One interesting thing about being in the workforce is observing the power of email. Not email itself, which is quite extraordinary, but the power of an email address. At many companies, the email address is far more powerful than the job and title being held there. My dad would classify such a phenomenon as "feku" which roughly translates to bullshitting in Gujarati (our native tongue).
When Punchd sold to Google, we retired our (short-lived) @getpunchd.com email addresses, swapping them for @google.com equivalents. Of course having an email from such a well known company was far more powerful than any of us were despite the circumstances of our arrival. Simply getting an email from @google.com surprised many people since finding a way to contact the company was nearly impossible.
The phenomena of feku (you're an institutional Guju now) and email addresses extended within Google, too. Employees with shorter email addresses, like just their initials, were perceived as older or more senior since those email addresses were usually unavailable and therefore uncommon. I suppose it mimicked Top Level Domains (TLDs) where shorter and simpler URLs were taken and highly sought after (often sold for eye-popping premiums).
Mathematically speaking, it makes sense, as the number of letters in an email address gets big quickly:
And so forth…
(This same principle is why hashes, with more characters like capitals and numbers, scale so well.)
During our on boarding at Google, we had the opportunity to select our username and email address — a wonderful proxy for how well a company operations and its culture, as HR / IT tends to be unnecessarily dogmatic. I applied for:
I was not aware that a minimum of three letters were required for these usernames (called LDAPs internally), a vestigial irony of me loving to read anything except instructions.
It had turned out that one and two letter addresses were all taken, and therefore no longer available. Despite this and Google having around 15,000 employees (and thousands more previously) in 2011, I lucked out in getting nnd@google.com, or what we affectionally referred to as "nnd@" in abbreviation. The rest of Punchd took on rgam@, xanderp@, mjoanou@, knasser@, and natwelch@.
These addresses, at least at Google, are not easily recycled, surviving the tenure of the worker as a memoriam when their time at Google is complete. You can peruse the many documents, code, and footprints of employees long gone in this way.
If you're a real OG, you might be like our friend Brett Crosby, who held the enviable bc@google.com address until his time was up. I recently learned there are 225,000 current employees at Google nowadays, and doubt any of the shorter 1,2,3 and perhaps even 4 letter addresses remain.
It was amazing who you could email and get a response — something Joanou learned first and executed best. In a weird way, an email address is kind of a proxy of company value or interest. The response, internally and externally, reveals the true magnitude of the creation. He would meet with the most interesting people by simply sending an email — something he no doubt continues over at Reddit.
When I decided to join the University of California as an Investment Fellow, sometime in early 2017, I asked for niket@ucop.edu, clearly violating their firstname.lastname@ucop.edu structure. I realized that an email address allocation, inwards, could reveal how flexible a company or organization would be — especially one that was interested in hiring an unequivocally non-finance person (me) into a highly respectable finance role.
From what I understand, this sent their IT and Internal Policy teams for a loop which was only my half-desired effect. In the end, they sorted it out and I joined the company which made me thankful given how much of email was developed in part at the University of California.
I was sought after to help their Investment Office think about how the University would play a role in innovation and entrepreneurship from the perspective of their considerable assets, over $120 billion dollars. And that money, combined with the reputation of the school, provided me with yet another email address that could open doors in Silicon Valley and around the world.
But if they couldn't sort out a simple email address, how were they ever planning on solving cancer or advancing deep computational sciences forward?
One year into my Fellowship with the University of California (I'll expand on this later), I got an email from an @mit.edu counterpart interested in showing me "the hottest donut in the Universe!"
I've seen enough Computed Tomography Scanners in my lifetime, so a new donut, if not one I could eat, seemed intriguing and I jumped on a flight to erudite Cambridge, MA.
It's easy to be down in the world these days with the many externalities that form as result of human existence. Even beyond those, I find that humans are more culpable of causing issues that don't exist outside of their psyche. If only we could reliably harness such wasted energy.
Outside of showers, a first world gift, I feel most alive in planes, another first world gift. There's a marvel of flying that makes me uncontrollably giddy. I could stare out at the stars, clouds, and terrain wondering about the many possibilities that exist in each. And while my head was in the stars, in a few hours my body would be in front of one too.
In a somewhat hidden and plain building near MIT Campus exists an extraordinary team and opportunity: Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS has the explicit mission to develop the fastest path to commercial fusion energy. Yeah, that Fusion Energy — the one predicted to be here 20 years ago 50 years ago.
I was being chaperoned by Robert Mumgaard, one of the six founding team members of CFS, all hailing from the vaunted MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, who is equal parts Genius and Boy Scout. One of the rooms looked like Mission Control, with desks and computers strewn about and somewhat facing a massive screen surveilling the reactor and impressive looking data charts.
Wait, wait, wait. We should backup.
What is Fusion Energy?
To be honest, I assumed that's what powered the Death Star prior to my education. In an attempt to be concise, and considerate of my cursory knowledge, Fusion Energy is the energy derived from the fusion of two atomic nuclei into a heavier single one (done over and over and over again).
All stars, for some portion of their lives, are essentially massive fusion reactors and operate with some key factors: plasma (heat), the vacuum of space (confinement), gravity (pressure), and availability of hydrogen (fuel). These systems allow for continuous fusion reactions to occur while throwing off enormous heat which can be translated into other forms of energy.
Once these systems were understood, the question within the scientific physics and energy communities was if it was possible to replicate these conditions, here on Earth. The short answer is yes, and while it has required decades of research to reasonably prove and prototype, creating commercial fusion evolved from a physics problem into a materials science one.
On Earth, each of the Fusion Systems requires replication:
Heat - We are able to create heat in the form of the 4th state of matter, plasma, by spooling up a huge amount of energy derived from existing sources.
Confinement - We have designed sophisticated enclosures for plasma with a few variants (laser and magnetic based). The version CFS uses is called a Tokamak, a Russian designed magnetic-based enclosure, that resembles a hollow donut.
Pressure - We luckily have gravity here on Earth, too and we also have super powered magnets.
Fuel - We use isotopes of Hydrogen, Tritium and Deuterium, which are widely abundant.
Those systems combined produce and sustain a star on our planet, without the star knowing because it thinks it is in the vacuum of space thanks to an incredibly strong magnetic field. As result, instead of gathering whatever heat we can from our Sun, we generate one locally to capture energy more directly and consistently.
The overriding principle is maddening simple to understand while the mechanics underneath are complex. Fusion systems can be graded by a quintessential metric, known as Q, which is the ratio of energy output divided by energy input. If Q > 1, you have successfully accomplished sustainable fusion energy; anything else, including unsustainable Q > 1, won't keep the proverbial lights on.
Within the magnetic approach to fusion power, the challenge has been building a tokamak that can satisfy the conditions for fusion continuously and achieving Q > 1 power. The key lies in building ever more efficient and capable superconducting magnets which require less power to enclose and maintain the plasma for fusion. While there are countless other areas of optimization and things to sort out, this is one of the main breakthroughs that can lead to prototypes that can be scaled up to sub commercial or commercial levels for deployment.
There are many reasons commercialized fusion power is an interesting and important invention for humanity. The simple benefits are a much safer way to generate tremendous amounts of energy in a decentralized manner with minimal waste and upkeep. The ~eight foot Tokamak at CFS could power all of Boston on grams of fuel.
Beyond the advancement of science and energy generation and distribution, commercialized fusion power could unite a world fearful of and divided by finite resources. We could clean our oceans, freeze polar caps, provide lights, water, and food for everyone. We could use these reactors for far reaching travel, propelling our modest humanity into a sophisticated long-term and space-faring society.
While watching one of the reactor tests, Daniel informed me that the two or so inches between the plasma and tokamak interior wall represented the largest heat differential known to mankind in the universe at over 100 million centigrade.
I think about that gap often and fondly. To think that we are mechanically recreating our universe in ways only humans could do it. That salvation, no matter how unlikely, lies in our hands at finger length.
And a few emails of course.
My interest in restaurants probably started when my mom made a fast-casual concept around Indian wraps in the early 2000s. As the entrepreneur in residence in our family, she has the creativity, motor and will.
When I got the chance to join Chubby Noodle on their journey in San Francisco, much of it was driven by a hope to create something that I could attend myself. That is, build for and entertain my community. My dream mostly came true when we opened the second location in North Beach and I could fulfill a, somewhat random, lifelong goal of going to a bar for a drink and walking out without worrying about it.
You could do that with money, of course, as San Francisco over the years has become (unevenly) awash with cash. You don't (easily) see it in the cars or clothes people buy, which do a decent job at hiding their elevated costs with minimal designs shipped right to your doorstep from an Instagram ad. But you do see it in the style of consumption here. Like our, now D-List famous, brunch service, we've programmed bottomless experiences and trips designed to be digitized and retargeted.
Restaurants, and really the Food & Beverage industry, are not one for the faint of hearts. If you're lucky, you'll create a place with 10-15% margins after a lot of blood and double the sweat, only to see it shutter at the end of a lease that skyrockets in price after your neighborhood becomes gentrified.
Chubby Noodle was born out of some questions related to why Marina folks were stumbling to North Beach to go to Don Pistos, a small and lively Mexican restaurant a stones throw from my place on Union St. Starting as a one-man (literally) operation in 2010, it grew to become a hit with the new up and coming youth in SF that wanted something a little more upbeat, boozy, and group-driven. The food was great, as is the requirement of any long-term establishment, but it was probably the fast-firing drinks and ballad 90s hip-hop ambiance that drove it into hashtag popularity.
In that regard, Chubby Noodle, in the Marina, was the first attempt at capturing this idea (for us). My business partner, Nick - one of the scrappiest operators I've ever met, and Chubby Noodle cofounder, was certain that the concept could work in a tighter (read: smaller and more condensed), faster turn (read: more tables with new people and money), and upbeat (read: louder and boozier) way. Getting there took risks that seemed far riskier at the time.
The location chosen, on car-ridden Lombard St., flew in the face of setting up shop on the legendary Chestnut St., which was an established walking thoroughfare in the Marina district (the rent, though, was also 2-3x). We wondered if people actually drive or use a taxi to come to our restaurant? Structurally, sitting on an opportunistically low fixed cost (rent) allowed us to open the restaurant with much more room for experimentation and fixing our many errors we would encounter through opening.
I think it's likely Chubby would have failed if we opened up on Chestnut and the lesson of managing cashflows was forever ingrained in my heart and head. Even today, at the new restaurant holding company, Opavino, our motto is "Cashflows Rules Everything Around Us" as a warning and homage to our earliest endeavors.
We elected, at greater cost and complexity, to gut the interior of the restaurant and build a custom layout thanks to the endless wizardry of another Nick, our designer and builder extraordinaire. In order to achieve the density we were looking for we needed to custom build the booths which were setup to be a tight and flexible 2-6 seating. Even the long wooden slab "Chef's Tables" jutting out of the cold line of the kitchen were designed as a multi-purpose experience for birthdays or random smatterings of smaller groups.
The list of outstanding things to fix for opening, known as the "Punch List," grew and grew until I had a year+ worth of rent in loans to cover the gap. At the time it was scary, but we felt that creating an atmosphere where you could overhear and join another party made the party. In practice this was a nightmare for our servers who already were squeezed walking through the single aisle restaurant, similar to working in a single-aisle 737 jet airliner. The tables were small and our tapas shared style plates quickly filled up the small real-estate which we combatted with informal dinner placements and fast pickup and drop-offs as servers shuttled up and down the floor.
To compliment all the floor movement, we would blast a refined and Spotify-followable Chubby Noodle playlist that soon took a life of its own with thousands of followers. Having the power to queue a song on demand while eating was a San Francisco super power. I don't think it truly struck me how these small but additive measures coalesced until we starting hearing about people who originally met at Chubby Noodle getting married. A few years later we would start seeing those couples wheel in their newborns for our now popular brunch service.
The two other (literal) drivers that helped shore the business was Caviar and Uber, which were born and pushed our fortunes as they grew. Uber made destination restaurants widely approachable while Caviar highlighted our well-traveling garlic noodles to the many Netflix abusers in San Francisco. The takeout / delivery market began to represent > 30% of gross sales, pushing the concept of a kitchen-first business (which I would later experiment with Ev through Pythagoras Pizza).
Replicating the success of Chubby Noodle has proven to be difficult in San Francisco. While those projects went well, most of my other endeavors in restaurants have become daily battles. Much of the operating conditions we started with are impossible making cheap-experimentation difficult. It's why going out means automatically spending $50-100 an evening nowadays; an unfortunate byproduct of the success without investment damnation we wrought upon ourselves in San Francisco (I'm writing an essay/rant on this in a forthcoming musing).
Without these struggles, however, I would not be able to appreciate how special the few things that work out truly are.
I don't go to Chubby as much as I used to now that I'm 31. A lot has changed, including my tastes and preferences. But when I do go back, I often think about the small footprint we've been able to provide to the people of San Francisco, supporting this wonderful city — even if it only lasts for a quick 90 minute brunch at a time.
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I am excited to share more tales in and of Food & Beverage. I'll pepper them in between boring pieces on Finance. For those of you who have attended Ragemas, I'm excited to let you know I'll be brining it back in 2019 on Saturday November 16th from 6PM — 2AM. This time, we'll be presenting "Family Dinner" — an invite only dinner party & after party. We all have people close to us, but which ones are our family? Details and invites to come soon.