From Wall Street to Busboy — A Founder’s Passion To Do What It Takes
I started my career as a software engineer on Wall Street. It didn’t take long to realize I had made a mistake. It took quite a bit longer to build up the courage to fix that mistake. In February of 2017, my wife and I decided to move from NYC to Austin, TX to allow me to work full-time on building my restaurant tech startup. I immediately set out to find a job at a restaurant to better understand how it operates. Despite having a Computer Science degree from Columbia, they wouldn’t hire me as a server, so I started as a busboy. I worked there for six months until my startup was accepted into the Capital Factory Accelerator.
The true passion needed to propel a founder through the startup trenches has two parts. The first part is the vision or mission. The second is the driving force. Part one can be articulated in a few brief sentences, part two must be demonstrated in the execution.
The problem you are inspired to solve and the reason why you want to solve that specific problem makes up the vision of the company.
The passion is more clear in the second part. This is the underlying force that drives your interest, nay obsession, with solving that particular problem.
Part one is intellectual, the reason. Part two is carnal, the obsession. Part one can be faked by a charismatic founder, but part two must be an ingrained trait.
Many observers focus only on part one, mistakenly accepting a well crafted mission statement as true passion. Few take the time to see if the founder actually has that driving force and the traits necessary to obsess over the minute intricacies that make up the larger building blocks of an innovative solution.
For me and my startup, the problem is the massive inefficiency that sit-down restaurants face where the majority of their tables sit empty for the majority of meals. The mission is to enable a completely new operating model, using more affordable technology than currently exists, to give even independent restaurants and small regional chains the same technology as their larger, more corporate competitors. My inspiration comes from my late grandfather’s experience owning and running his own restaurant. I cherish the stories of the unique challenges of running a small business with such low margins and high waste. Some might accept this story as proof of my passion, but these words build a nice “about” page on a website, not the force behind a venture-scale business.
My obsession is with efficiency. I inherited from my father a certain impatience in social or public settings where waiting around or standing in line wastes perfectly good time. During my first programming classes in high school I was drawn to the simplistic loops and algorithms that complete tasks so efficiently. This obsession with efficiency and hatred of its vile counterpart eat at me every time I needlessly wait to dine at a restaurant. It is a carnal instinct, an inherent personality trait that drives my obsessive pursuit of a solution to the largest problems restaurants face. It shows in my willingness to leave my job on Wall Street to work at a restaurant in the suburbs of Austin. I did what was necessary to understand the current processes from both sides of the table (pun intended), because I am actually willing to do whatever it takes.
