Nick Kokonas — How to Apply World-Class Creativity to Business, Art, and Life (#341)

“I just look at some things and go, ‘Why is that? Why does it work that way?’ Oftentimes, the people most entrenched in a system have no idea why.”

— Nick Kokonas

Nick Kokonas (IG: @nkokonas, TW: @NickKokonas) is the co-owner and co-founder of The Alinea Group of restaurants, which includes Alinea, Next, The Aviary, Roister, and The Aviary NYC. He is also the founder and CEO of Tock, Inc, a reservations and CRM system for restaurants with more than 2.5M diners and clients in more than 20 countries.

Alinea has been named the Best Restaurant in America and Best Restaurant in The World by organizations and lists as diverse as The James Beard Foundation, World’s 50 Best, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Gourmet Magazine, and Elite Traveler. His restaurants have won nearly every accolade afforded to them.

Nick has been a subversive entrepreneur and angel investor since 1996. He spent a decade as a derivatives trader, has co-written three books, and believes in radical transparency in markets and business. His latest effort is The Aviary Cocktail Book, which is perhaps the most gorgeous book I’ve ever seen. It is self-published, has already pre-sold nearly $1M in copies, and is being released and shipped in October of 2018.

We’ve been trying to get this interview going ever since Nick was of immense help to me for The 4-Hour Chef, so I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. We talk about much more than the restaurant business, including philosophy, derivatives trading, favorite books, and how Nick tends to break every industry he enters in the most productive way possible! Enjoy!

You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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Want to hear another episode with someone else who understands that the most interesting way to do something isn’t always the easiest? — Listen to this episode with Astro Teller, CEO of X on moonshot thinking, mutilated checkerboards, “safety third,” and much more. (Stream below or right-click here to download.):

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Nick Kokonas:

The Alinea Group | Tock | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

• The Aviary Cocktail Book
• Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas
• The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
• Wall Street
• How to Turn Failure into Success, The Tim Ferriss Show
• Colgate University
• A River Runs Through It
• Chicago Mercantile Exchange
• Chicago Research and Trading Group
• The Socratic Method, The University of Chicago Law School
• The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
• Bertrand Russell on Ludwig Wittgenstein
• The Nature of Things by Lucretius
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
• MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Hand Signal Galleries, Trading Pit History
• First Options
• Option Theory, Investopedia
• The Wolf Of Wall Street
• Chicago Board of Trade
• 20 Years Already? Alan Greenspan and the ‘Irrational Exuberance’ Flop, MarketWatch
• Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
• Asymmetrical Risk/Reward, Asymmetry Observations
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Dumb and Dumber ‘So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance?’
• Long Lost Lamented Restaurants Power Hour: Trio by Jeffy Mai, Eater Chicago
• Blue Trout and Black Truffles: The Peregrinations of an Epicure by Joseph Wechsberg
• The Great History of Fernand Point and La Pyramide, Vienne Condrieu Tourisme
• eGullet Forums
• Alinea
• Crucial Detail
• Bocuse d’Or
• Chef’s Table with Grant (Volume 2, Episode 1)
• The Aviary
• Husk
• Sean Brock’s Opening Day Review of Alinea, eGullet
• Chartres Cathedral
• Alinea — The Business Plan
• The French Laundry
• Alinea is the Best Restaurant in Chicago, Chicago Magazine
• A Man of Taste: A Chef with Cancer Fights to save His Tongue. by D.T. Max, The New Yorker
• Next
• Dinner: The Toughest Ticket in Town by Brett Martin, GQ
• Next: Paris 1906 by Adam Goldberg, A Life Worth Eating
• When Paris Flooded, 1910, Rare Historical Photos
• OpenTable
• Rackspace
• Marimekko Chart — A Complete Guide, FusionCharts
• How to Make a Marimekko Chart (Video), MekkoGraphics
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charles T. Munger
• The Boring Company
• U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• About the Best Sellers, The New York Times
• Weta Workshop
• Pixar
• Industrial Light and Magic
• The Alinea Project
• Peychaud’s Bitters

SHOW NOTES

• Is pressure Nick’s default setting, or are the risks the world perceives he takes somewhat of an illusion? [09:35]
• How do behavioral economics and Nobel Prize-winning investor Richard Thaler fit into Nick’s way of doing things? [12:35]
• How did Nick make the transit from philosophy to finance, and does he feel philosophy was an asset to what came later? [14:55]
• Why did a legendary philosophy professor at Colgate give Nick’s classmates 15-page assignments while capping his limit at three pages? [16:21]
• What was Nick’s introduction to the world of trading at a time when his future father-in-law was predicting he’d become an intellectual bum, and why did he have to dumb down the academics on his rÈsumÈ to get a clerk job on the Merc floor? [18:12]
• Why is it common for philosophy majors to become traders? [21:03]
• Why Nick is glad he didn’t pursue an MBA in 1992. [22:00]
• Going back to Nick’s professor at Colgate, why does he think he was singled out from his peers? [23:48]
• Books and other resources Nick recommends for aspiring entrepreneurs who don’t have the benefit of a philosophy background (or a tough professor to keep them grounded). [28:15]
• Did Nick find that being a clerk on the floor of the Merc was everything he dreamed it could be? [33:48]
• How Nick followed his entrepreneurial father’s model for owning his own situation when entering the world of trading, and found someone who was doing business in a way no one else was doing it. [36:10]
• Why did Nick leave his mentor after a year and start his own company? [40:53]
• How did Nick and his employees train to quicken their mental agility required for trading? [42:34]
• The formative moment when Nick realized he could thrive in the trading environment. [45:31]
• Resources and books Nick recommends to anyone who wants to learn to become a better investor. [46:21]
• When it comes to taking investment risks these days, Nick seeks out the “high, small hoops.” [48:22]
• Averages can be misleading. Do so many businesses fail because the model is difficult, or because too few do enough due diligence before diving into the fray? [52:00]
• At what point did Nick decide to leave trading and get into the restaurant business — in spite of being warned of the high failure rate to be found there? [55:15]
• The dinner and conversation that led to Nick teaming up with Grant Achatz — even though they didn’t really know each other very well by that point — and the decisions they made together along the way. [1:00:18]
• Out of so many equally risky and exciting options, why did Nick pick opening a restaurant as his next “thing?” [1:07:17]
• How does Nick spot talent early in others that most people are late to notice? [1:10:23]
• Why do restaurants have candles, why do fancy restaurants have white tablecloths, and other questions that Nick and Grant have pondered. [1:14:22]
• Incidentally, a now-famous chef was Alinea’s first customer. [1:17:25]
• Nick and Grant would never let an architect or designer shoot down their ideas just because the way things have always been done happen to be practical. [1:18:39]
• As someone who had never run a restaurant before, how did Nick contribute to the business effectively without simply falling into the role of financial donor dilettante? [1:19:29]
• Why was Nick “horrified” when Alinea won Best Restaurant in America from Gourmet magazine in 2006? [1:23:24]
• Grant was diagnosed with stage IV cancer and given six months to live — so of course he and Nick wrote a book and worked on revolutionizing the way their industry handled reservations while supervising a dwindling staff. [1:24:51]
• Sometimes a PoS really is a PoS. Nick explains how reservations have been traditionally booked in the restaurant industry and what he’s done to improve upon this in ways that go beyond holding a table. [1:29:29]
• Partner bickering at a time-traveling press dinner and using austere minimalism to avoid Next becoming the Disneyland of cuisine. [1:39:51]
• Dealing with reservation software problems seven hours before the first dinner and the novelty of variable price points based on the day of the week. [1:44:58]
• The moment a bearded, unwashed, and somewhat slightly dazed Nick was able to say “This is the best thing I’ve ever built.” [1:47:44]
• Why the rewards of such a reservation system were worth their asymmetric risks on several levels. [1:51:02]
• Marimekko charts can be used to instantly see anything from how much your restaurant’s sending to the fishmonger every month to what the ROI of sponsoring a podcast might be. [1:55:15]
• The next industry Nick wants to disrupt? Truffles. Here’s why. [2:00:41]
• How does Nick choose the black boxes worth trying to illuminate and examine, and what role do his more ambitious employees play in bringing them to light? [2:04:24]
• On the confining self-selection of roles many people fall into on the job (for better or for worse), and how Nick’s hiring process is different today than it was 20 years ago. [2:10:31]
• Nick deals with a lot of email. What systems does he have in place to help him cope? [2:16:41]
• Social media can be hard to keep up with, but we both agree it’s important to demonstrate that we’re paying attention by engaging when possible — even if we can’t respond to it all. [2:22:49]
• What “puzzle” filters and other mini-hurdles in correspondence accomplish. [2:24:06]
• We compare notes about the somewhat slimy similarities between the music and publishing industries. [2:26:02]
• Another black box: the agency problem. [2:35:25]
• On the Hembergers and The Alinea Project, and the upcoming Aviary Book being released independently. [2:41:23]
• A little cocktail talk. [2:48:37]
• Books Nick has gifted most, and how he personalizes the gifts he gives. [2:53:47]
• What would Nick’s billboard say? [2:55:44]
• Parting thoughts. [2:57:34]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

• Grant Achatz
• Richard Thaler
• Jerome Balmuth
• Bertrand Russell
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Rene Descartes
• Lucretius
• Dagmara Kokonas
• Jim Hanson
• Nassim Taleb
• Howard Marks
• Jim Carrey
• Captain America
• Gordon Ramsay
• Martin Kastner
• Thomas Keller
• Daniel Boulud
• Sean Brock
• Ruth Reichl
• Auguste Escoffier
• Stephen Bernacki
• Charlie Munger
• Warren Buffett
• Elon Musk
• Jason Fried
• Brian Fitzpatrick
• Aaron Wehner
• Allen Hemberger
• Sarah Hemberger
• Eric Jeffus

The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.