Acquired - Adapting Episode 1- Canlis

0:00It's kind of like the word pick six. I don't that just like happened a few years ago and now everybody says it watch. Now the like ESPN is like pick six, pick six. And when it doesn't happen, they're like, we could really use a pick six right now. Totally. No one said that 10 years ago. Get out. Welcome to season six, episode four of acquired the podcast. Ben, I think you're on autopilot. Yeah, sorry, muscle memory.

0:38All right, listeners, we are coming to you in a time of enormous change and upheaval. The coronavirus has spread around the world, challenging global health systems, bringing economies to their knees and changing daily life for everyone seemingly overnight. Given this, it just seems irresponsible to stay business as usual over here and put on our normal acquired episodes for you all. So we're changing acquired. For the first time ever, we're taking a pause from normal episodes.

1:07The world doesn't need acquired right now. People normally tune in to hear us talk about stories behind great technology companies and what goes into building them, but these aren't normal times. What the world does need right now is stories of great leaders and how they and their organizations are responding to what might be the biggest moment of change we've ever seen. So we're going to take everything that we've put into acquired over the years. Our format.

1:32our infrastructure, and the way we can reach all of you, and we're going to put our full way behind this. So starting today, we're pausing required and we are launching adapting. Adapting is a series all about doing just that, showing leadership and changing to fit what the world needs right now, not what it needed last week.

1:50So with adapting, we're going to take a shallow dive, a more shallow dive at the beginning of each episode into the history of an organization. But our focus is really going to be on the present and on the future, not the past. We also won't be grading. Adapting requires taking risks and putting yourself out there. And anyone who's doing that right now is forever and a plus in our book. Yeah. Yeah, David. I think we were just talking about this, but I'm excited about this. It just feels right in in this moment to do this.

2:20Totally. Listeners, we are making some important changes to the acquired community. If you haven't joined our Slack, you can sign up on the acquired website and find all the announcements there. And we're doing some sort of new and pretty cool things in there. If you're not yet a limited partner, now is the time to join. In addition to LP episodes, we are adding a community component to the LP program.

2:42So last week we had our first group Zoom call with everyone who's shut in at home. And it was really fun and therapeutic to get to talk with everyone. So we've decided to make it a regular monthly thing as part of the limited partner program. So we'll be announcing more details on that in the LP show. And in the meantime, you can sign up at glow.fm slash acquired by clicking the link in the show notes below. And lastly, David and I feel very strongly that money should never be a reason that a single person can't become an acquired LP. So we were talking about this beforehand, especially when introducing this new sort of community hangout component. If you can't afford a subscription, especially as we all respond to this pandemic together, even if you already are an LP, just shoot us an email, introduce yourself and we'll take care of you. Yeah, we feel super strongly about this. We want everyone who wants to be part of this community to be able to.

3:37Shoot us, no. Yep. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

3:52Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm.

4:18for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legora's bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

4:47And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves when they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor they win 70% of the time LaGora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries and crazily they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR in about 18 months truly insane numbers and that is the real test

5:40Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Now what is today's episode actually about? Well, we are doing an episode on a topic that we never thought we would do on the show, a local restaurant.

6:10but it is so much more than that. Indeed. And we think our guests' words are very inspiring and super important today. So without further ado, please enjoy our conversation with Mark Canless of Seattle's Canless Restaurant. All right, listeners, most of you are aware that restaurants are among those hit the hardest from our current health crisis. Canless is leading the way in adapting to provide a product in need, delivery food.

6:38saving jobs and ensuring the continuation of the business through trying times. Many are asking as a city, country, and a global community, can we do this? And as Mark said in the Seattle Times earlier this week, Hell yes, we can do this, and we're going to do it with burgers and bagels. So to introduce Mark, I'm going to borrow a line, or a little bit of Mark's bio from the Canless website because I find the pros just poetic.

7:05Mark Canless is the second of three sons. He grew up in a restaurant family. He joined Canless in 2003 after graduating from Cornell University and serving as a captain in Air Force special operations. He met his wife Ann Marie, well-opening famed restaurant tour, Danny Myers, fifth restaurant, Blue Smoke in Manhattan. Returning to Seattle, Mark spearheaded the generational transfer and brand modernization that has garnered the family business national acclaim as one of the finest restaurants in America. He now owns and operates canless with his brother, Brian. He and Anne Marie reside on Queen Anne with their three children. And as for canless food and wine magazine has called it one of the 40 most important restaurants in the last 40 years, they have received 22 consecutive wine spectator grand awards and been nominated for 15 James Beard Awards and won three of them. Welcome, Mark. Thank you.

8:01It's good to hear. Also, the luxury of when you write your own bio, you can kind of make yourself sound good. I hope I haven't inflated that in any way, but thank you. I was going to say the most important thing for Ben and for me is I know both of us have had many special memories at Canless, so thank you guys. No, I'm honored to be on the show. All right, David, take us in. History and facts. Yeah, well, so for anybody of our listeners who are in the Seattle area, probably many who, even many who aren't. You already know a lot about Canless, but Mark, can you give us a little bit of the history? I mean, it's a very, very special place. This isn't just another restaurant. Maybe can you go back and talk about your grandfather's story and Hawaii and Pearl Harbor? Sure. You know, we, if we're going to go all the way back, I run this restaurant with my brother, Brian. And we very much feel like this is the tale of a couple different grandfather's. It's of the malgamation of

8:57four generations of canlessers doing restaurants. Our great-grandfather cooked for Teddy Roosevelt after his presidency on an African safari. I was picked up at a hotel in Egypt and invited to come along and be a steward on that whole thing for a year and a half. So really it starts there. He and my great-grandmother would come to the United States somewhere in 1909, 1910. They started a restaurant in Stockton, California at that time and had a bunch of kids. One of them, Peter Candles, started this restaurant, Candles in 1950. So, that was my grandfather. He would pass away in the 70s and my mom and dad ran this for 30 years. Brad and I have not been doing it since 2003.

9:48in so many ways we feel like we're just giving the hang of it. So, slow learning. But, you know, more or less 100 years of trying to cook for people. There's a pretty cool military history with the restaurant and starting with Peter too, right? Yeah, so then on the other side of the family are a whole bunch of folks who have served in the Armed Forces. And that just continues to be something that we're really proud of in this family and something that many of us have chosen to do.

10:18and represent, I think some of the sweetest years, at least for my own life. And I would say that the same is true for my dad and my grandfather and my brother. So I was in the Air Force, so with Brian, dad was the Navy. My grandfather was a Marine for 43 years. I don't think you can do that anymore, but back then you could. And so we have, yeah, that's just been a part of our family story. And to be completely honest, a very large influence on the way that we lead. Last, yesterday we were running this crazy drive-through with cars everywhere, shut down traffic, and I get a phone call, and I am hearing it, so the thing just comes straight into my head, it's as if the phone is ringing in your brain. So I just answered it because I thought it was our road team. And it was the kernel that I worked for 25 years ago, Colonel Miller, and a man that just had such remarkable influence on the way that I lead. And it was random. I haven't talked in years.

11:17I was like, Colonel Miller, no way. I've been talking about you to everyone because in so many ways I feel like you prepared me for this. And it's not about adapting your company, but the leadership, I think, the way the military teaches you to prize your people is just, you know, I just learned so much in my time and service. So that's just been a gift to us. That's great. So the first iteration of Canless the Restaurant was on Honolulu.

11:47He grew out of the USO after Pearl Harbor, right? You know, he'd left the place and stalked him. He'd grown up there and he wanted nothing to do with restaurants. The way his parents were doing, he ends up in Hawaii. He's still in dry goods when Pearl Harbor happens. He remembers zeros flying over. He was flying tennis in the morning. Like everybody, like so many people in Honolulu at the time, they can all head to the base and try to do what they could. My grandfather had quite a healthy self-esteem.

12:17Just code for, you know, he sounds like an entrepreneur. Yeah, there you go. That's the thank you. Yeah, that's a nice euphemism for how to largely go. And at some point, he finds himself talking a lot of smack inside the USO about the quality of the food. And chef gets so upset that he kind of throws a towel at him and says, you need to do a better job. You know, you try it. Which of course he does. And by the end of the world, he's running all of the food on base for the USO. It's about kind of between 3,000 and 5,000 meals.

12:46So maybe in some way, this drive-through is us getting back to our sort of, I don't know, high-volume roots if you will, but that's what happened, and then right after the war opened a restaurant on a beach that was a little less known before the war, and certainly than before now, called Waikiki. So he had that restaurant in 1947, it was called the Boiler, and then he came to Seattle in 1950.

13:16context set for our listeners a little bit. When you say getting back to our high volume routes, for folks not from Seattle, canless is fine, fine dining. What does normal volume look like and what is the adapted volume look like? I don't know. I feel like I live in a bubble and I don't really understand the real restaurant business. But in the world of, okay, let's just try to understand fine dining for a second because I think it's a funny term.

13:41We consider fine dining just to be the most considered form of caring for somebody with food and hospitality. For us, we're considered to be a massive fine dining restaurant in the world of fine dining. 12 to 15 tables is pretty standard. We have 33. But on a busy night, the most guest we can serve is somewhere around 150 to 200. I have 115 employees to make that happen.

14:10We are a model of inefficiency and that's just six dinners a week that's all we're doing so I say that like because I just want people to know just exactly like and not open for breakfast not open for lunch now no no no yeah 115 people to figure out dinner and there's always if not maybe there's like a couple hours a day where there's someone not there but when you talk about that 115 people it's like 2 a.m. to bake bread or something a day we don't use our kitchen. So it takes us 20 hours to open for what is essentially five hours of dinner time service. So a lot of prep obviously goes into that and yeah sure you're baking bread and setting things up sometimes to take a couple days to make. But today we served you know about 1200 people through the drive-through. We served about I don't know somewhere in the range of 300 people.

15:05for breakfast tonight. We'll send a couple hundred dinners out for delivery. So it's a much different impact for us. And we're not exactly set up for it. So we're trying to figure that out as we go. But today was a day of rest for us. It felt so every day this week, we've opened a new restaurant concept. We started on Monday with a drive through Tuesday. We added bagels and yesterday we added at home delivery so today we were just sort of refining some of those systems again and was kind of nice just to just to run them and see how we could tweak so let's get right into you know this show is adapting it's now 70 years that your family has run canless fine dining and in two weeks really since you started planning you've thrown that out the window and now you're doing these three different things like can you walk us through when was the moment you realize that

15:55this was going to happen and you needed to change. A couple weeks ago now my wife and I were in New York City doing something for the James Beard Awards and we got the news that Seattle had its first case and we went back to the hotel and sort of talking through like you know this thing's coming it's here it's here in Seattle and what does that mean? You know what's it mean for our family what does it mean for Not just our marriage and our own children, but our extended family. I have parents who are in their 70s. And what does it mean for the restaurant family, for the staff? And a couple of days later, back at home, we had a meeting as a team and we just said, you guys, let's really think through this a little bit while we were having that meeting. King County or Governor, I can't even remember what it was, but someone official announced.

16:47had this live stream and kind of came on and said, it is much bigger deal than we thought. And you know, it's like at first you just kind of have it's like the sucker punch to the system. You've got the wind taken out of you a little bit. And then pretty quickly we realized that it would be just as risky to do nothing as it would to do something really radical. And if we were going to live into our values.

17:11Then, you know, every once in a while, that really is probably going to cost you something. And in this way, it was going to cost shutting down what was still a profitable business for the unknown of opening up three new ones. And the reason we're doing three is because, again, it just took that many ideas to get all of my staff up to having all the hours they would have normally had. And that was the goal here. So, we started with the drive-through. For those that don't know, we're a fine dining restaurant.

17:40Looking this direction, but if you turn around, we're on a really busy road. And that's not ideal. No one would plan that out these days. But we just said, OK, what do we have? Like, what starting with what do we have to be thankful for? And then what assets are out of disposal here? If we started from scratch, how would we play this?

18:03We were, I remember watching the live stream. We were all sort of huddled on the couch there at the team. There's seven of us on the phone in this meeting. This is like in the meeting and we do these like three hour off sites and we go to one of, oh, somebody's homes. We can like kind of feel what it's like to be welcome into their home personally. So we're sitting on Marin sofa and which is not set for person sofa. It's like a three or four person sofa. We're all kind of like huddled and watching this thing and Yeah, I think it just hit us that like the game isn't up. Like wait a second. This isn't over. This is just beginning. And I think we'd all gone in with the sentiment of helplessness. If we're honest, maybe hopelessness, I think there was a feeling of, okay, I got to batten the hatches. I got to hunker down. I got to, you know, and...

18:55um protect yeah protect and that's a lousy strategy in a lot of things soccer being one of them um like you see it in sports all the time when when when an entire team sort of switches the defense and loses their offense like suddenly you're like ah don't do that wait a minute like keep playing your game and for us we're like if we're gonna keep playing our game we just need to admit that the game changed And the game now currently today, and this is two weeks ago, was no one understands the six-foot rule and no one understands what is socially acceptable. We don't understand if we should be shutting down schools and public places or if that is building a fear that, right? So this is happening so quickly, but so we just said, well, today is what we know at that moment that the game had changed. We just got the sense that it was going to.

19:48Yeah, it hadn't yet, but it was like the writing is on the wall and I think nobody wanted to actually say that out loud But it felt that way a couple of weeks ago and so well I can tell you from the outside the way it sort of felt is you made a more drastic move earlier than Most places like I think in the next week a lot of places started trying to figure out what does it mean for us to do delivery but I will say from the outside the way it looked was And frankly, part of what inspired David and I for this was, oh my god, that was decisive. And that was severe and extreme and risky. Like you, you know, you guys, I wish I could take credit for that. Let me tell you where a lot of that credit belongs. First off, we have an incredible board of directors and some advisors who are just remarkable sounding boards for us. Both of our wives were really key into sort of speaking into

20:45how we were perceiving the world. And I think in this time, it was a time of just great perception, trying to understand and make sense of what we were hearing, how it pertained to us and our team. But really, when we launched this with the executive team, we said, you know, this thing could work, that's to say, there's a chance the boat is taking on water, and there's a chance it might sink. And also, there's a chance it's a lifeboat on the end.

21:13Well, someone just go to the end of the ship and see if there's a lifeboat. If that's kind of what that meeting felt like, and somebody came back and said, you know, as a turn of that, there was a lifeboat on the back of the ship. Like, we could all get in it, right? And so I was like, huh? So we sat on that as a team for about 24 hours. The next 48, two days later, I was having dinner with our staff. And we're all sitting around having family meal, talking this through. And I just said, you guys, let me just tell you where my head's at.

21:41I'm scared to tell you because I don't know what it means. But this is what we're thinking about as a team and it would mean all of you need to re-volunteer to work here. They would mean all of you choosing to be in a position choosing not to be laid off or temporarily furloughed choosing to actually continue to do this thing. And would any of you be interested? And not only that group of sort of five or six of us sitting around the table, but the next night in a staff meeting announcing it to the entire team.

22:11This is up to you. You don't have to do this. And every one of them saying, we're in. You know, put me in coach. And I think that was just such a boost of encouragement to us as like, if you guys are in, we're in. And let's do this, right? It had like that sort of sentiment to it. It was like, okay, why not? And I think at some point you say to yourself in any time of crisis.

22:38If I have the ability to help, why am I not doing it? And that is what it felt like to us. It felt like this could be an encouragement to the city. It was clearly an encouragement to the staff. And it was for us, just the way through, a way that an untested, untried way. But I don't know, without we give it a whirl. That's awesome.

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24:52I want to talk about communication and language. And the language you guys use, I've always used, but particularly now it's really inspiring. But before we get to that, can we go back to the three concepts you guys are doing, breakfast, the big ol' shed, drive-through lunch, and then delivery for dinner? Where did they come from? There's also a fourth concept coming.

25:18which I'm super stoked about. But yeah, I can kind of walk you through all three of those. The first one was the drive-through. We saw that as being the biggest revenue generator. We have a ridiculous amount of labor here. It's the most expensive thing. And we knew that one of these concepts had to actually work. And so we just, geographically, if you understand the way this restaurant works, you can pull right off of the street, right under our porch, your share.

25:47You can stay in your car and you can roll right on down the driveway. And it was like, that's what we knew we needed that the cleanliness there, the ability to not have any contact with the guest, but still sort of be facing them. And so, yeah, we were embracing our inner drive through as a fine dining restaurant. It was just like, yeah, this is us. Come on, let's just let it out of the bag. And chef can cook a remarkable burger. And we've always joked about doing this sort of traditional salad ours, the camel salad is the to go item.

26:17Like, why not? Like, let's just do burgers and ice cream sandwiches and salad to go. It's like, like, I don't know, sometimes that's all you need. Can you talk about average ticket price for each of these three concepts? And that was $40. So, you know what? We have designed this thing not to make money. I think it's a little bit weird to be...

26:41Let's see, this is a tricky thing. I don't think there's anything unethical about making money in this time. In a certain sense, we have a duty to do so, but mostly as a means of protecting the staff and to be clear, we're only four days in. I don't know if we are. That's to say, the bigger concepts clearly does not make money. It's labor-intensive.

27:07We don't have the equipment to scale that in any way such that we could move that to be a profitable business. We could raise the prices, but that just feels dirty. So the point, again, is to keep people employed. So with burgers, we probably make little extra with bagels. We're definitely losing with dinner as we scale that up. That'll be profitable and somehow if we can get to break even.

27:31Even from the onset, that's what that's what the goal was. It'd be amazing if for the next three months, Candles could not lose money. I think that'll posture us really well coming out of this thing on the other side. And I do think of it as a few months, not just a few weeks. So yeah, bagels came out of the idea of four really busy for lunch. Our expediter happens to be this incredible woman from the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

27:56She's a baker and she makes a ridiculous bagel and chef is from Brooklyn and he was like, that's the best bagel I've had in New York City, or in Seattle. We happen to have a bread oven and a shipping container and it was like a no-brainer. So we just opened the bagel shed and we're doing everything bagels with fried eggs and homemade sausage and cheese. Can you sell the bagels as an add-on to dinner for breakfast at home the next morning? What will we say?

28:25They have a good idea. We sell out of bagels in under an hour. So it's a full-time crew of eight making these things, and it lasts, that whole idea lasts an hour. So we actually thought about intentionally slowing the line so that, because again, the idea is to keep everyone employed here, but no, we've been blown through them too greatly. So we're right now, we're looking at taking over another bakery that is closed, and maybe we can use their space and cascade a little bit higher somewhere.

28:54Yeah, I did see something is like you did some message on your website this morning like unfortunately bagels are sold out as of 8.37 a.m. Yeah, yeah, I think I'm going nuts. So the last concept of just doing family meal at home, you know, we cook an amazing family meal for the staff. That's the meal that twice a day chef prepares for our team. And we always joke about like one of the best restaurants in the city actually being countless as family meal. Like it's so good. The pastry chef is making Cobblers and the bartenders are like making homemade sodas and chef is like, hey, this is my mama's meatloaf and this is like enchilada from Niko's and French and prepping all that and it's so good and it kind of kills us that the rest of the city doesn't get to see what these guys are capable of outside of fine dining and so we just thought, okay, well that's a no-brainer. Like why don't we just keep making family meal? We don't need a big menu.

29:46Delivery is tough to figure out and making a transition like this. I think if you can keep it simple, you should. And so we offer one thing a night. The very first night, it was Casale, because we had all these dry-aged ducks. We're like, what are we going to do with ducks? And more arrive a farm saying, are you going to take delivery of ducks going forward and we get a way to say yes.

30:08Tonight it is a rabbit pop pie and glazed carrots and it's headed for lunch. It's insane. It's so, so good. So we just thought, shoot, we can bake all that stuff here, pack it up, throw a bottle of wine in it and my servers, who used to take food from the kitchen to the table or not just taking it to the parking lot and right on down the street a little ways. So it keeps them employed and it keeps my kitchen cooking all night long and it's kind of fun.

30:36That's so cool. Technically, how did you make that happen? You guys adapted, you've been on talk, the reservation and ticketing system for a while. How did you, did you work with Talk to make this happen? Like guys at Talk were awesome. We called them early on and we're like, we have this crazy idea and we're actually trying to like hack the system. So Talk is a reservation system for those that don't know and that those guys are awesome. And we were trying to see what we could do. And we worked the reservation system into a delivery system. And we just about figured out and They they call it like you guys stop it. Hold on a second. We can we can do this give us five minutes five minutes later They call back and they said we stood our company down returning it back on we just called everybody in there in Chicago And we're just gonna work on this so you have the platform and they cranked it out working around the clock for a couple of days and we were able to launch and so that is a mechanism that any restaurant in the country Look now everybody can do drive through

31:30And just the physicality of it is that the location is going to work for them. But any restaurant that company could do delivery and now that we've got the software for it, it's just, it's not, you know, overtly tricky. Can you talk through any restaurant in the country can do delivery? I'm sure there's a lot of folks that own restaurants that are listening to this. What does that take? It takes lower guts and it takes...

31:54just that kind of good old-fashioned restaurant scrappiness that every restaurant tour already has. If you're in this business, I guarantee you have what it takes because it's just the same thing it takes to run a restaurant. It's that. It's a little bit of the willpower just to make it happen. That's what all of us are going through. So all we did was figure out a menu and we launched a website. So someone that knows what to do.

32:23on the internet. That's not me, but our design team drew up a little logo, which is not necessary. We threw a little splash page on top of canless.com, which is also not necessary. You can just post on Instagram having to switch to delivery. So appreciate you supporting us doing this. You can do various versions of it. It's pretty fancy. Our servers have it all on their phones. They get the maps. They get the texts. We can do drop-offs. No contact drop-offs. We can do alcohol.

32:52again, talk about all that possible. But you can keep it really simple. I mean, it takes ordering some boxes and some to-go containers, coming up with one thing that holds hot really well and letting your constituency know tonight is a great night for takeout. So, yeah, we sold out three nights worth of takeout in about 90 minutes. Wow. One question that I have that I'd be remiss if I didn't ask. And I'll give a little context for listeners. So canless is Innovative, not just in the way that over the last 60, 70 years, you guys have changed fine dining, which we haven't talked about on this episode, but Mark's given some great talks that you can sort of read about and the evolution of fine dining and canless is rolling it, but also in doing these wild experiments that you would not expect.

33:38The finest dining in the city to also have a Shake Shack pop up in the parking lot before there was a Shake Shack where you would not have expected to eat you. Can we uncover that a little bit? Do you mind if we dig into why you wouldn't expect a fine dining restaurant to do that? Yeah, definitely one of the reasons I think this transition has been possible for us is that we practice this kind of thing.

34:03And by that, I don't just mean events in our parking lot. I mean, if you want to be a restaurant that is around, let alone relevant or germane to the conversation, you're doing a fair amount of this every year anyway. People always ask, Brian and I, how come you guys haven't opened a second restaurant? I'm like, oh, you just don't know it, but we open a second restaurant about every 18 months.

34:31I would say that's how often the systems inside of Canvas are changing. Those are being rewritten by new employees and employees that have been here 20 years. The idea is that there's probably a better way to do it than the way that we're doing it. We just kind of believe that. I think if you want to matter, you need to earn that right and to earn it. You've got to be working all the time at opening a restaurant that's really good and tonight we're good. Tomorrow will be better.

35:01And that's not news to anyone. I think what happens, that's to say, that's not a strategy that no one's heard before. If you're in business, you get it, right? And maybe thank you to the Japanese who made that a really popular concept in the late 80s and 90s, but we're all sort of thinking that way. What happens is it's really easy to get lazy. It's really easy to start to devalue that as the thing is working. And of course, if you go too far with that, maybe you're enjoying things that still had a a usable lifespan inside of them, right? So you hate to take a system down that would have been an amazing flex, you know, foreseeable future. So that takes a little, I don't know, sorting through. You got to be careful there, but you're welcome to business. It's a delicate balance, right? And less listeners think that, you know, we're just talking about a one-time thing, opening up a...

35:50Jake, I like I went to your restaurant last summer. I want to say a restaurant. I mean parking lot for the Hawaiian nights. Luau and where listeners, it's the largest hot tub you've ever seen. It's up on like a second story deck overlooking. Like you guys opened a little pizza shop and like a multi story like a bar. Which we Which we I think I think we created and then we also had so we built a couple of teaky huts and Had's yeah, but yeah Is the story is am I right you bought the swimming pool on Amazon? Well no, so for we'd like to test things out on staff parties and the goal of a staff party is to throw one that the staff would willingly come to If they had no association with the restaurant, right? So you just said look you guys it's a true day off or it's a true night off

36:48Like do whatever you want. And also, we're going to be throwing this party over here. And it's like totally like no expectation come. Only let me just talk about it. And so, um, anyway, yeah, at some point, we were throwing a luao. Oh, yeah, we had covered the parking lot and saw it. Uh, because we're like, it's not cool to throw party to party not and cement. And wouldn't be close grass. So we saw the thing over and we threw a volleyball party and made a pig roasting. And somebody said at some point, Well, I really love how it needs a beach. So we like brought in sand and then I went on Amazon and I'm like, no way you could buy a pool for like $2,000. Well, that's cheaper than, you know, in the world of staff parties, the stuff adds up quickly. So anyway, bought a pool and we filled it up and then it just kind of like went from there. So then that was a really successful party and we were thinking about fun things we could do over the summer and we thought, well, why don't we just throw the staff party for the city?

37:45And honestly, you guys I thought like a few hundred people would come like who goes to a parking lot to find any restaurant to hang out in a program pool right it gets Yeah, like 1200 people came a night like it was nuts and all of them waited an hour or two to get in so that caught us by surprise a little bit But it was also a ton of fun I'm gonna get DJ on top of a shipping container and underneath your bacon the best pizzas and roasting pigs and I don't know what I have another but it was good. It was fun. So we do like to just sort of think through these things and I think it's a little bit good exercise. Look just because we're fine dining doesn't mean we're not thinking of 99 other ideas to do and to us it's kind of like the Formula One version of putting out a sedan. It's like why don't we go push this as far as we can. Let's see what happens and every one of these projects finds a toyback on our video.

38:37Every one of these projects influences what we believe about hospitality. And you need that stuff. You need to be inspired by it. People need to be inspired by it. Yeah. That's fun. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

39:03Yeah, the hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks are real. Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI control tower.

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40:27So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. So as we start to wind down here, that's the question on my mind is I know it's only been four days, but of the three restaurants you talked about and fourth that will keep under wraps for now. What do you think might make its way into canless when we live in a normal world again?

40:55Here's what I hope makes its way into Canvas. I hope that what comes out of this is a visceral reminder of how alike we all are. And if there's anything that I think we've learned so far, it's that our understanding of the human spirit is limited at best. And it's only when you come to me and say, Mark, I think you got this, man. And while I reflect that back to you and say, look, Ben, you got this, right? Like, that's what happened. Something really powerful happens there. And the whole mission of this company, which is I know a really weird mission, but it's to inspire people that turn toward one another. And when we saw the disease spreading, and I am not talking about COVID-19, I am talking about the amount of fear

41:51the amount of discouragement when we saw that spreading and often for really good reason. These are not insignificant days. This is a good, overused but good word. This is unprecedented for the entire world to go through something together where no one gets to say, yeah, it doesn't apply to me, right? When something like that happens, I think we have a responsibility to remind ourselves of the truth.

42:19And the truth is we don't know what we're capable of. We, the canless team, we, the city of Seattle, we, the United States of America, we, the citizens of this rock that we're floating around on. And I hope that we understand that better on the other side of this thing. And that's what we're learning. That's what we're learning inside this building. I don't know if we'll...

42:46We might not be able to do this tomorrow. Maybe this will go for months. I don't know. But every day I tell the team, I was like, hey, look, you're going to want to go home and crawl under your covers and reach your phone and it is important to do so. But when you wake up the next morning, you go outside, you physically go outside of your house, your apartment. You look up at the sky and ask yourself the question, is it still up there or did it fall? And if it's still up there, you can be thankful for that.

43:16And you start with what you're thankful with. You say, all right, the sky didn't not fall. Contrary to the way I feel having mental headlines, it's still up there. I hear a bird tweeting. I see a neighbor walking down the street. You know what? Let's start with what we have. Let's go from there and let's ask ourselves a question. If this is what I have, what can I do with it? And I don't know. Maybe what we get at this whole thing is that as a discipline, as a practice, as a reminder that I don't know, maybe that's a reminder that we need right now. I think it's a reminder that I needed and I think it's a reminder that my team needed and I wish you could feel the difference inside this place before and after we made this decision before it was a feeling of helplessness and after it was a feeling of hope before it was a feeling that the overwhelming weight of this thing was too much.

44:14And after it was the understanding that I had a role to play, and that even just enduring, even just enduring a little bit, might be my role. And I think when we tell those stories, then we start to remind ourselves the truth of who we are as people. And that's pretty cool. That's why we wrote on that website. We got this, Seattle. That was the most poignant way I could say.

44:42To a city that needed to hear it, we are capable of making it through. Well, I cannot think of a single better way to leave this episode and leave our very first episode of adapted and with that line. So, Mark, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on the show. Anything else you want to tell listeners or tell them where they should go get some great food? I do want to tell listeners something, yeah.

45:11I think they have the ability, even though it doesn't feel this way, to make a difference. What we've been talking about here is my restaurant. You know what you don't have? You don't have my restaurant, and you probably don't have a restaurant to dismiss this as someone else's story in a city that you don't live in. I think would be a great, what would make me sad. I think to hear this and to know that If we're crazy enough to give this a whirl, maybe you know, maybe some year crazy is okay too. And I hope it gives them permission to think optimistically. I hope it gives them permission to smile at a neighbor. Keep it six feet away. I don't care. You can still smile at them. And so that's not insignificant. It's important. And it's going to take all of us remembering that about ourselves.

46:10Remembering that that is who we are as people. So this is a story about our country. And and largely this is a story about well beyond our borders and how like we all really are. So that's all I got. Hey, man. Let's all go do not exactly what you're doing, but do what we all can to. You're welcome to open to get there. I think competition only makes us better, but But you're going to have some steep competition. The burgers are pretty good. Well, it is on my calendar to come tomorrow morning. I think, hopefully, around 730 to the big ol' shed and pick one up. So it's going on through. I also have to see her. Thanks so much, Mark. Listeners, we will catch you for the next one. Thanks, guys. See you next time. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

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