Danny Meyer

“Danny Meyer, one of my great heroes, and he became an investor in Clear, and that was awesome.”

“Danny Meyer, one of my personal idols, and he's an investor in seven shifts.”

“Danny Meyer almost concurrently with Shake Shack becoming a customer, became an investor in Olo and joined our board. So he's been a board member for the past 10 years plus as we've been on this journey with Shake Shack.”

“Today, that very ethos informs everything I do. How can this feel more timeless? How can the dining room be a little less designed, the dessert a little less composed?”

“Innovation for me is never about inventing something that was never there. It's truly about how many of these discoveries did I store in my taste memory, my heart memory, wherever, and then use that file cabinet and pull out those things and combine them at th…”

“Invariably, 20% of the things I'm doing are things that someone else on our team could do as well or better than I do it. And every time I do that, it's an act of generosity because someone else gets to grow. Every time I don't do it, it's an act of selfishnes…”

“That implies that I ever decided Shake Shack was going to be a scaled concept, because I didn't. I won't go into the whole story but it started as a hot dog cart. This was the summer of 2001. We didn't open a second Shake Shack for five years.”

“If you find that, that people have found a place in their heart for something you're doing, and it's becoming essential, it's becoming part of their lives, you don't have a right to hold it back from people. You don't have a right to, Not employ more people. Y…”

“A hundred percent of everyone on our team at that point got a chance to buy stock at the strike price, which was 21 dollars. The first trade happened at 46 dollars.”

“The leadership Is probably even more potent than the idea itself. I think a great leader can pivot and make a decent idea even better, but I've never seen a great idea overcome bad leadership.”

“No, I think perfection is a recipe for unhappiness. I really do, and so yeah, I, I'm really all about pursuing excellence, which is, for me, the way I describe it. No, you can have all the perfection you want. I won't have it because I can't, but what I love i…”

“The gift to me was that I planted roots, and I think we know this from grapevines, that the deeper those roots dig into the soil, the more flavor the resulting wine will end up having. And so try to grow where you're planted a little bit before you scale.”

“Success lies not in the elimination of problems, but in the art of creative, profitable problem solving. The best companies are those that distinguish themselves by solving problems most effectively.”

“Shake Shack is now, you know, a four and a half billion dollar company today, and started off as a hot dog cart in a park in New York City.”

“Calls from Danny Meyer, Tom Colicchio, Jose Andres. So eventually we started independent restaurant coalition.”

“I had this ability from the beginning to figure out how people were feeling, and to figure out what it was gonna take, whether it was gonna be via food, or alcohol, or caffeine, or remembering their favorite table, whatever it was gonna take. I had a desire an…”

“I made the assumption that Doing anything for a second time, or doing a second thing for the first time, or doing anything that looked like growth beyond one business would obviously lead me down the path. Of bankruptcy.”

“Really trying to figure out what had led him down that path, and it wasn't expansion, it was A failure to surround himself with a lot of people who knew how to do things he didn't know how to do. He had a need to be the smartest guy in the room, which I don't.”

“Hospitality describes an emotional transaction, whereas service describes a technical transaction, and you need them both.”

“It's 49 parts performance and 51 parts hospitality, and that's what you are going to be judged on, that's how you're gonna get paid, that's how you're gonna get your bonus, and guess what, guys? In this business, the customer is going to come second. And by th…”

“The third stakeholder that gets hospitality is the community in which we do business. And the fourth are the suppliers with whom we do business. And fifth, we're actually going to put our investors fifth.”

“I just feel like culture is driven by language. I don't know any culture in the world that is not glued together by language, whether it's your family, your religion, there's language, and I think that the CEO of a company is the shaman of that culture, and th…”

“Well, the first Shake Shack was kind of a mistake, probably the best mistake, certainly the most lucrative mistake I'll ever make in my life, but it was truly to try to prove to myself that hospitality was not a fluke.”

“What she really helped me to see was that the most powerful thing I think a leader does is to signal through the people that they hire and promote what are the behaviors that they want to propagate.”

“Here's what's happened with this mashup that's happening right now in what I call the fine casual world. We've challenged us to say, well, whoever wrote the rule that You only get to two by going one plus one plus zero. And so what fine casual is doing is sayi…”

“Having your stakeholders in that order ultimately is the way to best serve all of your stakeholders”

“The first question I asked myself is, Would I want this even if it were for free? And guess what? 98% of the time, the answer is no.”

“Sometimes there's people we have to fire. In any great culture, you have to do that, if you want the rest of the vine to truly thrive.”

“Hospitality exists when you believe That the person on the other side of the transaction is on your side.”

“In business, I think that the first people who need to receive hospitality are the people who work in an organization, because if when you come to work, You feel like your colleagues are on your side, your boss is on your side, that people genuinely want to se…”

“Our suppliers are going to take exactly as much interest in us as they believe we're taking in them. And when they know we're on their side, they're going to want to see us succeed.”

“Because every time someone gets a promotion, the rest of the organization is watching very carefully and asking, so that's who I have to be if I want to get a promotion in this company. That's how I have to behave. That's what kind of values I have to put out …”

“The way we ideally get to a hundred, 49 of those points are going to be how well someone does the job they do. How good of a cook are you? If you can make the best bowl of pasta I've ever had in my life, You get 49 points. That leaves 51 points if you want to …”

“Real empathy actually rejects the old golden rule. The old golden rule says do unto others as you would have done unto you. The hospitality golden rules, which is driven by empathy, says do unto others as you believe they would want done unto them.”

“I'm not sure they can be learned and I'm not sure they can be taught. I think we can teach people how to identify them in others. I'm sure that we can teach people how to celebrate them when they see them happening. And I actually believe that this is a classi…”

“In a day and age where we're all in where what you know how to do can be so easily copied by everybody. I really believe that that 51%, which is how do you make people feel while you're doing it, can truly become the alpha that can differentiate different orga…”

“And the fact is, you cannot afford to keep Johnny because he is making me look like a fool every time he behaves in a way that's contrary to my stated values and behaviors. He is actually making everybody else look at me like I'm full of it, and that's on me a…”

“The only way that you can feel like I'm on your side is if I customize it for you, because you're different than everybody else in the world. The temperature that you like is different than everybody else's temperature. The lighting is different. The sound is …”

“We didn't have a second Shake Shack for five years, by the way. We had one Shake Shack for the first five years, and, you know, the next 300 plus Shake Shacks have all happened in the 16 intervening years after that. Or maybe the 11 years after that. Yeah, I t…”

“And as cities, states, and now the entire country move to a higher minimum wage, and then perhaps one day, one wage for everybody, as opposed to a second-tier For tipped employees, which I believe is not gonna last forever. Can't. You're gonna start to see res…”

“So the five A's of mistake making are be aware. That's the first one. If you're not aware, you're nowhere. I've made many, many mistakes that I didn't even know I made, and the person on whom I made the mistake might have been carrying around a bad feeling for…”

“The most powerful thing I think a leader does is to signal through the people that they hire and promote what are the behaviors that they want to propagate. If you are super careful about promoting not just the people who are great at what they do, but the peo…”

“I've come to learn that a hallmark of being an entrepreneur is that you are upsided, as in, you can only see up. You don't see what could go wrong”

“240,000 dollars. For the 14 years, and then I spent 500,000 dollars building it, and that was it.”

“To my mom's credit, my aunt's credit, my uncle's credit, we all structured this as a loan, which was great, because they then put me in a position where I could actually own all the equity after I paid off all the loans.”

“My hiring, if you were from New York, I didn't pretty much want to hire you. I was looking for, because I didn't think of New York as being a very friendly place back then. I wanted a place that, that was welcoming.”

“I think service is a way to describe the technical delivery of the product. Did you do what was expected? Did you get the right food to the right person? And I think hospitality is a very different thing, which is, oh, by the way, how did you make the recipien…”

“I don't let our chefs hire that pasta cook unless they believe that the pasta cook has those six emotional skills, meaning that now you've got someone who's really good at what they do and who is motivated to do that thing because they are happier themselves w…”

“Well, what we had done was to offer to give all of our profits back to the Madison Square Park Conservancy, and that was pretty easy because we lost about 5000 bucks that first year.”

“And I just sat down one day, just scribbled on a piece of paper the menu, and the menu I scribbled that day is kind of 95% what we serve at Shake Shack to this day”

“There's about 70% of the cost taken out. There's not a, if you look at any Shake Shack, there's not a chef or three sous chefs or a pastry chef or a maitre d' or a reservationist or a florist or a linen company, and I, you know, that's probably only half the c…”

“Whoever wrote the rule that it has to be one plus one plus zero, and what we found is that it was not as fast as fast food, but it was a lot faster than a full-service restaurant, and it was not as inexpensive as fast food, but it was a lot less expensive than…”

“Today they're grossing on average, A little bit more than four million dollars per shack. There's 278 of them in the world.”

“Well, Chipotle, I think Steve and Chipotle really deserve an enormous amount of credit for really being the first national chain to break the barrier that fast food could not be It's gastronomic. There's real cooking that takes place in real time”

“In keeping it open two years longer than I should have, where we couldn't make ends meet, I was actually doing something incredibly unfair, which was to keep people on the team just because they were so loyal, and they were not getting raises, and they were no…”