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Sudden equipment failures. Supply chain surprises. Retaining staff as the goalposts move in real time. These arent challenges Ive faced as a tech founderbut I have faced them running restaurants. Twenty years ago, I cofounded a conveyor belt sushi concept that grew over 10 years across 12 units and six states. And if I’ve learned one thing from over two decades of operating restaurants, its that they require more discipline than any startup, with far less margin for error. On paper, hospitality and tech dont seem to overlap. Yet, many of my current practices as a leader were forged in a restaurants back of house, where staying close to the numbers and the customer experience was key to survival. A master class in leading under pressure I didnt expect my time running a sushi chain to influence how I run my software company. But the leadership fundamentals that were critical in the restaurant business turned out to be the same ones needed in tech. Putting out fires in tech usually means resolving a bug. At a restaurant, there could be a literal fire. Once, during a lunch rush at one of my restaurant chains Washington, D.C., locations, our hood system failed. As teriyaki chicken smoke filled the HVAC system and forced a 14-story building to evacuate, we scrambled to fix it without stopping the line. Even when the crisis isnt so dramatic, leaders have to rally the team quickly. Staff and customers depend on you in person, so you think on your feet to handle any challenge at hand. As you juggle priorities on the floor, youre also protecting razor-thin margins behind the scenes. Unlike in tech, theres no bridge round to float you through a rough quarter. Its your job to monitor costs and adjust staffing or procurement to keep things stable. Anyone whos worked in a restaurant knows that its a unique type of chaos. But the instincts the environment encourages can also drive resilient tech companies. 3 restaurant rules that tech leaders should borrow Restaurants dont have the luxury of recurring subscription paymentsthey have to fight every day for every dollar of revenue. That reality pushed me to be data-driven and relentlessly hands-on. While some lessons didnt feel obvious at the time, they guide how I lead in tech today. For example: 1. Be actually customer obsessedWell-run restaurants are maniacal about customer service. If you need proof, look to restaurateur Will Guidaras concept of unreasonable hospitality: creating extraordinary experiences by exceeding customers expectations. In this mindset, every touchpoint during a meal matters, from the first greeting to how the check arrives. Staff are expected to embody that service culture, no matter their role. Tech companies love to say theyre customer-centric, but how often does that ethos extend across the org? If customer experience is siloed to success or support teams, you limit your ability to build with empathy. Tech leaders should take a page from restaurants and make it everyones job to surprise and delight customers. It can be as simple as a program that lets team members nominate partners and clients to receive curated giftswhether theyre celebrating a win or going through a difficult time. Real customer obsession shows up when service is a shared culture, not a siloed department. 2. Your unit economics matter I could go on about how restaurants profit margins force you to get the math right. But one habit it encourages is a laser focus on unit level costs. If any element of a takeout order, from packaging to ingredients, is out of balance, your margin disappears. Before you know it, your profit & loss statements have red at the bottom. Tech companies often overlook unit economics, but getting back to the basics of cost structure helps prevent unnecessary burn. Metrics like customer acquisition cost and lifetime value let you stay laser-focused on profitability and ensure you’re building a business that can sustain itself. It’s surprising to me how many tech entrepreneurs will claim success when they have early clients with strong usage metrics but little or no revenue. If you cant charge for it, is it really adding value? Rigor at the unit level lets you scale responsibly and course-correct as the market shifts. 3. Break down silos and build a culture of teamwork Imagine if the kitchen and front-of-house staff stopped talking during a dinner rush. Orders would back up, wait times would spike, and customers would walk out before their food hit the table. Since coordination is make-or-break in a restaurant, leaders are wired to instill a culture of teamwork. Front-of-house and back-of-house employees don’t point fingers at each other, they solve issues together. In tech, building that instinct to collaborate means giving teams visibility into each others work. Engineers listen in on customer support calls and product managers shadow the QA team. When staff realizes how their work ladders toward the same goals, people start offering support without being asked. In fact, we are so focused on hospitality for our customers that we often see too many people running toward the same problem. But thats the better issue to haveit means teamwork is the norm, not an anomaly. Bringing restaurant discipline to the startup world When margins are tight, customer expectations are high, and every dollar of revenue takes real work, success depends on rallying employees with a culture of shared ownership. Thats the kind of leadership restaurant operators practice every daywhy should startups be any different? The stakes are distinct, but the playbook holds: get close to your customer, know your numbers inside and out, and build a team that solves problems shoulder to shoulder. The sooner tech leaders embrace this discipline, the better their odds of scaling something that lasts.
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E-Commerce
On a recent Saturday afternoon, I noticed an unusual silence from my 9-year-old’s room. I was surprised to find she wasn’t taking advantage of her allotted two hours of screen time; instead, she was curled up on her chair reading a magazine. Three decades ago, when I was her age, this wouldn’t have seemed strange. Starting in the late 1800s, the United States had a thriving culture around children’s magazines. Young children would get Jack and Jill, Turtle, or Sesame Street Magazine in the mail; teens would graduate to Sassy, Tiger Beat, or Teen People. But as the internet emergedwith blogs, streaming sites, and online games competing for young people’s attentionmagazines lost their luster. Although there are a few legacy magazines that still publish, like Sports Illustrated Kids, National Geographic Kids, and Highlights, most have gone out of business over the past 15 years. [Photo: Honest History] In a strange twist, however, kids’ magazines are making a comeback thanks to a new flock of startups. My daughter, for instance, was pouring over Anyway, a magazine for 9- to 14-year-olds that debuted in 2023. Jen Swetzoff and Keeley McNamara launched the magazine with a Kickstarter campaign to see whether there was an appetite for a publication that deals with the issues tweens are facing, from understanding body hair to developing personal style. The founders reached their funding goal within days, and hundreds of families now receive their quarterly magazine. Anyway is part of a broader wave of new publications that began nearly a decade ago with Kazoo, a quarterly magazine for 5- to 12-year-old girls that features contributors like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Jane Goodall, and has won a slate of awards. There’s Honest History, which makes history engaging to elementary school kids. And Illustoria, a kid’s magazine for children up to 14, meant to encourage creativity and imagination. One of the more recent entries is Spark, a monthly activity magazine for kids between 4 and 8. According to these magazines’ founders, their publications are growing not in spite of smartphone culture, but because of it. As it becomes clear that too much screen time can be harmful to children, parents are willing to spend money on print magazines because they provide an alternative to technology. And this new world of kids’ magazines raises the interesting possibility that today’s children who grow up with print publications may continue to seek them out as they get older. [Photo: Kazoo] An Ad-Free Business Model Erin Bried, founder of Kazoo, had spent her entire career in magazines, as an editor at Self and Glamour. She’d seen the industry collapse as advertising revenue dried up and people stopped buying print magazines. Despite this, she believed there was a market for a magazine for young girls that inspired them to be smart and strong. I would take my daughters to the magazine rack and there really wasn’t anything they were interested in, Bried says. It occurred to me that I could create it. Bried quit her job to focus entirely on Kazoo. She began with a Kickstarter campaign to see if there was any appetite for the kind of magazine she had in mind, featuring stories by top children’s authors, interviews with heroines like Sonia Sotomayor and Misty Copeland, and comics. She raised an astounding $171,215 the highest figure for a magazine. Nine years later, the magazine has tens of thousands of subscribers who pay $58 a year, and every year the circulation grows. It’s the only children’s magazine that has won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. [Photo: Kazoo] For Bried, it was crucial not to rely on advertising. She had seen how quickly advertisers had pulled out of magazines when they realized they could reach people more directly on social media and Google. But also, having direct subscribers gives Bried more control over her company. At so many magazines, you were reliant on ad dollars, clicks, and algorithms, she says. You were reliant on outside forces and never had total control over your own success. We aren’t in that situation. While Kazoo is profitable, its budget is much smaller than those of kid’s magazines of the past. Bried has made the business work by doing most of the work herself. She writes most of the copy, assigns fiction stories and comics, and hires illustrators. I only bring on female creators, given the focus of the magazine, and I make sure to pay them well, she says. But you cannot imagine how much work I personally put into each issue. (For instance, she deals with customer service issues, which means walking to the post box to send off isses that got lost in the mail.) It’s a similar story at the other magazines, which all rely on subscribers. The founders run a very tight ship, doing most of the work themselves, tapping on freelance artists and writers. And most are profitable. Sparks, founded by Katie and Cody Gibbs, is already in the black after one year, at a price of between $6.50 and $8.75 a month, depending on the length of the subscription. We didn’t want it to be cost prohibitive, Katie says. But we’re grateful to be profitable so quickly. [Photo: Anyway] Beautiful Immersive Art Objects Given that these magazines are competing with the visual appeal of screens, the founders have worked to make them aesthetically appealing. Their covers are beautiful, featuring stunning, immersive art and very little text. Honest History‘s cover this moth features a retro-modern image of robots, circuits, and clocks to reflect the issue’s focus on the history of technology. Anyway‘s features stunning photography of a female skateboarder in mid air. They’re very different from the magazines of the ’80s and ’90s that tended to have crowded covers packed with text advertising the content inside. While Katie Gibbs creates the content and puzzles in Spark, she partners with a design agency called Whiteboard that creates all of the illustrations. The magazine has a very clean aesthetic and consistent visual branding. There’s a lot of white space, a soft color palette, and some hand-drawn illustrations in the midst of the graphic design. [Photo: Anyway] In the past, consumers thought of magazines as disposable. But given that today’s consumers aren’t used to spending money on magazines, Honest History’s cofounder David Knight felt that it was important to deliver a product that felt more like a book or an art object that families would keep coming back to. When people are spending between $12 and $15 an issue, they’re more intentional about the purchase, and they’re looking to buy something that feels permanent, he says. This influences how these magazines tackle content. While kids’ periodicals used to focus on current events, today’s magazines tend to focus on topics that tend to be more evergreen. We’re trying to stay plugged into the issues kid’s care about today, but we’re always thinking about whether a reader will find this interesting a few months, or years from now, says Anyway‘s Swetzoff. [Photo: Emily Star Poole] An alternative to screen time Gen Z, who are now between 13 and 28, were the first cohort to grow up in a world of smartphones, social media, and video streaming. For years, it was unclear how this technology would impact them, but there’s now a growing body of data suggesting that it is problematic. A new meta-analysis of research suggested that children who spent a significant time on screens were more likely to develop socio-emotional problems. And a study by Gallup found that Gen Z reports the poorest mental health of any generation. As parents of tweens, Swetzoff and McNamara were alarmed by all of this data. They scrambled to find ways to help their kids navigate technology and develop strategies for coping with emotional challenges. A print magazine seemed like a smart solution. When we first had the idea for coming up with a magazine for teens, some parents asked why it had to be on paper, when it could so easily be online, Swetzoff says. But then, more data began to emerge about the impact of digital media on our kids, and we saw a shift. Parents really understood the value of having a print magazine. Anyway addresses some mental health issues directly. In the most recent issue, for instance, there’s a whole section about why sleep is important and how tweens can get better quality sleep. It’s also full of ideas for fun activities that don’t involve screens, like cooking and flower arranging. [Photo: Emily Star Poole] Parents of younger kids are eager to avoid the pitfalls of the previous generation. Spark is specifically designed to give 4- to-8-year-olds an alternative to screen time. It’s full of old fashioned puzzles and activities, like mazes, spot the difference pictures, and color by number.A big theme throughout our magazine is slowing down and noticing things, she says. We’re encouraging kids to look closely at the art. Can you find the flashlight somewhere in this camping scene? Honest History is on a similar mission. There’s something inherently calming and regulating about giving children something they can sit down with and encouraging them to look carefully at pictures, says cofounder Brooke Knight. It encourages better focus and learning, as opposed to a screen where they have images flashing at them. In an ironic twist, while technology killed the last generation of kid’s magazines, it is also technology that appears to be breathing life back into this business. Today’s parents seem willing to spend money on engaging and educational magazines, if it will get them away from shows and social media and video games. We’re seeing kids fall in love with magazines again, says Swetzoff. It’ll be interesting to see if they keep seeking out magazines as they get older. There’s a chance the magazine industry will make a comeback.
Category:
E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Just weeks ago, Moodys chief economist Mark Zandi was signaling cautious optimism. In a mid-May conversation with Gunnar Branson, CEO of the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate (AFIRE)a global network of international investors focused on U.S. real estateZandi said the economy appeared resilient and that the additional housing market softening this spring looked more like yellow flares than anything more serious. That caution has since escalated: Zandi is now issuing a red flare. In a July 13 post on X, Zandi warned that home sales, homebuilding, and even house prices are set to slump unless mortgage rates fall materially from their current 7% rangesomething he believes is unlikely. The housing downturn to date has been mostly about the depressed existing home sales, Zandi told ResiClub. New home sales, housing completions, and house prices have held up wellthats about to change. Existing home sales have been stuck at historic lows since the pandemic housing boom ended in mid-2022. Between early 2020 and 2022, soaring house prices and then soaring mortgage rate hikes rapidly deteriorated U.S. housing affordability. Since then, the housing sector has been in a slump, with continued job losses and slashed commissions for mortgage brokers and agents as transaction volumes receded. But now, the housing market could be headed for even more weakness. One of the clearest tells, according to Zandi, is that builders are now postponing land deliveriesa move that typically precedes a drop in construction activity and could mean fewer starts and completions in the quarters ahead. Its not surprising that homebuilders are pulling back, given that unsold inventory just hit another 15-year high. Click here for an interactive version of the chart below According to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by ResiClub, the number of unsold completed homes hit 119,000 in May 2025the highest it’s been since July 2009, when it hit 126,000. More home price declines are likely, especially in the South and West Zandi told ResiClub that he expects national house prices to fall by a mid-single-digit percentage, from peak to trough, over the next 18 to 24 months, assuming mortgage rates remain near 7%. But not every region will be impacted equally. Prices will be weakest in the South and West, where affordability is lowest and there has been more construction, he said. These regionsmany of which saw home prices stretch far beyond local income levels during the pandemicare now seeing softening demand and rising inventory. Unlike the Sun Belt, many Northeast and Midwest markets experienced less pandemic-era migration and limited new construction. With tighter inventory and fewer builder-driven price adjustments, home prices in these markets have remained more stable heading into spring 2025. Builders in metro areas like Austin, Phoenix, and Tampa, Florida, have leaned on incentiveslike mortgage rate buydownsto keep home prices elevated and maintain sales. But as those incentives become less effective or too costly, some builders are starting to cut prices outright, putting pressure on both the new and resale markets. Simply put, Zandi thinks the housing downturn is broadening. So far, the housing downturn since mid-2022 has mostly hit one side of the market: existing home saleswhich remain at historically low levels due to lock-in and affordability barriers. But Zandis warning suggests the next phase of the downturn could cut deeper, dragging down home prices in some regional markets as well as construction activity.
Category:
E-Commerce
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