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The meez Podcast
Josh Sharkey (Entrepreneur, professional chef, and founder/CEO of meez, the culinaryOS for food professionals) interviews world class entrepreneurs in the food space that are shifting the paradigm of how we innovate and operate in our industry.
The meez Podcast
Nabeel Alamgir Co-Founder and CEO of Lunchbox
#48. In this week's episode, we explore the world of online ordering and restaurant revenue generation with our special guest, Nabeel Alamgir, the CEO and co-founder of Lunchbox,the enterprise restaurant technology company boosting customers like Papa Ginos, Chopt, Walk On's and more. Starting out at Bareburger as a busboy, Nabeel worked his way up to the position of CMO and then went on to build this restaurant tech company made by operators.
Born in Bangladesh and raised in Kuwait before settling in Queens, Nabeel starts things off by sharing his insights on the incredible food scene in Queens and how it influenced his passion for the industry.
But our conversation goes beyond culinary delights as we delve into the challenges and triumphs of being a CEO. Nabeel shares his strategies for managing stress, time, and health, offering valuable insights for leaders in any field. We explore his unique approach to time management, including a fascinating use of a label maker to organize daily tasks—a refreshing analog touch in a digital world.
With Nabeel's expertise, we discuss the future of digital ordering and provide practical tips for restaurants to boost their online orders. Whether you're a foodie, an entrepreneur, or simply curious about the intersection of technology and dining, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge and inspiration.
Where to find Nabeel Alamgir:
Where to find host Josh Sharkey:
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In this episode, we cover:
(05:55) Nabeel's journey growing up overseas and what led him to come to America
(10:49) The creation of Lunchbox
(18:34) How restaurants can find out if they are being discovered by customers
(22:38) Nabeel's biggest mistake as a CEO to date.
(27:01) The advantages and disadvantages of being a young founder
(32:11) What takes up most of Nabeel's time
(41:33) Product teams and earning respect
(45:22) What makes Nabeel really really angry
(52:15) Being an avid learner as a CEO
(56:04) Putting priority on taking care of yourself first
[00:00:00] Josh Sharkey:
You're listening to season two of The meez Podcast. I'm your host, Josh Sharkey, the founder and CEO of meez, a culinary operating system for food professionals. On the show, we're going to talk to high performers in the food business, everything from chefs to CEOs, technologists, writers, investors, and more about how they innovate and operate and how they consistently execute at a high level.
[00:00:23]
Day after day. And I would really love it if you could drop us a five star review anywhere that you listen to your podcast. That could be Apple, that could be Spotify, could be Google. I'm not picky anywhere works, but I really appreciate the support. And as always, I hope you enjoy the show.
[00:00:43]
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, our guest today on the show is Nabeel Alamgir. Nabeel is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Lunchbox. Lunchbox specializes in online ordering and just generally helping restaurants generate a lot more revenue from their native. digital ordering. I met Nabeel at least five, six years ago before he started Lunchbox when he was still the chief marketing officer at Bareburger when he was talking about building a company like this.
[00:01:12]
I think he was on a panel at this tech conference and we had just sort of connected and it was really awesome to see, literally fast forward a few months later and He launched this product. Nabeel was born in Bangladesh and grew up in Kuwait until he was about 15 and then moved over to Queens. So he is a Queens boy by heart, for sure.
[00:01:30]
We definitely talk a little bit about why the food in Queens is so good. But really, we spend most of the time just chatting about trials and tribulations of, you know, being a CEO. of a company and how we manage stress, how we manage our time and how we manage our health and things like that. Nabeel and I catch up every, maybe twice a year.
[00:01:52]
So it had been a while since we had last talked. So it's always nice to hear how things are going. Things are going very well for him and he's come a long way as a leader and he had some really interesting sort of Insights into how he's been growing the company as he's grown as a leader some of the frameworks that he uses for managing time one of the really interesting things I saw which was I think it's a kid's toy this like little I mean, it looks like a toy, but it was so interesting.
[00:02:20]
It had a label maker that he clearly used to label the things that he wants to remember to do in a day. He was like clicking them off. Very cool. Because it's so analog in such a digital world that he's in. So, you know, we swapped some sort of tips and tricks of how we each manage our time. And he talks about kind of the future of digital ordering, gives some tips for restaurants on how to increase.
[00:02:44]
Digital orders in your restaurant? And of course, a bunch more. So I loved catching up with him. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And if you did, please, as I think I've mentioned a couple of times, I would love it if you would give us a five star and you know what? I'm usually not picky, but how about this time?
[00:03:03]
Just throw it into Apple iTunes if you can enjoy the show.
Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I don't remember when we last caught up, but
[00:03:15] Nabeel Alamgir:
We do, like twice a year.
[00:03:20] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, I tell everybody that I know that comes on, like, this is just an excuse for me to get to talk to people that I, you know, love and respect, and I don't have to, you know, I actually get to schedule the call, so I know it's going to happen, and people just get to, you know, be along for the ride, so
[00:03:38] Nabeel Alamgir:
Well,the admiration is mutual, and we build our companies at the same time, so it's been awesome watching you do your thing.
[00:03:45] Josh Sharkey:
Well, I'm going to start there because I remember very vividly when you started building Lunchbox, you were still at Bareburger. I think you were still at Bareburger, but you were definitely like pushing Lunchbox. I was it. I was, you know, the COO at Aurify at the time. And I remember so well, like talking to the team, like, guys, like this product that he built, this is insane.
[00:04:06]
Like we, we had been talking for a year about how to build an app to sell a product online. And as you know, like I, it was a huge uphill battle to get everyone sort of bought in. And I think the biggest reason was like, Now, this can't be true. It can't be that this thing just works the way that it does and it's going to work so quickly.
[00:04:25]
Turns out it actually does. But, you know, it was, early on, it was like, I don't know, this seems like it's not going to work. But, you know, you push through and I'm sure you had a million no's before you got to not just yes, in terms of investors, you know, customers. And that's what I love most about just seeing your journey, Nabeel, is people see, you know, there's so much success with Lunchbox and you know, how much, you know, you guys have grown and how well you, you know, have built a product and tell a story and you've raised millions of dollars, but I know, and you know, that there was a bunch of heartache and pain and probably crying or at least misery.
[00:05:05] Nabeel Alamgir:
So many.How many breakdowns are you having a year right now? I'm having four a year.
[00:05:09] Josh Sharkey:
Oh, I have way more than that. I have two kids though, so it's more. More weekly, but you know, I think these are really helpful. I don't know about you. And actually, I do know about you.
[00:05:19] Nabeel Alamgir:
Like talking to fellow founders, so cathartic.
[00:05:21] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, it's actually funny because part of what I was going to ask you today was not just about founders, but you have, you've done a really good job of like surrounding yourself with really great advisors as well. But man, it's very lonely. And no matter what happens, you know, as a, as a, you know, when you start a company, you're pretty much in isolation.
[00:05:37]
So the more you can, sort of, you know, just talk with others that are in that same boat, it's just so helpful. We're going to talk about that today, a little bit. But before we get to that, I actually, I peripherally know about, you know, your background because, you know, I mean, just honestly, just seeing the stories.
[00:05:55]
I think you're from Queens, right? And your family is from Bangladesh, is that correct? Absolutely, yeah. So, what was it like growing up in Queens and how the hell did you get into what you're doing now from that?
[00:06:08] Nabeel Alamgir:
You know, um, before Queens, I, you know, I came to the country when I was 15. I came from Kuwait.
[00:06:13] Josh Sharkey:
Okay. You said you were born, you were born overseas. Yeah.
[00:06:15] Nabeel Alamgir:
I was born in Bangladesh and then lived in the Middle East. You know, went through the Iraq war, I was in Kuwait at the time, saw that happen, realized America is such a, you know, we were, from Kuwait's point of view, we were like, oh, that's a great country coming to help us save our butts.
[00:06:30]
And then I came here, 2005, when I was 15, and I came to Queens, and it was A magical place to be and still is. Uh, I, I'm a Queens guy. I, hopefully walk, sound, talk like one. If not, I hope I will eventually, but Queens is a great place for a lot of outsiders to come and not feel like they're all from this other, all these places and they don't belong.
[00:06:54]
Everyone is from so many different places. You become, you know, part of just like this New York vibe. We have this amazing thing that you cannot replicate anywhere else. That only this, the city has built that you and I grew up in together. So. Growing up in Queens was amazing. And I was a shy kid. What part of Queens?
[00:07:09]
I grew up in Jackson Heights where all the Indians grew up, you know, Jackson Heights, you know, amazing Bengali and Indian and Pakistani food. And I went to Bryan high school and I was shy. I sat in the back of the class, scored really high on my exam, sat in the back and did not say two words. You know, I learned English watching mafia movies, use my hands a lot.
[00:07:27]
Eventually when I picked it up, I stopped, I never stopped talking, which is a defect of its own. But growing up in Queens was amazing. And at 17, I found some of my voice when I finally joined the restaurant industry. I joined BearBurger, which we both know about. It's an amazing New York City burger chain.
[00:07:44]
But at the time we had a single burger joint and I was a busboy. And I was a bus driver for a long time, like two years. And then I stayed additional eight years in corporate and worked my way up to CMO. But that was my 10 year journey before this. So I did American high school, 10 years of restaurant and lunchbox. I've had three, three big, you know, movements in my life.
[00:08:07] Josh Sharkey:
It's nuts. So we're gonna talk a lot about Lunchbox today, but Queens also has. So much good food. I remember, you know, it's still around. It's not the same sort of, um, you know, intensity of everybody going there as it used to be. There's a place called Shreeper Pie that everybody used to go to for Thai food.
[00:08:22]
Oh yeah, in Woodside. Yeah, and they have this crispy watercress salad. So, yeah, and I mean obviously like spicy and tasty and flushing and all those spots and the Greeks, you know, obviously the Greek spots. That's the beautiful thing about Queens. It is a mix of culture, but also because of that, people don't even know there's so much good food there.
[00:08:39]
So much good food. Like you don't even have to go to Manhattan unless you want to get like some sort of like, you know, fine dining meal. You don't live in Queens now, do you?
[00:08:48] Nabeel Alamgir:
No, I lived in Queens my entire life. I just like a year ago moved to Upper East Side. And the reason I moved to Upper East Side is because it's right off the bridge from Queens.
[00:08:55]
So I can go back to the airports quickly, go back to see my family in Jamaica, Queens quickly.
[00:09:00] Josh Sharkey:
Nice. Yeah, my mom grew up in Regal Park.
[00:09:02] Nabeel Alamgir:
Nice. My parents lived in Forest Hills and Regal Park for a little bit too.
[00:09:05] Josh Sharkey:
Nice. So obviously you spent a bunch of time at Bareburger. So the first one was in Queens, right?
[00:09:11]
Yeah, first one was in Astoria, Queens. I had a group of restaurants called Bark I used to own. And um, we opened our third one on Bleecker Street. And there was a Bareburger on LaGuardia. Yeah, LaGuardia, Queens. It was the best location for like colleges and things. Killer. That was our second location.
[00:09:26]
Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. I used to make milkshakes there. I probably saw you. I mean, I must have. That's funny. Well, anyways, fast forward. Then, you know, you launched Lunchbox and how long from I had this idea of this thing to a customer is now using it and paying for us? How long was like the gap between those two things?
[00:09:48] Nabeel Alamgir:
I think it happened, uh, Hemingway has a line, which is, someone asked him, how did you become poor? And he said, gradually and then suddenly. And that's how, that's how Lunchbox was born as well. It happened very quickly, where to find the exact inception is hard. Except we were looking at the problem every day as restaurant operators, like you and I were, right?
[00:10:06]
You were looking at the problems in your restaurants, and meez was born out of that. The exact same thing was happening with us, which was like, we were dealing with all this amazing stuff Sweetgreen was doing, and we're like, how can we do that and not spend so much money? And how can we go ahead and, you know, have a competitive product to all these amazing marketplaces products that are out there.
[00:10:25]
So we're going to win some of our own customers and build our own IP. How do we do it? How do we do it? As a CMO, that was what I wrestled with the most. And we used systems, second movers, like GoParrot was a great company at the time I was using. You know, I was using LevelUp at the time, which I thought, you know, I was very fond of them at the time.
[00:10:42] Nabeel Alamgir:
Are they still around? No, they just sold, they just shut down.
[00:10:46] Josh Sharkey:
It was so ubiquitous for so long and then just gone. Yeah,
[00:10:49] Nabeel Alamgir:
That's what happens when GrubHub buys you. But that's neither here or there. But, so I was using all the second movers and I was getting a lot out of them, but I was like, how about we do it ourselves?
[00:10:57]
Restaurant people building restaurant tech. Can we, is that such a magical concept? You know, so that's what we did. And we said, you know what, GoParrot, you guys have an amazing web, can you make an app? They said, no, I said, okay, we'll make that app. So we made the app, we took their web, we tried to connect them, couldn't, we couldn't.
[00:11:15]
We said, all right, we're going to do the web as well. It went from 30 days we did the app, 60 days we did the app and web. We had a customer in 60 days, which was Bareburger, you know, and then I just called our friends in New York, a lot of mutual friends. Would you use it? Stickies, would you use it? Winds over, would you use it?
[00:11:32]
And it seems like everyone wanted to use a product not ready to be used. Not ready. But they're like, you know what, one of our guys are making it. One of our guys is making it. We're going to back it. And we're going to make sure we have a seat at the table because we've not had that for a while with these tech companies.
[00:11:48]
I think that's day one or month one or quarter one of how it was born. And first quarter we had like a dozen customers and it wasn't easy by any means, it wasn't easy, like these customers are still with us for the most part, but they put up with a lot and we wouldn't be here without them.
[00:12:03] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in terms of crossing the chasm, those were definitely the very, very early adopters or innovators.
[00:12:09]
It had to have been at least, you know, a year or so, but I don't know if you remember this and I don't know why I just thought about it today, but you were at a conference called Tech Table here in the city. I remember it exactly. And I remember you, I don't know why I remember this, but you were actually, nothing to do with Lunchbox.
[00:12:24]
You were there for some other panel representing Bareburger as CMO. you saying, Uh, we're going to disrupt the industry. I have something I'm working on. No mention of Lunchbox, at least in terms of the timestamp. That was my anchor of like, oh yeah, that's, that's when.
[00:12:40] Nabeel Alamgir:
That was three, four months before we released it. And I said on stage, we should build something together as operators. And I remember Adam was on stage, Adam Askin, CEO of Dig. And cowboy hat, cowboy hat. He had a cowboy hat, you know, I was like, are you from Texas? He said. I was like, okay.
[00:13:00] Josh Sharkey:
My urban cowboy. Yeah. I actually want to get your thoughts on like the future of like what this ordering is like because it's all pretty new, you know, new in meaning like in the last five years has come a pretty long way.
[00:13:11]
So for a very long time, there was basically no online sales. And then. You know, right around 2010, Seamless, Grubhub, DoorDash started offering this. It was, I remember I owned restaurants and we would have fax machines, you know, and you would get orders via fax and it would come in. You're paying an arm and a leg, but you didn't even think about it because it was just new orders.
[00:13:31]
Then, you know, you start, you know, Grubhub lets you do like the, your own website for a dollar, but nothing happens. Now people are actually able to own their native sales their ability to sort of sell their own product, you know, without third party distributors. How does that work? You know, I know with obviously with any company right there's like Google SEM You can spend money on ads you can retarget people you can but how does lunchbox?
[00:13:56]
I guess Lunchbox is a proxy for the premise of like native learning. How do you help them? Mm-Hmm. like generate more revenue?
[00:14:03] Nabeel Alamgir:
You know? First is there is a group of customers that are loyal to you and they're looking for a platform. They're looking to be platformed appropriately, and they're not platformed on third party companies.
[00:14:14]
They like. If I'm a fan of. You know, let's say a Little Beet, right? If I'm a fan, I am going to go ahead and download your app, check your website, see if there's merch there, depending on how much do I identify with that brand and how much of a lifestyle brand it is. And there's these customers out there that are looking to connect with their favorite brands.
[00:14:36]
Like, I give you so much money, man. I wish you knew I give you so much money. I wish, like, because when I had a one off You know, they knew, they used to give me free beers, like now at scale, couldn't even replicate that at Sweetgreen, or at Shake Shack, or at Bareburger. And that's what we want to do. So we want to create a platform so you can speak to your loyal guests first, right?
[00:14:59]
Because you will never convince an UberEATS super user to get off UberEATS, it's a great app! It's a beautiful app, their card is there, it works, if they're a regular user, they want a refund, they get their refund quickly, it's great. They are a user of Uber Eats, of the marketplace, and that's one type of user.
[00:15:19]
There's a type of user that wants to be your user and wants to connect with you. Are you ready to connect in technology? That's where Lunchbox comes in, but more important than Lunchbox, do you have the hospitality skills to do that? Right. What are some ways you can do that by making sure these are the people that know about your menu offering before everyone else does by making sure they have limited, you know, LTOs first, they have specials first, that you're taking care of them first, you're giving them news first, you're releasing things to them first, or even just communicating them or giving them better service, whatever it may be, whatever defines You're version of setting the table, your version of, you know, being, you know, a little bit better in hospitality.
[00:15:57]
How can you go ahead and build that with your super users? If you had a technology we've built for you, that's the relationship we try to have with restaurants. So let me expand that a little bit more. We work with Clean Juice. They have a hundred restaurants. They really care about. Building great habits with their users so their users can become a subscription member and get juices delivered automatically four times a week, four times a month.
[00:16:21]
That's a cool technology, but what they're trying to do is they're trying to get repeat users to have less friction, repeat users to go ahead and be, you know, consistent members who are paying them and also. You know, making sure that inventory is good and we're getting these things out on time and building great habits with customers who are trying to be on a cleanse program.
[00:16:40]
That is one way tech plays a small part, but we play a small part, dude. We are a tiny part of the stories these restaurants want to tell and the stories are hospitality stories.
[00:16:51] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. Yeah. You know, all those companies you mentioned, your 100 unit, 200 large groups, and I know because your product has grown so much, you can service these really large groups.
[00:16:59]
Just thinking through like how someone gets started, let's just say I have, I'm the next sweet green, but I have one location or I'm going to find any restaurant that crushes it. And I also have this really good sort of, you know, takeout and I'm sort of starting to scale. What are some of the things that you've learned from helping all these restaurants that folks can do to like.
[00:17:18]
Grow more digital sales and get them away from, you know, the margin you're losing from third party. Yeah,
[00:17:24] Nabeel Alamgir:
There's a Bengali restaurant in New Jersey called Korai Kitchen Bengali is I'm Bengali by the way, it's a place right next India and I ordered food from them And actually it was really far, so I had my assistant drop it off and the packaging was awesome, there's a little note and the lady wrote, I'm writing on behalf of my mom who doesn't write English, but thank you so much for ordering from us, hyphen, you know, team cry, you know, and I posted it on Instagram on how awesome this packaging was and the food was and, you know, they reposted it and we had like a small moment, like six months later, I see them in my inbox inquiring if they need Lunchbox.
[00:18:04]
And I jumped on a call and said, you don't need lunchbox. I'll give it to you for free. I don't like, I love your restaurant and your food. You only have location. I'll give it to you for free. You don't need it. You don't need it. You're on toast. You have native ordering there. Turn it on. It matches your menu.
[00:18:18]
It's the easiest. It's the least friction. Turn it on. Right. I believe they were on square or toast, whatever it may be. But my point is you can do a lot with what you have. Right. You can do a lot with what you have. Make the best out of what you have. You don't need what a like the difference between and you know this more than anyone else.
[00:18:34]
The difference between that one unit and 10 unit is massively different, right, like a lot changes operationally, and then 10 to 50 is the next milestone, right? So you don't need a enterprise tech when you have a single location. You need to pay the bills and make sure you're testing things out. So the first thing I would do if I was a restaurant operator is go on marketplace and see if people are even ordering my food. Oh, they are? Okay. All right, cool. Then I'll go do native.
[00:19:01] Josh Sharkey:
How do you find that out? How do you find out if you're an operator, if someone's ordering your food from, you mean like because you have DoorDash and things like that?
[00:19:10] Nabeel Alamgir:
Just turn it on and see if you're even discoverable. Yeah. What is it? Why? Okay. If you're being discovered, great. Let's figure out why. If you're not being discovered, let's figure out why. Is my food not traveling well? Is the packaging bad? Is it my words, my pictures? First, play that game. Experiment there as a digital marketer. Or make your kids, or someone do that part, right? But first see if there's a demand. You know, supply and demand.
[00:19:32]
After that, I would go on, do something first party. And for first party, I'd just do web first. You don't need an app. Everyone doesn't need an app. We have customers on our system that doesn't need an app. You know? So. You need to first pick what's right for you. And for a single unit operator, the best thing is to have your own first party ordering and just show more love when someone is ordering from that site.
[00:19:52]
A little extra note, a little extra promo. Grubhub and those contracts say you cannot offer deals to come to first party. They're not checking in a small time. They're not checking, but go and just talk to your community and your community will be your repeat business. And as you scale and open a hundred more location, hopefully we can explore a Lunchbox and all the way and all these other enterprise companies.
[00:20:13] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. I don't know if you, by the way, if you don't know this answer, it's totally fine. I just, I thought you might know the stats on this. Do you have any sense of like what percent of the country is actually doing native digital ordering? Like, you know, where they're getting orders on their actual. Website or app versus none at all?
[00:20:31] Nabeel Alamgir:
So the number one way people are still ordering delivery in the country is via the phone, believe it or not. I look at the stats and blows my mind. That's why we just acquired a call center. So we have a bunch of call center technology. Now we're doing with Papa John's, but number one is still phone calls.
[00:20:46]
That's it's crazy, you know? Yeah. Number two is marketplaces, number three is native. I don't have the exact numbers, but that's the stack rank.
[00:20:54] Josh Sharkey:
Got it. Yeah. We had like this off site with my team a couple weeks ago, and we ordered Where'd you go? It just had, it was like in a boardroom in New York. Our, all team one is in Miami in a couple weeks.
[00:21:03] Josh Sharkey:
Shout out Life House Hotel for that. How big is the team now? It's 28 internal. Wow. And we have contractors as well, so we're pretty small still, I think. That's awesome. So anyways, we ordered from this restaurant on the street. This was in, uh, like the Nomad area, you know, they left out a couple of things in the order.
[00:21:18]
And so I called the restaurant and it was 100 percent a call center in the Philippines. I'm like, this is crazy. Like I'm going to the restaurant. You would think they have like a, you know, it's like down the block. And this is just like a, you know, just a definitely like some single units with Thai spots, good food.
[00:21:34]
I don't remember the name, but like they were getting their calls answered by, you know, a team in the Philippines. I was like, wow, that's actually pretty impressive. You know, instead of employing someone to do it. Then there's, there's actually really cool companies. Now there's one called slang. I don't know if you know about it.
[00:21:48]
That like, I've heard of Slang. Yeah. I don't know much about it, but I've heard it's, I heard it's really good just to sort of do the same thing, but with AI instead of people. But anyways, I'm gonna spend most of the time on Not on, on Lunchbox, but like on you, you're, and you're just the arc of how you've changed the last, you know, I don't know how many years it is since you launched, because to your point, right, you were in a restaurant for 10 years, and now you're the CEO of a tech company.
[00:22:12]
There's not a lot of in between there, right? You had a big learning curve of what it meant to be a founder, to be a founder of a tech company, to be a founder of a venture backed tech company. To be a founder of a venture backed tech company that went through COVID and went through a market crash and things like that, you can call it a crash.
[00:22:27]
So there's a lot, I think that would be interesting to kind of dig into, but what are like, if you had to think about like, what are like the worst decision that you've made in the last five years and the best, do you have a sense of like,
[00:22:38] Nabeel Alamgir:
I have the worst ready. I have the worst ready. Cause you know, we're founders. We think about them often, especially when we accidentally wake up two in the morning and can't go to bed anymore because the brain started again, going remote is my biggest regret. I wish we never went remote. I wish we never went remote. You cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube, but we were a COVID company and.
[00:22:58]
We didn't know any better. Oh, you can hire cheaper talent if you go remote. That was a fallacy. That's a lie. Oh, you can hire cheaper talent if you hire Canadians. That's not true as well. You know, the countries, the salaries have become, you know, the same across the board, no matter where you live anymore, for the most part.
[00:23:14]
And so my biggest regret is going remote. Some of our Top performers are members that live far away that don't live in New York, but I'm still a lot to have regrets. And the regret is I wish we had office. I wish we had that buzz. I wish we had that camaraderie. I wish we got into arguments and went for drinks at the end of the day and figured it out.
[00:23:34]
And I wish we had all of those things, but we don't. So that's my biggest regret.
[00:23:38] Josh Sharkey:
It's so true. Yeah. Once you go remote, you can't change it because everybody's scattered. Where are you going to put your office now? You're going to have three offices? I mean, you can. It's tough. And obviously then kind of defeats the purpose of being remote because it's more expensive.
[00:23:52]
What about like the best decision?
[00:23:55] Nabeel Alamgir:
The best decision I made, I mean, there's so many, no, there's so many bad decisions I've made, but the best decision I think I've made, you know, like the way I formed our leadership team, it's a nice blend of industry leaders, industry, like there's folks like Amy Harmon there.
[00:24:13]
You know, there's folks like Chrissy from spot on, you know, and then there's people who have, or 25 best marketer in the world leads by marketing, head of marketing, 25. Never was a head of marketing before, you know, and it's crushing, right. And our leadership team is like a nice blend of all two groups that just
[00:24:35]
gets along just like, you know, like I, when we in the Monday morning, we're exchanging information, what we did over the weekend and I'll hear the different age groups and different backgrounds share what they're doing. And it's just hilarious to hear how a common mission has really brought us together and has made us better for being so different.
[00:24:52]
And then each other. Yeah. So, yeah. So I'm very proud of that leadership team. They are amazing.
[00:24:57] Josh Sharkey:
This show is brought to you by, you guessed it, meez. meez helps thousands of restaurants and food service businesses all over the world build profitable menus and scale their business successfully. If you're looking to organize your recipe IP and train your team to put out a consistent product every day in less time than ever before, then meez is just for you.
[00:25:17]
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[00:26:07]
I love that man. I mean, I don't know about you, but typically that comes and I have a, I love our, our leisure team as well. Typically that comes at least for me, it did with like. A lot of mistakes before that of wrong, wrong hires. Not because they were the wrong people. Oh my
[00:26:22] Nabeel Alamgir:
God. Yeah. I don't even want to think about the mistakes I made before where the iteration is now this current team.
[00:26:28] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. And what's interesting with that is it can be. The wrong hire that's also an incredible person, but just not for that job or at that time, you know, or for the thing that you need, you know.
[00:26:41] Nabeel Alamgir:
That's my biggest weakness, hiring amazing people, but the wrong stage of Lunchbox. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:48] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you talked about like different ages in the age group and um, you know, I think we're probably at least a decade apart in age.
[00:26:54] Nabeel Alamgir:
I've said this to you always, you're aging like fine wine. I appreciate that man. I've said this to you before, you know I've said this to you when we're not being recorded.
[00:27:01] Josh Sharkey:
I know you have and I appreciate that. But you know, I'm curious because you forget once you get older, what, like the younger part and I love seeing when people start something so early and then it, you know, it kicks off and then they start to learn more from it and grow from it. There's gotta be a lot of advantages. of being a young founder, and there's probably some disadvantages as well.
[00:27:24]
And I have to imagine you have thought about at least a little bit, both of those. I'm curious, like your perspective on what has been helpful about being such a young founder and what are the things that you, that you find actually to be blockers or difficult about it?
[00:27:37] Nabeel Alamgir:
You know, I'm a series of accidental wins and mistakes that have come to the point I have today, somehow stumbled here. And the first thing I do is I love. And give grace to myself for all the things I've done wrong. You know, it's fine. You were doing your best. I wish you did not. I wish you were a little bit better, but you're fine. Stop being so hard on yourself. So that's the first thing I really had to learn to do in 2023.
[00:28:06]
Like that inner critic was very powerful. And I had to be like, can you calm down a little bit? Alright? Like, you're a son of a taxi driver, and a mom who's a Dunkin worker. You're doing fine. Can you relax? Okay? So, like, that's the first thing I'll say, which is, It's easy to go back and look at these things, but I really have to work hard on stop being so negative to myself and, like, start being, like, a little bit kinder.
[00:28:30]
Now, there's so many mistakes I've made and so many things I've gotten right because of my age. I'll give you one, which is I don't know how things are done. So I'm doing them almost from first principle mentality, which is like, this sounds like a good idea. Why don't we do this? Well, that's not how you do that.
[00:28:48]
Why not? Well, that's not how we did it. Why not? So that's an advantage, right? But sometimes there's a reason something was done a certain way and you need to realize that the maturity and the intelligence is realizing when do you use a first principle and when do you go ahead and stick to tradition. I think the smartest person in the room is a person who knows when to pull and push those levers.
[00:29:09]
So, I mean, I see that all the time happen. I think another mistake I made, and this, I'll give you something more explicit, which is when I was building this company and brand, I was very loud, and I was very aggressive, and I was a restaurant operator that was out there talking. And I don't think that's the right tone when you're helping restaurant operators.
[00:29:30]
Okay? Right? Like, I was just being myself. And myself, what I Needed to do is evolve from a restaurant operator to a tech CEO who was a former restaurant operator and that required maturity and Getting my, you know, my butt kicked to realize that there's some growing there to do. And because I'm not just dependent on myself.
[00:29:50]
I'm also, I, there's a lot of team members we have in the company who are dependent on me getting it right and saying the right things and being thoughtful about what leaves my mouth, even if, you know, something will sound better. Any article versus something that I will not.
[00:30:04] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, absolutely. I think about it a lot because this is such a new industry for me. Similar to you, I was a chef and restaurant owner for 20 some odd years before I got into tech. I think the beauty of, and this is not innately because someone is young, but when you're young, you know, you have far less sort of like cognitive biases and you can, and first principle thinking and using intuition to make decisions is what you have, right?
[00:30:33]
That's all you have. And the experience is something that comes later and you can definitely succeed, you know, with that intuition and first principle thinking, especially if you surround yourself with folks that were experienced, right? I've seen that to like sort of remind you, Hey. I love that. But by the way, here's some things that happened historically or some empirical, you know, information you might want to know when you're making that and vice versa.
[00:30:59]
If you are much older and you have a lot more of these cognitive biases because you've been through a lot more and you know, you're less, you know, you might be using somewhat less intuition because you've seen these things and you're making kind of, you know, not rote decisions, but because, you know, sometimes it's dangerous, but that you make decisions are sort of without thought because you've done it so many times.
[00:31:21]
But I think that's okay too, as long as you have somebody that you surround yourself with some folks that are younger and that think outside the box. And so I think that there's beauty in both of them. I do think as a founder, at least as a startup, there's a lot more advantage to having that first principle thinking and intuition because.
[00:31:39]
You have to, I mean, I know it sounds cliche, but you have to disrupt, you have to find something that's, you know, non contrarian and right. And you can't really do that if you're just using, you know, historical information.
[00:31:50] Nabeel Alamgir:
You have to be a little nuts. You have to be. Otherwise you're not investable, you're not going to lead, you need to convince people to quit normally fine job, to come join you for peanuts.
[00:32:03]
How do you do that? If you are not going to break some eggs, right? I think that's what you're referring to. And I think it's very true.
[00:32:11] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. What is taking up the most? I'm out of your time right now, or at least in the last month or two.
[00:32:19] Nabeel Alamgir:
Oh, I'm going to pull up my calendar and I'm going to answer honestly.
Yeah, you can do it.
[00:32:21] Josh Sharkey:
I do the same thing, by the way, but my wife will ask me, what did you do today? I have to look at my calendar. I'm like, I don't remember.
[00:32:29] Nabeel Alamgir:
Listen, I, you think I'm working during the day, honey? I have to, I work at early morning and late at night. Okay. What is taking most of my day? I think it's Q1.
[00:32:37]
So a lot of, so we moved to enterprise early next year. Right. And that's blowing up. And so a lot of enterprise deals are, you know, coming to a finish line in terms of like, we're close to signing them and that requires a lot of travels. So I spent a good chunk of my time traveling to meet this enterprise operators, because they're massive and, you know, they want to see you.
[00:32:57]
Do you want to, you know, build a relationship with you rightfully? So, cause they're betting on you so big and that requires a lot of human touch. So I do a lot of that. I work a lot with our sales and marketing team. To continue and customer team to continue to go ahead and understand what our customers are looking for, what they need.
[00:33:14]
For example, I'm hanging out with my, actually my head of customers in my living room right now. He came in early. We're going to go to dinner tonight. We're going to meet some of our customers. So a lot of like, I'd say like. Uh, coat. Oh, nice. Delicious. And, and Amy Hom is joining us from, you know, former Sweetgreen, Blue Swan, Maine.
[00:33:32]
She's joining us for dinner. She's consulting with us, helping us speak to our customers better. I was a former operator, but even I've forgotten what our customers are looking for, you know? So constantly being in touch and understanding what they're looking for, what they need and having a pulse on it is, you know, what I'm focused on.
[00:33:45]
So a lot of customer facing, half my job and half my job is internal facing, you know, working with our ops team. Working with our onboarding team, our product and technology team to make things better, faster, take customers life faster, you know, work on features that customers want, we design arrow mark.
[00:34:01]
And so we're working on a bunch of things for the Nike campus. That's a lot of new things. So yeah, half my job is internal and half is external and on the road. Yeah.
[00:34:11] Josh Sharkey:
Do you have anything, any tools you use to manage productivity or manage your time?
[00:34:15] Nabeel Alamgir:
Yeah.Yeah. I use, I have two boards like this. I have two boards.
[00:34:19] Josh Sharkey:
What is that?
[00:34:21] Nabeel Alamgir:
It's a board, and I literally, when I finish my task, It's a literal board. It's a literal board. I have two of these. My board that is in my kitchen is my personal board. It has things like finish your AG1, drink your AG1, drink your collagen, nighttime skin care routine, morning time skin care routine, go to the gym, eat 150 grams of protein.
[00:34:42]
So that's my personal one and this is a work one. I'll read you some of them. Cancel meetings. That's one. Cancel as many meetings as you can, because, you know, as a founder, some founders, you know, we say yes to a lot of meetings that we shouldn't. Check on leaders. I check on our leaders every day. So that's another thing I check off.
[00:35:01]
Clean up my text is one. Clean up my reminder app is one. So those are four of them I'll read out to you, but some of them are more like tactical and, You know, hit X number in revenue.
[00:35:11] Josh Sharkey:
So but where is that board? Where did you find that? It's for kids.
[00:35:13] Nabeel Alamgir:
It's for kids. It's for like small kids.
[00:35:15] Josh Sharkey:
Is that a, uh, like, uh, a labeling app thing that, like, how did you put those words on there? Is it I'm a label maker.
[00:35:22] Nabeel Alamgir:
I'm a full nerd. I'm a label maker, dude. I'm a label maker. And, you know, I have, I'm always organizing stuff and, you know, stuff like that.
[00:35:30] Josh Sharkey:
I wish I was more analog than I am. Part of it is because I have terrible handwriting, but. I use this app called Reclaim, it's Reclaim. ai and I've been looking for something like this for so long because I manage my calendar pretty maniacally.
[00:35:44]
My assistant's a big help with it. Yeah. But I block off everything for me. Like if it's not on the calendar, I don't do it. Well, I just assume I won't do it. Right. So I have time for. You know, personal check in. I have time for strategy. I have time for exercise. Everything's in there. And then I can measure as well over time.
[00:36:00]
Like what did I spend my time on? And I love the track, like, you know, every day how I'm feeling. And then I can correlate that to how much time I was spending on X or Y or who I'm meeting with anyways, a lot of that was done through things I had to build and there's this app that I found called Reclaim, it allows you to set priority levels of different types of meetings.
[00:36:17]
And it rearranges your calendar for you, cancels things or moves them back based on priority levels. I love that. And you can create all these habits. So I have like a habit for, let's pull it up because I don't remember. Like I have so many of them. Uh, strategic planning. I have one for writing, right? I write every day.
[00:36:33]
One for weekly team care, where I just reach out to my team and want to, you know, share thank yous and things. Task work, personal check in, meditation, you know, morning email catch up. And it's all there. And the thing, what I was struggling with for so long was. I would block off this time and then nobody could book that.
[00:36:50]
And my assistant would be like, I don't have, you don't have any time in your schedule. Now when someone books something, one of the, we have these different links they can use, it will rearrange. I'll still get the time in the day for the strategy, but it might bump it by 15 minutes or something. It's amazing.
[00:37:04]
I tell everybody about it now because it's filled all the buckets of the things that I needed out of managing time without, you know, being too unintuitive. I love this. I think it's great. Yeah, and I love it. I don't, I don't really talk about it so much. I'm not like, you know, getting paid by them or anything.
[00:37:18]
You're getting paid for this then, Josh? Anyway, so, so you were talking about customers. You know, I'm always curious about this. And you're right by the way, in Bareburger for 10 years, right, Bareburger, and I spent 20 plus years in kitchens, the minute we start building product for restaurants, we're immediately a little bit less connected, right?
[00:37:39]
We're just once removed. So the ability to sort of collect and synthesize feedback is so important. I'm curious, you talk about sort of, you know, first principles, but if you have any like frameworks or tactics you use to synthesize all the feedback that you get from customers in order to build the right product or service.
[00:37:57] Nabeel Alamgir:
You know, we have a board. If you go to lunchbox.com, can I share my screen? I think you can.
[00:38:03] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. I'm going to lunchbox right now too. Has anyone ever done this? No one has. Let's try it. Let's do it.
[00:38:08] Nabeel Alamgir:
Let's do it. Okay. So, so if you go to our website. All right. And you go to the bottom.
[00:38:15] Josh Sharkey:
I love that you're doing this, by the way, this has never been done before on the podcast.
[00:38:18] Nabeel Alamgir:
You can go and like, you can like see like, Hey, are there, can I request features? You know? So we're going to go to a feature request. There's 269 feature requests already. And I can see all the features that are being requested. By customers and our team members and potential new customers. And we are like, all right, what are the top features, you know, let's build it.
[00:38:41]
In fact, when I talk to customers and they tell me, Hey, I really need, you know, loyalty, you know, bank loyalty. I'll go in there myself and I'll put a note in there. Right. So some of these are our customers. Some of these are our employees. You know, Stacy works at team lunch, team Lunchbox. That's our head of customer.
[00:38:57]
So we're having this conversation together, but we're also having them. During drinks, we're having them when we're meeting up for food. And so we're collecting all of that and we're putting it here and we're making it very clear that this is what our customers want, you know, so that's one way we collect data and make that data a little bit more actionable, but more importantly, we're also.
[00:39:18]
You know, using our product, like whenever we launch a restaurant, we're on site, you know, and we're eating, we're ordering pizza and we're complaining about, you know, hey, this printout came out wrong. So I think that's what we did at Operator as Operator the most, which is when you open a restaurant, you were there on opening night, you jumped in and you started making stuff.
[00:39:39]
You know, every operator has done this. You jumped in and you had to clean a table because the line was too long during friends and family night. If we can continue to do that as tech people, you know, we will be better for it. And the way we've been able to achieve that is we hire a lot of former operators.
[00:39:53]
A lot of IT directors work here on our onboarding team, on our configuration team. You know, the IT director of Bareburger works here, the IT director of Sticky's I believe, uh, works here on our product team. So these are people who have opened restaurants. They're not going to let us forget, you know what it means to be a restaurant operator.
[00:40:10]
So that's one of the things we have done to reconnect. But I would say two years ago, we became very techie and very, and I don't think it was great. We became very techie very quickly and then it was something we really had to go ahead and, you know, course correct.
[00:40:23] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. It's funny. I was just having this conversation, well, yesterday or two days ago, Jordan, Jordan Boesch on the podcast from 7shifts.
[00:40:31]
And we were talking about this and, you know, he had a similar approach, but we have the feature request piece as well. I think the difficult part I find is synthesizing that information once it comes in, because you know, we have, most of my team is actually chefs, you know, and restaurant owners, but we have a bias in that we know the product really well.
[00:40:50]
So we know that button is, we know exactly how to get to each place. And customers often, through no fault of their own, will share. The solution that they want and not the problem that they're having. The core problem, right? Like the, you know, like it could mean like, Hey, this is, it's too hard to know, to find this button.
[00:41:09]
Can you move it closer or can you make it bigger or whatever? But the problem might be. That it's, you know, people need to order faster, whatever the thing is. And like being able to ascertain that from all of the disparate feedback you get from all these customers, I'm curious if like your product team has anything that they do to sort of synthesize all those feature requests you get into what is the problem that they're trying to solve and then how you go and build something against it.
[00:41:33] Nabeel Alamgir:
I mean, I tell my product team this all the time, which is, because they will always tell people all the time, tell me the problem, not the solution, you know, and I tell them this all the time, which is you have to earn that, like product teams have to work twice as hard to earn the respect than any other member in the company.
[00:41:51]
And let me tell you why. You're not coding, you don't code, right? You're not an engineer, you know, but you're telling these engineers what to do. The only way that works is you're working twice as hard for them to prepare as much as you can and really go ahead and talk to all the stakeholders. I've talked to these customers, I've talked to the CEO, I've talked to our customer advisory board, I've talked to everybody.
[00:42:13]
So you don't have to, I know you don't want to talk to these people. I've also done. The, you know, I also designed the storyboard. I've also made sure when you, it's time to test it, you'll test it really well. I am your buddy. I'm your friend. Can you just make it real now? Right. I think that's the kind of product person people want to work with.
[00:42:30]
Yeah. I think any other kind of product people you don't want to work with. I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah. But most product people, I mean, it doesn't look like most humans. 10 percent are great, 10 percent are terrible, and 80 percent are so-so in the middle, right? So are product people. So are investors.
[00:42:45]
So are CEOs. So, but all of their. Pitch is the same. Don't tell me the solution, tell me the problem, but I, I tell them you got to earn it. You have to earn it.
[00:42:53] Josh Sharkey:
You're totally right. Especially in the restaurant business. I remember one of our product folks that was like late to a call for a customer and I was like, no, that doesn't happen.
[00:43:02]
As you're saying that, I'm thinking about what is a parallel to a product person in say the restaurant industry? Because like, if you think about it, you know, a chef. Creates a menu, but he's also cooking everything, testing it, you know, coming up with the, with, you know, how he's going to sort of present it and what are the like ingredients used and what he's going to cross utilize it.
[00:43:22]
And he might then have the team actually execute that every day, but they're building it. They're actually building it first. And there isn't really someone that's just like comes up with an idea for a menu, completely specs it out and then has someone else go and execute it. There's no real parallel to that. And it's true. It's such a, it's a very difficult job to add value, you know,
[00:43:43] Nabeel Alamgir:
It's like a founder. Imagine being a founder who never got their hands dirty in the early days. And then, you know, they get to your stage and they're like, you need to do X, Y, and Z. Right. When a founder works really hard in the early days, that becomes a legend.
[00:44:00]
You know, Tony Shoe delivering food, or, you know, Steve Jobs in the garage, making those keyboards one at a time with his girlfriend and Wasniak and others, you know, when founders work their butts off on day one, that those are legendary stories where they don't, they can now earn it, they have earned the right to now, you know, push their teams hard, you know, imagine a founder who's imagine I did not visit any of the restaurants we work with, and I told our customer success team, you should do that.
[00:44:29]
You know, there'll be like, yeah, great. Thanks. Thanks. Good feedback. And Bill, how often are you on the road? You know? So it's just leading by example, I guess.
[00:44:38] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. And just so that product folks that are going to hear this, no, there are some really incredible product.
[00:44:47] Nabeel Alamgir:
I’ve never met one. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. They are.
[00:44:50] Josh Sharkey:
If you haven't just listened to Lenny Richesky's podcast for like five minutes and you'll find a couple, but all right. So
[00:44:55]
by the way, I'll say one thing and to defend the product, people have been bashing or I've been bashing. I'll say one thing, which is whenever we do something without our product team's permission, we have to redo it.
[00:45:06]
We have to go back and redo it whenever we do it with them. You know, that number decreases significantly more. So we absolutely need them. And we just hired our head of product. Now it's from all, she spent a decade at all, Lisa, and she just joined us and she's just brought in so much. She's been here for three weeks. She's already running the place.
[00:45:22] Josh Sharkey:
Congrats, man. That's amazing. Okay. I've been asking this lately because I was on this. CEO retreat, uh, this, I'm a part of this organization called Hampton and we did this really cool retreat and the facilitator did this exercise that I really loved. And basically the question is, what makes you angry?
[00:45:40]
Like what makes your blood boil? So I wanted to, I'll explain why, but what makes you really angry? Like within your company, like what is the thing that like, just like, you know, makes your blood boil when it happens?
[00:45:52] Nabeel Alamgir:
First of all, Hampton, is this the one that's founded by the million pod? Okay, yeah, he's an angel in Lunchbox. I was gonna join that, so let me know how that goes offline.
[00:46:03] Josh Sharkey:
It's great. I've been in it for a couple years. I love it. I love it. I've had a really incredible experience. You know, I can't speak for everybody, but I've loved it.
[00:46:10] Nabeel Alamgir:
Awesome. So what makes me really angry? Blood Boil. What was your answer as I think about it?
[00:46:16] Josh Sharkey:
So the first thing that came to mind was when someone brings me something and it's not, I can tell that there's a lack of detail and thought put into it. And I had to sort of dig into to why and it sort of just, you know, this distilled down to, you know, some things that make me really, you know, basically the end result becomes like, what is your, what do you value most personally?
[00:46:35] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. But yeah, when someone brings me something and it's,
[00:46:39] Nabeel Alamgir:
I have one. I'm ready. Oh, when people refuse to work outside of nine to five.
[00:46:45] Josh Sharkey:
Why? Why does that make you so angry?
[00:46:48] Nabeel Alamgir:
Because restaurant people, no luxury. They have no luxury. They're, they're working the hardest when we are all relaxing on the weekends, Friday nights, weekends, to serve that industry and say, And maybe from our, like, imagine, like, imagine I worked with a tech, imagine you own a restaurant and you, your POS company is not working.
[00:47:13] Nabeel Alamgir:
Imagine you call your POS company and it's a support chat that will get back to you on Monday. Like that doesn't make sense. Oh yeah.
[00:47:22] Josh Sharkey:
Let me ask you something. That doesn't make sense. Is it, it sounds like it's not a work ethic thing, it's actually more of a respect. Like, that they have, that they don't, that there's a lack of respect for the people they serve and for the restaurant industry.
[00:47:34]
As opposed to, you just not working hard enough. Unless I'm reading it wrong.
[00:47:37] Nabeel Alamgir:
Yeah, it's less about clocking as many hours as you can. Cause that's not sustainable. Like I've, I tell our team, Lunchbox is take care of your health. Take care of your home. That's the, I'll get so much more out of you guys. If you guys do those two things for me, right?
[00:47:53]
So it's not about clocking in the most hour. It's about being flexible with your hours. Just like we should be flexible with a mom who needs to pick up. Their kids in the middle of the day, or, you know, one of our sales leader does hockey coaching, soccer coaching every day at between two and three. Okay.
[00:48:10]
But if our customer needs us at 8 PM or 9 PM or 10, and they have a restaurant opening, or if it's a Superbowl, it's all hands on deck guys. We're all going to be around when a Superbowl, because we have a bunch of amazing wing concepts that depend on us to get that day. Right. Yeah, it's respecting the industry we belong to.
[00:48:27] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, yeah. It sounds, I mean, it was the first thing that I thought of when you said it. Just, maybe just the tone of what you said is that you value respect highly. So anyways, that exercise, it was a longer drawn out thing because we wrote a bunch of things down and mine, you know, I share mine offline, but it was really helpful to understand like personally, what do we value?
[00:48:44]
Which by the way, it doesn't necessarily have to be with the company values, but sometimes they are aligned. Anyways, if you had to ask somebody at Lunchbox, why they work there, what do you think they would say?
[00:48:56] Nabeel Alamgir:
I think they would say, and I've heard this so many times, and I need to hear it, because there's days, I'm sure you don't want to do this, alright, there's days you don't want to do this, or maybe moments you don't want to do this, and when I ask our team, why are you here, or why are you working so hard, what I hear again and again is this is the, this company is their best shot at improving the industry for off premise, and I hear that I don't know if I've said it and they believe it or they say it, and now I believe it.
[00:49:25]
I don't care where the origin came from, but this is the symbiotic relationship we have as a team, which is we think we can really improve off-premise.
[00:49:35] Josh Sharkey:
That's great. That's a great core value to have if they're working there. It's funny, it reminds me, in terms of the restaurant world, many years ago, I think this was like 2004, I was working at this restaurant called Bouley, very famous chef.
[00:49:47]
He's, yeah. And it was the day that we actually. Lost a star and that team, like many restaurant teams, was filled with musicians and, at least in front of the house. You know, like, yeah, front of the house, like musicians, actors, dancers, people going to law school and things like that. And I'll never forget it, you know, Bouley, you know, brought us all to the, into the kitchen.
[00:50:10]
He said, look, a lot of you here. are not here because you want to be in the restaurant business, are not here because you want to build, you know, a four star restaurant. You're dancers, you're musicians, you're actors, you're, you know, whatever you are. But I know this is a really hard restaurant to work at.
[00:50:28]
But if you can give 120 percent at a job that isn't even the thing that you love the most, just imagine how well you'll be able to do at the thing that you do love the most. And it's stuck with me for, you know, it's been 20 years now. That's amazing. Because. You know, you don't always love the job that you're in.
[00:50:46]
And sometimes that's okay. If you know why you're, you're doing it and any job, and it, by the way, in the same, in that same restaurant at the same time, and this was, by the way, at this time, Christina Tosi was working there and Evan Rich and Cesar Ramirez and Dave Santos and PJ Calapa. I mean, there's an amazing team of chefs and, you know, Cesar said something as well, like this was, you know, four or five months in and I was like, it was not a great place to work by the way.
[00:51:12]
But Cesar said something that also stuck with me that was very similar. He's like, look. Any job you have, you're going to find a hundred reasons why it sucks, but only you can make it into a good job. No one else, you know, and if you can take what the thing that you're working on right now and figure out how it's going to make you better, that's how you can be, you know, that's how you can be successful.
[00:51:36]
And I think about it a lot, especially with restaurants, because it can be a transient career, you know, it can be something where you're doing it because you know you're going through, you're getting through college or you're working on being an actor or musician. Sometimes you end up going into hospitality, you know, longer term, sometimes you don't.
[00:51:50]
But in anything that you do, you might be working at Lunchbox, you know, in CS, because eventually you want to go start some other kind of company, and that's fine too, and you might think like, I don't need to know CS so much, I'm just going to do this because I want to experience a startup, but if you can be, you know, the most incredible, you know, customer success rep, you know, that you can, um, Knowing that, like, actually you want to do something else, you're going to be so much better at the next thing, you know?
[00:52:15]
Yeah, I love that. I love that. I do too. I'm pretty sure you're an avid learner, like, you read a lot. Are there things that you, are there measures you take, like, throughout your day, week, month, to try to incorporate learning into what you do?
[00:52:30] Nabeel Alamgir:
Okay, so I am I'm going to share my screen again.
[00:52:34] Josh Sharkey:
Uh, I love this new thing. I'm going to ask people to do this.
[00:52:38] Nabeel Alamgir:
Talk is easy. You share your screen and it'll be about it. Right. Okay. So this is my notion board. Okay. I have everything here. All my hobbies, all the books I read, everything I do for wellness, all my friends, all my frameworks, all my core values, all my journals, my writings, my therapy notes, all my haters.
[00:52:59]
How I modulate emotions. I want to see that one. I know you do. But like, each page is this detail, like, you know, this is the biographies of the people I read and there's a lot of them, you know? And like, you know, I will read about you know, Medici and I'll take notes there. I'll read about Carnegie, I'll read about Bezos.
[00:53:16]
So, I'm constantly learning about And reading about folks because history doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes and founders, you know, we all come in four or five different formats again and again. We just keep on showing up, you know, like you read about all of them and you're like, oh, Bezos and Walton are the same guy reincarnations.
[00:53:35]
You know, Elon is very similar to Benjamin Franklin, how they both had the biggest press at their time, you know, and they both, you know, wanted to go ahead and have publication, wanted to be in government, wanted to be invent, you see them reading about each other. Bezos used to read about Walton, Elon used to read about Benjamin Franklin, and you just see us emulating from our heroes and then also bringing ourselves to the picture.
[00:53:58]
So, so I'm constantly learning, I'm constantly learning about frameworks and systems and, and I'm also constantly failing at applying half of them or more than half of them. So yeah.
[00:54:08] Josh Sharkey:
I love that. I struggle a bit because I read a lot but like I'm a big believer not just because I believe it's more helpful but also just because the way that I operate it's better for me.
[00:54:18]
I'm a big believer in just in time versus just in case information. So meaning like I read something and then I want to You know, take action on that, operationalize it into my, like, world somewhere. Otherwise, I'll forget it, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I take notes and things like that, but it's so hard to, to remember all these things if you don't actually start to use them right away.
[00:54:38]
It's funny, I was reading, um, Genghis Khan. Last book I was on right now, you know, he had this premise of, well, the number 10 sticks out a lot because he was, he would build armies and basically it's such a beautiful lesson in scale is that everything was sort of this denomination of 10 and there were names for each denomination.
[00:54:54]
So like, you know, one person would oversee a group of 10. And then there'd be 10 groups of 10 and one, you know, person, one group would oversee the, you know, all 10 of the groups and one person from that. And then of those 10, a hundred and a thousand and 10,000. And so you had these sort of blocks of like each time, you know, there's this, you know, scale of 10 to 10 times, 10 times 10.
[00:55:17]
And, you know, basically life was at stake, so you were responsible for the ten, you know, groups that you had, or the hundred groups, or the thousand groups, and sometimes by death, right? So if you, and of course, you know, we don't want to kill people, but the notion of using these denominations to think about how to scale a team, a process, was like fascinating to me.
[00:55:37]
And that's what I love so much about, like, we just think that business books, you know, are the ones that are going to teach us these lessons, but you're so right, I totally agree, There's so much about what people do that you can apply to, to, to so many things. Yeah. From cooking to entrepreneurship, to having a podcast.
[00:55:54]
Absolutely. A hundred percent. Well, you know, we talked a lot about you and Lunchbox today. Was there other things that you think I didn't ask you that you wanna share or talk about?
[00:56:04] Nabeel Alamgir:
I think as founders, we don't talk about it enough. I think we're starting to, I hope we are, but. You got to put oxygen mask on yourself before you can help the people next to you.
[00:56:14]
I think boardrooms. Investors and everyone should invest in their founders and taking care of their mental and physical health and founders need to lean in as well. Like you got to take care of your health. I did it all of 2023, like my mental health, going to therapy, building my community of friends.
[00:56:33]
One of the most important things, you know, one of the first things you would throw out the window when you are building a company, you know, and I think if you need to just do those three things, it's so. So profitable. I don't know how else to say it. It's so profitable. What are we trying to do?
[00:56:47]
We're trying to build a great company that can have a massive impact. The best way to do that is take care of yourself, you know? And I, I think we need to talk about that more as founders gotta take care of yourself, the easiest thing to neglect, but just literally the first thing you need to do, the phrase goes.
[00:57:03]
The person who cannot do five minutes of meditation needs 50 minutes of it. That's the best way to, uh, I can summarize this.
[00:57:09] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, I totally agree, man. You know, it's, the funny thing is, you need all three for any of them to be optimized, to be the best, right? So if I look at, you know, health, friends and family, and career, right?
[00:57:21]
Those three things, those are like the three parts of any of our worlds, right? And if any one of them isn't being taken care of, the other two are going to suffer.
[00:57:38] Josh Sharkey:
If you work on, you know, if you work really hard, then you're not going to have a personal life. And if you have a personal life, you're not going to be able to work as hard. And it's not true. Like you have to have all three.
[00:57:59] Nabeel Alamgir:
Yeah. I think in modulate, you can like say, Hey, I'm going to do 20 percent help this year. And I'm going to focus mostly on career because career, like it's the first year of the startup or the second year or a pivotal year, I think you can modulate. I think you're allowed to modulate.
[00:58:13]
Right. But I think what you're not allowed to do is just completely say, Oh yeah, I'll pick that up next year. Oh, yeah. Mental health. I'll take care of that in seven months from now. I think, I think modulation is welcomed, but more than anything else, if founders understood investing in themselves is the best investment they can make in their employees, their team members, their companies, if investors also understood that, I think every boardroom would be talking about this and every boardroom should talk about this.
[00:58:37] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, I think that's right, man. We have a board meeting next week. I'll talk about it then.
[00:58:41] Nabeel Alamgir:
You gotta bring someone else in. You can't talk about your own mental health. You gotta bring someone else to pitch it, you know? Yeah, that's probably true.
[00:58:47] Josh Sharkey:
This was awesome. I'm really grateful for the time and grateful to, you know, to have you sharing some more of your, you know, your background and on Lunchbox.
[00:58:55]
And I'm also just like so, it's silly to say because I'm not anything other than we slightly know each other. I'm just so proud of what you've built because I saw it from when it was just an idea. And you were hustling to get people to, you know, to say yes to what it is today. So thanks and congrats. And thank you.
[00:59:14] Nabeel Alamgir:
Thank you and more than anything else, thank you for. I never do anything this long, so I really got comfortable and was able to talk and I really forgot we were recording for a little bit. My point is, thank you for creating this space and we don't hang out enough. I feel like we've been checking in on each other religiously, and I feel like there's some camaraderie there.
[00:59:35] Nabeel Alamgir:
And I'm just, the love is real. And I'm excited for everything you guys are doing as well.
[00:59:38] Josh Sharkey:
All right, man. Well, I appreciate it. And we will see each other in real life soon. Let's do it. Let's do it.
[00:59:48]
Thanks for tuning into The meez Podcast. The music from the show is a remix of the song Art Mirror by an old friend. Hip hop artist, fresh daily for show notes and more visit getmeez.com/podcast. That's G E T M E E Z dot com forward slash podcast. If you enjoyed the show, I'd love it if you can share it with fellow entrepreneurs and culinary pros and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to your podcasts.
[01:00:12]
Keep innovating. Don't settle. Make today a little bit better than yesterday. And remember, it's impossible for us to learn what we think we already know. See you next time.