MOD Pizza

“Right now we have about 12,000 squad members.”

“Prior to the pandemic, 95% plus of our customers would come into Maud, a restaurant, and either walk down the line and build their own product, or pick up their product and take it out.”

“This concept wouldn't work if we couldn't crack the lunch occasion, just given the economics of paying for a piece of real estate and the people and so forth.”

“Whatever mistakes we made, whatever collateral damage, if you will, there comes from going too fast would be more than made up for by winning in this category and having All the advantages that come from being that market share leader over time, being the Star…”

“So today, 85% of our stores are company-owned, 15% are franchised with nine partners who were fabulous, incredibly valuable, and experienced operators”

“If you allow a brand in a category to get too far ahead in a particular market, it's hard to supplant them.”

“The Mod name was inspired by the Mod era of the fifties and sixties in the UK. Ali and I grew up as big fans of the Who and the music and vibe of that era, and”

“And no, that had never been done before in pizza.”

“Yeah, we were the fastest growing restaurant brand in the country for, I believe, four years. Three or four years.”

“They would have had to check a box in this, in Seattle, and we did not require them to check the box. We employed them. The first job out of prison was working at Maud, and in a very short period of time even though some people thought, well, that's kind of cr…”

“On our fifth birthday, 12 stores in western Washington, five years later on our 10th birthday, we had over 400 stores spread across seventy-plus discrete markets around the U.S.”

“In our ovens, we can at peak have 15 to 20 pizzas in the oven at one time, But it's still gonna take, you know, three to four minutes for that product to cook”

“And then we got into a dynamic where we needed to raise capital, which we knew we were going to. It just accelerated it and put us into a position of either needing to raise capital or sell the company. And we ended up selling.”

“We had never worked in retail. Our qualification was the fact that we had been customers of the thing that we wanted to create.”