Free food!

inner at Daniel is nice, but there's just something about free food. Somehow it tastes better. It combines that feeling of getting away with something with the joy of food the way ham goes with cheese, peanut butter with jelly, beer with anything...

Unless, of course, the free food is something you don't like or can't eat. Then you're not only SOL, but you have to pony up for food elsewhere. A travesty.

Here's Giusto's offer: Got an iPhone? Live in the Charlotte, NC area? Want free food? Sign up for our beta here and we'll craft something for you according to your food preferences. Already signed up for the beta and want to test it out? Then tweet #freefood! at @appgiusto and we'll do the same.

Sunday Cookin'

Since starting work on a food tech startup in January I have spent significantly more time on the tech and less time on the food. Since then I've prepared old dishes over and over. My girlfriend hasn't said, "Spinach and sausage pasta...again?" yet, but her enthusiasm over a new dish the other night resounded loud and clear. I hear you, girl.

All the tech time has meant a lot of me sitting on my ass at the computer. By Sunday I need to shake up the routine, get off my ass, and step away from the machine.

So I'm setting aside Sunday afternoon as time in the kitchen. A good day and time to put on some music and to make pizza dough for Wednesday night, stocks for risotto and other dishes, sauces or butters to doll up poultry, and maybe even a little pastry to get us through the week.

It's also a good time to prep for Monday night Giusto meetings with the rest of the team. We've allocated Monday nights as our get shit done time. While Adah, Becca, and Sophia focus on usability testing, marketing, and SEO in the living room, I make dinner according to their Giusto profiles. It gives us a chance to test Giusto, spend time together, and make progress all at the same time.

If this leads to empty plates on Monday night, Giusto's done it's job.

Marea's Pinstripes

As a kid I wanted to play second base for the Yankees. I knew centerfield and shortstop were long shots, but second, second I had a chance. If Billy Martin could play second, I reasoned, with nothing but spit and vinegar so could I.

Needless to say, second base for the Yankees didn't pan out. But a few years ago I got to cook at Marea in Manhattan and for me that was like playing second base for the Yankees.

That first year at Marea was like playing on the 1927 Yanks. We had guys who had come up with our Executive Chef Michael White (Jared Gadbaw, Adam Dooling), the most decorated Italian chef in the U.S.. We had cooks who had come through Gramercy Tavern (Asi Maman, Ronen Tenne). We had Jimmy Everett who had worked at WD-50 under Wylie Dufresne. David Chang brought us Jared Forman. Most of pastry had done stints under Johnny Iuzzini at Jean Georges (Heather Bertinetti, Jade Riggin, et al). And that's just some of the back of the house. Never mind the front of the house.

But winning is not what I admire most about the Yankees or why I enjoyed my time at Marea. I admire the Yankees for the standard that they set, the standard they play up to, and how timeless they are whether it's their uniforms which have never changed, their team before player philosophy which translates into no players names on their jerseys, or their respect for tradition.

For the first time in my professional career, I found the same ethos at Marea. A high standard that won us the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in the U.S., three stars New York Times, and two Michelin stars. A standard that we played up to whether we were serving a handful of people that first summer or 300 after the reviews hit. And, believe it or not, our aprons.

Unlike many famous uniforms - be they for athletes, the armed forces, police or fire - most people never saw us cooks in our dark blue navy aprons. But for me, putting on that apron felt like putting on the pinstripes.

Each morning I walked across 58th Street to Marea where I entered through a service entrance, my ears full of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" as I'd fist bump the rest of the staff as we prepped for service. I walked tall across the city knowing I worked at one of its best restaurants and I took pride in the work we did.

This fall I am honored to recreate Marea's menu at my alma mater, Davidson College, for a night. And, thanks to Amador Acosta, Chef Michael White, Omar Hanhan, and the staff at the Altamarea group, I am happy to put this back on.

Pick UP!

Giusto

Over time we molt skins, we live multiple lives, and we change direction. The same applies for businesses. Long-time insurance behemoth Lloyd's of London started as a coffee house. Nintendo started out selling playing cards and vacuum cleaners. And long before it sold motorcycles, Suzuki moved looms. Likewise, the time has come for Cookbook Calculator to shed its first name and purpose and to take on a new identity more in line with its focus.

Somewhere along the line people got the idea that Italians make good food and that they like to eat it together. While my family's gatherings typically occur around religious events, what brings people out is the time with each other and the food they have brought with them out of love. A little something of everything so that everyone had something to eat, whether it was finicky eaters like me as a kid or cousins that had gone vegan, there was something there for you that was made just right.

While short on communal eating, cooking at Marea taught me about the high standard of culinary excellence. The chefs at Marea taught me how to make food "giusto", just right. Now I can not only bring something to family events, but can make sure it's just right.

Or so I thought.

With a big family it's hard to keep track of who's eating what, who's on what diet, and who has what allergy. It's become harder to make something just right for everyone.

Which leads us from Cookbook Calculator to Giusto. The business' focus has changed, and now, so has our name. We desire to help people eat together, to share the foods they love with the people they love, and to cut down the $25 billion caregivers in the U.S. lose annually from either lost wages or in health care costs due to trips to the emergency room for food allergies. That's time and money that could be spent eating well with good people instead of interrupting Thanksgiving with an epipen. That's Giusto.

Kung Fu

If I neglected my fantasy baseball team and QuizUp as much as I have neglected this blog, my girlfriend would be pretty happy.

Two months of intensive coding courses will do that. I've studied seven languages, but nothing like computer code. As a classmate said three quarters of the way through our eight week course, "It now feels less like Chinese and more like Portuguese." Well said. Total mind fuck, but when you come out of it and start to realize you can start downloading existing knowledge straight to your brain like Neo, watch out.

That program done, it's on to the next. In this case, Queen City Forward's summer startup incubator program. Another eight weeks, another sprint in the larger marathon of life leading up to Pitch Day on August 6th.

We continue to search for our user and our customer, but we're closer. We'll spend a lot of time the next eight weeks on that hunt. In the week ahead we'll canvas the companies that reside in Packard Place and then follow up with the local take-out places that they frequent. Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and its use of D-Day as a metaphor has helped us visualize the process. While we're not ready to storm Normandy yet, the metaphor is apt and provides a clearer path forward.

The product continues to evolve as we continue to talk to people and feel out demand and interest. We've drawn up a series of wire-framed screens that we presented yesterday at a local farmers' market to solicit feedback from strangers which lead to a number of good referrals.

It isn't Kung Fu yet, but it's progress.

Good Science as Good Business

We’ve heard the scientific method since grade school: ask a question, conduct background research, construct and test a hypothesis, analyze data, and draw conclusions. Repeat for maximum results. This method is frequently repackaged to fit other disciplines. Most recently, thanks to Blank and Dorf, the latest discipline is the business sector. The scientific method controls variables and determines optimum results through step-by-step testing. As lab researchers frequently states, “data is data” and it is hard to argue with the facts.

Sadly, it’s not hard to ignore facts. Unfortunately, there are graveyards of nascent companies that have failed to put their businesses through the rigors of the scientific method or to listen to the facts they encounter. Rather they've fallen in love with their products or are afraid to talk to people about them. 

Cookbook Calculator has learned early on from the mistakes of these failed ventures. The data we collect drives our future business. Background research is conducted by talking with potential users and customers.

Instead of donning white coats and dealing with beakers, we’re setting up tables, picking up the phone, getting in the car, or showing up at offices and simply talking to people. Along the way we learn which questions resonate with people, which fall short, which need to be tweaked. It’s business evolution in real time.

As most research scientists will point out there is often a great disparity between the projected results and the actual results. How well one learns from this disparity and can figure out a way to minimize the gap quickly, cheaply, and effectively is now proof of a good entrepreneur. It involves not being afraid of failure, but going after a result full force.

For us, this involves investigating the disparity between what we perceive as a good idea and what the needs of a community are. Chances are high that it will be necessary to reevaluate the original set of hypotheses, that’s how good science works. And that’s how we plan to make good business work too.  

Lean, But Not So Mean

In the past two weeks we've read and taken notes on Eric Ries' The Lean Startup and Ash Maurya's Running Lean, two books that focus on helping startups economize time and financial waste. The former does a particularly good job of laying down the groundwork of what it means to work lean while the latter offers a more specific blueprint.

No matter which you read, they agree on the most important first step - getting out of the building to talk to customers -  and what the biggest mistake is - building a product before even listening to said customers.

To that end, we are now beginning a startup's most important phase - customer discovery. And we'll do it by dipping our toes in the customer waters by directly reaching out to and talking to locals.