Sweetgreen co-founder Nicholas Jammet explains how the company chose regional density in the Mid-Atlantic to refine operations before launching in major national markets.
“We got to around 20 restaurants in DC, Virginia, Maryland. We'd gone to Philly, so a little further, really understanding what a second city feels like. And we made a bunch of mistakes on how you hire, how you operate remotely, how you build a second supply chain how do you build a brand from scratch in a new city. All these micro learnings that really allowed us to, once we were ready to go to New York, Boston, California, Go with some set of a playbook, some sort of belief of how we introduce Sweetgreen the right way in a new city.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Nicholas Jammet
Insight
Public market scrutiny creates constructive focus for founders executing business plans
“Being a public company, you have that expectation of having to execute on what you've promised to the street. So it actually creates a bit of this constructive pressure for us to actually try to stay very focused on the business plan at hand.”
Nicholas JammetMay 6, 2024▶ 48:25Sweetgreen co-founders: From college friends to a $2.5 billion public company | Masters of Scale
AssertionPartly supported
Salads are now one of Sweetgreen's smaller menu categories
“And so our menu has really broadened quite nicely over the last few years, and where salads used to be the only and majority category, today it's one of our smaller categories.”
Nicholas JammetMay 6, 2024▶ 1:00:18Sweetgreen co-founders: From college friends to a $2.5 billion public company | Masters of Scale
AssertionSupported
All three Sweetgreen co-founders are children of immigrant entrepreneurs
“We were all kids of immigrants, kids that had come to this country, parents that had come to this country and built businesses. They were all entrepreneurs.”
Nicholas JammetMay 6, 2024▶ 1:48Sweetgreen co-founders: From college friends to a $2.5 billion public company | Masters of Scale
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Neman called Sweetgreen's first landlord 30 consecutive days to secure a meeting
“I actually remember the landlord of our Georgetown, our first location, wouldn't even return our call. John called her 30 days in a row, every single day, so she finally took a meeting just to stop the calls.”
Nicholas JammetMay 6, 2024▶ 14:58Sweetgreen co-founders: From college friends to a $2.5 billion public company | Masters of Scale
AssertionPartly supported
All 40 Sweetgreen corporate team members relocated to Los Angeles in 2016
“And we had about 35, 40 people on the team at the time and they all moved with us.”
Nicholas JammetMay 6, 2024▶ 44:18Sweetgreen co-founders: From college friends to a $2.5 billion public company | Masters of Scale
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, about 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.
