{"id":21719,"date":"2013-12-04T09:34:17","date_gmt":"2013-12-04T08:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=21719"},"modified":"2019-04-30T17:52:01","modified_gmt":"2019-04-30T15:52:01","slug":"want-your-startup-to-succeed-peel-carrots-not-finished","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2013\/12\/want-your-startup-to-succeed-peel-carrots-not-finished\/","title":{"rendered":"Want your startup to succeed? Peel carrots"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"carrots\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The following is a guest post from\u00a0Michael Ferranti, a marketer and product guy living and working in San Francisco, USA where he earns money for hanger steak and c\u00e8pes\u00a0mushrooms. You can follow him on Twitter\u00a0@ferrantim<\/a>\u00a0where your tweets in English and fran\u00e7ais are welcome, or on his\u00a0blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was 17 and got a job cooking in a great restaurant I thought a lot about what my life would be like. \u00a0My fantasies were aided by alluring images from the increasingly popular cooking shows that were springing up in the 1990s American television landscape. \u00a0I knew from watching TV, \u00a0for example, that it was incredibly important to correctly tie a boneless lamb loin before roasting (especially when stuffed with saut\u00e9ed spinach and chanterelles). \u00a0I also knew\u2013even if unsure of the proper technique\u2013that egg yolks must never be left to overheat when making a Sauce Hollandaise. \u00a0When I started working with real chefs, I’d master all of these techniques and more. No dish would be too complicated. \u00a0And it was only a matter a time before I was teaching others these elaborate dishes. \u00a0And then the 25-kilo bags of carrots arrived.<\/p>\n

Orange hands for weeks<\/h2>\n

My first 2 weeks in the kitchen, I did almost nothing except peel carrots. \u00a0I’d finish one bag and another would arrive. \u00a0For weeks, my apron and hands orange with carrot juice, I’d leave for the night disappointed that I’d wasted the entire evening peeling while the other chefs roasted monkfish, saut\u00e9ed fresh morels and pulled fondants au chocolat<\/em>\u00a0out of the oven at the exact right time. \u00a0 I didn’t appreciate the grunt work I was given, but I persisted and eventually graduated to potatoes and shallots.<\/p>\n

After a couple of years working my way up in the kitchen, ingredient by ingredient, I learned that we had never intended to use all the carrots and potatoes and shallots that I peeled. \u00a0They had been ordered primarily with the purpose of giving me something to do that I couldn’t mess up. But beyond simple restaurant self-preservation, my chef mentors understood that these humble\u00a0ingredients are the foundation of all great food, whether it is a grandmother’s roast pork or the house delicacy of a Michelin-starred restaurant. Without respect for these ingredients and a proper understanding of how to process them, it is impossible to create great food.<\/p>\n

Scaling shallots<\/h2>\n

Take the shallot as an example. \u00a0You can learn to properly dice a shallot in a 30-second Youtube video. \u00a0Anyone can do it, and it doesn’t take that much practice to do it reasonably well. \u00a0But what about dicing 100 shallots in an hour while simultaneously simmering three different sauces, and keeping an eye on delicate pastry cooking in the oven ? \u00a0For a chef, this isn’t a theoretical problem. \u00a0A busy weekend night in a popular restaurant can easily go through 100 shallots, even more if they are being incorporated into a cooked sauce that reduces their volume significantly. \u00a0 The art of producing perfectly square diced shallots at scale is something completely different from the technique of dicing a single shallot in the abstract. When doing something at scale, you have to think differently. \u00a0Small details like on which side of the cutting board to put the finished product matter, since any wasted motion pushing shallots around the board make you slower and less precise.<\/p>\n

Just as importantly as mastering pure technique,\u00a0executing mundane tasks\u2013perfectly\u2013over and over keeps you in touch with the basis on which everything else in the kitchen is built. \u00a0And as you learn to appreciate the fundamentals, you stay humble making it much \u00a0easier to jump in and help wherever needed. \u00a0Being humble also does wonders for the culture of a kitchen, which is notoriously ego-driven. \u00a0Seeing a grand chef dicing shallots with the same care as he would take slicing truffles reminds everyone else that every task is important to the final experience created in the dining room.<\/p>\n

From kitchens to startups<\/h2>\n

What does all this mean for your startup? \u00a0In my view, it means that succeeding building your business requires you to really understand the foundations\u2013whether\u00a0that is technology, customer service, sales, or marketing (and most likely all four!). \u00a0It requires you to stay sharp. When your company’s grown to 500 employees, you can stop worrying about (some) of the day-to-day activities without which business would grind to a halt. \u00a0But when you’re 10 employees, loosing touch with how the\u00a0business is being run can mean the business runs away from you. \u00a0And lastly, it means staying humble. When you understand the foundations and keep your skills sharp, you can command armies by being humble. \u00a0In business, the best idea doesn’t always win. Neither does the best funded. \u00a0But teams that refuse to give up often do. \u00a0So stay humble and lead. \u00a0And never be afraid to go home with orange hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is a guest post from\u00a0Michael Ferranti, a marketer and product guy living and working in San Francisco, USA where he earns money for hanger steak and c\u00e8pes\u00a0mushrooms. You can follow him on Twitter\u00a0@ferrantim\u00a0where your tweets in English and fran\u00e7ais are welcome, or on his\u00a0blog. When I was 17 and got a job cooking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":21720,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-finance"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}