Latino founders are winning. The more uncomfortable truth is that too many people still do not act like it, including us.

Part of the reason I wanted to write this is to amplify what Stanford and LBAN are doing, because this is not one more story dressed up as economics. It is economics.

If U.S. Latinos were their own economy, we would already be the world’s fifth-largest, at roughly $4 trillion in 2023. More striking still, that economy grew from about $2.1 trillion in 2015 to $4 trillion in 2023 — it nearly doubled in eight years.

That should change the tone of the conversation immediately.

This is not a niche market. This is not an emerging constituency. This is not a promising little side pocket of the American economy that deserves encouragement and a nice panel discussion. This is real scale. Real output. Real momentum. If these numbers belonged to a software category, Wall Street would have created a vocabulary for it by now, and venture capital would be hosting dinner series about it in Miami, Austin, and Palo Alto. Instead, Latino entrepreneurship is still too often framed as a social issue when it should be discussed as one of the clearest economic opportunities in the country.

The Stanford State of Latino Entrepreneurship report makes that point in its own way. Latino-owned businesses added 180,000 net new firms between 2017 and 2023, created 976,000 jobs, and grew faster than white-owned firms across firm formation, employment, and revenue. Latino-owned businesses now account for 9.7 percent of U.S. employer firms and generate $832 billion in annual revenue. In any sane market, that kind of performance would attract more early belief than it currently does.

But this is where I think the conversation usually goes soft.

The easy version of this piece would be to say Latino founders are overlooked, underfunded, underestimated, then end with a hopeful note about resilience. There is truth in that, but it is also a little too convenient. It lets everyone off too easily. The system is part of the problem, yes. But so are we.

The external version of the problem is real enough. The Stanford report shows that Latino-founded startups posted a median VC deal size of $6 million in 2025, above the U.S. median, even as Latino participation at pre-seed and seed fell sharply. In other words, when Latino founders do get funded, they are often highly competitive. The issue is not that quality disappears when capital arrives. The issue is that too few people get the chance to reach that point.

That is a market failure. But it is not the only one.

The harder truth, and the one I left Stanford thinking about, is that Latinos are often not very good at underwriting each other either. We are strong culturally and weak commercially. We are loud with encouragement and quiet with economic commitment. We celebrate each other on Instagram and then shop against each other like price-sensitive mercenaries.

I see this all the time. I have friends with great jobs, real disposable income, and every ability to support businesses they know are better, more thoughtful, and more aligned with their values. And yet many of them will still hunt down the cheapest possible option to save ten or fifteen percent, sometimes the equivalent of a few dollars a pound, as if this were some heroic act of financial discipline. It is not discipline. Most of the time it is short-term thinking dressed up as savvy. And that behavior adds up. Ecosystems do not scale on applause. They scale on margin.

Full disclaimer: this used to be me too. Today I am happy to pay a premium to support a fellow entrepreneur, because I have come to understand that the premium is often the point. One of the things I loved about LBAN and the summit was seeing how many founders already share that vision. Not performative solidarity. Real alignment.

This is where the comparison to the Jewish community matters. One thing they understand exceptionally well is that community is not just cultural. It is commercial. They support institutions, schools, service providers, retailers, and each other with real economic intent. They are often willing to pay more because they understand they are not just buying a product — they are reinforcing an ecosystem.

Latinos, by contrast, often do the opposite. We love the language of community, but we do not always practice the economics of community. We are less likely to pay for alignment, less likely to keep value circulating inside our own ecosystem, and less likely to treat supporting one another as an investment rather than an expense. That is not because Latinos lack generosity. Far from it. But too often, our support systems are optimized for survival, not for scale.

Survival keeps people afloat. Scale builds institutions.

That distinction matters to me personally because I have lived both the immigrant reset and the entrepreneurial version of it. I came to the United States from Venezuela in high school. My parents were successful business owners back home. Then they came here and had to start again. Competence travels. Status often does not. Reputation does not clear customs. Networks do not transfer neatly.

I watched two very capable people go from established to unknown, from connected to disconnected, from having pull to having almost none. It teaches you quickly that in America, performance matters, but legibility matters too. If the room does not know how to read you, your quality can sit in plain sight for a long time before it becomes investable.

That lesson shaped the way I think about Meat N’ Bone. We bootstrapped a business from zero to roughly $11 million in revenue in a category that is difficult, operationally unforgiving, and very real. Food is not software. You have to execute every day.

By any reasonable standard, a business like that should have a relatively easy time raising growth capital.

And yet it has not been easy.

Part of that is familiar. We did not start with the deepest investor network or the cleanest inherited map of capital. But part of the issue is closer to home too. If our own people do not consistently support quality when it is right in front of them, why would we expect a dense, self-reinforcing Latino business ecosystem to materialize on its own?

Today, I can count on one hand the number of Venezuelans who buy from us. Kind of crazy, isn’t it? Then you see the same people happily spending $500 on an Inter Miami ticket or on 18-year-old scotch.

Thin ecosystems produce talented survivors.

At some point, scale stops being an excuse and starts becoming a responsibility.

No victims here.

The numbers are too strong for that, and frankly so are the entrepreneurs behind them. Latino founders are building, scaling, and proving things the hard way. The question is whether the rest of the market, and whether we ourselves, are prepared to act accordingly.

Because compounding is the whole game.

We need better underwriting from investors and lenders.

We also need better underwriting from ourselves.

Because if U.S. Latinos already represent a $4 trillion economy, and if Latino entrepreneurs are already posting this kind of growth while operating with thinner networks, less inherited capital, and weaker commercial cohesion than they should have, then this story is not close to its ceiling.

It is still the warm-up.

Random though…

FYI: Color coded Calendar… I keep saying I will do this and I never do!

Luis Mata

Flavor & Founders

There are two types of people. The ones who go to restaurants for the ambiance, and the ones who go for the food. The best places give you both. Most places give you one and pretend it’s two.

In Miami especially, the trend is obvious. Bigger rooms. Better lighting. Expensive build-outs. Bathrooms that look like they belong in a nightclub in Tokyo. And then the food shows up and it’s… fine. Not bad. Not great. Just familiar in a way you can’t quite explain.

A lot of ambiance. A lot of decor. And increasingly, a lot of Sysco.

That is about to get worse.

Sysco just announced it is acquiring Restaurant Depot in a deal valued at roughly $29 billion including debt. Restaurant Depot did around $16 billion in revenue last year and operates more than 160 locations across the U.S. On paper, this is about expanding reach into the independent restaurant market, capturing more volume, and generating synergies. That is how it will be framed.

But this isn’t really a story about Sysco. And it’s not really a story about Restaurant Depot either. To be frank, Meat N’ Bone, The Wagyu House and The Wagyu Bar do not source food from Sysco (outside of things like avocados)

To be honest, Restaurant Depot was never a great purveyor. The quality is inconsistent, the experience is chaotic, and half the time you’re buying something because you need it now, not because it’s the best version of it. Anyone who has actually operated a kitchen knows this. Anyone who has experienced Restaurant Depot knows the quality is… cheap.

That’s not the point.

The point is that it was an option.

Jason Perlow (who runs a popular South Florida Facebook group) said it best: “The last real workaround just got absorbed.”

That’s exactly right. For years, a huge portion of restaurants were already tied into Sysco’s ecosystem. That part is not new. What still existed, barely, was a pressure valve. If you didn’t like the pricing, didn’t trust the quality, didn’t want to get pushed into house brands, you could still go around it. You could go to Restaurant Depot. You could source some things yourself. You could mix vendors and keep a little bit of control.

Now that fallback sits under the same umbrella.

So no, this isn’t just consolidation. It’s supply chain capture.

What’s interesting is that this idea is already everywhere online. TikTok, Instagram, reels from “foodies” and cooks and former line guys all saying some version of the same thing: every restaurant tastes the same. It’s all Sysco. Different menu, same food.

A lot of that content is exaggerated. Social media loves a villain, and Sysco has become the easiest one in the industry. But like most internet narratives, it sticks because it’s directionally true.

Not every restaurant is the same. Not the good ones. Not the ones that actually care. But the middle of the market, the part that actually feeds most people, is getting flatter.

Same fries. Same chicken. Same desserts. Same fallback sauces. Same substitutions when something is out. Same “close enough.”

The menu says originality. The supply chain says otherwise.

And here’s the part that gets missed in most of the hot takes: this isn’t happening because chefs suddenly stopped caring. It’s happening because the system rewards it.

Restaurants are not operating from a position of strength right now. Labor is expensive. Rent is out of control. Insurance is worse. Margins are thin. Nobody is making romantic sourcing decisions in that environment. They’re making survival decisions.

Survival looks like fewer vendors. Simpler ordering. Predictable product. Consistent substitutions. Systems that don’t break in the middle of service.

Which means leaning into whatever makes that easiest.

Which increasingly means the same system.

That’s why Restaurant Depot mattered. Not because it was premium, but because it gave operators agency. You could get in your car, walk the aisles, touch the product, and solve your own problem that day. You weren’t fully locked into one distributor’s logic. You had some room to maneuver, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Take that away, or even just weaken it, and the system tightens.

And when the system tightens, the middle compresses.

We’ve seen versions of this before. In 2015, regulators blocked a merger between Sysco and US Foods on the grounds that less competition in food distribution would likely lead to higher prices and worse service. That deal died. This one is different on paper, but the underlying concern doesn’t go away just because the structure changes.

Less optionality tends to lead to more standardization.

Anthony Bourdain said it years ago, in a different context: “If you’re not using the best ingredients, you’re not cooking. You’re assembling.”

That line feels less philosophical and more literal now.

A lot of restaurants today are assembling. Not because they want to, but because the system makes it easier to assemble than to cook.

No one wakes up and decides to be mediocre. It happens one decision at a time. A substitution here. A vendor change there. A private label product that is “good enough.” A decision to simplify ordering. A decision to trust the system.

Each decision makes sense on its own.

Together, they flatten the industry.

You end up with twenty restaurants on a street, fifteen different menus, and a surprising amount of overlap underneath. You think you’re choosing between places. You’re choosing between different edits of the same catalog.

That’s the real impact of this deal.

Not that everything becomes identical overnight. That’s too simplistic. The restaurant business is too chaotic for that. The impact is more subtle and more permanent. The middle gets flatter, faster. More private label. More standardized inputs. More menu engineering driven quietly by distributor economics instead of taste.

The top will still exist. The places that care about sourcing, that build real relationships, that are willing to do it the hard way, they’ll survive. They might even benefit, because differentiation becomes more valuable as everything else converges.

But they become rarer. More expensive. Harder to sustain.

The independent middle, the part of the industry that made restaurants interesting in the first place, is what gets squeezed.

Sysco is not doing anything irrational here. If anything, this is exactly what a smart operator at scale should do. Expand distribution, capture more volume, reduce friction, own more of the customer relationship.

But smart for Sysco is not the same as good for the industry.

That distinction gets lost.

Because this isn’t really about Sysco. It’s about structure. And structurally, this moves the industry one step closer to a reality where the distributor has more influence over what ends up on the plate than the chef or the owner.

We’ll keep talking about ambiance. We’ll keep talking about vibes. We’ll keep arguing about influencers and portion sizes.

Meanwhile, the more important shift is happening underneath.

The rooms will keep getting better.

The food, less so.

Luis Mata

www.flavorandfounders.com

For the past fifteen years the dominant advice has been some version of: build first, figure the rest out later. Move fast. Ship product. Iterate. The pitch deck replaced the business plan, and founders were told that traction was the only thing that mattered.

To be fair, this shift corrected a real problem. Traditional business plans were often elaborate works of fiction. Forty pages of immaculate formatting, optimistic charts, and revenue projections that had very little connection to reality. They created the comforting feeling of preparedness without requiring much real thinking.

But somewhere along the way we threw out the wrong thing.

Not the document itself. The discipline behind it.

A good business plan is not about predicting the future. It is about forcing the uncomfortable conversations early—before reality forces them for you.

Lately I have been meeting with a number of startups, many of them led by extremely capable founders. Brilliant, even. They understand their product. They understand the market. They can explain convincingly how the idea will make money and why the timing is right.

In the first fifteen minutes, everything sounds promising.

Then you ask a few more questions.

What does the company actually look like when revenue is ten times larger? Who gets hired first? Where does capital actually go? What systems will finance run on? What happens if customer acquisition becomes more expensive than expected? What breaks first?

That is usually where the conversation slows down.

Not because the founders are not smart. Because much of the company still exists as instinct. The product is real. The business, however, is still partially a thought experiment.

A business plan is where that thought experiment becomes architecture.

Right now I am involved in a real estate venture, and the first thing I did was write a business plan. I do not think there would really be a business without it. There would be conversations, enthusiasm, maybe even some early deals. But the act of writing the plan forces a kind of clarity that informal thinking rarely produces. It turns a concept into something you can interrogate.

You start asking practical questions. What are the economics? How does this scale? What does the capital stack look like? What kind of organization actually needs to exist for this to work beyond the first few projects?

Those questions are not glamorous, but they are foundational.

I saw this dynamic clearly in two conversations this week.

One friend of mine—let’s call him Jarvis—has built one of the most impressive AI tools I have seen in a long time. It is the kind of product that makes you pause and recalibrate what is possible. He already has a couple of term sheets floating around.

On paper, that sounds like the startup story investors love: brilliant founder, breakthrough technology, early capital interest.

But Jarvis is still, practically speaking, a one-man company. The product exists. The company around it is still forming. He has a plan, but much of it lives in his head. That is normal for a founder at this stage. But there is a meaningful difference between a brilliant product and a structured business, and the bridge between the two is usually built in the process of writing things down.

Another friend—let’s call him Cami—has the opposite situation. He has a SaaS business with traction, real customers, and meaningful ones at that. There is ARR. The product works. By most startup metrics, things are going well.

But once you look under the hood, the structure is thinner than you would expect. There is no real P&L. The organizational model is still fuzzy. Finance, marketing, PR, HR—the parts of a company that determine whether it can scale—are still treated as afterthoughts.

Cami has a business that works commercially.

What he does not yet have is a fully formed company.

This is where business plans become surprisingly practical. They force founders to confront the operational questions that momentum allows them to postpone.

What should compensation look like? What salary philosophy makes sense for the stage of the company? When do you hire senior talent versus cheaper generalists? What systems will the company run on? Where does finance live? What CRM powers sales? How does reporting work when the company doubles in size?

These questions rarely feel urgent early on. But they quietly determine whether a startup becomes a durable company or simply a successful product that eventually collapses under its own improvisation.

A business plan does not solve those problems.

It simply forces them into the open.

There is also an important nuance here. Early-stage business plans should not be overly financial. At the beginning, the numbers are mostly educated guesses anyway. Founders sometimes obsess over detailed five-year projections as if the spreadsheet itself were the strategy.

It rarely is.

At that stage the finances are inevitably a bit “pie in the sky.” What matters far more is the foundation behind them. What is the business trying to become? How does it make money in principle? What capabilities need to exist for it to scale? What kind of organization must be built around the product?

The plan is less about predicting exact outcomes and more about defining the architecture of the company.

And here is the funny part: it has never been easier to build one.

Twenty years ago writing a business plan felt like a chore. It required spreadsheets, consultants, and a large block of uninterrupted time. Today you can build the first version conversationally. With Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, a founder can outline a real business plan while walking the dog or sitting in traffic.

You can ask the model to challenge your hiring plan, sketch organizational structures, propose software stacks, build early financial models, or pressure-test assumptions. In other words, you can take the vague version of the company that exists in your head and quickly turn it into something concrete enough to argue with.

AI does not write the business plan for you in any meaningful sense.

It simply removes the friction.

The founder still has to think. If anything, the process just makes it easier to see the holes.

Startup culture often treats planning and speed as opposites. The assumption is that you either move quickly or you sit around thinking. In reality, the best founders do both. They build quickly, but they also spend time modeling what the business becomes if it actually works.

Because scaling introduces entirely new problems. Hiring complexity. Capital planning. Operational systems. Distribution strategy. Brand positioning. Organizational structure.

None of those appear magically when the product succeeds.

They have to be designed.

The business plan is simply where that design begins.

It is not glamorous. It will never trend on LinkedIn. It does not photograph well next to a laptop and a cappuccino. But it quietly does one of the most important things a founder can do: it forces the company to exist outside the founder’s head.

Startups love to talk about disruption. But the companies that survive are usually built on something much quieter: the discipline of thinking the business through.

That is why I have not written much lately. It is also why I am writing this now.

The mistake many founders make is thinking finance becomes important once a company gets serious. In reality, finance is one of the functions that makes a startup serious in the first place.

The easy version of startup finance is familiar enough. Watch cash. Extend runway. Raise capital. Build a model. Send the reports. None of that is wrong. It is just incomplete. The real role of finance in a startup is not simply to report on the business. It is to help build the business in a way that can survive growth.

In a mature company, finance usually enters a game whose rules are already written. There are planning cycles, approval chains, prior-year budgets, established definitions, and enough operating history to make forecasting feel like something more than educated fiction. Finance, in that world, is often there to optimize. The machine already exists. The job is to make it run better.

A startup is different. Finance is not optimizing a machine. It is helping design one while it is already moving.

That is where many traditional finance executives struggle. They are trained in environments where structure already exists and rules generally cannot be broken. Startups are less polite. The rules still matter, often a great deal, but timing may not cooperate. The information is incomplete. Revenue may not have enough history behind it and, even when it does, the revenue streams themselves keep changing. Hiring decisions may need to happen before the model feels ready. A vendor decision may matter now, not after the monthly review. The company has to move before it feels fully prepared to move.

This is why finance in a startup cannot just be rigid. It has to be disciplined.

Those are not the same thing. Rigid finance assumes the answer is in the process. Disciplined finance understands that the process may still be under construction. The point is not to ignore the rules. The point is to build them, use them, and, when reality forces an exception, document it, understand it, and maintain accountability around it. In a Fortune 500 company, breaking process is usually a sign something has gone wrong. In a startup, breaking process may sometimes be the right call. The question is whether it happens thoughtfully, transparently, and with the numbers still intact.

That is the part many founders underestimate and many corporate finance people are not trained for. In a large company, finance inherits an operating system. In a startup, finance helps write the first version of it.

Early on, that role is mostly about foundation. Not polish. Not elegance. Foundation. The business needs a common language for the numbers. It needs to know what it is measuring, who owns what, what gets approved, how cash is reviewed, and how decisions are documented. At that stage, finance is less about precise forecasting and more about creating enough operating definition that the company does not become financially incoherent while it is trying to become commercially successful.

This is where the role is often misunderstood. Founders tend to think finance starts when the company is bigger. That sounds intuitive. It is also backward. By the time the company is big enough to feel the pain, the mess is usually already expensive. Finance is not the department you install after scale. It is part of what prevents scale from turning into chaos.

The startup CFO may be one of the hardest executive hires in the building.

The role asks for an awkward combination of traits. The person needs enough rigor to build process, enough flexibility to operate without complete information, enough judgment to know when to hold the line and when to adapt, and enough commercial instinct to support growth without becoming a passenger to it. In theory, that sounds obvious. In practice, it is rare. Most finance leaders are trained either to preserve a system or to police one. Startups need someone who can help build one.

That does not mean a startup needs to cosplay as a public company. Quite the opposite. One of the more common mistakes is importing too much corporate process too early and confusing that with professionalism. Startups do not need financial theater. They need financial clarity. Enough discipline to make good decisions. Enough visibility to know what is happening. Enough accountability that speed does not become an excuse for sloppiness.

As the company grows, the role evolves. Once there is some operating history, finance becomes a more active decision partner. This is when the function starts helping management answer better questions. What are the real drivers of margin? Which customers, products, or channels are creating value and which are simply creating volume? What hiring sequence makes sense? Which investments are worth making now and which ones are better delayed? At this stage, finance is not just protecting the downside. It is helping management decide where the next dollar has the highest expected return.

Later still, finance begins to look more familiar to outsiders. Forecasts become more credible because the business has earned the right to trust its own data a bit more. Reporting gets tighter. KPIs get cleaner. Governance matters more. The board expects more. Investors expect more. Finance becomes part of the institutional backbone of the company.

But even then, the best finance leaders do not confuse process with purpose. They understand that the point of structure is to improve decisions, not to perform adulthood. There is a lot of corporate life built around looking sophisticated. Startups, mercifully, tend to expose that game pretty quickly. The numbers are more immediate. The tradeoffs are more obvious. The consequences show up faster. It is messier, yes, but also more honest.

This is also where the startup CEO needs to understand the role clearly. Finance is not there just to protect the bank account or explain why everyone else is wrong. It is there to help turn a company from a collection of activity into a real operating system. It is there to preserve flexibility without sacrificing discipline. It is there to create visibility before the business becomes too complex to understand intuitively. Most importantly, it is there to lay a foundation the company can actually scale on.

That is why startups do need finance leadership. They need CFOs, heads of finance, and finance operators who understand that this is not smaller corporate finance. It is a different job. The mandate is not simply to bring order. It is to bring useful order. Enough structure to support growth. Enough flexibility to deal with uncertainty. Enough accountability that people can move quickly without pretending the numbers do not matter.

Whether that person is a full-time CFO, a head of finance, or a fractional leader depends on the stage, complexity, and needs of the business. That is an implementation detail. The bigger point is that the startup needs the function, even if it cannot yet afford the finished version of it.

Because that is the real misunderstanding. Founders often think finance records the business. In a startup, finance helps build the business.

You do not build finance once the company scales. You build it so the company can.

If you’ve lived this from the founder or finance seat, I’d love to hear how you think about it - info@flavorandfounders.com

I used to walk into certain Miami restaurants and feel a nagging, intellectual confusion.

I wasn’t jealous. Okay, maybe a little jealous. Maybe I still am. But mostly I was confused. I was doing the math—and it didn’t add up.

The rooms were cavernous. The finishes immaculate. The furniture looked imported from a designer’s fever dream. If you’ve seen the bathrooms at Sexy Fish, you know the genre. It’s not a restroom. It’s a capital allocation decision with mood lighting. Rumors peg that build-out north of $17M. Others—like Casadonna—are said to push past $20M.

Meanwhile, I was, and still am, at my desk counting weeks of runway. Renegotiating vendor terms. Weighing every “yes” against the brutal opportunity cost of cash. I kept asking the same question: How do they afford this? How does it make sense?

In Miami, the common explanation is a whisper about something shady. People call it laundering. They assume it’s a front for “someone’s money.”

But that never fit. At least not most of the time. These places are too public, too polished, too institutional. You don’t launder money by putting it under a spotlight in a global dining destination.

Then one day—scrolling restaurant headlines over an overpriced burger—it clicked.

It’s arithmetic.

They aren’t “affording” the build-out.
They’re trading a tax bill for an asset.

Profit Is an Expense

In high-level business, profit is often the most expensive line item in the building.

Not because profit is bad, but because profit is what gets taxed. At the corporate level, the federal rate is 21%. Take those profits home and you can hit a second layer, depending on structure. Most hospitality groups aren’t neat C-corps anyway; they’re pass-throughs, where the bite lands at the owner level and can feel like 30%+ before state taxes even enter the chat.

So when a well-capitalized operator has a monster year, they face a choice that sounds philosophical but is actually mechanical:

Do I cut a massive check to the IRS—or redeploy that cash into something the tax code rewards and has potential upside? After a well operated restaurant can make a LOT of money (look at Mila and Joes, both have grossed $50M+ per year)

The tax code isn’t neutral. It’s an incentive machine designed to push capital back into the economy. Learn how Section 179 and bonus depreciation work, and the speed of the spending starts to make sense.

One of my goals is to build a business large enough where I can do this. This is one of the things that make America great and our economy thrive. Yes, other countries have similar initiatives… but our execution is best.

The Discount Is Real—But It’s Not Free

This isn’t free money. It’s timing, qualification, and documentation.

Section 179 can allow immediate expensing of qualifying purchases, but it has limits and an income constraint—you generally can’t manufacture a loss out of thin air. Bonus depreciation is the bigger lever right now. For qualifying property acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025, businesses can deduct 100% of the cost in the first year.

That one sentence explains a lot of “how are they doing this?”

Translate it from CFO-speak to real life:

• The spend: a $1,000,000 check for equipment and build-out components that qualify.

• The shield: the $1,000,000 becomes a deduction now or slowly over years, materially reducing tax liabilities.

• The reality: at a 25% marginal bite, that million-dollar room can feel like $750,000 after taxes.

Same room. Same chandelier. Different arithmetic.

When the alternative to investing is losing a meaningful chunk of cash to the Treasury, spending $50,000 on a chandelier isn’t bravado.

It’s a hedge.

Access to Capital vs. Operational Excellence

This is where founders get tripped up. We see a $10M dining room and assume the person who built it is a better operator (they may be!). However, access to capital and operational excellence are different sports.

The capital game is defensive. It’s played with depreciation schedules, tax shields, and the ability to classify spend in ways the tax code treats kindly. Section 179 and bonus depreciation don’t explain every dollar—but they explain the incentive: move money into qualifying assets, fast.

The operator game is offensive. It’s played with labor, food cost, retention, and the grind of turning $1 into $5 just to survive.

When you’re bootstrapping a concept, you have to focus on being a great operator and being efficient with the little money you have. You can’t hide a mediocre steak behind an ego subsidy. You don’t have a tax shield big enough to catch you if service fails.

In the capital game, the room is the strategy.
In the operator game, the business is the strategy.

The Danger of the “Tax-Smart” Build

To outsiders, this can look like laundering. Money comes in, moves fast, and vanishes into physical stuff. The profit line shrinks while the room gets bigger.

But there’s a trap.

Tax efficiency is not business health. A room can be optimized for depreciation and still be a ghost town on a Tuesday night. I’ve seen owners confuse “having the capital to build it” with “having the demand to sustain it.” Depreciation doesn’t create demand. It changes timing.

Eventually the deduction is taken, the bonus is used, and you’re left with a massive, expensive machine that still has to satisfy customers.

That’s why I don’t look at those rooms the same way anymore.

When I see a $10M build-out, I don’t assume they’re smarter or more confident. I assume they’re playing a game where spending is sometimes cheaper than standing still.

They aren’t building monuments to success.
They’re building shelters for cash.

The Take

For the founder still counting runway: you’re not behind because your build-out is modest. You’re unencumbered.

Some restaurants are built because the market demanded them. Others are built because the tax code nudged them. Both serve food—but only one is an engine. The other is a shelter.

Know which one you’re building. You do not have to match the neighbors. You should do your own thing and do it well. That is how you win.

Quick note for the lawyers: this is about legal tax planning, not tax evasion. Outcomes depend on structure, qualification, and documentation. Talk to your CPA before you build a marble bathroom out of vibes.

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about food, hospitality, tech, and capital. But none of that matters if you ignore the decision that actually shapes everything: who you decide to build with, and how you structure that relationship. Reach out to info@flavorsandfounders.com

Two regulars walk into a restaurant on a random weeknight. Same seats. Same opener. The first drink lands on the table on pure muscle memory.

And then the night just… stalls.

No second round. The bread arrives and turns into table décor. When it’s time to order, it’s all protein. Light on sides. No cocktails. Dessert gets a clean, polite “we’re good.” Not even the ritual maybe we’ll split something. Just a full stop, like someone flipped a switch.

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are usually framed as a health story, sometimes a cultural one. For restaurants, they’re something simpler and more dangerous: a small change in physiology that creates big changes in behavior. These diners are not anti-restaurant and neither are the drugs. They are anti-autopilot. Expectations are changing and menus as well as operators need adapt.

The Add-On Economy Meets a Brake Pedal

A large part of the F&B industry still runs on momentum. One add-on becomes the next. A second drink because the plate is still half-full. A side because “we’re already here.” Dessert because “why not.” That model works when appetite is driving the room. GLP-1s turn the volume down.

Take liquor, the margin stabilizer for most restaurants: high margin, low labor, the quiet subsidy that keeps the math working when food costs rise and wages inflate. But the profitability isn’t the first drink. It’s velocity, the second cocktail, the bottle because it “pairs,” the third round because the night is humming. Mute appetite and that chain breaks more often. Guests still drink. They just do it more deliberately and more slowly. The bar doesn’t go empty. It thins. Note that this is a double whammy as the newer generation does not drink as much (more on this later).

This isn’t just vibes. A randomized clinical trial in JAMA Psychiatry found low-dose semaglutide reduced alcohol consumed in a lab self-administration setting and reduced alcohol craving among adults with alcohol use disorder. The point for operators is not that GLP-1s “cure drinking.” It’s that they appear to dampen reward-seeking, exactly where late-night beverage economics live.

Protein Wins Share When Appetite Shrinks

Here’s the twist: the same force that slows liquor often strengthens protein.

When people expect to eat less, they pick the part of the meal that makes stopping feel legitimate. Protein is satiety with good PR. It’s also the one part of the check that still feels like value when everything else is being questioned. If you’re not going to graze through three courses, you still want one decisive plate. In restaurants, decisive plates tend to be steak, chops, fish, shellfish, eggs—food that signals completion.

So in practice, GLP-1 behavior doesn’t always mean smaller checks. More often it means fewer line items. The table that used to spend by stacking appetizers, sides, and rounds now anchors the meal around one premium protein and lets everything else compete for relevance.

The broader spend data points in the same direction: impulse-heavy food occasions are the first to soften. Cornell researchers matched household transaction records with survey-confirmed GLP-1 use and found that within six months of starting, households reduced grocery spending by about 5.3% on average (more than 8% among higher-income households), while spending at limited-service restaurants fell about 8%. A separate working paper finds a similar 8% decline at fast-food/limited-service venues.

The MAHA Moment: Restraint Becomes Fashionable Again

This is where the cultural framing creeps in.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks about “Make America Healthy Again,” the messaging is essentially a pitch for restraint, less excess, fewer shortcuts, more intentional consumption. Strip away the politics and the overlap is hard to miss: GLP-1s are doing chemically what culture has struggled to do socially, which is to reduce overconsumption without asking people to white-knuckle it.

Restaurants are not responsible for public health. But they do sit downstream of consumer behavior. When restraint stops being a niche virtue and starts becoming mainstream default, the economics change.

The Cheesecake Factory Problem

No chain sits closer to the center of the GLP-1 debate than Cheesecake Factory.

Its model has long been a masterclass in abundance: encyclopedic menus, supersized portions, and a check quietly engineered around “might as well.” The first drink leads to the second. The appetizer happens because the menu invites browsing. Dessert is not an afterthought; it is a signature.

That’s why investors keep asking the question on calls, whether leadership is seeing any demand impact from obesity drugs.

To be fair, the pushback is reasonable: America has panicked before. Calorie labels did not kill indulgence. Big chains have survived nutrition disclosure, macro diet cycles, and every “people are finally eating clean now” narrative that comes around every few years. But GLP-1s are a different mechanism and GLP-1s will become more affordable and more mainstream with time, so leadership should read the warning sides and act accordingly.

The risk to Cheesecake Factory isn’t traffic collapsing. It’s conversion. Fewer automatic add-ons. Fewer impulse desserts. Slower beverage velocity. Dining rooms that still look full, but generate revenue with less momentum.

According to Bloomberg, GLP-1 drug usage has doubled from 6% in May 2024 to 12% by November 2025 and is expected to keep climbing as prices drop and alternatives expand. ⁠

⁠While many GLP-1 users eat smaller portions or go out less often, their habits change once they do dine out.⁠ That change is already showing up at Darden Restaurants, the company behind Olive Garden, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, and LongHorn Steakhouse.⁠

The opportunity is also there, if the chain chooses to take it. GLP-1 diners don’t reject indulgence; they ration it. One decisive plate can replace three exploratory ones. Protein anchors become more valuable than menu breadth. Smaller-format indulgence—done intentionally rather than defensively, can preserve both satisfaction and margin. The abundance brand doesn’t have to disappear. It just has to learn how to sell “enough” without sounding like it’s apologizing.

The Investor Lens: It’s Not Traffic, It’s Mix

If you’re looking for a single clean metric, “guest counts” will lull you into complacency. The more meaningful shift is mix: fewer line items per cover, lower beverage velocity, less dessert attachment, more spending concentrated into the primary entrée, especially protein.

That mix shift changes how you should value concepts. The casual middle that relied on breadth, bundles, and habitual add-ons looks more fragile. Concepts that already sell a thesis, great protein, great seafood, a tight menu, a clean experience—look more insulated. In other words, GLP-1s don’t just pressure restaurant demand; they pressure the business models that monetize indecision.

My take on what operators do now

The smartest move for operators right now isn’t to redesign menus or chase a GLP-1 narrative. It’s to pay closer attention to the numbers you already have. GLP-1s don’t announce themselves in traffic or revenue. They show up in averages. If you are on top of your metrics you will be ahead of the curve.

Guest counts can stay flat while the economics underneath start to drift. Checks may not collapse; they will soften. Dining rooms may still feel full, but the mix quietly changes. Fewer items per table. Fewer second rounds. Cleaner “no dessert” decisions. More spend concentrated into the main plate. If you’re only watching covers and total sales, you’ll miss it.

What actually deserves attention is how the check is built. Items per cover. Beverage attachment. Second-round velocity. Dessert conversion. Time at table. These are the levers GLP-1 behavior touches first, and they’re the same levers most restaurants stopped obsessing over once the room filled back up post-COVID.

The danger is misdiagnosis. A softer bar night gets blamed on the bartender. A weaker dessert week gets chalked up to seasonality. A slightly lower average check gets dismissed as noise. But when those changes line up over weeks, not days, they’re telling you something structural is happening.

This is also where discipline matters. If portions are adjusted, do it intentionally and track guest response, not just food cost. If the beverage program evolves, measure satisfaction per pour, not just total alcohol sales. If you tighten the menu, watch whether clarity increases conversion on your core dishes.

None of this requires knowing which guests are on GLP-1s. You don’t need to ask. You don’t need to label. You just need to observe.

Because GLP-1s don’t create new problems. They remove the cushion that used to hide existing ones… and in a business where margins are made at the edges, losing that cushion without noticing is far more dangerous than the drugs themselves.

The Take

GLP-1s won’t empty dining rooms, in fact they can increase revenue. They’re a behavior change: subtle, but real. And as access expands and costs come down, you’re going to see more of it, even if it never becomes “everyone.”

The industry will adapt. It always does. In fact, plenty of European restaurants have operated forever with smaller portions and less emphasis on piling food high as a form of value. It’s cultural. In a weird way, GLP-1s may make America a little more “European” at the table… less about quantity, more about completion.

The hard part is what comes next for operators: when appetite stops doing the selling, restaurants are left with execution alone. Fewer bites mean higher standards. Fewer drinks mean less margin to hide behind. Excess, long confused with hospitality, becomes visible for what it is.

That’s uncomfortable for an industry built on abundance. It’s also clarifying. In a market where diners stop earlier, only restaurants that know exactly what they’re selling—and why—will feel complete.

I’m older, without question. Wiser in ways that don’t show up on a résumé. I still listen to punk rock. I still play soccer three times a week. I still like video games. I still haven’t learned to play the piano. And I carry more responsibility than I did at 31 or even 36, whether I want to admit it or not.

I went quiet for almost two weeks. Not by design. Reality simply caught up. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I have a habit of trying to do too much at once, convinced that momentum is something you earn by never stopping. I’m working on a few pieces, but today feels like the right moment to be honest instead.

Meat N’ Bone has been a rollercoaster. A beautiful one, but a demanding one. It’s a company that makes sense on paper and in practice, yet the learning curve has been steep.

We run Meat N’ Bone like a Fortune 500 on cocaine. Not recklessly, but at speed. Everything is urgent because everything is connected. We are constantly balancing tomorrow with a year from now. Shipments, boutiques, inventory, customer experience, hiring, capital, brand. The ship moves fast. The results can move fast too. And when they don’t, it doesn’t just disappoint you. It punches you.

That speed changes who thrives here.

Corporate hires are smart, polished, and genuinely brilliant. Many of them are trained to drive cruise ships. Stable course. Clean handoffs. Predictable waters. We don’t always have that luxury. Sometimes the weather changes mid-sentence. Sometimes the engine room is on fire. Sometimes the map is being drawn while we’re already sailing.

So we build with doers. People who may look less perfect on paper but are built for motion. Scrappy. Loyal. Fierce. The kind of people who don’t panic when the plan changes because they are already solving the new problem.

Some days it feels less like running a company and more like leading a ragtag crew. Like we’re more likely to be characters in One Piece than executives in a boardroom.

But when the ocean gets rough, you don’t need more passengers. You need sailors.

There’s a personal sacrifice to this too, and it doesn’t show up on a cap table.

Work and life stop being separate when you’re an entrepreneur. They become the same thing. Your wife becomes your rock and your therapist, often at the same time. Your co-founder is usually the only person who truly understands what you’re carrying. Family and friends keep you grounded, remind you who you were before the chaos.

And yet, you still feel the weight of the time you’re not spending with them.

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Before this chapter, my career revolved around scale.

An old boss used to joke that I was like a pirate. When something broke, you just threw Luis at it because I enjoyed the crazy. And I did.

But “crazy” in corporate America usually means bigger projects and tighter deadlines. Building systems. Infrastructure. Guardrails. It’s intense, but it’s not personal. It’s not your money. Failure is inconvenient, not catastrophic.

I knew how to make companies bigger.

What I had never done was bootstrap something this exposed, this personal. For the first time, money wasn’t just a variable. It was the constraint.

Founders are taught to seek advice, to listen, to stay focused, to pick battles carefully. What no one tells you is that sometimes the battles pick you. Your vision outruns your runway, and suddenly you’re making decisions with incomplete information and very real consequences.

When the fire hit, we had just opened four new boutiques and were preparing to open a new restaurant. Everything moved forward, but not the way we planned. Without a fulfillment center, boutiques underperformed. The restaurant became a fulfillment center because it had to. Growth plans stalled. We were capable of growing 30–40–50% in 2025. Instead, we barely grew, and we knew exactly why.

At that point, the decision wasn’t theoretical. Do you cut deep and retreat to survive? Or do you push through and protect the team, the culture, the long-term thesis?

We pushed through.

Today, we’re on the verge of closing our second financing round. Fundraising is exhausting in a way that doesn’t show up on spreadsheets. There are moments where it feels tempting to trade ownership for oxygen. But experience teaches you something valuable. Not all capital is equal. Not all shortcuts are worth taking.

But here’s the truth too.

This is what I chose, and I love it.

Life as an entrepreneur is certainly not boring. One day I’m in the warehouse helping my team ship orders because Christmas is tomorrow. The next day I’m catering high-end bites for Calvin Harris. Then I’m dressed up pitching to capital providers. After that, I’m on Zoom calls, back-to-back, talking through details that nobody sees but everything depends on.

Somewhere in between, I still find the time to write Flavor & Founders (usually). I’m even embarking on another entrepreneurial project, more on that later.

All while juggling a loan we can barely afford as we close this round. Reviewing conversion rate optimization in the morning. Closing the books in the afternoon. Pitching pre-dinner. Then watching my team cater steaks and spirits to 50 Cent in Miami.

Meanwhile, the managers running our F&B operations, who do a kick-ass job day in and day out, are blowing up my phone. Not because they don’t know what to do. They do. Sometimes they just want to run it by you. Sometimes leadership is simply being available, even when you’re already stretched thin.

That’s the job.

It’s stressful. It’s messy. It’s not always glamorous. And it’s definitely not balanced.

But it’s alive.

2025 aged me faster than the calendar ever could. It was a dog year. I feel ten years older mentally, and strangely more grounded because of it.

At the same time, I feel younger.

I love my wife more than ever. I love my dad, my family, my friends. I’ve learned to value people, time, and presence in a way I probably couldn’t have without the pressure. When everything feels fragile, you get very clear on what actually matters.

And if Meat N’ Bone doesn’t work? I’ll be able to write about it honestly.

If it does work?
That’s probably just the next level of crazy.

Happy birthday to me.
May my journey from 41 to 42 be a little less chaotic, but just as enlightening.

For the past decade, independent restaurants haven’t been beaten by better food.
They’ve been squeezed out by capital.

Across most major cities, the story is familiar: neighborhood spots replaced by multi-unit groups, backed by private equity or institutional money, armed with cheaper capital, professionalized ops, and the patience to lose money longer than any single operator can afford. What looks like “better execution” from the outside is often just a longer runway.

Technology played an uncomfortable role in that shift. The same tools that promised to “empower operators” often ended up rewarding scale instead—better purchasing leverage, tighter labor optimization across many units, better data feeding better decisions. If you could afford the systems, the integrations, and the people to run them, tech made you stronger.

Which is why, when someone says “AI will revolutionize restaurants,” my first reaction isn’t excitement. It’s suspicion.

AI could become the next accelerant for consolidation—another advantage layered onto groups that already have money, data, and margin for error. Or it could be the first shift that actually compresses the advantage of scale—not by making independents “smarter,” but by taking work off their plates. Less admin. Less chaos. Fewer decisions that require a full-time manager to remember, chase, and fix.

That’s the tension running through this entire conversation.

Because when you run independent restaurants for a living, your nights are less “AI will change everything” and more “the printer died, the fryer’s sulking, and Uber Eats just double-sent an order.”

These days our F&B operations are relatively sophisticated. We piggyback on the Meat N’ Bone backbone: procurement, finance, analytics, systems, the unsexy infrastructure most small restaurants never get to build. On paper, we look more like a small group than a lone neighborhood spot. But we didn’t start there. We started with one kitchen, one dining room, one POS, and a lot of guesswork.

From that vantage point, it’s hard not to take the promise that artificial intelligence will “revolutionize hospitality” with a pinch of salt.

Not because AI isn’t real. Because the ROI story is… ugly.

A widely circulated 2025 report described as “MIT-linked” claims 95% of generative-AI pilots show no measurable P&L impact—a brutal ratio for something being sold as the next operating system of work. (Fortune) IBM’s 2025 CEO study lands in the same neighborhood: only 25% of AI initiatives delivered the ROI leaders expected, and only 16% have scaled enterprise-wide. (IBM Newsroom) Gartner, already looking past chatbots into “agentic AI,” predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 as costs rise and value stays unclear. (Gartner)

That’s not a dunk on AI. It’s a reminder that the hard part isn’t the model. It’s everything around it

So far, AI in restaurants has mostly made the big operators bigger—and we can name names.

The early beneficiaries aren’t neighborhood bistros. They’re high-volume machines where a fractional gain compounds fast. Yum Brands has been expanding voice AI in Taco Bell drive-thrus and talking openly about pushing AI deeper into operations through its Byte platform. (Yum) Papa John’s expanded a partnership with Google Cloud to use AI for personalization and delivery optimization—because when you have a massive digital funnel, even small improvements pay. (Papa John’s International) Chipotle rolled out a conversational AI hiring platform (“Ava Cado”) precisely where it saves manager time and reduces friction at scale.

And even the poster child for scale, McDonald’s, is a useful cautionary tale: it ended its IBM drive-thru AI order-taking test in 2024. (Restaurant Business Online) Not because the idea was dumb, but because restaurants are brutal environments for anything that can’t handle edge cases, noise, accents, and human behavior at speed.

That’s the pattern hiding behind the hype. Chains benefit first because they already have what AI needs: cleaner data, standard workflows, capital for experimentation, and the organizational patience to survive failed pilots. When AI works there, it doesn’t look like science fiction. It looks like incremental improvements that become enormous at scale.

Most independents do not live in that house.

Their “data warehouse” is a POS dashboard, a couple of panicked Excel files and an accountant who emails once a month. For years, many of us were sold systems on credit-card rates instead of product depth. We fell for it—twice. We jumped to EPOS and later to Lightspeed because the processing looked sharp on paper. The software felt like it had been designed by clever engineers and bankers who have never, in their lives, tried to run a Saturday double or done an inventory count. We got cheaper rates and more chaos. That’s a bad trade when your margin for error is a couple of busy weekends.

This is how technology quietly widens the gap. Chains buy a brain; independents buy a cheaper calculator.

The more interesting story is what’s happening under the radar: a wave of products that actually feel like they were built for operators, not just for head offices and pitch decks.

On the analytics side, tools like Tenzo, ClearCOGS and Lineup.ai all attack the same boring but vital problem: you cannot run a modern restaurant on vibes alone. None of this is glamorous. There are no robot waiters in the marketing. But if you’re running three or five locations without a data team, software that quietly says “order less of this, prep more of that, and cut one server from Wednesday” is the difference between feeling in control and drowning.

On the guest side, Latin America is quietly ahead of the curve. Cluvi, a Colombian-born platform, turns the humble QR code into an operating system: digital menus, ordering, payment, reservations, delivery, marketing and analytics in one place. A neighborhood taquería can suddenly A/B test its menu and pricing with a level of discipline that used to require a strategy team. Cluvi now has an AI agent called Otto, built to turn guest behavior into actions, not just analytics. That’s the direction I’m watching: not AI that explains the business, AI that moves it.

Then there is the unglamorous operational middle—the part of the business where most AI conversations go to die. Here I’m increasingly obsessed with tools that start from the premise that frontline teams are the main character, not an afterthought. Camillion, for instance, began in retail but feels tailor-made for multi-unit food: it connects store-level POS data, day-to-day task management, photo and video checklists, promotion execution and incident reporting in a single mobile-first platform. It doesn’t scream “AI”. It just turns WhatsApp chaos into structured information—exactly the kind of information a model can learn from.

And this is where I’ve become cautiously optimistic—because I’m starting to see builders who get it.

Recently I met with Jason Solomon and Dave Gordon from Foodstack.AI. They’re raising capital to do what most restaurant “AI” products only pretend to do: bring real AI applications into F&B that respect the constraints of the business. The intent—at least philosophically—is the right one: take messy restaurant reality and turn it into something a small operator can actually use. And their ambition goes beyond restaurants—more “dirt to plate” than POS-to-payroll.

But here’s the uncomfortable question: will it work?

Not because the models aren’t good enough. The models are fine. The graveyard is implementation.

Restaurants are a hostile environment for software. The data is messy. Staff turns over. Wi-Fi drops. The POS breaks at the worst moment. Every vendor promises “easy onboarding,” and then asks for six months of perfect inputs you don’t have. That’s why those ROI stats matter. “AI didn’t work” usually means “AI didn’t survive contact with the workflow.”

Which brings me to the part of AI everyone is starting to whisper about—usually right before they ruin the conversation with jargon: agentic AI.

Strip the buzzword away and the idea is simple. Most restaurant software stops at telling you what’s happening. Agentic systems are designed to do something about it.

This matters because insight has never been the bottleneck. Time is.

I can look at a report. I can read a forecast. I can even agree with it. What I usually can’t do—between service, staffing gaps, vendor calls and broken equipment—is act on it consistently. That’s where most “AI ROI” quietly dies.

This is why tools like TimeShark are interesting. We use it, and it works—not because it’s magical, but because it handles a job restaurants are uniquely bad at doing while the room is on fire: answering the phone. TimeShark positions itself as a 24/7 voice AI that can help guests book, modify, and cancel reservations, including through an official OpenTable integration.

That’s the quiet promise of agentic AI in restaurants: not smarter insights, but fewer little operational tasks that require a human to remember, chase, repeat, and clean up.

It’s also where a lot of ambitious AI companies will fail. Acting inside restaurant workflows means touching real systems and real humans—reservations, staffing, payments, compliance, guest expectations—all the messy edges where software usually breaks. That’s why Gartner’s forecast is worth taking seriously: over 40% of agentic AI projects getting scrapped isn’t a model problem; it’s a friction problem. Gartner

Here’s the line in the sand I keep coming back to.

If an AI tool can’t plug into the systems you already live in (POS, reservations, payroll, inventory), it won’t last. If it doesn’t fit the way service actually happens—fast, messy, interrupted—it won’t get used. And if the incentive is backwards—if it measures the staff instead of helping the staff—it will turn into surveillance, and everyone will find a way around it. Restaurants don’t need another dashboard. They need fewer things to remember.

Give a sharp independent a POS that really functions as an “OS.” Toast is a good example of how AI quietly compounds: it’s layering AI into things like menu classification and benchmarking so insights work across messy real-world menus. Then add a forecasting layer that talks to it. Then add a forecasting layer that talks to it, plus tools that tighten frontline execution, and finally, agentic tools that take real work off managers’ plates.

That’s when the math flips. You start to see a five-location group with the analytical reach of a regional chain.

Right now, AI is still mostly a power-up for the already powerful. The question I find myself returning to, night after night, isn’t “Will AI change restaurants?” It’s this:

How much more dangerous does a small, ruthless operator become once the software finally starts working for them, not just for their card processor?

Disclosure: The founders of Cluvi and Camillion are friends of mine. I’m including them here not because of that, but because I genuinely think they’re pointing restaurant tech in the right direction. I’ve tested most of the tools I mention here, but I’m not yet using them all at scale—for the same reason most independents hesitate: the opportunity cost of getting implementation wrong is very real.

If you know a piece of software that actually makes life easier for real operators—or you’re building one yourself—I want to hear about it.

Send it my way: info@founderandplumbers.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisematab/.

Let me clear something up before the year ends and we all start pretending we’re brand new people on January 1st.

I don’t need you to be my customer. I don’t need you to “support me.” I don’t need you to root for me like I’m your cousin in the Olympics.

But I do want something from you… something cheaper than a steak and way more valuable: basic decency. Positive vibes. The kind of community energy that makes a city feel human instead of transactional.

Because once you open businesses in public: Meat N’ Bone, then The Wagyu Bar, now The Wagyu House—you learn the hardest part isn’t the market.

It’s watching how people behave when the business belongs to someone they actually know.

Before we get spicy: here’s the whole point

This isn’t a lecture. It’s a New Year’s default setting.

In 2026, cheer louder than you criticize.
If you can’t cheer, at least don’t heckle. Make more friends. The world will be a better place.

And if you can help, help like a grownup: a referral, an intro, a kind word, a little grace.

That’s it. That’s the post.

So… why is that so hard?

The three audiences you meet the minute you open a door

First, there’s the small group that supports you because they genuinely want you to win. They show up, pay full price, bring friends, post the story, and don’t need you to “earn” their goodwill. You never forget them.

Second, there’s the group that “supports”… with conditions. The friends-and-family discount that somehow becomes a subscription. They’ll spend $80 on Uber Eats from a chain without blinking. They’ll buy the latest Real Madrid jersey for $160 because it dropped this week. But when it’s your business, they suddenly become negotiators: “Come on bro… help me out.” It’s casual, like your margin is a friendship test.

And to be clear: if someone genuinely can’t afford it, that’s a different story. I’m not talking about people dealing with real life. I’m talking about the people who can pay full price—they just don’t want to when it’s you, because they confuse “knowing the owner” with “owning the margin.”

Third, there’s the group you don’t understand until you’ve built something in public: the people who get a tiny thrill out of being unimpressed. They don’t say “congrats.” They say “interesting.” They don’t ask “how can I help?” They ask “what are you doing different?” like they’re on Shark Tank and you’re pitching them a plate of fries. They criticize sometimes even without knowledge (The placed looked empty on an influencer video!)

This isn’t a Yelp post. Yelp is just the easiest microscope slide. The real topic is the behavior underneath it: why some people are quicker to critique than contribute—especially when the person building is close enough to trigger comparison.

The psychology (aka: your brain is running old software)

Here’s a very unromantic reason negativity spreads so easily: bad hits harder than good. It’s one of the most repeated findings in psychology—Roy Baumeister and colleagues summarized it perfectly: “Bad is stronger than good.”

That’s why one negative moment can outweigh ten good ones. That’s why people will go out of their way to write the angry review… and feel like the great night doesn’t require a sentence.

Then layer in loss aversion. Kahneman put it cleanly: “Losses loom larger than gains.” So we’re more motivated to avoid disappointment than to reward excellence. We treat “protecting ourselves” like it’s a public service.

And online, the guardrails come off. Psychologist John Suler’s “online disinhibition effect” explains why people act more extreme behind a screen—anonymity, distance, and low consequence turn normal adults into keyboard gladiators.

So yes… some of this is wiring. Some of this is incentives. And some of it is just… people being weird.

Real-world examples (because you’ve seen this too)

You’ve seen the chef friend who does collabs with everyone except you. Not because the other partner is better. Not because they’re bigger. Just because it’s not you. Collaboration becomes optics: who looks good together, who feels safe to align with, who signals “upward.”

You’ve seen the “allied” brand next door—the obvious partner—who would rather do anything except the obvious cross-promo. They’ll work with someone random across town before they work with the neighbor sharing the same parking lot. Not because it’s smarter. Because partnering with the neighbor is too direct, too equal, too real. If it’s next door, it can’t be packaged as “strategy.” It’s just community.

You’ve seen the “support” that’s really a negotiation. The friend who’s proud of you… as long as you comp the upgrade. The person who “loves your business”… as long as there’s a code. They don’t haggle with Target or Nike. They do it to you because they have access, and access makes people feel entitled.

And then you see them on Instagram paying full price at Papi Steak like it’s a spiritual journey. That’s when you realize it was never about money. It was about the psychology of “I know you.”

The group that bothers me most: the ones who forgot

There are people who have walked in your shoes… and forgot.

They used to be scrappy. They used to be the one praying payroll clears. They used to be the one asking for grace. Now they’re comfortable, and instead of becoming more empathetic, they become sanctimonious.

They love telling you they bootstrapped it. “We built it with nothing.” “No help.” “No shortcuts.” Struggle as a flex.

But the minute you make a mistake… and you do the mature thing, you own it, fix it, apologize… they don’t respond with the grace they once needed.

They respond with leverage.

They threaten you with “destructive reviews,” sometimes while their email signature says something like “Startup Consultant” or “Founder Coach,” like intimidation is a mentorship style.

Not feedback. Not accountability. Destructive. As in: “I’m going to hurt you on purpose, and I’m going to call it honesty.”

That’s not principle. That’s a power fantasy.

This is where Bourdain... He didn’t dress it up. He went straight at the culture of performative criticism, and his “elite Yelper” rant became famous for a reason: it captured the casual cruelty of scoring small businesses like it’s a sport.

And yes, I’ve seen it up close. We’ve had “Yelp Elite” types walk into a boutique, spend five minutes browsing, buy nothing, ask no questions, learn nothing about what we do… and still feel entitled to publish a verdict. Not a conversation. A verdict.

We opened The Wagyu House and got one of those classic “first reviews” during a soft opening—literally within hours. Think about that for a second. Two hours into a soft opening, and someone’s already in the comments acting like they’re auditing a mature operation.

That’s not consumer protection. That’s entertainment.

Again, Yelp isn’t the point. It’s the symptom. The point is what happens when we normalize the idea that small, human businesses exist to absorb our moods.

It’s not just restaurants. It’s every local profession.

Think about the local dentist—. Not the corporate factory where you’re a time slot and a billing code. The real one. Built a practice from scratch, remembers your name, squeezes you in when you’re in pain, invests in equipment, pays a staff, keeps the lights on.

One awkward interaction at the front desk and suddenly it’s “one star, vibe was off.” Not because the dentistry was bad. Because the moment didn’t feel curated.

Now zoom out to medicine. Most people can’t reach their doctor like a normal human relationship. It’s portals, call centers, “please hold,” and an appointment three weeks out. That didn’t happen because doctors forgot how to care. It happened because the system scaled away the relationship.

Same story with pharmacists. We used to have neighborhood pharmacists who knew you, who picked up the phone, who could spot a problem before it became a crisis. Now it’s the same two logos on every corner. Convenience everywhere, connection nowhere.

And this is where the “local” conversation stops being sentimental and becomes structural.

This is how you get a world run by private equity

Local businesses don’t die because someone gave feedback. Local businesses die because they don’t have an error budget. They can’t survive a slow week, a public pile-on, a rent increase, and a supplier issue all at the same time.

Meanwhile the real machine moves quietly. Chains scale. Platforms take fees. Roll-ups buy categories. Private equity doesn’t take over the world with a villain speech. It takes over by buying the boring infrastructure that decides what survives: distribution, leases, supply chains, and attention.

So every time we treat the local butcher, baker, chef, dentist, or shop owner like they should operate with Amazon efficiency, Costco pricing, and Ritz-Carlton emotional labor, we’re voting—whether we mean to or not—for the consolidated version of life.

The one where everything is “more convenient” and somehow nothing feels better.

Rivalry isn’t the problem. Petty rivalry is.

Let me say this clearly: rivalry is good. Rivalry is healthy. Rivalry makes people sharper. It forces you to innovate. It raises standards. If you have a competitor who makes you better, that’s a gift.

What’s stupid is the sideways, personal rivalry where the goal isn’t to get better… it’s to make sure the other person doesn’t win. The kind where you root for the new spot to fail because you don’t like the owner, or because they didn’t invite you, or because their success forces you to look at your own excuses.

That’s not competition. That’s insecurity.

Real rivalry says: I see you. I respect you. Now let’s both level up.

My 2026 ask (and it’s cheaper than a coupon)

And to be clear: this isn’t aimed at the people who already show love. You’re the reason “local” still exists. You pay full price. You send the referral. You DM the owner first. You give grace when it’s earned. You don’t treat small businesses like they’re here to absorb your moods.

For everyone else, here’s the year-end ask: you don’t have to support me. You don’t even have to root for me. Just don’t contribute to the world where private equity is the only thing left to support.

In 2026, do the small things that add up: Give a referral. Make an intro. If you know someone who can help someone else, connect them. It costs you nothing and it can change someone’s year.

Support local in human ways. Buy a flower from the flower girl outside the gas station—or from the single mom running an e-commerce shop after her day job ends. Smile at the overworked baker at 6 a.m. Be patient with the barista who remembers your name. And if you love a place, say it out loud once in a while—public positivity is oxygen.

And if you have a “rival,” consider that the easiest way to keep your city interesting is to work with the people who are also building. Do the collab. Cross-promote. Share the stage. Compete like professionals, not like teenagers.

Because the future where every street looks the same doesn’t arrive with a bang. It arrives with a million small moments where we chose convenience over community, criticism over kindness, and ego over collaboration.

You don’t have to support me. You don’t have to root for me.

But if you say you love “local,” prove it the one way that matters: when it’s imperfect, when it’s trying, when it’s still becoming.

Because “local” doesn’t die in one dramatic moment.

It dies in a thousand tiny ones… when we choose sarcasm over kindness, commentary over community, ego over collaboration.

In 2026, cheer louder—especially for people you know.

That’s how you keep a city alive.

When raising capital for Meat N’ Bone, 8 of every 10 investors would ask about subscriptions.

The question arrived with the same calm confidence every time, like it was a law of nature.

What about subscriptions?

Not how do you win the second order?
Not how do you build trust?
Not how do you protect margin without cheapening the product?

Subscriptions… as if recurring billing were the missing ingredient that could turn expensive customer acquisition into a predictable machine.

I understand the obsession. Subscriptions are the closest thing consumer businesses have to the certainty software enjoys. They smooth revenue. They tidy forecasts. They make messy human behavior look, from far enough away, like a contract.

The problem is that most consumer buying isn’t contractual. It’s situational.

Subscriptions work when the product behaves like a utility… boring, frequent, predictable. That’s why they’re great for household staples and refills. Pet supplies are the cleanest example of subscription as service, not subscription as trap. Chewy’s Autoship isn’t a side feature; it’s the engine, representing 83.9% of net sales in a recent quarter. That’s what alignment looks like; the business cadence matches real life.

Drinks can fit this too… coffee, certain functional beverages, pantry staples… when consumption is steady and the subscription simply removes friction. But the moment the “plan” exists to rescue the economics rather than serve the customer, the tone changes. “Never run out” stops being a convenience promise and starts sounding like a retention strategy.

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Food is where the subscription fantasy gets exposed, because food is the least compatible with the idea of consistency.

Food is mood and travel and weekends that don’t resemble weekdays. It’s dieting, guests, holidays, and the human truth that what sounded great last week might feel wrong today. It’s also spoilage, substitutions, missed delivery windows, and a cold chain that doesn’t care how pretty your brand looks in a paid social carousel.

When you force food into a subscription cadence, you’re not selling convenience. You’re selling a calendar.

And calendars lose to life.

That mismatch is why so many food subscriptions drift toward the same playbook. You discount heavily to acquire. You make enrollment frictionless. You rely on inertia to keep people paying long enough for the math to work. The business stops focusing on earning repeat purchase and starts focusing on pre-authorizing it.

You can call that retention. Consumers have another word for it.

We’ve already watched this movie at scale.

Blue Apron is the cleanest case study because the arc is public and brutal. In 2017, it went public around a $1.9B valuation. The promise was familiar… yes, marketing is expensive, but subscription repeat will pay it back. The story was presented with the language investors love; cohort economics, payback, lifetime value logic. Critics flagged the catch early. If your acquisition math leans on earlier, cheaper-ad years, it can flatter the present.

The ending is the lesson. In 2023, Wonder agreed to acquire Blue Apron for roughly $103M. Subscription didn’t change the physics of customer acquisition and fulfillment. It helped narrate them… until the narration stopped working.

Then comes the inevitable rebuttal. But what about Butcher Box?

It’s a fair question. But the counterexample is also revealing, because it shows what has to be true for subscription meat to work at scale.

This is where consumers get sold a feeling.

Most people see the box, the logo, the paid ads, the influencer testimonials, and they assume “premium butcher.” But behind many subscription protein models is a more ordinary reality. The business survives on standardization. Not because anyone is evil. Because national cold-chain shipping, heavy promotions, and expensive acquisition are unforgiving. Something has to give.

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Start with a basic misconception. A lot of customers treat “USDA” language as a quality badge. It often isn’t. USDA inspection is mandatory; it’s safety and wholesomeness. Quality grading is a separate, voluntary thing. If you’re not reading the actual spec, “USDA” can feel like “premium” when it’s simply “legal.”

Then there’s sourcing. ButcherBox has explicitly said its 100% grass-fed beef is sourced from Australia, and it has also described some U.S. programs as USDA Choice grain-finished. None of that is scandal. It’s scale. But it creates an expectation gap when customers think they’re buying “best possible,” and what they’re actually buying is often mainstream spec packaged with premium tone.

If you’ve spent years around beef, you learn to separate brand premium from meat premium. Choice can be great… when it’s selected well. But Choice as a category is also what many good supermarkets already sell every day. And when a subscription model has to protect margin, the customer often feels it in the details. Smaller portions. Thinner cuts. More standard, and therefore more forgettable, eating quality than the box implied.

That’s the quiet trick of many “premium subscription” food brands. They aren’t necessarily selling you better product. They’re selling you a better story.

And when the story outruns the spec, the value feels low… because it is low relative to the expectation the brand created. That disconnect shows up everywhere people are brutally honest; in reviews, in complaints, in the private post-mortem conversations between friends who tried the box and went back to local. This is not to beat on Butcher Box I have immense respect for what they are doing from a business perspective, but the only benefit of their service… is convenience.

In food, subscriptions don’t create premium economics; they often force premium branding onto commodity reality.

Which brings me back to that investor question, and what I learned living inside it.

Subscriptions don’t fix CAC. They refinance it.

They take a front-end problem, acquisition getting more expensive, and spread it across future orders, hoping churn doesn’t call the bluff. In utility categories, that’s fine because behavior is naturally repeatable. In food and drink, where consumption is situational, the subscription becomes a bet against human life.

Sometimes you win that bet. Often, the customer does… by canceling.

Dinner doesn’t renew on the first of the month. Any business model that depends on it will eventually learn the difference between loyalty and inertia.

And that’s why, at Meat N’ Bone, I resisted the temptation to force recurrence. I wanted subscriptions, badly… not for the deck, but for the predictability. But I wasn’t willing to compete in that lane if it meant lowering the ceiling on quality and calling it “premium.”

Agree? Disagree? Would love to hear from you. Shoot me an email or post a comment.

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about food, hospitality, tech, and capital. But none of that matters if you ignore this one decision: who you decide to build with—and how you structure that relationship.

I’d go further: clear accounts, clear roles, and a clear operating agreement can save your company—and your sanity.

Founders love to romanticize the business partner. The person who “gets it,” who jumps off the cliff with you, signs the same guarantees, pulls the same all-nighters. When it works, a great co-founder is a cheat code. When it doesn’t, that same person becomes a quiet, compounding risk to everything you’ve built.

This is a story about both sides.

When a partner is a superpower

Let’s start with the good version, because it does exist.

A great partner is the one who:

• Shows up when things break, not just when press releases go out.

• Takes the unsexy work seriously, not just the flashy stuff.

• Holds you to your stated standard, not the convenient standard of the week.

• Tells you, “You’re wrong—and here’s why,” without making it personal.

If you’ve ever built something real, you know the feeling. You send a horrible update—bad numbers, bad news—and your partner replies with: “Okay. This sucks. Here’s how we fix it.” Not blame. Not panic. Just commitment.

The right co-founder gives you emotional runway when financial runway is thin. They take the ugly investor call. Fire the person you’ve been avoiding. Renegotiate with the landlord. Admit the strategy you both loved is dead—and help you bury it without theatrics.

When that’s the dynamic, equity never feels expensive. You’re genuinely happy they own as much as they do, because without them, the company doesn’t work.

When the legend becomes the liability

There’s another version.

This is the partner who slowly begins to believe his own legend. The one for whom rules, processes, and deadlines are for everyone else. He’s “the boss,” so the calendar, the budget, and the agreements become… suggestions.

At first, you justify it.

“He’s stressed.”

“We’re all overwhelmed.”

“He just had a kid.”

“This is just how founders are.”

I’ve been there. Several times.

In one of my past ventures, a partner managed payroll. During our end of year routine audit—one of those boring, standard ones—we discovered he’d paid himself a higher salary for quite a few months. Not a rounding error. Not a typo. A full extra salary.

When questioned, the answer was immediate: “It was a tax mistake.”

Here’s the uncomfortable part: everyone knew that explanation wasn’t quite right. Maybe it wasn’t criminal mastermind stuff, but it wasn’t innocent either. And we did what founders so often do—we chose the story that allowed us to keep moving.

We let him “pay it back.” We told ourselves it was cheaper to keep the peace than to call it what it was: a breach of trust at the top.

That extra salary wasn’t the only issue. It was just the most measurable one and it was the beginning to a very long and uncomfortable journey that almost bankrupted us.

The real problem was the pattern:

• deadlines missed, chronically

• commitments made verbally, then forgotten

• “I’ll send it tomorrow” messages that never became documents

• rules broken because “I’m the founder”

None of these things, individually, looked big enough to blow up a company. Together, they eroded trust in a way that’s hard to reverse.

The cost of ignoring what you already know

Why do founders tolerate this?

Because confronting it feels existential.

If you’re honest about the problem, you have to ask scary questions:
What if he leaves? Who runs X? What will employees think? What will investors say if they sense drama at the top?

So you rationalize.

You downgrade a breach into a “miscommunication.”
You relabel a pattern as “a bad week.”
You avoid putting anything in writing, because writing it makes it real.

Meanwhile, the team notices. People aren’t blind. They see when one founder is held to a different standard. They feel the tension even when nobody names it.

Good employees quietly start looking. Vendors tighten terms. Partners get cautious.

That’s the real cost: not just the money that went missing, but the confidence that drains out of the system.

And by the time lawyers or auditors are in the room, your leverage isn’t your passion or your story.

It’s your paperwork.

The least glamorous hero: your operating agreement

This is where the operating agreement—usually treated like a boring formality—shows up as the main safety net.

When things are good, an OA is a PDF in a folder.
When things are bad, it becomes the only neutral voice in the conversation.

In our case, a proper operating agreement didn’t make the situation pleasant. But it made it survivable.

It:

• spelled out how decisions were supposed to be made

• defined what constituted “cause” and what the removal process looked like

• described how compensation and distributions worked

• provided a roadmap for what happens in a deadlock

We didn’t avoid conflict. We still spent time, money, and emotional energy resolving it. But the OA gave us something objective to point to when memories, interpretations, and WhatsApp screenshots didn’t align.

That’s the real function of an operating agreement: it remembers what you both agreed to when you still liked each other.

Have the hard conversation before you need it

If your partnership still feels like a honeymoon, this is exactly the moment to have the hard talks.

You don’t do it because you distrust your co-founder. You do it because you respect each other enough to plan for versions of the future where one or both of you are tired, broke, burned out, or simply different.

Talk—concretely—about:

Separation.
What happens if one of us wants out? Stops performing? Life changes—divorce, illness, kids, another opportunity?

Power.
Who has final say over what? What requires unanimous consent and what doesn’t?

Money.
How do salaries work? What’s the protocol for bonuses, distributions, or “temporary” over-payments? (Anything involving money needs to be in writing.)

Role drift.
What happens if I no longer want to do what I’m doing today? What happens when I’m no longer capable to do the role? Who makes the call? Can we bring in a CEO above us? Under what conditions?

Non-negotiables.
What behaviors are grounds for separation even if the KPIs look great? Lying? Hidden side deals? Harassment? You cannot handle these case-by-case after the fact.

Write the answers down. Sign them while you still assume you’ll never need them.

Because if you ever do need them, you’ll be grateful they were drafted by calm, optimistic versions of yourselves—not the angry, exhausted people you become mid-fight.

“Cuentas claras conservan amistades” isn’t just about accounting. It’s about expectations. It’s the difference between “I feel betrayed” and “We agreed this is how we would handle this.”

The range of outcomes

I’m not anti–co-founder. The lesson isn’t “never have a partner.”

The lesson is that founders underestimate the range of outcomes—because optimism is part of the job description.

In the beginning, everything feels fixable. Red flags look like “stress.” Patterns look like “a phase.” And your gut? You treat it like superstition instead of signal.

Here’s what’s annoying: my gut has been right more often than my spreadsheets. Every time I knew a partnership would work, it worked. Every time I had that low-grade dread that it wouldn’t, it didn’t.

I ignored it several times. The guy had left every job and every work relationship in bad terms. Consulting, franchises, partnerships… same movie, different cast. Every time it failed, the villain was a third party. I bought the story. I shouldn’t have.

On one end, the right partner is a multiplier. You build something 10x bigger because you cover each other’s blind spots, divide the emotional load, and compound strengths.

In the middle, a misaligned but functional partner quietly caps your growth. You design workarounds around their habits. The company becomes smaller than it should be.

On the far end, a bad partner can sink you—no matter how good your product, brand, or market is.

If the foundation is rotten, it doesn’t matter how pretty the building is.

The market you chose, the deck you send investors, the tech stack you use—none of it is as structurally important as who sits next to you on the cap table and what rules govern that relationship.

What I’d tell my past self

I know the rules of the game. In every company I’ve started and every one I’ve advised the last few years, I’ve tried to follow them.

But knowing the rules and enforcing them are two different skills.

Sometimes you have the operating agreement. Sometimes you even have the proof. And you still hesitate…because emotions show up wearing a friendship mask. You tell yourself you’re being loyal, when you’re really just postponing the inevitable.

If I could go back to an earlier version of myself—the one swallowing the “tax mistake” story and pretending everything was fine—I would have ended the business relationship right then and there. Not out of anger. Out of respect for the company. And honestly, for the friendship too.

So here’s the recap:

Your gut is a data source. If something feels off, treat that as information. You don’t need a spreadsheet to justify hard questions.

Don’t confuse loyalty with enabling. A second chance can be generosity. Building your entire operating system around someone’s worst habits is negligence.

If it matters, write it. Roles, salaries, clawbacks, deadlines, side deals—if you expect to rely on it in a crisis, it can’t live only in WhatsApp.

Professionalize early. Audits, basic governance, real reporting—they’re not “corporate.” They’re smoke alarms.

Design the breakup while you’re still in love. A solid operating agreement isn’t a sign you expect to fail. It’s a sign you’re serious about protecting what you’re building, even from yourselves.

And one last thing: a good lawyer is expensive, but you can’t overpay for a good one. If you truly can’t afford counsel yet, use templates, study best practices, pressure-test terms with mentors—do something. But don’t do the most dangerous version of entrepreneurship: two people, one bank account, and zero paper.

Your operating agreement isn’t pessimism—it’s insurance against your own denial.

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about food, hospitality, tech, and capital. But none of that matters if you ignore this one decision: who you decide to build with—and how you structure that relationship.

Choose carefully. Write clearly. And if you’re already staring at red flags, stop repainting them yellow.

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For almost 15 years, my world was mostly spreadsheets, slide decks, and corporate strategy. Then, about eight years ago, I added cutting boards, walk-in coolers, smoke, fire, guests, and all the messy beauty of hospitality to the mix. These days I live somewhere between a kitchen line and a cash-flow model. Flavor & Founders lives in that in-between.

I’ve spent most of my career being the person asked, “How do we scale this?” A recent class with Stanford professor Huggy Rao, who wrote Scaling Up Excellence, gave that instinct a language. He talked about two kinds of people you need if you want anything meaningful to grow: poets and plumbers. That frame hasn’t left me.

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Poets make you care. They see a world that doesn’t exist yet and pull you into it. In our world, they’re founders, chefs, brand builders, product people—the ones obsessing over how a dining room feels at 8:30 p.m. on a Friday, or how a bite of aged ribeye should live in your memory.

Plumbers make it work. They live in systems, code, ops, infrastructure, finance. In food and hospitality, they’re routing your orders so they land hot or cold as they should, designing loyalty programs that don’t blow up your margins, engineering POS systems that don’t crash when the Wi-Fi stutters and the line is out the door. They’re rarely on stage, but without them, the whole thing floods.

You need both. Without poets, the industry becomes a spreadsheet with calories. Without plumbers, it becomes a string of beautiful ideas that die the second they meet rent, labor, and reality.

My view of that balance has been shaped by people who talk about hospitality with both romance and rigor. Danny Meyer is a poet and plumber in one body—he made hospitality feel aspirational while obsessing over culture, systems, and how to scale “enlightened hospitality” without watering it down. Unreasonable Hospitality hit me the same way when my GM at The Wagyu Bar, Saul Ferrarosa, handed me the book: in a world full of “good enough,” the people who win go unreasonable in how they care for guests and teams—and then build plumbing so that level of care can repeat.

Robert Cialdini’s Influence, introduced to me by my friend Alejandro Delgado, added another layer: a reminder of how messy perception is, how easily we’re swayed by social proof, authority, scarcity, and noise from investors, friends, and naysayers. It’s the same psychology that has people happily dropping $1,500 on a steak in a tiny suitcase, convinced they’re buying a story, not just a piece of meat.

I like to think of myself as a bit of both poet and plumber. I founded Meat N’ Bone while working in the strategy department of the world’s largest education company, living a double life between PowerPoints and walk-in coolers. I’ve learned a lot, but I still have more to learn—and a big reason I’m writing this is to learn from better poets and plumbers than I am, and to share those lessons in public.

Food is changing fast. Not just “more delivery, more apps,” but in deeper ways: how supply chains work, who captures value, how data flows, how brands are built, how hospitality survives in a world of thin margins and rising expectations.

Most coverage lives at one extreme or the other. It’s either “cool new restaurant” with pretty photos and zero mention of how the numbers work, or “food tech” written like SaaS, with no sense of why a guest, chef, or line cook should care. I’m not interested in either.

Flavor & Founders sits in the middle. It’s for the operator deciding if a new delivery platform is a partner or a parasite, the investor who knows there’s something here but doesn’t fully speak the language, the tech founder pulled toward food but determined not to ship yet another pointless ordering app—and anyone who senses that behind every plate and every brand there’s a real story about humans, money, and systems colliding. I’m writing from inside the industry, but not just for insiders; this should read just as well at the bar after service as it does on a flight to a board meeting.

Each issue starts with a story, not a chart—a chef-founder making a crazy lease work, a food-tech tool that quietly became essential, a logistics failure that explains why someone’s meal kit showed up warm. Then we zoom out: what does this say about where the industry is headed, and what’s the takeaway for operators, founders, investors, and plumbers who’ve never set foot on the line?

To answer that, I’ll lean on people who’ve actually done the work—founders, chefs, investors, ops leaders, technologists—and occasionally step outside food to pull ideas from fintech, gaming, transportation, space, and agtech. A loyalty program might behave like a game. A restaurant membership might look like SaaS. A cold chain might steal tricks from aerospace. Some weeks we’ll stay squarely in food; other weeks we’ll step out and come back with a sharper lens. The promise is simple: I’ll go find the poets and plumbers shaping this space—and a few on the fringes who will matter sooner than most people think.

I’m building this because I’m tired of two things: romantic stories that ignore the math, and sterile analysis that forgets the magic. Scaling in this industry isn’t just about opening more units or raising bigger rounds. It’s about protecting the soul of hospitality while upgrading the pipes underneath it. Poets without plumbers burn out. Plumbers without poets build things nobody loves.

So this is issue zero. A handshake. If this resonates, stick around. I’ll bring you the stories of the people making food, tech, and capital actually work together—one kitchen, one product, one deal at a time.

Are you more poet or plumber?
Have you fallen for suitcase-steak psychology?

If you know a great poet (founder) or plumber (builder) in food, send them my way or forward this to them. info@founderandplumbers.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisematab/

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