What running a pizzeria taught me about entrepreneurship
Why did a restaurant get me thinking more than a tech startup?
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Note: I initially wrote this article for a friend seeking advice on advancing her career. She wanted to switch fields, leave her job, and was considering starting a restaurant. That’s why I created it as a personal entry in my journal to share with her. Later, I chose to make it available to everyone, made some edits to improve clarity, and posted it on my blog.
Lessons learnt
I’ve always thought I learned a lot building all these companies. For some reason, I decided I was going to write something called “lessons learnt” only when I opened my restaurant. But there were lessons learned all the way along.
The restaurant, maybe because it's very tangible, because it's closer to people, and because I think it touches something more fundamental, eating, taught me more. I approached it with a blank state. I'm a software developer, a math-guy, and I ended up trying to make the best pizzas in Medellín. I can’t say I sell the best pizzas1, but they are as good as I can make them, and people seem to like them. Actually, they are the best in town, but that’s another story.
Also, ultimately, some people, usually slightly younger, asked me for tips because they’re at a breakthrough moment in their life. Or at least they feel like it. I feel extremely flattered, because I think those people are more intelligent than I am. They're smart, they're extroverts, socially very aware and capable, and quite cultivated. That’s nice, though, because they’re younger and asking questions to someone just five years older. Five years is quite close to nothing, but at that age (late 20s) these things matter. Those are the years when freedom, youth, and a nascent self-knowledge cross beautifully, and one knows what they love, and most importantly, what they don’t want in their lives. A few act on it, but again, that’s for another day.
As of now, my restaurant is growing and improving, but there were some lessons I wish I had known earlier. Here are a few.
A restaurant, like any business, should reflect some genuine interest. It should express your soul, your passion, your taste, your way of being, your identity, your authentic self. This is why I never sell a product I wouldn’t consume or buy myself. I strongly believe that’s one of the most important tips. So many people think their restaurants (or any business) as just a money operation: how to extract hard-earned dollars from people without any passion for the product they’re selling. I don’t think this can work. In fact, it never really works.
Even Todd Graves, who sells chicken fingers -the most trivial product one can imagine- is passionate about it. Ray Kroc from McDonald’s was passionate about scaling milkshake production. The In-N-Out founder, Harry Snyder was really into cooking the best burger. I’m really passionate about the best pizza. I love food. I've always loved food. I conquered all my girlfriends, who are much more attractive than I am, also through food, and I have no shame in admitting that.
Most importantly, I’m the first client of my restaurant. I can’t really explain what that matters to me. It just does. I like seeing a clean kitchen while cooking a beautiful Naples-style pizza. I like knowing the Burrata is fresh, the olive oil extra virgin, and basil at best of its flavour. I enjoy seeing people's faces as they bite into that slice and realize they made a good choice entering this place, our place, my place, their place for a short moment. The money is consequential; passion comes first, always. Missionaries always beat mercenaries in the long term and also have more fun and find deeper meaning in the process.
Literally, if I wasn't one of the founder of this restaurant, it would still be the first place I’d think of when looking for somewhere to eat in town or for a date, to bring some friends, to spend time, to listen to music, to talk to the bartender, to flirt with a waitress, and to check on the food. That would be the first place. That’s why we built exactly this place.
I believe in autotelic activities, done for their own sake. You should build your business with that in mind. That means doing things because they’re you. You want the decoration and design that you like, the food you like, the drinks you like. Why? Because when you sell it, you’ll have passion, and passion is contagious. People will buy it because they see you happy and want that kind of happiness.
This is exactly what Phil Knight explained in Shoe Dog: when he sold shoes, he wasn’t really selling, he was transmitting his passion for running in those Japanese shoes. Before that, he couldn't sell jack.
You’re not running a restaurant, you’re running an inventory
On more concrete stuff: a restaurant is an inventory management company and also a sanitary operations company. As soon as you have good inventory and an extremely clean process, things can go well. It does not mean it will go well. It means it’s necessary but non-sufficient.
What makes inventory hard? It's boring and tedious. People don’t know how to do it. It takes time. Also, restaurants usually attract people from other industries who think that cooking something at home is enough to make a good restaurant. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.
Inventory management means knowing exactly what kind of table you're serving and how much money you make from it. You should know the precise margins on every product, whether it's 15%, 20%, 30%, or 70%. You need to know where you’re making money and where you’re losing it. You should also know which items must be sold together -like beers and tapas- if you want to preserve margin across both. Not every item will have the same margin, and that’s fine. Some products have zero margin because they're meant to be consumed with others that carry the profit, like a hamburger paired with liqueur, or a beer with snacks. The key is to keep your inventory clean and your margins clear. Dedicate at least one morning a week to reviewing your inventory, updating the system, and knowing exactly where you stand.
You should know exactly what type of product comes in, what providers to choose for each item, have a list of providers and prices, know the amounts and quantities, and have standard recipes entered into an inventory management system so you can track it.
Even if you’re not in the restaurant yourself, you should do inventory every week. You should know discrepancies -what ran out too fast, what you had to reorder, and what you lost- and how you can negotiate prices if you’re buying more. Always try to find the best product for each item. Inventory is what makes the business work or die. Simply put, when I see a pizza going out, I know exactly how much I make and exactly how much it costs: the waitress bringing it, the electricity and gas, the cook’s labor, the flour, the cheese.
Another thing: strip everything to the bone. Your inventory should be simple, with few products. That will later surprisingly relate to brand strategy. Your inventory should be simple, and so should be your brand. My pizza is flour, water, salt, some cheese, tomato, olive oil, and a few optional condiments like homemade Balsamic reduction or artesanal green Pesto. Fundamentally, everything revolves around that. With those ingredients, I can do everything. Add chickpeas? I get pizza bread with hummus. Add vegetables? Antipasti of Pizza bread with grilled vegetables. Meat? It’s already on a pizza, I can make a meat sandwich with pizza bread. That’s how it works.
Build your inventory clearly with just a few products. Then set good margins and build concentric circles around those core ingredients. Most restaurants fail because they think they’re managing a restaurant, but they’re actually managing five. They have five different identities on the menu with products that don’t work together. Every successful restaurant has a clear identity, and that means tight inventory management.
Identity, and brand
Now, about identity: don’t dilute your brand. Ever. Never sell random shit that has nothing to do with your concept. Yeah, I’ve got a great taco recipe. I love cooking pasta. Still, it doesn’t work. Think simple. Think about the restaurants you love, the places you keep going back to. The most famous, the most successful : All have a clear identity. You are either a wine bar, or cocktail bar. You aren’t both.
This applies not just to food. It’s true for other types of brands too. Here a three examples I love.
Example 1: Akio Morita from Sony refused to market the Walkman as a tape recorder. He thought it would dilute the brand.
Example 2: Steve Jobs always reduced things to one : One button on the iPhone, one product in an ad, one word in the copy. Reduce to one. One identity. One product. One north-star.
Example 3: James Dyson refused to market his vacuum as an air expiration machine, even though people used it that way. Why? Because of confusion. It's that simple.
Brand dilution is very tempting, especially early on, when you have no cash. You want to sell everything. But if you sell everything, you sell nothing. Why? Because few things together don’t compound like one thing that compounds hard. For instance, you sell tacos and pizzas. You’re the second choice for tacos and the second choice for pizza. That means someone else, who only does tacos or only does pizza, will beat you, simply because they’re the first choice.
You should be passionate about a few products, and attract equally passionate clients. In fact, it doesn’t matter if everyone likes your restaurant. If you have 10 clients, you want one to be extraordinarily happy. By the way, Haruki Murakami used to run a jazz bar and he said the same thing. That passionate client will comment, interact on Instagram, know you, leave a review, come back, bring friends. The other nine? Doesn’t matter. That’s the balance. Don’t try to get everyone to come back. Find the one who is extremely happy and build around them. Again: concentric circles. Compound from the center. Have a QR code with the review always ready. It goes a long way and help people find you.
I saw it at my pizzeria. I don’t care if the guy who wants to fuck a new girl brings her here because it’s a trendy spot. Whatever, he’s not coming back. Or not until the next girl. Fine. But someone who shows up and likes the music, the pizza, the food, the vibe, the waitress : They’ll come back. They’ll bring friends. They’ll transmit their passion. Passion is contagious. My restaurant isn’t full every night, but it’s getting close. I like thinking that’s because we’ve got passionate clients, and built in concentric circles around them.
It’s hard to be patient at the start. But be patient. Never, ever trade quality for short-term gain. You’ll kill the long-term game. Even now, when I desperately need cash, I sometimes refuse to let a pizza or a tiramisu leave the kitchen. It happened a couple of weeks ago (as of June 25, so in May 2025) Why? Because it wasn’t perfect. And this pizza is me. I am the fucking pizza. If the pizza is ugly, I am ugly. And if I’m ugly, I’m fucked. Simple as that. And I don’t want to be ugly, I sometimes think I am, and I used to be (more than now), it sucks. So the Pizza is made of my passion, the passion is me, if the pizza comes out bad, I’m fucked, a servile useless idiot, single, ignored by people and women, for the rest of my life, up to the eternity, among all the multiverse, a loser, even a loser at being a loser. That’s how important the Pizza is.
I don’t want someone to see that pizza and say, “Meh, not as good as the picture.” Maybe it tastes good, but not as good as they heard. I don’t want that. So I refused to serve two pizzas. The cooks were outraged. My co-founder was pissed. The waitress was angry. The clients were losing their patience. I don’t give a fuck. I’m not ugly, period. The pizza should be as good as it can be. No trade-offs. Ever. One time, the dough was bad. It was 8 p.m. on a Friday. We decided to close the kitchen. Either it’s the best, or it’s nothing. My co-founder is the same, even worst.
One bad experience for a potential passionate client and you’ve lost them forever. You should take pride in your product. Only the best you can do. Not the best in the world, just the best you can do. Never trade quality. Whatever short-term gain you make will vanish fast and be forgotten. It’ll kill the long term.
And here’s the thing: it’s easier to not trade quality when you only have one thing to care about. In my case, I’ll never trade quality on the pizza. That’s it. The pizza is the restaurant. The dough is the whole game. Just one variable to optimize. Don’t try to optimize 20 things. “Best wine, best pastries, best meat, best fish”. You can do that later when you’ve got a huge operation. For now, pick one or two things that you taste, know, explain, sell, and promote.
It takes time, by the way; that’s why you should be ready for 12 months, 18 months of 60/80% break-even. Also, don’t spend your taxes; please have two bank accounts, one with the VAT and withdrawal, and whatever other taxes provision. Those are government’s pennies, not yours. Don’t spend it. That’s the difference between EBITDA and cash flow. EBITDA is a garbage metric loved by ignorant bankers who never sold even a club soda. It’s what you have in the bank account before paying what you have to pay if you don’t want to go to jail. Great, I’m EBITDA positive in jail, good stuff. That’s useless; you want cash flow.
Promotion
Whatever you do in your restaurant, you have to promote it. Building is only half the job. Cooking is only half the job. Building is only half the job.
Got a new pizza? Promote it. New recipe? Promote it. Better dough? Promote it. New wine? Promote it. Happy clients? Promote it. New ingredient? Promote it.
If you don’t promote it, it’s like it never happened. Promotion is complex because your brand isn’t just food, it’s the whole experience: The atmosphere, the music, the table color, the duck color, the bar, the beer’s taste, the wine, the way the waiting staff looks. Does they have tattoos or long hairs, are they alternative?
Your brand should be treated like a complete world, a universe. Promote every part of it. Why? Because that’s how you go from just serving food to creating identity. That’s how successful places thrive. People don’t just come to eat, they come to be seen, to feel like they belong, to align themselves with others they admire.
Promote. If someone beautiful walks in, take a picture. If people are happy, encourage them to post, repost their stories, go on TikTok, Instagram. Promotion is no longer half the job. In 2025, it’s 70–80% of the job. Once you have a good product and a process, replication is easy. Technology allows it. Just buy the same ingredients and repeat. But branding is how you turn wealth into money, which leads to my next point.
Wealth is what you build, money is what you get
Your restaurant isn’t just a place where food is served, it’s a brand, a feeling, an identity. People should come not just to eat, but because they’re seeking a specific experience, a world they want to be part of. That’s the foundation of real value.
Here’s the key: wealth is not money. Wealth is what generates money over time. It’s your recipes, your know-how, your hospitality standards, your space, your story : Everything that is hard to copy. Wealth is the set of intangible, durable advantages you build: your brand, your culture, your loyal customer base, your location's vibe, your unique atmosphere. The most powerful form of wealth is the one nobody else can imitate, and the best version of that is you.
Money is just the byproduct. It flows from wealth. If you think of your restaurant as a wealth-building engine, you stop chasing short-term profits and start building long-term power. That’s when leverage kicks in. Because once the brand is strong, once people associate your name with quality, consistency, emotion, they spread it for you. You don’t have to spend more. You just have to keep the experience alive and let word-of-mouth, aesthetics, and social proof do the work.
This is non-price-based competition. You're not fighting to be the cheapest or the fastest. You're creating something irreplaceable. Competing on price is a race to the bottom. Competing on brand is a path to compounding advantage, because you are not really competing. Your business is yours, and nobody can beat you at being yourself. A beautiful menu, a memorable wine pairing, the look and feel of your plates, the tattoo on your waitress’s arm, the playlist in the background. This is culture, not cost.
Once you understand this shift, from optimizing for cash flow to optimizing for brand equity, then your decisions change. You stop cutting corners for today’s margin and start investing in tomorrow’s legend. And when you play that game, wealth naturally converts into money. But it does at 10x the scale and longevity.
So never compromise your brand. Never cheapen the experience. Everything you do, every client interaction, every dish, every detail, is an investment in your wealth. That’s the leverage you own. That’s how you build something timeless. The money is consequential.
The kitchen is a sacred space, run by holy warriors
Ideally, hire people who care so much it hurts. People who’d rather throw a plate than let it leave the pass looking mediocre. The kitchen isn’t meant to be comfortable, it’s meant to be real. Brutal. Honest. People yell, curse, sweat, fight. Not because they’re toxic, but because they give a damn. That’s the difference between a dead restaurant and a living one. In the kitchen, there's no space for faking it, no time for corporate smiles. The only thing that matters is the food. Not how you feel. Not how tired you are. Did the plate go out right or not? That’s it. That’s the law. You can insult each other, cry in the walk-in, break down mid-service, but you never trade quality. Not for time, not for ease, not for anything. The kitchen is sacred because it respects one thing above all: the craft.
And as the one in charge, you need to live in that fire. You spend most of your time teaching, fixing, sharpening minds. Because it’s never as good as it can be done. That should be your religion. Every day you walk in asking: how can I push this further? How can I make the sauce tighter, the timing cleaner, the cut smoother, the crust better? You’re not managing people, you’re infecting them with your obsession. Because if you don’t push, it rots. The craft is part of the brand and builds the wealth that creates money. Again, the money is consequential.
And, at last : you will hate it, a lot
I remember one day, we were scared of a potential fire in the air extractor above the cooking station. Some idiot before us had never cleaned it, and years of thick, were dangerously hearing. It smoked. Total chaos. I had a date that night, I wanted nothing to do with it. But no one else was going to handle it, so we did. My hands were black with grease, my co-founder was screaming in the kitchen like a madman, tickets were piling up, customers were getting pissed. And in the middle of all that, with everyone yelling, sweating, falling apart, I realized : This is exactly where I want to be. Not because I enjoy it, but because I finally understood: most people are miserable because they think happiness is a life without problems. That’s bullshit. A good life is one where you fight problems that matter to you. And the real hack is to not waste your life solving problems you should’ve never had in the first place.
That’s what I felt back when I was at the bank. We were all pretending to care about dumb bullshit. Is the model broken? Will the market collapse? Is X getting fired? Did Y cry again? Are their kids depressed? Are the partners dying? I didn’t give a single fuck. These weren’t people; they were plants with suits, transparent sheep going through life and wasting their existence for something bringing nothing but a monthly salary to buy everything but what matters, which are good memories. Good memories are the substance of life. Just imagine if you had amnesia about everything. Nothing would really make sense.
And now? I get to actually live something, not only in my restaurant. But in my pizzeria, it’s to feed people. Feed bitches, feed angels, feed weirdos, feed your friends, and feed the bitch, feed the bitch, feed the bitch, as Adam said. Make them smile. Make them shut up for a second because the food’s too good to talk, or just too hot. That’s something. That’s a life. When it’s hard, when everything’s on fire, just ask yourself: Would you trade this for your old life? Would you trade it for sterile meetings, KPIs, and someone else's fake mission statement? Would you trade something for nothing? Not even a fool would trade something for nothing.
"Feed the bitch or she'll die!"