Chef Marcus Samuelsson on the ingredients for success

Telling a clear story about your product is an essential entrepreneurial skill. Chef Marcus Samuelsson is an expert at this in his beloved restaurants (Hav & Mar and Red Rooster) and through his broader entrepreneurial efforts. Samuelsson joined host Reid Hoffman in 2024 to share how embracing a diversity of stories has been an essential ingredient to his businesses. Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Reid Hoffman?

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• 0:48Reid Hoffman?

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• 1:32Reid Hoffman?

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• 1:41Speaker 01

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• 2:11Speaker 02

  One of the dishes that is so dear to me, it's something that I've loved growing up, is a dish called sai baji, a spinach and lentil stew that has 10 other vegetables that have been pureed and delicately weaved into the stew. So you get this complex amalgam of flavors.

• 2:30Reid Hoffman?

  That's Jay Punjabi. He's a co-founder and head of television at Wait What, the company that produces Masters of Scale. The dish he's talking about sounds delicious, but for him, there's a deeper meaning to it than simple comfort food.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  When my father was just eight years old, he was in a refugee camp in Bombay after the partition of India and Pakistan. He would go out and seek this dish in the home of people in the refugee camp, because it became a thing that connected him to the home that he had left and the world that he was familiar with.

• 3:16Reid Hoffman?

  That was just one of the many personal stories Jay heard for the first time, thanks to an informal experiment he undertook when visiting family in India.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  I only get a chance to go once a year for about 10 days, and I was searching for a way to connect deeply with them while we're there.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  So I came up with this adventure.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  I identified 21 of our favorite home-cooked meals growing up.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Over the course of seven days, we cooked all 21 of them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  My parents, my entire family, my brother, everyone was in the kitchen together. It was complete anarchy and chaos. We started to share stories about our lives, and I started to hear things about my family that I'd never heard before. And it connected me with them in a way in which I could never imagine.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  And that time ended up becoming sacred.

• 4:25Reid Hoffman?

  On returning home to New York, Jay couldn't stop thinking about how sharing those 21 meals with his family had opened a wellspring of unexpected stories. Jay's colleagues at Wait What were also enthralled. So they decided to dedicate an episode of the Wait What Podcast meditative story to Jay's project.

• 4:46Reid Hoffman?

  The episode, titled 21 Meals, struck a chord with thousands of listeners.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  The response was unbelievable. Countless people sharing how my experience resembled theirs and how the story had opened up a dialogue between them and their family.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  It was more than just a story. It felt like a movement. When you start to hear from other people about how they're moved, you almost let go of your own ego, and you kind of understand that storytelling and connecting with people, it's kind of a service. As you bring your story to life and you share it, it's really no longer your own. You're a spark and a catalyst for someone else to bring their own experience to life.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Once you see its impact, you start to realize it's not about you. It's about what you share and what that opens up for someone else and where they go and where they take it. And it continues to ripple out there into the world.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  We're excited to see where we can take this next.

• 6:06Reid Hoffman?

  For Jay, uncovering the stories of his family opened an exciting new area of exploration, one that inspired others to delve in their own stories and share them. It's a lesson every leader should bear in mind, because the best way to invite people into the story of your product is to give them a platform to share their own stories. That's why I believe you need to amplify the unique stories of your community and your customers. Doing so will build a foundation of trust, loyalty, and enduring impact.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  You've got to have incredible talent at every position.

• 6:45Reid Hoffman?

  There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it?

• 6:47Speaker 04

  Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do.

• 6:55Speaker 05

  Sorry, we made a mistake.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  But you have to time it right. Oops.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  So they just seem absolutely nutballs. 10 years later, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it. Just how you do it.

• 7:10Reid Hoffman?

  This is Masters of Scale.

• 7:19Reid Hoffman?

  I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe you need to amplify the unique stories of your community and your customers. Doing so will build a foundation of trust, loyalty, and enduring impact.

• 7:36Reid Hoffman?

  Picture a vast library with sections for every genre you can imagine. You can find escapism in the romance and sci-fi sections, points of reflection in memoir and poetry, and guidance in the self-help and business sections.

• 7:52Reid Hoffman?

  Excited at delving into this wealth of literature and information, you start browsing the shelves. But you quickly realize something's amiss. Each book you pull from the shelf is written by the same author. What seemed like a monument to the abundance of human knowledge and heart now seems like a garish edifice of self-indulgence.

• 8:15Reid Hoffman?

  Because even if each of these volumes turns out to be well-written, the library's most compelling promise of a multitude of voices has been dashed.

• 8:26Reid Hoffman?

  We rightly value learning from different perspectives. Doing so gives us insights and wisdom we can then incorporate into our own stories. It's something we need to keep in mind if we hope to build enduring and impactful businesses.

• 8:42Reid Hoffman?

  If we embrace a diverse array of stories and create spaces where every individual's narrative is valued, we can cultivate the deep trust needed to build a business that stands the test of time.

• 8:54Reid Hoffman?

  Doing this also contributes to building a more inclusive and empathetic society.

• 9:04Reid Hoffman?

  I wanted to speak with Marcus Samuelsson about this because through his career as a multi-award winning chef and media personality, he has emphasized telling and amplifying the multitude of unique stories that he encounters. Marcus has founded acclaimed restaurants, including Red Rooster, Haven Mar, and Metropolis. He is also founder of the Marcus Samuelsson Group, which produces media and events celebrating the fusion of food, art, music, and culture. Marcus's own story begins in Ethiopia, where he was born.

• 9:36Speaker 06

  I was born in a hut in Ethiopia in a tiny village called Abragodena. My sister, my mom, and myself, we got tuberculosis. Our mother walked us into the capital, which is a two-hour drive, so it's a very long walk. She found a Swedish hospital. She passed away, but my sister and I survived. Through lots of luck, but also some really good people there, we got adopted to Sweden.

• 10:15Reid Hoffman?

  For Marcus, this traumatic experience marked a huge shift in his life's narrative, which even included changing his name.

• 10:26Speaker 06

  I went from being Kassahun Sigai to Marcus Samuelsson. Left one of the warmest countries in the world to one of the coldest countries in the world. I traded chickpea puree for herring and potatoes and meatballs. So it was a lot of changes. But I was surrounded with lots of love. A very secure home with two strong parents and older sister, grandparents. The Samuelsson tribe, we were diverse. We knew that we had each other.

• 11:01Reid Hoffman?

  One family member in particular was an influence on Marcus.

• 11:06Speaker 06

  Cooking found me through my grandmother, Helga. She was a master of that. I started to understand the essence of taste just through my grandmother's meatballs. We had school lunches, and then we had the lunch or dinner I got at home by my parents, and then I got the lunch or dinner I got by my grandparents. The school lunch, you were lucky to find meat in the meatballs, but they were perfectly round, not that tasty.

• 11:42Speaker 06

  My mom, that was super busy, her meatballs could be one giant patty that we had to cut up ourselves as kids. And then our grandmother's meatballs, they were not perfectly round in shape, but they were lovely. They were delicious. Very early, I understand that things can taste differently based on who makes them.

• 12:11Reid Hoffman?

  For Marcus, the humble meatball staple of Scandinavian cuisine was an example of how food can be an expression of a multitude of stories. Marcus became passionate about cooking. He found inspiration in the stories of established chefs, whose cookbooks gave him a window into the possibilities, not just of cooking, but of himself.

• 12:34Speaker 06

  Charlie Trotter's first cookbook transformed my life. I was blown away that he wasn't French, he was American, and it opened a door to me that America was possible. I remember reading Marco Pierre White's first book, White Heat. The fact that he was young and had long hair and smoked, I thought, okay, if he can do all those things, there's got to be room for a black chef.

• 13:05Reid Hoffman?

  Inspired by these stories, Marcus spent his late teens and early twenties working as an apprentice in restaurants across the world. Japan, in particular, left a deep impression.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  When I went to Japan the first time, and I learned about umami, for example, which is something that, I didn't know what it was, but to taste it, feel it, to be around it, I felt like, wow, this is a different world.

• 13:31Reid Hoffman?

  Marcus kept coming across new flavors, dishes, and approaches to creating food. So when he returned to Europe to work in France, he was struck by the narrow definition of fine dining that prevailed amongst influential chefs there.

• 13:45Speaker 06

  I grew up in a time where all the good food was French, and I was like, that doesn't make any sense. There's tons of great food here in Japan, tons of great food in Singapore. How come that doesn't get acknowledged? How come I can't buy a cookbook about this? There's another world out there, and you have to discover it.

• 14:05Reid Hoffman?

  There was another reason Marcus found his return to Europe difficult.

• 14:09Speaker 06

  I was speaking to my chef, and he says to me, as a young black chef, you can't ever own a restaurant. No one's going to support it. And he gave me two examples. Do you know anyone that looks like you that have a restaurant in France? I was like, no, I just don't, you know, I don't know a lot of places in France. And then he's like, do you know anyone in Europe? I was like, I haven't been all over Europe. And that was his point to say this is not possible. And I said to him, well, I gotta go. I can't lower my dream. I can't lower my ambition.

• 14:39Reid Hoffman?

  That chef's ludicrously narrow-minded view was rooted in his inability to understand stories that differed from his own. For that chef, being white was a non-negotiable part of the story of any head chef. This is an extreme example of how being close off to the diverse stories around you will lead you to overlook talent and opportunity. That head chef's narrow view alienated and drove away Marcus, one of the most promising rising talents on his team. Fortunately, Marcus had faith in his own abilities. All he needed was to find a place that celebrated a diversity of stories.

• 15:21Speaker 06

  New York City became the place that made sense for me. I just felt like it was my time to start my own thing.

• 15:27Reid Hoffman?

  In 1994, Marcus applied for a position at a high-end Scandinavian restaurant in Manhattan named Aquavit.

• 15:35Speaker 06

  First of all, I loved New York. Right away. I loved the noise. I loved the smell. I loved the [bleep] you from the subway, get out of my way. I had somewhere to stay, which was a massage bed with my four roommates, and I was loaded. I had $300. Within a week, I got a job.

• 16:01Reid Hoffman?

  Despite all the distractions of New York, Marcus kept laser-focused on his work.

• 16:07Speaker 06

  Once you love where you are and your medium, which I've always loved my medium, it's like a calling. You don't think about how many hours you work. You don't think about how much you give to it. So I could really give myself to food and this opportunity, fully.

• 16:26Reid Hoffman?

  However, shortly after Marcus joined the team at Aquavit, the head chef, Jan Sandel, passed away. Marcus's work ethic and talent had already been noticed by the restaurant owners, so they offered him the role of head chef. He was just 23 years old.

• 16:43Speaker 06

  I had support within the ownership group, and they believed in me and they supported me. And I also loved what I was doing. I loved the city. So it was, let's go.

• 16:55Reid Hoffman?

  Marcus began by radically rethinking how to tell the story of Scandinavian cuisine to his customers.

• 17:02Speaker 06

  Well, I thought there was a mystique around Scandinavian food at the time that no one had kind of figured out. And I really had the building blocks of new, modern Scandinavian food. We have big woods and outdoors, seafood. We have great clean water, and pickling and preserving, you know. So once I had these blocks down, I felt I could build from anything.

• 17:25Reid Hoffman?

  Marcus didn't want to simply tell the story of Scandinavian food. He wanted to infuse his menu with elements of the stories he'd encountered during his international experience and in New York. It paid off. Less than a year after taking over Aquavit, Marcus scored a coveted three-star review from The New York Times. At 23, he was the youngest chef to have received the accolade.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  So the three stars were great, but one of the best things about being 23 is that, at my case at least, I had no clue what it meant. I just knew that we went from kind of busy on the weekends, not so busy on Monday, Tuesday, to busy all the time. So now it's just about working hard and having a mission.

• 18:13Reid Hoffman?

  For the next six years, Marcus grew Aquavit's reputation as one of New York's most exciting dining destinations. But then, on September 11, 2001, everything changed for the city Marcus now called home.

• 18:28Speaker 06

  It's still to this day, very challenging even to speak about because, you know, I cooked at the World Trade Center the weekend before it happened. And so I knew a lot of the cooks and servers that passed away that morning. It was very difficult. I didn't know what to do. Should I go back to Sweden?

• 18:52Reid Hoffman?

  We'll hear what Marcus decided after the break.

• 19:01Speaker 07

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• 19:37Speaker 07

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• 20:21Speaker 07

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• 20:52Reid Hoffman?

  We're back with Marcus Samuelson.

• 20:56Reid Hoffman?

  To see exclusive clips from my interview with Marcus, head to the Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

• 21:03Reid Hoffman?

  Before the break, we heard how Marcus reached a turning point after the September 11 attacks on New York.

• 21:09Speaker 06

  Like, it was very difficult. I didn't know what to do. Should I go back to Sweden? But I can't leave because of this, because I just felt like, it's not, you don't, you don't do that. Like, you can't, no, I just couldn't do that.

• 21:22Reid Hoffman?

  Marcus knew he was going to stay in New York, but he also knew he needed to change things up. A conversation with his mom gave him focus.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  So my mom said, you need to change.

• 21:34Speaker 06

  Why is your experience always high-end, expensive? Do something in your neighborhood that's more affordable?

• 21:44Reid Hoffman?

  AquaVit was embracing a diversity of stories to inspire the food it served. But Marcus realized that this diversity was not reflected in the restaurant's customers. This meant there were huge numbers of people who wouldn't even consider stepping through the doors of AquaVit.

• 22:03Reid Hoffman?

  Marcus came to realize that he wanted to focus on building institutions that reflected the communities around them, institutions that celebrated and elevated a wide range of stories and lived experiences. So he took the decision to move to a different part of the city, somewhere that would put him in the midst of a thriving hum of vibrant stories.

• 22:25Speaker 06

  I moved from midtown to Harlem, and those 50 blocks was like moving to a different country. And I think my love affair for Harlem really starts there.

• 22:35Reid Hoffman?

  The move opened Marcus up to thousands of new stories.

• 22:40Speaker 06

  I noticed right away that everything worked different uptown. The good food was not necessarily in a traditional restaurant. It could be oyster mite that pulled up right by the subway station, or it could be a church lady that handed out cornbread, or the Jamaican jerk guy that you had to figure out in which park it was in.

• 23:05Speaker 06

  And it was not a line, but people were in the known, because there's a line once I got there. So I was clearly just new in the neighborhood. So it was this kind of more scratchy, but delicious, very community-driven. And that journey and thirst, I had to learn about what's going on here.

• 23:30Reid Hoffman?

  Harlem was an invigorating new environment for Marcus, where individual stories fed into a communal narrative that stretched across generations and continents.

• 23:39Speaker 06

  I walked in a neighborhood that kind of wrote the story for me if I was just quiet and just observed enough, just as much as I learned brand-new things when I came to Asia or when I came to France. And it was something exciting to be, at that point, been working for 10, 12 years at a very high level. But then, I have to like, none of that stuff matters. Throw that out. You know, I just, I was a student again, which I really loved.

• 24:07Reid Hoffman?

  This is one of the most important reasons to make yourself a platform for sharing stories. It primes you to constantly learn new things and take on new perspectives. Someone who is at the nexus of the complex narratives that flow through Harlem is Thelma Golden. She's the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, an institution that plays a pivotal role in the cultural and artistic life of Harlem and the broader art world. She's also been a friend to Marcus since his days at AquaVit. Thelma recalls how Marcus's passion for Harlem played a part in her decision to join the Studio Museum in 2000 as deputy director for exhibitions.

• 24:49Speaker 08

  I did not live in Harlem, but my father was born in Harlem in 1926, and he held a love for Harlem in the deepest, most profound way. And Marcus was the exact very same way. He was spending so much time thinking and looking and experiencing Harlem that opened up ideas about Harlem for me that while I knew were in me, quite literally, right? Embedded in my DNA, had not activated. When I applied and was offered the job at the Studio Museum, Marcus is one of the first people I spoke to about, was this the right moment? And he was enthusiastic in his sense

• 25:33Speaker 08

  of what this possibility could mean. I, of course, understood it from my curatorial perspective, my art career perspective, just thinking about what the social scientists call "placemaking."

• 25:45Reid Hoffman?

  Placemaking is a collaborative process of creating vibrant, inclusive environments that foster stronger community ties and enhance the overall quality of life. The Studio Museum has been at the heart of placemaking in Harlem since its founding in 1968.

• 26:02Speaker 08

  The Studio Museum was founded in the cauldron of the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement. And at that time, there was a sort of clarion call for the ways in which arts and culture played into an understanding of the liberation of Black people. And so, the founders of the Studio Museum were an incredibly diverse group that came together, all with the distinct idea that Harlem deserved an institution devoted to the presentation of visual art by Black people. But they also wanted, in creating a museum at that point in the late 60s, to project into a future. So it was a very bold task.

• 26:47Speaker 08

  It was one that was, on the one hand, holding to legacy, but it also was incredibly radical in its sense of future-making. Exhibitions such as the museum's Harlem Renaissance exhibition defined an art history. And of course, all through that moment, the museum-mounted exhibitions of African-American artists of significance, artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Romer Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett, Betty Sarr, Alma Thomas, and so, so many more.

• 27:21Reid Hoffman?

  Sharing such a diverse range of stories is at the heart of placemaking and helps build and sustain momentum for positive change.

• 27:31Speaker 08

  I think that art spaces can be catalysts for change through the ability to find a space to kind of understand the diversity of perspectives and ideas. Through the engagement with art, we are constantly being offered an opportunity to understand the complexity of the world in our own lives through the stories and the narratives. Presenting a broad range of diverse art allows for a community to see itself reflected.

• 28:10Reid Hoffman?

  Following his move to Harlem, Marcus established a new restaurant serving food with a Japanese influence named Ringo, and then another focused on cuisine from across Africa named Mercado 55. He also published a number of cookbooks and hosted a show on the Discovery Channel. However, Marcus found himself getting more and more immersed in the diverse food, stories, and cultures of Harlem. So in 2010, he opened a new restaurant, Red Rooster. Through it, Marcus wanted to celebrate the neighborhood's rich heritage through not only food, but by programming, inclusive events, and entertainment.

• 28:47Speaker 06

  This programming idea really stemmed out of the bedrock of the creative community. The churches in Harlem, the music, whether it was gospel, also jazz. Why don't we go from gospel brunch on Sunday to jazz night on Sunday? On the weekends, it's this kind of block parties environment, and everybody cooks and helps out.

• 29:17Reid Hoffman?

  Marcus was excited about the possibilities of combining all these unique stories, but he foresaw a challenge.

• 29:24Speaker 06

  One of the things, as a Black person, very often, our arts get miscommunicated or misunderstood because there's not a lot of people of color in the writing or in the editor process. If we were to talk about something that comes food out of the migration and then even more twist of Africa on that, hey, there's not a lot of journalists left at that point, at 2008, 2009, that would actually understand.

• 29:49Reid Hoffman?

  So Marcus came up with a bold way to overcome this.

• 29:53Speaker 06

  So I said, we gotta be both an hospitality company and a media company. And we have to drive the media, drive content, drive narrative. We can do cookbooks, we can do blogs. You have to be in media, and you have to have something to say.

• 30:09Reid Hoffman?

  Marcus knew that he had to take charge of the narrative around Red Rooster in order to amplify the stories of the community. In doing so, Red Rooster and his media group would become conduits for sharing a multitude of stories. Marcus created cookbooks, such as The Rise, Black Cooks, and The Soul of American Food. He showcased the rich stories of immigrant food in his TV show, No Passport Required. And he leaned into the unique perspectives that surrounded him in Harlem with a Harlem Meetup Food Festival. Here's Marcus describing how that festival incorporates and celebrates many different stories.

• 30:48Speaker 06

  There's about 15,000 people come to Harlem to spend money at the local restaurants. It also is a TV show that runs on ABC. There's a charitable component to it. So a nine-year-old can take part of kids' cooking classes. Their parents can participate in the dinners area. The sponsors can obviously take part in the dinners series, but also in the TV show in terms of advertisement, right? So you create content that is, just doesn't operate on one level.

• 31:19Reid Hoffman?

  For Marcus, there's one constant when it comes to sharing these stories.

• 31:24Speaker 06

  What I've learned in the media game is you constantly have to innovate, whether that's in a restaurant, book, audio, or TV. It's about building something, creating an audience, and you gotta make it sticky. Otherwise, that audience doesn't come back.

• 31:45Reid Hoffman?

  The way to make it sticky is by telling compelling, surprising new stories. That can be as grand as a multi-part TV series or as simple as finding new twists on established meals, something Marcus was challenged with when President Barack Obama asked him to create a state dinner at the White House for a visit by the Indian Prime Minister.

• 32:07Speaker 06

  Well, cooking for President Obama was a huge, huge honor. Four courses in 44 minutes, 400 people. I started to look at state dinners, and they were all French. And I'm like, that makes sense if there's a French delegation coming. But if it was Indian, we really gotta show the best of America and the best of India. And like, really, how do we present this? I thought about all these politicians, about delegates from India. They probably don't know each other. I was like, let's break bread, you know? And it was, bread baskets was big, with cornbread and chipotis. And, you know, like, both Indian and American ties to it.

• 32:48Reid Hoffman?

  With that meal, Marcus helped tell a story with a fresh perspective, merging the experiences and cultures of different parts of America and India. Following that dinner, Marcus continued to scale the reach of his media company and his restaurants, opening locations across the world that became pillars in his mission to elevate diverse narratives. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, he immediately began hearing harrowing stories from across the planet.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  We had restaurants in Canada, Montreal, in Bahamas, Sweden, in London. Every call that we got was worse than the other, and we didn't know what to do. So it was scary. Wow. It took 20 years to build and 10 days to break down.

• 33:36Reid Hoffman?

  Marcus didn't speak just to his own restaurants. He got on calls with other chefs. The calls quickly became about more than mutual commiseration.

• 33:46Speaker 06

  The chef community is very strong. Calls from Dana Meyer, Tom Calicchio, Jose Andres. So eventually, we started Independent Restaurant Coalition. That was a place where we can jump on calls and talk, and how did you solve that? And, oh, this is what's happening in California. This is what's happening upstate. It was, you know, it became a thing with hundreds of people on the call.

• 34:09Reid Hoffman?

  Out of the sharing of so many different stories came hope. So when the pandemic began to tail off, talk turned to recovery. For Marcus and his fellow chefs, that meant helping people who were having trouble getting food.

• 34:23Speaker 06

  And then Jose said, we know how to serve safe food. We have masks, we have gloves. You gotta gather people, and we're gonna, we're gonna put this together. I can do that.

• 34:34Reid Hoffman?

  This was the beginning of the Red Rooster Community Kitchen, an initiative to help feed people struggling with the isolation and lost income thrust upon them by the pandemic.

• 34:45Speaker 06

  He's like, Marcus, do you think if we serve food, you think people will come? I said, absolutely. We served 200 people the first day, 300 people the next day, 800 people, and eventually 1,500 people. And after a couple of weeks in, I realized, after all the success we had with Red Rooster, the most important work came at the toughest time.

• 35:09Reid Hoffman?

  The Community Kitchen reflected the ethos of the Red Rooster as a community space that celebrates the rich cultural heritage of Harlem and where everyone feels empowered to share their own stories.

• 35:22Speaker 06

  We had new guests, and they could be food insecure, but they were guests. And they had opinions just as much as Harlemites or downtowners.

• 35:32Reid Hoffman?

  Marcus listened to those stories from his guests with an open mind.

• 35:35Speaker 06

  They're like, hey, we loved the chicken burger yesterday. Okay, how come we don't get dessert today? Or, like, with all these type of questions, there was just like a dialogue. In the beginning, it was just local to home insecure and food insecure people. And, you know, the word got out. People came in buses. And then, towards the end, people came in the cars. Now, with my neighbors, it was not just people who came from shelters and so on. It did transform us, transformed myself.

• 36:11Reid Hoffman?

  The pandemic also gave Marcus time to think about a new project.

• 36:16Speaker 06

  The country was really going through a lot of different things. We went through the tragic George Floyd incident as well. So that semi-pass as a creative, which you never really get, what you're supposed to get, was massive. I'm like, if I ever get a chance to do this again, I know that the things that are not working in our industry, it's like, okay, if I'm gonna open up a restaurant, I wanna do it with people of color in center and women of color in leadership. And we created our new restaurant, Havmar. It is the restaurant where all leadership position is held by women of color.

• 36:55Reid Hoffman?

  At the core of Hav and Mar is that continual drive to highlight diverse stories that fuels all of Marcus's work.

• 37:04Speaker 06

  When it comes to Black food, for me, it was very important for people to understand that it's not a monolithic conversation.

• 37:13Speaker 06

  A Jamaican and a Haitian person both love food, but one does griot and great black rice, and one does jerk chicken. And they're both Black food, but they're very, very different experiences. And they should be celebrated. Part about being a leadership positionist, I cannot sit on the sidelines.

• 37:34Speaker 06

  For me, it's like, rather than complain, ask what can you do about it? And create and shape a better future.

• 37:44Reid Hoffman?

  As a leader, your role as a storyteller transcends the boundaries of your personal journey. By giving voice to the varied experiences of your team, your customers, and the broader community, you can help weave a narrative that's rich in diversity and depth. This not only builds a resilient and lasting organization, but also cultivates an environment where every story is valued.

• 38:12Reid Hoffman?

  I'm Reid Hoffman. Thanks for listening.

• 38:19Speaker 07

  Every business hits the same wall the moment your business outgrows the systems that got you here. Spreadsheets everywhere, five different logins, data scattered across entities that don't even talk to each other. If your finance team spends more time finding data than using it, that's when you need the Intuit ERP. Intuit Enterprise Suite is the AI-native ERP solution that's powerful, painless, and proven. Built for businesses scaling fast without the complexity that usually comes with it. From the makers of QuickBooks, learn more at intuit.com/erp. Before we get to the rest of our conversation today, I want to spend a moment sharing with you

• 39:04Speaker 07

  about Masters of Scale Summit, which returns to San Francisco this October 20th to 22nd. So many of us feel overwhelmed right now. It feels like so much of the world is careening, and we don't have power. We don't have agency. That's the thing about the Masters of Scale Summit. It's really designed to remind us that we do have agency. Agency to lead, agency to design, to build the relationships and the partnerships that empower us and to make the change that we want to see. We program a stage, we curate an audience, we set a schedule that builds in time for these relationships to be made and to grow so that by the time you leave Summit, you are fired out of a cannon,

• 39:46Speaker 07

  ready to run through walls to do better in the world with the agency that you actually have. I hope to see you there. Visit mastersofscale.com/summit.

• 40:03Speaker 09

  Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday, we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely, from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the devil wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

• 40:41Reid Hoffman?

  Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Chris McLeod. Our producers are Chris Gautier, Adam Skuse, Alex Morris, Tucker Legerzki, and Masha Makotunina. Our editor-at-large is Bob Safian. Our music director is Ryan Holiday. Original music and sound design by Eduardo Rivera, Ryan Holiday, Hayes Holiday, and Nate Kinsella. Audio editing by Keith J. Nelson, Stephen Davies, Stephen Wells, and Andrew Nalt. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Our CEO and chairman of the board is Jeff Berman. Masters of Scale was created by June Cohen and Darren Triff.

• 41:24Reid Hoffman?

  Special thanks to Jodin Dorsey, Alfonso Bravo, Tim Cronin, Erica Flynn, Sarah Tarder, Kitty Blazing, Mariel Kerecker, Janime Ezequena, Colin Howard, Brendan Klein, Sami Opota, Kelsey Saison, Luisa Velez, Nikki Williams, and Justin Winslow. Visit masterscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our email newsletter.

• 41:59Speaker 10

  Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

• 42:02Speaker 11

  There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't.

• 42:07Speaker 12

  How do we build a future that is human-centered?

• 42:12Speaker 13

  I'm Rana Elkhayubi. And on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.