Unreasonable

I do not eat tamago, otherwise known as egg sushi. I never order it and when it comes as part of a sushi platter, I ignore it. I am coming for the fish after all, so why would I bother with a piece of sushi that is usually an afterthought.

Then I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The movie chronicles the life of Jiro Ono, the owner of three-star Michelin sushi restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro. One of the most memorable scenes was of an apprentice making the tamago. He was making four trays of the eggs per day for three months, not a single one deemed acceptable. Only after making over 200 of them, did Jiro say, “Now this is how it should be done.”

Apprentices do not start making tamago. They first must learn to properly squeeze the hot towel they present to customers at the start of the meal. Once they master that, they then spend the next ten years cutting and preparing fish. Only then does an apprentice get the privilege of making the egg sushi.

From that day forward, I had a newfound respect for tamago. I also learned how obsessive chefs can be, especially Japanese chefs. That standard of quality is something I never truly noticed before but now have started to appreciate.

It is the type of perfection that seems over the top. There is a scene in the TV show The Bear where the sous chef at Ever goes into an expletive filled tirade at a staff meeting about a smudge on one of the plates during a prior dinner service. The mistake cost the kitchen 47 seconds, which in the grand scheme of things seems incredibly minor and petty.

Later in that same episode, one of the main characters, Ritchie, runs into Ever’s executive chef peeling mushrooms. Most people would never think about peeling mushrooms, so expectedly Ritchie is curious. Chef Terry replies that when diners see it they will know someone spent a lot of time on their dish.

The thread in all of these moments is the deep level of care demonstrated for the craft and the customer. The vast majority of people would never notice the fanatical level of attention to detail. For chefs striving to be the best in their field though, the details are everything in delivering the very best product and service to their diners every single day.

I just finished a book called Unreasonable Hospitality from the general manager of Eleven Madison Park. He describes his experience in taking a pretty good high-end eatery in NYC and elevating it to become one of the best fine-dining establishments in the world. He and his partner Chef Daniel Humm did not just focus on the food however, they went to insane lengths to reimagine the entire guest experience to a level that sounds unreasonable.

What exactly was unreasonable? They created a staff role called Dreamweaver that personalized experiences for every guest beyond just a free dessert or glass of wine for a celebration. They dropped off a whole bottle of expensive Cognac on the table with the check, inviting guests to have as much as they like so as to not make paying the bill an awkward experience. They removed the front host podium while being able to personally greet each guest to provide a more welcoming experience when entering the restaurant. They implemented a hand signaling system to wordlessly communicate instructions or requests for help to make service feel seamless and invisible experience for diners.

For many restaurants, this level of detail would be excessive and overbearing. Frankly, for most people, much of this seems unnecessary. I am quite happy having fried dumplings in a night market or eating a bowl of pho sitting on a stool along the street. However, to be the very best restaurant in the world requires constant innovation and the type of unreasonable level of perfection that seems almost foolish to strive for. Because of these pioneers, the rest of us have the variety and quality of cuisine we have today such as imperial Chinese and French haute cuisine at an affordable price and commonly available.

Any significant advance we have had as a species has come from the few people willing to take enormous risks. Sometimes it came at great cost such as the Middle Age astronomers contradicting the accepted views of the church about the solar system. Sometimes it sounded preposterous such as landing men on the moon within a decade. Sometimes it was tech startups challenging the status quo across industries from agritech to fintech to transportation against entrenched interests.

To dispute, to dream, to disrupt is uncomfortable, even dangerous. This is what often makes entrepreneurship a long, lonely journey. Founders start with a vague idea that borders the line between ludicrous and dumb. Jeff Bezos recognized this as he was building Amazon, when many people were saying that it was going to fail in the early days. Years later, during a shareholder meeting, Bezos said, “we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

A startup by its very definition is an unreasonable venture. It is an organization that aims to find a scalable and repeatable business model. Sometimes it can take years to even get to a hint of traction. In the meantime, the founders wander the desert on the edge of failure, running out of funds, and losing sanity as hope for success look dimmer and dimmer. The only thing that remains is the unfailing belief in the vision.

Startups are unreasonable for another reason. To be successful, the founders need to constantly obsess on creating the very best product and service experience for their customers on a consistent basis. Founders own the responsibility to be chief product and experience officers of their company, with their ear to the customer and their eye on quality delivery.

A few months ago, a conversation started on the topic of “Founder Mode” from an essay by Paul Graham. It ignited a lot of debate and speculation as to what founder mode actually looked like. Some called it permission to allow founders to become tyrants and an excuse for toxic behaviors. Many founders, however, saw it as a reflection of the disconnect that happens as they lose control of what is actually happening as their startup scales.

Founders have to be in the details. This is the essence of founder mode. Without being in the weeds with customers and products, it is too easy for the founder to lose touch and the startup to veer from the vision. This is the natural tension in organizations, between giving autonomy and authority to the team on the ground to make the right decisions and ensuring the focus on quality execution and that adherence to standards never wavers.

To navigate this tension between autonomy and command successfully without undermining trust in the team or becoming a pushover requires three things:

1. Respectful conflict needs to be embedded in the company culture as a core value from the very beginning. Founders need to model an environment where any employee can disagree with superiors and the founders if data, evidence, or insight shows another option to be better.

2. Honesty and transparency need to be the basis for all communication and relationships inside the company. Many founders find that they are blind to the reality inside their own companies because information is presented as the best picture, rather than the actual situation.

3. Innovation is messy, so failed experiments and mistakes must be handled in a blameless way that encourages examination, fosters trust, and facilitates learning. Motivation dies when the team fears reprisals from managers and founders for trying things outside the boundaries.

This can feel like an intense, high-stress environment to work within. However, it is less about avoiding startup death or desperation for growth . The best startups enable employees to stretch their limits to achieve remarkable outcomes in an environment that fosters excellence. When everyone comes together as a team united by an inspiring vision, they push each other to try even harder and to get better each and every day doing work they are inspired by.

This is known as a generative culture where everyone is empowered and growing in their skills and confidence. The opposite is a coercive, or toxic, culture where people actively work against each other for survival. Founder mode can go down either path.

Which would you choose? For me, I want to create the type of company that people feel proud to work at, with colleagues and customers they care about, that values the passion and talent they bring to the company, and leaves a positive impact on this world.

MARK BIRCH

I spend the end of year cleaning up stuff before the new year, planning ahead for the next year, and reviewing results of the past year. One of those review is to dig into my social media activities (LinkedIn) to see what worked and didn’t work.

While I have a few ways of doing this, I tried a tool from Cleve.AI who launched a free “LinkedIn Unwrapped” feature using AI to analyze your past year’s LinkedIn activity. This startup was also mentioned in my Malaysia startup ecosystem post from last month which was a pleasant discovery!

What fun facts and interesting patterns emerged from my LinkedIn usage?

• Most of my posts were at 8 AM EST, but highest engagement was 7 PM and 5 AM EST.

• Posted 246 times, nearly every business day, my longest continuous streak being 22 days.

• Published mainly Tuesday to Thursday, though most engagement was Wednesday and Saturday.

• Top posts were Got My Taiwan Gold Card, Why Taiwan & Leaving AWS (no surprises there).

• If you post about travel tips, that gets a lot of attention!

I also gained some insights into things to avoid and ways to amplify your LinkedIn engagement to generate results. Here are some of those lessons learned:

• Scheduled content to sites off LinkedIn performs poorly - Proved this during my August vacation when I scheduled posts via Buffer linking out to my email newsletter and saw very little engagement or views.

• Reposting gets penalized - It is better to start a fresh post if you want to share content that mentions you or you wish to promote.

• Publishing more often does not help - limit yourself to 3 or 4 posts per week to optimize views and engagement.

• Never post more than once within 24 hours - the algorithm crushes the spread of your content and no one will see either post.

• Video is the best performing content - video is the future on LinkedIn, but photos posts also do well, much better than text only posts.

• Can't improve what you don't measure - there are many tools now using AI to help level up your social media effectiveness.

How will you use LinkedIn for your startup in 2025? What tips have worked for you to optimize LinkedIn? Let me know and glad to share more tips in future posts!