Food is the new music, chefs are the new stars
At The Family, we always repeat two things:
- Anyone can be an entrepreneur!
- Scale is coming!
In the first, anyone doesn’t mean everyone — it just means that a great entrepreneur can come from anywhere, no matter who’s in front of you… so we have to stay completely open as we try to find the people who will learn, grow, and build giants.
Because in startups, it is about building giants — scale is coming to every industry. Before the digital age, scale wasn’t easy, as you got bigger, the returns went down. But now increasing returns rule.
There are funny things that come out of repeating those principles sometimes, and one was a chance meeting that showed just how they could work together in an industry that I never really thought about them in: restaurants.
One year ago, at Noma…
… there was a cool sommelier named Luca.
Noma isn’t a restaurant, it’s a religious experience. René creates an experience that absolutely blew me away, and he did it by putting together an exceptional team.
That experience is based on a few things:
- Redefining hospitality
- Integrating the hygge spirit
- And above all, letting the chef escape the usual constraints, especially the prison that is the kitchen.
At Noma, the chefs are in the dining room. They say hello. They give off a sense of being truly happy.
Luca was able to experience all that not only at the restaurant itself, but also during trips across the world that Noma organized, with the aim of creating a new kind of restaurant: the pop-up.
Pop-ups change the game, and they respond to the needs of the digital age when every place has a shorter and shorter lifespan. They free the chef from all constraints. They let them get away from the difficulties of real estate. They let them create a real sense of the restaurant visit being an event. There’s an entertainment aspect to it all. Combining all those things means chefs can concentrate 100% on creativity — and that can lead to scale.
And so, welcome ONA!
Today, Luca took the leap. He became an entrepreneur. He’s going to make the restaurant industry truly scalable.
He’s also looking for the perfect co-founders and the most incredible business angels (loving to eat obviously highly preferable — after all, when you eat well, you sleep well ;)
Check out the deck 👇
Love it? Get in touch with him right here → lucapronzato@gmail.com
