Mark Ramadan

“I felt like I was constantly putting on some sort of suit of armor every day, like pretending things were great, pretending that everything was going well, including with investors, even when they could have helped.”

“If anything, we saw inertia as the competitor. People are on, you know, they're not impulse buying different catch-ups every week, and so the real competitor was Habit. And so we thought about how do we break a habit rather than how do we switch people away fr…”

“I work with a lot of restaurants, and those that are loaded up with debt can't focus on operations, and those loaded up with equity investors also are distracted from finding opportunities with their operations.”

“I think it was probably about 20 million-ish.”

“So on Wednesday, the company has both a CEO and a CMO, and by Monday, we're both gone for months.”

“We had this restaurant that was two blocks from our office that we would fire people at. So we wouldn't fire people in the office. We'd fire people at this restaurant.”

“I ended up, I wouldn't say fighting with the board, but informing the board that that wasn't the path I was going to take, but that we would go down a slightly different path, which is that I would ask Scott to step away from the business for a little bit. [44…”

“The advice I mostly got was, number one, this happens to every co-founder set. [4357] Mark Ramadan: It always happens. [4358] Mark Ramadan: Co-founders have falling outs or fights. [4360] Mark Ramadan: And then number two, the only solution is to remove Scott …”

“When we first incorporated the business, none of us were full-time. I believe it was 2009, and so I say it was easy in the sense that there were four of us, so it was You know, 25% all around.”

“We were going to raise at one million a valuation, and then I met with someone who said you should raise at ten million, and I said ten million seems crazy, and so Mark and I agreed on two and a half.”

“And I think the very first check into the business was my parents, and then Scott's parents, and a few other people who were very close to, and that allowed us to order this minimum run”

“We used fake letterhead for the law firm Skadden Arps, and we wrote a letter to the Brown Daily Herald, the campus newspaper, accusing them of stealing Sir Kensington's recipe as a way to get the newspaper's attention”

“The way ketchup is made industrially is pretty difficult to replicate at home, because it's essentially a rehydrated paste.”

“We were totally sure we were not going to call it Scott and Mark's ketchup. Like, to us, that was totally boring. We wanted to come up with something that was so radically interesting and different, and was a world that people could inhabit.”

“I think when we read this as food people, it didn't make sense to us that the only thing that matters to market dominance is the formula of a product. Of course it's not. That takes zero account of how people think about brand, how people discover brands, how …”

“And by 2015, the two founders had sold over two and a half million jars of product.”

“Anyway, in 2010, the year Mark Ramadan and Scott Norton decided to start a ketchup brand, Heinz sold 10 and a half billion dollars of the stuff.”