Brendan Foody: evaluation

Transcript context

…So these two companies you've started in the past, maybe share what they were because they're fun. And then how do they help you be successful in this? Like what's something that they taught you that helped you in your current role? Yeah, so there's been like a dozen, but I'll choose my favorite two. Okay. When I was in eighth grade, I started Donut Dynasty, where I saw that Safeway donuts were selling for $5 a dozen. And I was amazed because I felt like as an eighth grader, this was such an incredible deal. And so I started to bike down to Safeway, buy Safeway donuts for $5 a dozen, and then go back to my middle school and then sell them for $2 each. running really good margins, of course. It sold out super quickly. And so then I need to scale up. So I would pay my mom $20 to drive me in her minivan down to Safeway, buy 10 dozen donuts, go to my middle school, sell them all out. And then the school tried to shut me down. And so because I was selling like food on school campus, which they didn't like, uh, so they had me in the principal's office asking me to not do that. And then I moved my donut stand over 50 feet. So it was off school campus saying that they could no longer, you know, police me. I remember we had competitors pop up where the competitors were charging. They bought these Chuck's donuts, which if anyone in, in the Bay area knows are, uh, you know, higher end donuts than Safeway donuts, but they have a higher cost basis. They cost a dollar per. And so I dropped my prices to $1 for two weeks to run them out of business before I knew what anti-competitive practices were. And I'd hire all my friends, paying my friends in donuts because, you know, they perceived the donuts as $2 each where they could sell them throughout the school and I could have a lower cost basis on them. So I had all of these like fun experiences in selling. And then I could talk more about my high school business as well, which was a more significant scale. But I think the takeaway from that was just like, you can just do things like so many people have ideas, but the barrier to more companies being built, I think is just initiative and taking the steps to build the product or experience that customers want and investing the time and the ambition to scale that up. And so I think it was really getting reps of that that enabled me to realize that I should do it later on at a much larger scale. Amazing story. I love how wholesome that is versus like drugs.…

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