The Exchanges

Q How did you literally as a CEO deal with that?

A You know, I'd say I was really lucky to have my co-founders, each of our spouses who were there by our sides, our incredible CFO, who was the one member who did stand by us, and a handful of incredible leaders Throughout the company that did stay with us. So while the executive team left, we have a number of people who did stand by us and we really hunkered down and we rewrote the business plan. It was almost like a starting over moment of what do we want to be? Where do we want to go? And we rewrote the business plan and we had to go almost refund raise for this new vision. So it was a complete reset of how we operate the company and where we were going. And for a moment there, it was, it was very, very scary. I still have kind of nightmares of Some of those days, I remember very clearly, you know, we had lost three quarters of the team, and I was sitting in Boston Airport in the middle of the winter. My flight was canceled. All of a sudden, I'm like, I'm gonna be spending the night in this airport, and I get a call, you know, one of the execs, and I'm like, oh, God. The other shoe dropped, and, you know, he also told me he was leaving, and I was like, oh, wow, everyone's gone. But, you know, you get so low that you pick yourself up, and you turn it around, and I think that moment was so powerful. For us, because we were able to just rewrite what Sweetgreen wanted to be.

AI assessment note: “we really hunkered down and we rewrote the business plan”

Q I totally get it. I mean, whenever I'm in the US, it's kind of like the daily lunch for me, so I get you on the frequency. On the second one, you mentioned the payback. How has the payback on a restaurant basis changed over time, and what is good? Help me understand that.

A You know, I think good would be in the industry, I think if you could pay back in about three-ish years, you'd be pretty happy. So, you know, call it in the 30 or so percent return on invested Capital. We shoot for significantly higher than that, and I think what allows us to do that, and the reason our return on capital has increased over time, has largely been the efficiency of the boxes due to our digital investment. Taking you back, when we started Sweetgreen, there was only one way to order. You could order just, you'd walk in the store, you'd order down the line. In 2012, we introduced mobile ordering, where now you could either go in the store, or you can order on your phone and come pick up. A few years later, we introduced delivery on our apps, So now you could order through our app and get delivery. Then we introduced marketplaces. Then we introduced something called Sweetgreen Outpost, which is a virtual Sweetgreen hotspot anywhere. Essentially, we can put it in your office building, a hospital, university, and it's a shelf or a kiosk where you order by a certain time and essentially think about Sweetgreen as a cloud, cloud cafeteria dropping off the food at a certain time. So what we're doing with each channel that we are adding, we're utilizing those fixed costs at a higher rate. And what that does is increases the average unit volume, which increases our return on…

AI assessment note: “if you could pay back in about three-ish years, you'd be pretty happy.”

Q What does it mean to think digitally first about building physical infrastructure?

A So for us, it's how do you design a restaurant that can operate across what we do is today a five channel model. So in our early stores, you had one production line. So you could not do that. You could not run delivery without disrupting the in-store customer. Today, we have a line for in-store guests, but then we have, in some cases, one, two, up to six lines that In the back or in the basement or upstairs somewhere that is essentially our dark kitchen for the digital business. We've also had to think about the pathways of where does the courier pick up? You can't have the courier in the way of the customer experience, so we have a separate window. You have to think about where the customer is going to pick up their food in a seamless way, so really designing the physical space so that it's a great customer experience, a great courier experience, and you can manage across all channels has been one of the major unlocks

AI assessment note: “how do you design a restaurant that can operate across what we do is today a five channel model”

Q What does it mean to think digitally first about building physical infrastructure?

A So for us, it's how do you design a restaurant that can operate across what we do is today a five channel model. So in our early stores, you had one production line. So you could not do that. You could not run delivery without disrupting the in-store customer. Today, we have a line for in-store guests, but then we have, in some cases, one, two, up to six lines that In the back or in the basement or upstairs somewhere that is essentially our dark kitchen for the digital business. We've also had to think about the pathways of where does the courier pick up? You can't have the courier in the way of the customer experience, so we have a separate window. You have to think about where the customer is going to pick up their food in a seamless way, so really designing the physical space so that it's a great customer experience, a great courier experience, and you can manage across all channels has been one of the major unlocks

AI assessment note: “how do you design a restaurant that can operate across what we do is today a five channel model”

Q in the States, so I think I owe you the thanks, but I want to start with a little bit on you, because I heard from a wonderful friend Sean that when you started Sweetgreen, it was in your senior year, and you already had accepted an offer from a big institution, either Bain or one of the So tell me, what was the founding story moment with Sweetgreen first?

A Yeah, absolutely. So I went to Georgetown University is where I met my two co-founders, Nicholas and Nathaniel, and we really bonded over two things. One, a shared vision for food and a problem we had in our lives where we couldn't find a place that was healthy, nutritious, delicious, and accessible. And we were also all first generation immigrants. Our parents all moved here from somewhere else. And we watched them create their own businesses as entrepreneurs. So we bonded over these two things of food and entrepreneurship. We knew we wanted to really create something for ourselves and create that partnership together. And so it really all started senior year where we complained so much that we finally said, let's do something about it. And, you know, we looked around the world and we couldn't understand why there was not a healthy fast food restaurant. Why was McDonald's our best answer to fast And we couldn't imagine that the next generation was going to eat that sort of food at scale. And so we put our heads together and we decided to open one restaurant right off campus. We wrote a business plan, tested menu items. We built out that first little restaurant. It was 500 square feet. We took over an old burger shack and we started serving customers that summer. And the idea was very simple. It was sourcing food directly from farmers, making it from scratch and serving it to c…

AI assessment note: “it really all started senior year where we complained so much that we finally said”

Q What does it mean to think digitally first about building physical infrastructure?

A So for us, it's how do you design a restaurant that can operate across what we do is today a five channel model. So in our early stores, you had one production line. So you could not do that. You could not run delivery without disrupting the in-store customer. Today, we have a line for in-store guests, but then we have, in some cases, one, two, up to six lines that In the back or in the basement or upstairs somewhere that is essentially our dark kitchen for the digital business. We've also had to think about the pathways of where does the courier pick up? You can't have the courier in the way of the customer experience, so we have a separate window. You have to think about where the customer is going to pick up their food in a seamless way, so really designing the physical space so that it's a great customer experience, a great courier experience, and you can manage across all channels has been one of the major unlocks

AI assessment note: “how do you design a restaurant that can operate across what we do is today a five channel model”

Q in the States, so I think I owe you the thanks, but I want to start with a little bit on you, because I heard from a wonderful friend Sean that when you started Sweetgreen, it was in your senior year, and you already had accepted an offer from a big institution, either Bain or one of the So tell me, what was the founding story moment with Sweetgreen first?

A Yeah, absolutely. So I went to Georgetown University is where I met my two co-founders, Nicholas and Nathaniel, and we really bonded over two things. One, a shared vision for food and a problem we had in our lives where we couldn't find a place that was healthy, nutritious, delicious, and accessible. And we were also all first generation immigrants. Our parents all moved here from somewhere else. And we watched them create their own businesses as entrepreneurs. So we bonded over these two things of food and entrepreneurship. We knew we wanted to really create something for ourselves and create that partnership together. And so it really all started senior year where we complained so much that we finally said, let's do something about it. And, you know, we looked around the world and we couldn't understand why there was not a healthy fast food restaurant. Why was McDonald's our best answer to fast And we couldn't imagine that the next generation was going to eat that sort of food at scale. And so we put our heads together and we decided to open one restaurant right off campus. We wrote a business plan, tested menu items. We built out that first little restaurant. It was 500 square feet. We took over an old burger shack and we started serving customers that summer. And the idea was very simple. It was sourcing food directly from farmers, making it from scratch and serving it to c…

AI assessment note: “we put our heads together and we decided to open one restaurant right off campus”

Q I love that. I always think parents shape us in so many meaningful ways, but that's a really, really special one. Tell me, how does life change for you now as a public CEO? Good versus bad. What's great? What's not great?

A You know, I think what's good is it It creates an accountability, an attention in a positive way, where it creates a lot of focus on the things you said you were going to do. So we said we were going to do something, and it really focuses the company on what are those things. At the same time, I think going public, it's an opportunity to tell your story in a really big way, and of course raise a lot of capital to expand our mission. So I'd say a lot of good, and so far, you know, we're only a couple months in, but so far it's been good. I think what's, what can be bad is if you're not Careful. You can easily get stuck in the short term, and I've been very conscious and intentional about making sure we do not lose what got us here. Like, I always like to remember, like, what got us to this point? Let's not lose that because we're public, because that really shouldn't change anything. Yes, we have commitments on a quarterly or yearly basis, but we're here for the next 10, 20. I like to say we're building a hundred-year business and make sure we do not lose that long-term focus, that innovation cadence that really got us to this

AI assessment note: “what's good is it It creates an accountability... what can be bad is if you're not Careful”

Q which moves to brand, which, you know, obviously chatted to Sean before this, and he was like, there's many wonderful things about Sean. I have to say that he's my brother-in-law, but he said when he talks about brand, it is fantastic. You have to touch on this. So drilling down specifically on brand, How do you think about brand today, and has your thinking on brand changed over time?

A You know, I think for us, brand, it always started with this idea of the why. So it was, you know, for us, our why is our mission, which is building healthier communities by connecting people to real food. That's what's always grounded us, and I think been the North Star from a brand perspective. You know, people talk about brand, and I think oftentimes when they think about brand, they think about how it looks. They think about the logo. They think about a Part of the brand, but the brand is really your promise to your customers, how that promise is consistent across all of your touch points. It's really walking the walk every day in a truly authentic way. So the things that the artifacts that really make up our brand in the biggest way really are our mission and our core values. Those are the things that really everything emanates from. But from a brand perspective, brand has definitely evolved over the past 15 years, and I think that has been akin to the different things we've had to solve as a business. So when we started, you know, you think about from the beginning, you know, you put out this mission, building healthier communities by connecting people to real food. We want to be the McDonald's of the generation. So step one was how do you make people actually just want to eat healthy food? For so many years, healthy food was there, but it was this idea of like, oh, eat y…

AI assessment note: “brand has definitely evolved over the past 15 years”

Q When you think about those head coaches, how do you create an environment for them where they are ambitious, and they set big targets, and they want to do bold things, but they're also not scared that if this doesn't work, I'm going to get fired. How do you create that environment of ambition without the fear of it not working? Yeah.

A So it starts with, with the principles again, you know, one of our principles is learn forward. So we celebrate failures as long as we learn from those. So, and it's not just writing that principle, but then it's acting and sharing those. So, you know, we have town halls and oftentimes we share failures and celebrate them saying, I'll share my own saying, Hey, I made this mistake, but look at what we learned from it. So I think it's creating that psychological safety around failure that allows people to do their best work. I think Fear is really debilitating for anyone. And so you want to create, create a safe space where people can, can try to do great things, make mistakes. As long as their heart is in the right place, they're operating with integrity and they're learning from those decisions. Again, one of the biggest learnings I've had is how to move faster as a business by taking bigger risks, failing faster and iterating. There's times where we've waited two years to launch something as an MVP. And it's like, well, that's not an MVP. The MVP should have been done in two months. Should have put it out there. You should have been embarrassed almost about what you put out there, but you'll get to the right answer much faster than waiting two years to do a big launch. So it's in a way, again, it's taking much more of a software approach to rolling things out than a traditiona…

AI assessment note: “creating that psychological safety around failure that allows people to do their best work”

Q The challenging thing is he's not so scared of always telling you them. And he said that maybe diplomacy was something that was a learning curve for you. Would you agree with that as a weakness, genuinely? And how do you think about actually create, like, idea sharing without trampling people, because I do the same, and creating that safe space for people where you can share, but also listen?

A You know, I'd say I'm definitely pretty direct. I find that oftentimes a strength, but in certain instances can be a weakness. I think one thing I've learned as a leader is it's not just what you say, but it's how you make people feel. And so much of what you have to do as a leader, and I think this has been one of my learnings, is how to bring people along. You know, there's the right answer, and then there's people believing that's the right answer, and being motivated around that being the right answer. So buy-in and empowerment is such a critical part of this. I think one of the lessons for me is how to tailor your approach. I believe when you have deep trust, With someone, being direct is great, because it's, I love you, and I'm going to give you this feedback as a gift, or I'm going to tell you exactly what's on my mind. I think when it goes wrong is when the trust may not fully be established yet. You know, I love when, you know, Toby talked, Toby from Shopify talks about the trust battery, which is something that's really interesting. When your trust battery is full, you can be incredibly direct with someone, but if you're still building a relationship, you may need to tailor how you say something a little bit. So it really goes back to, is the trust It's there, and if the trust is there, they know the intent is there, and we're on the same team with this shared mission…

AI assessment note: “I'd say I'm definitely pretty direct. I find that oftentimes a strength, but in certain instances can be a weakness.”

Q speaking of executing on the core business, and final one before the quick fire, and you can thank Sean for this one, because it's a bit of a tough one, but he asked, you know, COVID was tough for many businesses, especially consumer-facing and more retail-facing businesses. He asked, what were some of your biggest lessons for you from managing through, you know, a very tough period, which was COVID?

A Yeah, so COVID for restaurants and for Sweetgreen was very, very challenging. You know, most, many of our restaurants, majority of them are in urban areas, You know, really catering to many people going to work. We were very fortunate in that so much of our business was digital, that we were able to pivot and meet our customers where they are in many places, although we were still severely impacted. The biggest lessons for me around COVID, one was around communication, how we keep morale up, even though the business is getting obliterated. And for me, it was always about setting our sights on a point outside of COVID and using COVID in my mantra is how do we get Come emerge from this stronger. We're going to be front footed throughout COVID. And we were fortunate to have the capital, the team, and the opportunity where the many of the world was kind of retreating, especially in our industry. We saw it as an opportunity in many ways to continue to expand what we were doing, even though we were taking hits on the face, the morale was, and the energy was, we're going to grow through this. We're going to improve through this. And when the world reopens, we're going to emerge as a much stronger and better company. So that was one. The second is communication, and the, I think every leader during COVID has had to dial up communication significantly. Things are changing so rapidly in …

AI assessment note: “The biggest lessons for me around COVID, one was around communication, how we keep morale”

Q expansion there with the kiosks in particular, you know, we see it in the UK, dark kitchens are actually very popular and becoming more and more so now. How important is physical retail Sweetgreen stores to the brand, to the customer experience of Sweetgreen versus actually the kiosks where, They finally get the food and love it, but you don't get that customer experience. How important is retail to brand?

A We find it to be incredibly important. And as it's our best customer acquisition channel, what it does is it's, there's no better way to really illustrate what we're all about than a retail. You know, you get to come in, you get to see the food being made from scratch. You get to touch it. You get to smell it. You get to taste it. You see the local list where you get to see where the food is coming from. You know, it is by far our best acquisition channel. What's interesting is after they come to the restaurant, experience at one, customers are typically downloading the app and maybe never going to a restaurant again, but from an acquisition channel, it's very, very valuable. Over time, do we believe dark stores and, you know, retail will shift for sure, but today we believe omni-channel is the answer because we're essentially, if you think about our stores, they are retail stores, but they're true. It's an omni-channel experience. We run delivery out of the stores. We run our outpost business out of the We run our pickup business out of the store. So the actual retail business is a small part of that, that experience, but it enables the digital experience we're looking to do. And we've been very intentional about building those restaurants in an omni-channel way. You cannot take an old retail store and add the digital experience on it. We've thought from a digitally native way…

AI assessment note: “We find it to be incredibly important. And as it's our best customer acquisition channel”

Q Can I ask a bit of a weird one? You know, bluntly you as the leader, you have to expel the brand and the mission and the vision every day. To every journalist, to every employee. I get founders and they're like, I'm bored of saying it. Like, how do you keep it fresh for yourself, where you deliver it with the same enthusiasm and gusto that you just did?

A You know, I think you really have to believe it. You just can't fake this, is where I get down to. It has to be so much a part of you, and something you so believe in deep down in your heart, and it's an emotional thing. For me, it is a mission. I do get very emotional about this. I do believe, you know, we can really change the world through food. I see so many of the problems that we're having today, whether it be the COVID crisis we're in, the environmental crisis we're in, and how much of that is related to food. So I think what keeps me going is this true belief that we can do good in the world, and by doing good in the world, we can create a really profitable business. And I tell my team all the time, these things go hand in hand. Don't tell me, like, we're going to do things that are great, but they're not going to make money. You have to be able to mirror the two, this Capitalism with the social good, and I think people get lost on that oftentimes.

AI assessment note: “what keeps me going is this true belief that we can do good”

Q When you think about those head coaches, how do you create an environment for them where they are ambitious, and they set big targets, and they want to do bold things, but they're also not scared that if this doesn't work, I'm going to get fired. How do you create that environment of ambition without the fear of it not working? Yeah.

A So it starts with, with the principles again, you know, one of our principles is learn forward. So we celebrate failures as long as we learn from those. So, and it's not just writing that principle, but then it's acting and sharing those. So, you know, we have town halls and oftentimes we share failures and celebrate them saying, I'll share my own saying, Hey, I made this mistake, but look at what we learned from it. So I think it's creating that psychological safety around failure that allows people to do their best work. I think Fear is really debilitating for anyone. And so you want to create, create a safe space where people can, can try to do great things, make mistakes. As long as their heart is in the right place, they're operating with integrity and they're learning from those decisions. Again, one of the biggest learnings I've had is how to move faster as a business by taking bigger risks, failing faster and iterating. There's times where we've waited two years to launch something as an MVP. And it's like, well, that's not an MVP. The MVP should have been done in two months. Should have put it out there. You should have been embarrassed almost about what you put out there, but you'll get to the right answer much faster than waiting two years to do a big launch. So it's in a way, again, it's taking much more of a software approach to rolling things out than a traditiona…

AI assessment note: “creating that psychological safety around failure that allows people to do their best work”

Q in the States, so I think I owe you the thanks, but I want to start with a little bit on you, because I heard from a wonderful friend Sean that when you started Sweetgreen, it was in your senior year, and you already had accepted an offer from a big institution, either Bain or one of the So tell me, what was the founding story moment with Sweetgreen first?

A Yeah, absolutely. So I went to Georgetown University is where I met my two co-founders, Nicholas and Nathaniel, and we really bonded over two things. One, a shared vision for food and a problem we had in our lives where we couldn't find a place that was healthy, nutritious, delicious, and accessible. And we were also all first generation immigrants. Our parents all moved here from somewhere else. And we watched them create their own businesses as entrepreneurs. So we bonded over these two things of food and entrepreneurship. We knew we wanted to really create something for ourselves and create that partnership together. And so it really all started senior year where we complained so much that we finally said, let's do something about it. And, you know, we looked around the world and we couldn't understand why there was not a healthy fast food restaurant. Why was McDonald's our best answer to fast And we couldn't imagine that the next generation was going to eat that sort of food at scale. And so we put our heads together and we decided to open one restaurant right off campus. We wrote a business plan, tested menu items. We built out that first little restaurant. It was 500 square feet. We took over an old burger shack and we started serving customers that summer. And the idea was very simple. It was sourcing food directly from farmers, making it from scratch and serving it to c…

AI assessment note: “we decided to open one restaurant right off campus. We wrote a business plan”

Q How did you literally as a CEO deal with that?

A You know, I'd say I was really lucky to have my co-founders, each of our spouses who were there by our sides, our incredible CFO, who was the one member who did stand by us, and a handful of incredible leaders Throughout the company that did stay with us. So while the executive team left, we have a number of people who did stand by us and we really hunkered down and we rewrote the business plan. It was almost like a starting over moment of what do we want to be? Where do we want to go? And we rewrote the business plan and we had to go almost refund raise for this new vision. So it was a complete reset of how we operate the company and where we were going. And for a moment there, it was, it was very, very scary. I still have kind of nightmares of Some of those days, I remember very clearly, you know, we had lost three quarters of the team, and I was sitting in Boston Airport in the middle of the winter. My flight was canceled. All of a sudden, I'm like, I'm gonna be spending the night in this airport, and I get a call, you know, one of the execs, and I'm like, oh, God. The other shoe dropped, and, you know, he also told me he was leaving, and I was like, oh, wow, everyone's gone. But, you know, you get so low that you pick yourself up, and you turn it around, and I think that moment was so powerful. For us, because we were able to just rewrite what Sweetgreen wanted to be.

AI assessment note: “we really hunkered down and we rewrote the business plan.”

Q The challenging thing is he's not so scared of always telling you them. And he said that maybe diplomacy was something that was a learning curve for you. Would you agree with that as a weakness, genuinely? And how do you think about actually create, like, idea sharing without trampling people, because I do the same, and creating that safe space for people where you can share, but also listen?

A You know, I'd say I'm definitely pretty direct. I find that oftentimes a strength, but in certain instances can be a weakness. I think one thing I've learned as a leader is it's not just what you say, but it's how you make people feel. And so much of what you have to do as a leader, and I think this has been one of my learnings, is how to bring people along. You know, there's the right answer, and then there's people believing that's the right answer, and being motivated around that being the right answer. So buy-in and empowerment is such a critical part of this. I think one of the lessons for me is how to tailor your approach. I believe when you have deep trust, With someone, being direct is great, because it's, I love you, and I'm going to give you this feedback as a gift, or I'm going to tell you exactly what's on my mind. I think when it goes wrong is when the trust may not fully be established yet. You know, I love when, you know, Toby talked, Toby from Shopify talks about the trust battery, which is something that's really interesting. When your trust battery is full, you can be incredibly direct with someone, but if you're still building a relationship, you may need to tailor how you say something a little bit. So it really goes back to, is the trust It's there, and if the trust is there, they know the intent is there, and we're on the same team with this shared mission…

AI assessment note: “I'd say I'm definitely pretty direct. I find that oftentimes a strength, but in certain instances can be a weakness.”

Q How did you literally as a CEO deal with that?

A You know, I'd say I was really lucky to have my co-founders, each of our spouses who were there by our sides, our incredible CFO, who was the one member who did stand by us, and a handful of incredible leaders Throughout the company that did stay with us. So while the executive team left, we have a number of people who did stand by us and we really hunkered down and we rewrote the business plan. It was almost like a starting over moment of what do we want to be? Where do we want to go? And we rewrote the business plan and we had to go almost refund raise for this new vision. So it was a complete reset of how we operate the company and where we were going. And for a moment there, it was, it was very, very scary. I still have kind of nightmares of Some of those days, I remember very clearly, you know, we had lost three quarters of the team, and I was sitting in Boston Airport in the middle of the winter. My flight was canceled. All of a sudden, I'm like, I'm gonna be spending the night in this airport, and I get a call, you know, one of the execs, and I'm like, oh, God. The other shoe dropped, and, you know, he also told me he was leaving, and I was like, oh, wow, everyone's gone. But, you know, you get so low that you pick yourself up, and you turn it around, and I think that moment was so powerful. For us, because we were able to just rewrite what Sweetgreen wanted to be.

AI assessment note: “we really hunkered down and we rewrote the business plan”

Q The challenging thing is he's not so scared of always telling you them. And he said that maybe diplomacy was something that was a learning curve for you. Would you agree with that as a weakness, genuinely? And how do you think about actually create, like, idea sharing without trampling people, because I do the same, and creating that safe space for people where you can share, but also listen?

A You know, I'd say I'm definitely pretty direct. I find that oftentimes a strength, but in certain instances can be a weakness. I think one thing I've learned as a leader is it's not just what you say, but it's how you make people feel. And so much of what you have to do as a leader, and I think this has been one of my learnings, is how to bring people along. You know, there's the right answer, and then there's people believing that's the right answer, and being motivated around that being the right answer. So buy-in and empowerment is such a critical part of this. I think one of the lessons for me is how to tailor your approach. I believe when you have deep trust, With someone, being direct is great, because it's, I love you, and I'm going to give you this feedback as a gift, or I'm going to tell you exactly what's on my mind. I think when it goes wrong is when the trust may not fully be established yet. You know, I love when, you know, Toby talked, Toby from Shopify talks about the trust battery, which is something that's really interesting. When your trust battery is full, you can be incredibly direct with someone, but if you're still building a relationship, you may need to tailor how you say something a little bit. So it really goes back to, is the trust It's there, and if the trust is there, they know the intent is there, and we're on the same team with this shared mission…

AI assessment note: “I'm definitely pretty direct. I find that oftentimes a strength, but in certain instances can be a weakness.”

Q When you think about those head coaches, how do you create an environment for them where they are ambitious, and they set big targets, and they want to do bold things, but they're also not scared that if this doesn't work, I'm going to get fired. How do you create that environment of ambition without the fear of it not working? Yeah.

A So it starts with, with the principles again, you know, one of our principles is learn forward. So we celebrate failures as long as we learn from those. So, and it's not just writing that principle, but then it's acting and sharing those. So, you know, we have town halls and oftentimes we share failures and celebrate them saying, I'll share my own saying, Hey, I made this mistake, but look at what we learned from it. So I think it's creating that psychological safety around failure that allows people to do their best work. I think Fear is really debilitating for anyone. And so you want to create, create a safe space where people can, can try to do great things, make mistakes. As long as their heart is in the right place, they're operating with integrity and they're learning from those decisions. Again, one of the biggest learnings I've had is how to move faster as a business by taking bigger risks, failing faster and iterating. There's times where we've waited two years to launch something as an MVP. And it's like, well, that's not an MVP. The MVP should have been done in two months. Should have put it out there. You should have been embarrassed almost about what you put out there, but you'll get to the right answer much faster than waiting two years to do a big launch. So it's in a way, again, it's taking much more of a software approach to rolling things out than a traditiona…

AI assessment note: “we have town halls and oftentimes we share failures and celebrate them”

Q expansion there with the kiosks in particular, you know, we see it in the UK, dark kitchens are actually very popular and becoming more and more so now. How important is physical retail Sweetgreen stores to the brand, to the customer experience of Sweetgreen versus actually the kiosks where, They finally get the food and love it, but you don't get that customer experience. How important is retail to brand?

A We find it to be incredibly important. And as it's our best customer acquisition channel, what it does is it's, there's no better way to really illustrate what we're all about than a retail. You know, you get to come in, you get to see the food being made from scratch. You get to touch it. You get to smell it. You get to taste it. You see the local list where you get to see where the food is coming from. You know, it is by far our best acquisition channel. What's interesting is after they come to the restaurant, experience at one, customers are typically downloading the app and maybe never going to a restaurant again, but from an acquisition channel, it's very, very valuable. Over time, do we believe dark stores and, you know, retail will shift for sure, but today we believe omni-channel is the answer because we're essentially, if you think about our stores, they are retail stores, but they're true. It's an omni-channel experience. We run delivery out of the stores. We run our outpost business out of the We run our pickup business out of the store. So the actual retail business is a small part of that, that experience, but it enables the digital experience we're looking to do. And we've been very intentional about building those restaurants in an omni-channel way. You cannot take an old retail store and add the digital experience on it. We've thought from a digitally native way…

AI assessment note: “We find it to be incredibly important. And as it's our best customer acquisition channel”

Q I'm too interested. You had that first restaurant. When did you know it was working? When did you look at each other and go, we should ramp this. We need more restaurants. More people need food.

A So, you know, you mentioned, uh, the job that I had and it's true. So we started building the restaurant called the beginning of Senior year. September of senior year, we decided we're going to do it. If you remember, when you're in college, you'd get job offers and apply for jobs right around that same time. So I applied for jobs. I got what I thought was my dream job, Bain & Company. Accepted the job. Got a signing bonus in October. Forgot about it. Said, I'm going to go build this restaurant. We'll see what happens. We build the restaurant. We open that summer, and all of a sudden, it's September, October, and it's time to report to work. So I had a conversation with my co-founders, and We have two things. I can go or I cannot go, and they're like, you know what? This restaurant's too small for the three of us to even fit inside of it, and we can't pay the three of us anyways. Why don't you go learn something, help us from there, and then come back, and so I went. I thought I would go for a couple years. I made it about nine months. Ultimately, my heart was with Sweetgreen. We had already opened the one restaurant. It was doing well. I was spending half my day in the bathroom on the phone with my partners and every weekend flying back and forth, and it just got to this Point where it felt like this mission was calling me. I could see what we could do. I remember I had a conv…

AI assessment note: “It was doing well. I was spending half my day in the bathroom on the phone”

Q and incredible business acumen together that makes you world-class. That was his answer to why you're world-class, although he said don't tell him it'll give him the money. But I do want to ask, if we break that down, capital allocations, How do you think about capital allocation decisions in bluntly a more asset heavy business than traditional enterprise software? How do you think about that capital allocation decision making?

A So first of all, in terms of marrying brand and business, I think it's something that we've been very focused on. And again, I think how the three of us have really come together with our unique skill sets that has brought us to this point. So at Sweetgreen, we have a leadership principle, which is balance art and science. And that's really where this comes together. So what we mean by that is the brand is many times the arts, the storytelling, it's the cultural relevancy, it's the way things feel. But so much of it, you also need the science, the science being the technology, the data, the analytics, the capital allocation, that the business acumen. And so many brands you see are either good at one or the other. They're great at, you know, the business side, but there's no soul. Or you see brands that have so much soul, but cannot stop. And so from very early on, we've been very intentional about marrying art and science. In terms of capital allocation, Sweetgreen, you know, we think about capital allocation really in two ways, and it's all about these KPIs that drive our business. Most importantly, we think about return on invested capital of our store base, which is essentially another way of saying our unit economics. They're quite simply spend X to build a restaurant. How fast does that store pay back in return? That's the standard how restaurants Kind of evaluate the effi…

AI assessment note: “think about capital allocation really in two ways, and it's all about these KPIs”

Q and incredible business acumen together that makes you world-class. That was his answer to why you're world-class, although he said don't tell him it'll give him the money. But I do want to ask, if we break that down, capital allocations, How do you think about capital allocation decisions in bluntly a more asset heavy business than traditional enterprise software? How do you think about that capital allocation decision making?

A So first of all, in terms of marrying brand and business, I think it's something that we've been very focused on. And again, I think how the three of us have really come together with our unique skill sets that has brought us to this point. So at Sweetgreen, we have a leadership principle, which is balance art and science. And that's really where this comes together. So what we mean by that is the brand is many times the arts, the storytelling, it's the cultural relevancy, it's the way things feel. But so much of it, you also need the science, the science being the technology, the data, the analytics, the capital allocation, that the business acumen. And so many brands you see are either good at one or the other. They're great at, you know, the business side, but there's no soul. Or you see brands that have so much soul, but cannot stop. And so from very early on, we've been very intentional about marrying art and science. In terms of capital allocation, Sweetgreen, you know, we think about capital allocation really in two ways, and it's all about these KPIs that drive our business. Most importantly, we think about return on invested capital of our store base, which is essentially another way of saying our unit economics. They're quite simply spend X to build a restaurant. How fast does that store pay back in return? That's the standard how restaurants Kind of evaluate the effi…

AI assessment note: “we think about capital allocation really in two ways, and it's all about these KPIs”

Q and incredible business acumen together that makes you world-class. That was his answer to why you're world-class, although he said don't tell him it'll give him the money. But I do want to ask, if we break that down, capital allocations, How do you think about capital allocation decisions in bluntly a more asset heavy business than traditional enterprise software? How do you think about that capital allocation decision making?

A So first of all, in terms of marrying brand and business, I think it's something that we've been very focused on. And again, I think how the three of us have really come together with our unique skill sets that has brought us to this point. So at Sweetgreen, we have a leadership principle, which is balance art and science. And that's really where this comes together. So what we mean by that is the brand is many times the arts, the storytelling, it's the cultural relevancy, it's the way things feel. But so much of it, you also need the science, the science being the technology, the data, the analytics, the capital allocation, that the business acumen. And so many brands you see are either good at one or the other. They're great at, you know, the business side, but there's no soul. Or you see brands that have so much soul, but cannot stop. And so from very early on, we've been very intentional about marrying art and science. In terms of capital allocation, Sweetgreen, you know, we think about capital allocation really in two ways, and it's all about these KPIs that drive our business. Most importantly, we think about return on invested capital of our store base, which is essentially another way of saying our unit economics. They're quite simply spend X to build a restaurant. How fast does that store pay back in return? That's the standard how restaurants Kind of evaluate the effi…

AI assessment note: “we think about capital allocation really in two ways, and it's all about these KPIs”

Q So should you then treat your direct reports as partners or just those co-founders with you?

A No, I think what I'm saying is I learned that you can treat your whole leadership team as partners, and it's less of a reporting relationship and more of a team and a partnership, and how that creates a camaraderie that is so different Then this is my company and you happen to work for me. So I'd say one of the biggest lessons from the three of us working that way was a model for how to work across the rest of the leadership team and really the rest of the company. We like to say so many of the cultural artifacts and the leadership principles and the values that we have at Sweetgreen today really stemmed from how we work together and together as the three of us. And how do we document those so we can scale it over the, you know, almost 6000 employees we have today.

AI assessment note: “you can treat your whole leadership team as partners”

Q I'm really interested. You said there about becoming CEO four years ago, and when I spoke to Scott, in particular, Scott Belsky, he said, ask John about the time when there were three CEOs. How did that work? And with that experience, what would you advise founders contemplating single versus multiple CEOs?

A Yeah, so very interestingly, we ran the company as co-founders and CEOs for the first eight years. And it worked phenomenally well. It was awesome because the three of us were so close. We share an office. We still share an office, by the way. We share a desk and an office. And it worked because there was immense trust between the three of us. Really a rule that we do not bring our egos into this. We always say, what's best for Sweetgreen? One of our leadership principles is win together. So we really put this owner hat on and what's best for Sweetgreen and put our personal opinions aside. I think the partnership, it's unique. We have such a shared Vision, mission, and values, yet very different skill set. So we complement each other in a really, really great way, and it's what allowed the three CEO situation to work for so long. We, about four years ago, as I mentioned, we transitioned where I became CEO and my two co-founders each took very large media roles within the company, and that's how we're operating today. And it's a unique setup because we still share parts of that CEO role, really that founder piece. Setting the mission, the vision, setting the strategy, really defining the culture. You know, the way I see it is, you know, I happen to sit in the CEO seat today. It's an honor to be able to do that. But, you know, I share that responsibility with my co-founders. And …

AI assessment note: “it worked because there was immense trust between the three of us”

Q speaking of executing on the core business, and final one before the quick fire, and you can thank Sean for this one, because it's a bit of a tough one, but he asked, you know, COVID was tough for many businesses, especially consumer-facing and more retail-facing businesses. He asked, what were some of your biggest lessons for you from managing through, you know, a very tough period, which was COVID?

A Yeah, so COVID for restaurants and for Sweetgreen was very, very challenging. You know, most, many of our restaurants, majority of them are in urban areas, You know, really catering to many people going to work. We were very fortunate in that so much of our business was digital, that we were able to pivot and meet our customers where they are in many places, although we were still severely impacted. The biggest lessons for me around COVID, one was around communication, how we keep morale up, even though the business is getting obliterated. And for me, it was always about setting our sights on a point outside of COVID and using COVID in my mantra is how do we get Come emerge from this stronger. We're going to be front footed throughout COVID. And we were fortunate to have the capital, the team, and the opportunity where the many of the world was kind of retreating, especially in our industry. We saw it as an opportunity in many ways to continue to expand what we were doing, even though we were taking hits on the face, the morale was, and the energy was, we're going to grow through this. We're going to improve through this. And when the world reopens, we're going to emerge as a much stronger and better company. So that was one. The second is communication, and the, I think every leader during COVID has had to dial up communication significantly. Things are changing so rapidly in …

AI assessment note: “The biggest lessons for me around COVID, one was around communication”

Q speaking of executing on the core business, and final one before the quick fire, and you can thank Sean for this one, because it's a bit of a tough one, but he asked, you know, COVID was tough for many businesses, especially consumer-facing and more retail-facing businesses. He asked, what were some of your biggest lessons for you from managing through, you know, a very tough period, which was COVID?

A Yeah, so COVID for restaurants and for Sweetgreen was very, very challenging. You know, most, many of our restaurants, majority of them are in urban areas, You know, really catering to many people going to work. We were very fortunate in that so much of our business was digital, that we were able to pivot and meet our customers where they are in many places, although we were still severely impacted. The biggest lessons for me around COVID, one was around communication, how we keep morale up, even though the business is getting obliterated. And for me, it was always about setting our sights on a point outside of COVID and using COVID in my mantra is how do we get Come emerge from this stronger. We're going to be front footed throughout COVID. And we were fortunate to have the capital, the team, and the opportunity where the many of the world was kind of retreating, especially in our industry. We saw it as an opportunity in many ways to continue to expand what we were doing, even though we were taking hits on the face, the morale was, and the energy was, we're going to grow through this. We're going to improve through this. And when the world reopens, we're going to emerge as a much stronger and better company. So that was one. The second is communication, and the, I think every leader during COVID has had to dial up communication significantly. Things are changing so rapidly in …

AI assessment note: “The biggest lessons for me around COVID, one was around communication”