Danny Meyer's Advice for Startup Founders

Danny Meyer has spent four decades proving that a restaurant is not a family, even though it can feel like one. That claim sits at the center of this advice-line episode, hosted by Guy Raz, in which the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and the man behind Shake Shack takes calls from three founders building very different food and beverage businesses. Meyer, who in 2022 gave up day-to-day operations to become executive chairman, a title he says he had never even heard before taking it, describes the move not as stepping down but stepping up. He now spends his time on fewer things, but the things that matter most: culture, the culinary product, and new ventures (02:10).

That focus on culture turns out to be the through-line of the whole hour. For about fifteen years, Meyer ran his restaurants on what he called family values. He came to see the phrase as sentimental rather than useful. The problem was not disagreement with the values themselves. It was the metaphor. Families do not fire people. Businesses sometimes have to.

"A business is not a family. And I noticed that every time we held someone accountable to the point that there just wasn't gonna be a place for them on our team going forward, people would go into deep grief because you don't fire a family member." (Danny Meyer, [03:59])

His fix was to swap family values for expected behaviors, a shift from feeling to specification. He offers something close to a formula: culture is the sum of the wanted behaviors an organization celebrates minus the unwanted behaviors it tolerates (04:21).

That equation sounds abstract until Meyer makes it visible. Asked how a customer can tell, within minutes, whether a restaurant's hospitality is real or performed, he does not mention the menu or the decor. He says to watch the staff. If they are focused on the job and having fun with each other at the same time, both boxes checked, that energy becomes an ingredient in the meal itself (05:39). He extends the test past restaurants, running it on flight attendants pushing a cart down an aisle and deciding whether an airline becomes his favorite not by whether the plane lands on time but by whether the crew enjoyed working together while it did (06:04). Asked how much of that is a management responsibility, he does not hedge: about 120 percent when it works, and 150 percent of the blame when it does not (06:24).

The discipline that keeps that energy from fading over decades, Meyer says, is what he calls a day one mentality. Union Square Cafe is 41 years old, Gramercy Tavern is 31, and Shake Shack and The Modern are both 22 (07:13). None of them, in his view, should be allowed to feel their age. The trick is to ask every team, every night, to imagine it is opening day again, when the floor had no scratch and the wine glasses had no smudge, and to cook and serve as if three restaurant critics happen to be in the room (07:13). It is a deliberately theatrical standard, useful precisely because it never lets a twenty-year-old restaurant coast.

Packaging as the Bartender Who Is Not There

If the first half of the hour is Meyer's philosophy, the second half tests it against three unrelated businesses. Janelle Bass of Louisville, Kentucky, co-founded Pony Boy Slings, a bourbon-based canned cocktail built to taste more like nostalgic soda than a classic old fashioned, at 7 percent alcohol (09:19). In tastings, where she or her husband can talk to a customer directly, the product converts at 60 to 70 percent (10:34). Her problem is scale. On a shelf, in what she calls the sea of ready-to-drink cans, nobody is there to sell the story.

Guy Raz's answer turns the packaging itself into the missing bartender. "I would think about the can as your bartender," he tells her, pointing to Liquid Death's "murder your thirst" label as an example of a can doing a bartender's job of inviting someone in (14:23). Meyer points her to Ramona, a canned wine built by former Union Square sommelier Jordan Salcito, designed so a customer feels they are drinking with Salcito even when she is nowhere near (15:03). The sharper point underneath the packaging advice is about identity, not design. "You're not selling a product," he tells Bass. "You're selling the opportunity to belong to a community where people like us do things like this" (13:27).

Scarcity as a Growth Strategy

The second call turns the conversation toward logistics, where hospitality has to survive contact with FedEx. Jade Taylor of Angel Oak Smokehouse, a premium smoked salmon company in Charleston, South Carolina, built her business on a family tradition that began when her father, a salmon fisherman in the north of England, smoked a surplus catch his own father demanded he remove from the family bathtub (20:19). Fifteen months in, Angel Oak is already in 42 Whole Foods stores across the southeast and about to launch in Fresh Market's 170 locations (20:40, 21:01). Taylor's question is whether to add direct-to-consumer shipping and risk a bad delivery turning premium salmon into spoiled fish on someone's porch.

Here Meyer and Guy Raz genuinely disagree, and the disagreement is instructive. Raz argues for caution: track repeat orders closely, because a direct-to-consumer business without repeat purchases is just an expensive way to mail people something they could buy at Whole Foods (24:15). Meyer agrees with the caution but layers on a second, almost opposite instinct: dabble anyway, in small doses, through a platform like GoldBelly, which already ships fragile goods, including his own daughter's ice cream, without requiring Angel Oak to build its own shipping operation (23:22). The value is not the sales volume. It is the data: knowing exactly where national demand is clustering, information Taylor could not get any other way without opening stores in those cities (26:50). When Taylor pivots to asking about supplying small gourmet shops instead, Meyer tells her to pick one or two accounts she would be proud to own and let everyone else want in. Scarcity, he says, does not shrink a brand. It gives it "more luster" (27:43).

The final call comes from Bar Brujas of Boost Couscous, a company that replaces standard couscous, which is really just semolina flour and water, with a blend of chickpea, lentil, and pea flour carrying 18 grams of protein and 11 grams of fiber per serving and no wheat or xanthan gum (30:36). Launched less than a year ago, the company has already shipped 150,000 boxes on a $2 million run rate, entirely bootstrapped, because the business is profitable on its first order and can plow that margin straight back into marketing (32:23, 32:45). Brujas wants to know how to get into fast-casual chains like Cava and Sweetgreen, which already build grain bowls that could easily add couscous as an option.

Meyer's advice inverts the obvious move. Do not chase the big chains first, he says, because their purchasing departments carry quality assurance requirements a young company may not yet be equipped to clear. Instead, find a small restaurant that already has couscous on its menu, win there, and let that success become the credential that earns the next, slightly bigger account (34:26). Raz adds a real precedent: Impossible Foods built early buzz by sending its plant-based meat to high-profile chefs like David Chang before it ever appeared at a grocery chain, letting culinary credibility do the marketing a young brand cannot yet afford to buy (35:41). Meyer adds one more detail before signing off. Boost Couscous is arriving at a moment when American interest in Mediterranean cooking is at a high point, and a handful of well-known chefs already keep couscous on their menus, ready-made advocates if the company can get its product in front of them (37:54).

The three calls sound like three industries, canned cocktails, smoked fish, high-protein couscous, but Meyer keeps returning to one instinct. Hospitality is not a feeling a company announces. It is a set of behaviors it can design, measure, and scale, whether the customer meets a server or only meets a can.

Asked, at the end, what he would tell himself at 27, opening his first restaurant, Meyer does not offer a growth hack. He talks about 1987, two years after Union Square Cafe opened, when a stock market crash known as Black Friday made him think his career was already finished (40:44). He has since lived through September 11th, Superstorm Sandy, the 2008 recession, and the pandemic, and the pattern, he says, always repeats: the graph drops, then it comes back, sometimes higher than before (40:18).

"The root of the word hospitality is hope, and I think we're actually in a business that can actually take pessimism and fear, and we can be the antidote to that." (Danny Meyer, [41:11])

In a business built on serving people through fear and uncertainty, that word is not decoration. It is the whole point.