial subway franchise fee.
Local sandwich shop opened up a few years back and... while I don't know all the numbers, he didn't put in $200k up front. I suspect it may have been more like $40-$50k, between initial lease, equipment, stock, etc. Small town, passing traffic, little competition, he's done well enough that he's expanding - doubling his size and moving a bit up the street. He's also a very pragmatic guy, and the sandwich biz has been in his family for a couple generations, so I have to think they're at least moderately profitable.
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-costs-to-open-a-subwa...
>I contacted the banks to apply for a business loan, but I didn’t qualify. I looked into a few angel investor groups, but it turned out that they didn’t “do” restaurants. I even considered Dragons’ Den. As it turns out, no one invests in first-time restaurateurs, no matter how mind-blowing they think their cooking is.
Not without a ton of experience running profitable restaurants.
A year later, he is bankrupt, has lost his house and his marriage.
I recall stumbling across the franchise agreement for a frozen yogurt place once. They wanted proof that you were able to invest something like $400,000 in the venture, and that's a way simpler setup.
For example Dairy Queen requires:
Investment Range: $779,675 – $1,729,160 Liquid Capital Requirement: $400,000 Net Worth Requirement: $750,000
https://www.dairyqueen.com/us-en/Company/Franchise-With-Us/S...
The idea would be strip as much cost out of the initial part as possible for the start-up (given their odds of early failure are ~97%). Most of them would still fail, the WeKitchen business would get paid their upfront monthly (or quarterly) fees as the restaurants come and go (and there's a perpetual supply of people wanting to try restaurant businesses, this would increase that supply by lowering the cost / risk; it could also accelerate experimentation). It could also enable a lot of other types of food businesses, such as tilt-up bakeries, rather than only restaurant-style.
The overall system would focus on orders to go, aligning with the increasing rise of food delivery services.
With office rents working on fairly regular timelines, it's easier to get a new tenant before an old one has finished up. But if restaurants inconsistently go bust, that may mean that you can't look for new tenants until you're already dealing with a vacancy. Given that restaurants may be cyclical, there's a decent chance that you'll face multiple vacancies in parallel. I know you bring up vacancies, so I just mention this as a possible consideration.
I actually think this is a really cool idea, and would love if someone pulled it off successfully. I've seen it done with clothing stores and would love to see the food equivalent.
I considered that the large unit space / building could have a dining area, where customers could sit down and could then select from numerous kitchens that are local to that space. That pushes it even closer to the mall food court. My reservation on that, is that some percentage of the restaurants will be producing subpar experiences in terms of quality. So a successful restaurant in the space, wants its customers to eat in a successful atmosphere, where customers as a whole are happy; if half the customers in the dining area are unhappy, the enjoyment by the other happier half will suffer as well (people pick up on such things, it rubs off). Then I considered sub-divided dining areas, so each rented kitchen gets its own limited sit-down space, it just might be a stretch though and adds to the overall cost burden in the system with minimum gain (ie, it's probably just easier to focus more narrowly on food delivery).
To deal with the vacancies issue, you'd only build these in higher population urban areas, to maximize the potential number of restaurants etc. that you can rent to (maximize the potential start-ups due to population). You'd also seek to under-build versus demand, preferring to always have a waiting list (recession times might even trash that best effort). I don't know if it would work, but, I'd seek to get a modest upfront payment allocation from the waiting list, that covers the risk on vacancy turn-over. By keeping the demand above the space availability, you can probably get the start-ups to front the first month of rent to get on the list (with some terms of refund). It wouldn't be something you could start with zero capital, the idea would be to get it into the $5k (solo bakery) to $25k range to go from moving into the space to the time it takes to get the first customer.
They're a great service for people who can go in and cook up a batch of, say, baked goods that they then individually wrap and take to coffee shops, or whatever.
The guy in the story did just about everything wrong, though, in kind of an amazingly thorough fashion.
I'd say trying in itself can be seen as a partial success, hope you didn't get too financially impacted.
Is there any books/resources you (or other HN readers who also started their businesses :)) wish you had read before starting? Or that you did read and consider essential?
There are some great resources here and in books, but I can't think of anything I wish I'd have read earlier, and nothing I know of that would have changed my course. It might be out there, but I haven't read it yet. ;)
My team wasn't balanced enough, and we underestimated how much marketing we'd need. We were conflicted about raising VC money, so we wasted time dithering. We didn't figure out the right business strategy and our market until it was too late. All the books say to pay attention to this stuff, but none can really tell you how to do it in your case.
Great books I read include "Early Exits", "The Startup Owner's Manual", "Lean Startup", "Pitch Anything". I think I learned more about startups reading HN than in those books, but it's all good stuff. Seek out a wide variety of conflicting advice, find the best team, and go for it! ;)
Do people start restaurants with their own money? That seems like a nightmare.
How can you hire people or evaluate their work if you don't understand what they do?
Not if you have worked in a restaurant as a high level employee(eg exec chef) for quite a while.
(Exec chef here, 17 years experience)
Owning a restaurant is a lifestyle in ways that working in tech never would be. There is no free time, there is never a day off, there is no exit in sight. It’s 80-100 hours in per week, small margins, and frequent turnover.
Can it be profitable? Yes. But it requires as much, if not more domain expertise as anything else, including doing a startup. And, there are far fewer people out there talking about the valuable details of doing it correctly - very different from the startup world.
Before he became TV famous, he worked in his restaurant every day until 1 AM, and back to it 6 hours later...every day, for many years. People vastly underestimate the time and dedication needed to run a restaurant. If you aren't built for it like Ramsay, you will regret it.
For a lot of owners, it's a really good way to earn not a lot of money for a massive amount of work.
Anyone who is an expert in their field should feel justified in being annoyed by people asking for help then ignoring or arguing with said help. Happens to me on a regular-enough basis that I can usually predict how a request for help is going to turn out. Not alway, but often enough.
What McDonalds and Starbucks do well is produce consistent (though not particularly high) quality at a price people are willing to pay and with staff who are not coming on board particularly well trained or talented. They also systematize / automate a lot of the other things you mention.
At some point in your life `Money` isn't really a problem anymore. What is more of a concern is the quality of the experience and the food. Considering if you've had a good, over-all happy meal then you don't think about the money and cherish the experience. On the other hand if the experience and food is sub-standard or poor then you hate it more because not only have you wasted your money but you've wasted your time and also other people time.
One thing I would say to restaurant owner's is procedures, standards, and having consistent meals is more important than anything. When taking my family out to a restaurant I just recently had a investor meeting with and the food is amazing and then the food is sub-standard then I feel cheated.
Starbucks is much better than the average Folgers-type diner coffee (in that it's not both totally burnt and weak), which was the previous point of comparison for most Americans. At best, a cup of Starbucks is merely strong. However, it's not remotely as good as something from a coffeeshop which tailors the whole process to highlight the quality of the ingredients and attention to detail in the process.
Of course, I perhaps do not appreciate the challenges of managing a global supply chain and making it scale to the size of Starbucks, but I would agree with gp's assertion their coffee is not particularly high quality.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Starbucks-considered-bad-by-cof...
This guy is so raw that he is even missing basic stuff.
> We can barely afford the place, but I wanted my daughters to have their own rooms
And he doesn't learn.
The more appealing a lifestyle seems, the more hard work probably has to go into it, because there's so much more competition.
For instance, in the story, he had a fantasy about having a hunting rifle next to the stove and going hunting whenever he damn felt like it. Who the heck doesn't want that?
Once he gets a taste of what it's like to peel several dozen potatoes, he doesn't take it to heart. He writes it off as an outlier. Anything cool takes a lot of effort, because so many other people want to do it also. But he still thought he could pull it off, because he "loved cooking". Does not matter. If you can't do the 1001 other things required to run a business, you're hosed.
Neither of them have actually worked as a chef in years, and one of them hasn't set foot behind the counter at a restaurant since 2004. I can't even imagine the constant time pressure chefs, and undoubtedly restaurant owners must feel for this type of behavior to manifest and basically never go away.
(Also I'm bemused as to why the opener suggests red tape was a problem.)
I am reminded of a college class where everyone but me was solely concerned with getting a good grade and enthusiastically encouraging the professor to curve the grades and skip parts of the curriculum. I was the only one who expressed the concern that we might actually need to learn the course materials in order to actually be prepared for higher courses or even, god forbid, a job at some point.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/business/too-many-restaur...
* http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/07/this-tiny-bu...
I find similarities to being a founder in a super risky high tech startup - but with higher possible payoff.
Yet, I don't hear a chorus of bar backs, dish washers, servers, hosts and chefs complaining about not having a life outside of the restaurant or needing "work-life balance." What gives?
Restaurants are ultra-competitive and have very thin margins, so people who work there can't.
Meanwhile within walking distance there are like two restaurants and a coffee shop and I count myself lucky I even have that and visit all of them at frequently because I so treasure them. Even if their food isn't that amazing they at least somewhat contribute to the community of their surroundings.
Reading this article, I think I'm right. I wonder what the success rate is of a restaurant is when the owner has even a basic idea of how the various positions in a restaurant work and the important business metrics.
To be fair, it's not that easy to learn all the fundamentals without doing the whole process and failing at it.
I ran a business out of high school / college summers networking up college kids in dorms. This was before computers came with ethernet cards by default and while dorms were being wired. My biggest mistake was not charging enough and not doing enough marketing. The university offered a similar service for 3x more than me.. I offered a flat rate including the card (which I got cheap.. easy drivers etc..) but I should have offered a choice of cards (fast, faster, fastest) and charged way more than I did as well as up sell (or sell an extended warranty or something...) It was a flash in the pan business only viable for 2-3 summers.
To follow up I also did computer IT consulting.. later and I still charged too little!! I guess one issue is that there is a ceiling on what you can charge (since you can just buy a new computer) unless it's in regard to recovering some important data... even then and nowadays you can just take the hard drive out and stick it in a usb enclosure, tell them to buy a new machine and call it a day.
So many startups are based on this very premise.
Reminds me of this poster: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/incompe...
It would be like wanting to start a restaurant because you like to eat, but don't know how to cook or what kind of food you should focus on.
The author's actions seem to be motivated by an almost childish level of over-enthusiasm. That the word childish occurs to me makes me wonder - are we making it too difficult for kids to try things? Not actually opening a restaurant, of course, but something moderately ambitions for their age. Big enough for them to fail badly at when they're insanely, blindly hopeful about it. It would be good in a way to experience that sort of failure at an age and life situation where you don't destroy your finances when you're 3/4 to retirement and with kids of your own to send to college. Maybe if he had experienced that, then he could chase after his next dream with a little more realism and self-control and a little less blind optimism.
Something is very very wrong.
and of course, you could make the food a lot faster i would imagine. and you could make it perfect every time. and you wouldnt have to pay people huge amounts of money to make it. i would also advocate for automating the delivery of the food to the table but that might be off putting to customers, so you could just build a system that would automate most of the mental load of managing tables and just use your human employees as meat puppets for the delivery software. perhaps something like google glass could be used. i bet you could reduce your serving staff very dramatically by doing that.
and as for ingredients, you could even grow some of them. ive seen videos about restaurants in new york that use roof top aquaponics systems to grow all their vegetables. whether on the roof or off site, one would need to run both production and processing and delivery in order for uniform quality to be achieved. the quality of the ingredients is supremely important -- i went to sauls in the bay area and their cheese burger literally gave me pause. if you want to know the difference between average ingredients and good ingredients, go try the cheese burger at sauls medium well.
even outside of automation, there are so many improvements to be made. i used to work in a restaurant and they would cook food on these large woks. i would guess more than a third of the energy from the flames below simply go around the wok and up out of the vent hood. automating the heating of the food would probably make it much easier to capture and use all of that thermal energy instead of half.
I suppose TV dinners are made like you say, but they can be frozen and transported to allow higher volume production.
http://www.wweek.com/restaurants/2016/09/30/heres-what-happe...
His journey is a cautionary tale on how difficult it is to start a new business (including tech startups). There's so much work to be done and a lot of them are non-glamorous.
So his first experience was extremely painful, almost landed you in the emergency room, and you lost money on it. What valuable lessons he learned going forward?
> I didn’t care.
None.
> Eighty per cent of first-time restaurateurs fail. I knew this. Opening a restaurant was the least sensible, dumbest thing I could do. My wife, Dorothy, a daycare worker, was coasting toward the end of a maternity leave, and we had two kids to feed.
It's so rare to see people brag about being reckless, irresonsible, and wasteful of resources they cannot afford to waste.
> “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Friends who knew what they were talking about tried to warn him off.
> My shifts consisted of a few leisurely hours chopping veg and prepping salad dressings.
Any opportunity for experience is to be strictly avoided. "The law says I need to know how a restaurant works? I know better!"
> My role was largely symbolic anyway
No it wasn't.
> As it turns out, no one invests in first-time restaurateurs, no matter how mind-blowing they think their cooking is.
Man, I wonder why? More to the point, it's clear he never did.
> I realized it was far from the downtown foodie scene [...] Admittedly, I had an ulterior motive: the place was a 10-minute walk from my house and close to the girls’ school
He purposefully chose a bad location, knowing it was a bad location, because it was convenient for him.
...I've got to stop reading, this is actually enraging me. It's so dumb, and he seems so proud.
I'm not saying that you imply his wasn't equally skewed. Just that when I read about Stallman or other people who rightly attract admiration this truism tends to be conspicuously absent. But the mythology is just as strong there too-- a rational person would not take years to find out from a specialist that their chronic hand pain was due to repetition caused by an unreasonable amount of typing[1].
I've seen a lot of different people fill those shoes. Their roles aren't symbolic, and it is an impressively grand delusion for a founder of any business to think as such. They are supposed to set an example for everyone else.
Only one of my bosses could not understand this, and his business has sunk millions without turning a profit because, initially, he was lazy and would blame every problem on his workers, the industry, the weather, etc. instead of his own laziness and lack of planning skills. He didn't seek to eliminate his problems, he relished in them because they let him feel like things were out of his control.
The rest of them worked themselves to the bone to provide good service and a good product. They took responsibility for all decisions and gave at least some thought before making stupid, risky decisions.
Literally the first thing you do when creating a brick and mortar establishment is research the area and find where the most profitable location will be. This guy fucked up from day one, choosing laziness over rational thought, and then denies responsibility for it. This is downright pitiful and he deserves to lose every penny that he did.
Best take a few steps back. He's brazen, and maybe a bit dumb. I'd probably get along with calling him too proud, mostly.
Now to reduce myself to platitudes: at least he did something. That's living. Who deserves in this life to try and come up with something new? I hope not only the few special people who were ever so lucky to be born into the right place, or have the right amount of money, or the timely and rational roadmap laid out before them like some kind of gospel whispered in their ear as if from above.
For all your favourite painters, scientists, theorists, philosophers, chefs, writers, musicians, actors, even just general stop-gap-role human beings (as the preceding rhetoric might lead me to classify them—after all what kind of animal would admire a labourer[/s]), remember: there are millions who died in obscurity, having lived more or less than this goofball, or you, and most of them didn't offer up (or didn't have the chance to offer up) any insight so that you might avoid the same mistakes. It's not that you're necessarily wrong in what you're saying outright, but maybe something else.
The unfortunate thing about social matters, is that social science is kind of trite—seemingly because it can't really be treated like science—the rules' changes depend on too many variables. I think that's the beauty of it.
You're not assessing a matter that is purely business or financial or scientific. You're reading it from the wrong perspective. Put his shoes on and just listen and learn from the experience. I think that's all there is to it. This is why we share experiences. I mean, unless you know everything and have done it all already—then I'd love to hear more from you!
On another note: if that's the response of an engineer, and their treatment of clients with a similar critique, let me know—I'll choose another bridge but those that such an engineer designed to cross any divide.
I think the right response is to ask a question.
I mean no offense, because I do sorta appreciate what you're going for, but this is almost the most philosophically, semantically, and most sillily empty sentence that exists.
Everyone does something. People who do 'nothing' do something. We only praise people whom succeed publicly or fail publicly. Even then, we only praise the people who fail when we ideologically align with them. We don't praise people who go out there and try to start a hate group, nor the ones who succeed.
Trying isn't really something that should count to other people. I won't say it shouldn't count to the person who tried it; self-esteem is a very personal thing. Failure shouldn't necessarily be a bad thing personally either, but let's not pretend that it's usually a good thing. The vast majority of failures are just failures. Starting a bead store in 2017 isn't a good idea, and we shouldn't congratulate my mother-in-law for doing it and wasting 30k in investments, nor should we congratulate her investors.
Edit:
Also, can anyone tell me if I should have used 'who' or 'whom' here? I don't 'think' it's the direct object, but I will defer to someone else:
'We don't praise people who go out there and try to start a hate group'
I didn't think I had to break it down further, and I was trying to be cool and all that, but what I was trying to say is: [if you know that area of Toronto, the location he chose was not that out of the way business-wise, but it is a little bit and ] he was trying to bring growth and culture to an area of his city that needs it. He was trying to do something that would have a significant positive impact for his family and his community. That seems like a good thing to me, overall.
He didn't do everything wrong. The reviews he received, being rated higher at some point than Bar Isabel (one of the best, if not the, best Spanish restaurant in the city), and Cafe Boulud (one of the finest French restaurants in the city at the Four Seasons in Yorkville) are substantial.
Wasn't congratulating the guy. He's got a tough road ahead. I'm just encouraging the humanist understanding treatment vs. hard-analytical treatment of the article. He already knows he's screwed He's said as much. That might mean he wrote it for another reason, no? It certainly isn't encouraging charity. Maybe he just wrote it for people like himself to read? I think that's a good starting question.
The story seems like he took a terrible risk he couldn't afford, he didn't prepare or research things well, and his endeavor failed largely due to his own shortcomings. Sure, he learned something and has a story. He also borrowed and lost thousands of dollars from his friends, and severely set back his family - possibly for life. Given that he's unlikely to be a restauranteur again, his lesson doesn't seem that valuable either.
http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/
When that failed I had to get a real job again, but got sick of it after a year and a half:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/leaving-full-time-jobs/
Then I took off on the road again and eventually had to return to the full time job/life:
http://khanism.org/perspective/a-tale-of-two-journeys/
I did something. I failed .. well maybe not failed so much as just didn't find a way to sustain myself. But each time I hope I get a little better at it.
And yea ... at least I tried. One day I'll be dead. At least I got to see Singapore, feel the wind of New Zealand, ride through the deserts of Australia, do a radio poetry show on the 8am commute in Perth.
He made some bad decisions. We can see that in the retrospectiscope. I agree I had trouble reading it. But yea, respect for trying. He lost a ton of money? Well as long as he can save enough to pay for his kids' education, at least he has a story to tell and they can learn from him.
It's all relative. I can see the bad and see the good. You gotta try, or else you're just gonna die in your cube.
I didn't get the impression that this was the case from the ending.
> I still have an outstanding HST situation, and I face the prospect of personal bankruptcy.
> We can barely afford the place, but I wanted my daughters to have their own rooms—like they did before I sold our house. I may have to moonlight as a bartender to make sure the rent gets paid, but my girls are worth it.
It sounds like he barely has enough money to pretend their status hasn't changed, since that's important to him. I don't want to rag on the guy, but nowhere in this piece does he seem to consider paying for his childrens education as a significant life goal. Playing restaurant seems like it was his dream, not seeing his children grow up successful.
That sounds like a good thing but there's another story on HN where commenters are complaining that it's bad! Rich bankers paying for their kids' education and helping them become rich too. That it's unfair to poor kids. People have such arbitrary and inconsistent opinions. No matter what you do, people are going to believe it's wrong.
He literally did nothing to prepare himself to fulfill his dream other than a mandatory 3 months of lazily being a line cook learning nothing, and a weekend cooking at a festival.
I'm not in the food industry, but off the top of my head here are basic things I would advise to prepare yourself for success:
1. Get yourself a year of runway so that you can spend 1 year being a restaurant owner's apprentice. Spend 3 months being a line cook, 3 months working bar, 3 months wait staff, and 3 months helping with the book. 2. Use this year network with restaurant owners. Agree to buy 10 them drinks so they can tell you about their biggest mistakes. This < $1000 investment probably could have saved him 10s of thousands. 3. Use this year to also network in the service industry generally, which tends to have high turnover and is good to have a network to find replacements.
This plan took me 10 minutes to think of and could probably be vastly improved. Instead he just hoped things would somehow work out. At some point you shouldn't applaud someone for following their dreams and instead just call it what it is, dumb.
Yeah, true. But...let's be honest, the thing he did was very destructive, dumb, and doomed to failure; he didn't get the outcome he wanted going in, he's not happy with the outcome he ended up with, and he's not articulated any lessons he learned from it.
There's a lot of things he could have done. He could have changed careers, gone back to university, backpacked across Europe, sold his house, put everything he owned in storage, and then circled the globe hopping from port to port on tramp freighters. Instead he cached out a chunk of his pension, sold his house, spent all the equity, borrowed money from friends, and basically spent every penny he and his wife had on pretending to be running a restaurant.
Commiting suicide is "doing something", so I guess by your definition that's living? That doesn't seem very useful of a definition. Meanwhile, I have a rewarding job I deeply enjoy, I spend time with friends and family, I have hobbies, I learn new things. Am I not "living"?
> Put his shoes on and just listen and learn from the experience.
That would be easier to do if he'd learned from it first. I think the point of making mistakes and "living life" is learning from those mistakes, and becoming a better person. What do I learn from reading about someone's fatalistic retelling of something he tacitly admits he knew was dumb? "Don't sell your house to invest in a project with no real upside and an overwhelmingly likely chance of 100% losses"? "Don't spend money you need to feed your kids on a vanity project which you've sabotaged for your own convenience?"
Do you know Toronto well? It might not be to learn from the lessons he has to offer, but may be something somebody (or many people) in this town need to hear.
Like I said, there are so many would-be anythings that fade into obscurity for one reason or another, for a cause that was their fault or not. Normally you just don't hear from them.
Everybody loves an unlikely success story, but are full of venom when shown the other side. Maybe nobody wants to believe it, and would prefer to believe that everything follows a perfect order and all you have to do is follow a prescribed set of rules and you'll be fine. I think the context is important—the story is a tragedy, not an ode.
I hate being sardonic, but we are on hacker news.
Yes, he made a lot of mistakes but it wasn't clear to him at the time. And of course he didn't know what he was bad at. We are all bad at several things.
It's good to keep these things in mind, whether it is for a restaurant or a tech startup.
He doesn't do simple math to figure out how much money he'll need, what runway he has, or what he should be charging for his food. He pays three grand to incorporate a business, when a Google search tells him it could be done for far less. When he gets the opportunity to work for a few months in a restaurant, he squanders it.
Sure, hindsight is twenty twenty, but a lot of these obstacles aren't hard to see coming. If you're going to gamble with your life savings, your friend's money, and your family's financial future, you should do the research and put the thought in to make sure you aren't throwing it all away.
This guy is praised, but he was a fucking pyscho (literally). He didn't give a damn about his own staff and risked everything. He got lucky, made it big.
If this guy had made it, we'd see him as a "The Hundred Foot Journey" style success story.
Maybe the only lesson is that he wasn't ruthless enough?
The restaurant guy...not so much. He took significant assets (his pension, home equity, health, his relationship with his wife), and gambled them all on high downsides and very limited upsides.
> Maybe the only lesson is that he wasn't ruthless enough?
Ruthlessness is not a substitute for making very bad decisions.