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NK Nick Kokonas On My First Million

“You don't simply go like, well, here's the recipe and it should taste like this. You have to know what great is. And knowing what great is is making mostly shit 99% of the time.”

My First Million · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“You don't simply go like, well, here's the recipe and it should taste like this. You have to know what great is. And knowing what great is is making mostly shit 99% of the time.” — Nick Kokonas, My First Million

Kokonas, who built a restaurant business with chef Grant Achatz, on what he told culinary graduates: show up at 6 a.m. and make 25 sauces. He gets emails from young founders who want help with a logo and a name, and tells them to go make the 50 sauces first.

My First Million · 2026-10-26 Listen to the episode → More from Nick Kokonas → More Startups & Venture quotes →

Transcript

My First Million Around 59:24 into the episode
Nick Kokonas

And also, like, no one really knows how to make it. Those recipes were kind of miserably, you know, they went down to the gram. That's for sure. And that was what I told the commencement. I was like, if you want to be a great chef, you show up at 6 a.m. and you make 25 sauces. Yeah,

Shaan Puri

I better see 20 sauces on the counter with blue tape.

Nick Kokonas

You don't simply go like, well, here's the recipe and it should taste like this. You have to know what great is. And knowing what great is is making mostly shit 99% of the time. And then you go like, oh, well, this one's kind of, I don't hate this one. That's probably actually really good. You know? And I get a lot of people that blind email me. My email's out there in the public and I'm fine with it. And I get a lot of like young entrepreneurs going like, hey, I've got this idea and I want to do this or that. And I was like, cool, go do it. Come back to me in five weeks. I don't care about your logo. Right. Like, everyone wants to make the logo. Right. You know, logo first, name for it. I got a great name for a restaurant. Awesome. That's terrific. Make the 50 sauces. You know.

Shaan Puri

Have you ever read that book, Art and Fear? I think they use this pottery class example. Do you know this story? I don't. Perfect example for this. So the story is there's a professor in Florida at university. I think he was actually teaching a photography class and they changed it to pottery, but…

Nick Kokonas

like I know where they are. So you know where they are.

Shaan Puri

At the end of the semester, obviously, the volume people made more volume. They also made the better pots. Of course. And like, you know, basically, this is like this principle is just everywhere. It's so obvious.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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