The $3 Million Lie We Refused to Believe

“I got spiteful,” he started.

She set her pen down slowly. “Tim... what the hell did you do?”

He laughed at that. “Sometimes... Spite is the best motivator. Someone tells you that you can’t do it? Really makes you feel different doesn’t it?”

She nodded slowly. “Yeah. The consultants laughing at you for wanting to make the high protein ramen... Not that you can be blamed, honestly. I would’ve gotten pissed, too.” She looked up, a half smirk on her lips. "I hope you remembered his name."

“Never was good with names,” he said with a shrug, “But that lit a fire under me. I got angry.”

She leaned forward. "And just like that, spite made you motivated enough to do all those impossible things, didn’t it?"

“I thought, if others can learn this, why can't I?” His voice began to take on a faster cadence, a certain edge entering it. “It was a skill issue. It's something my mom always said to me. If others can learn it, why can't you? And my dad would always teach us to think through things step by step, because all problems could be solved eventually. Who cares how hard other people thought it was?”

She smiled to herself as she jotted down his words.

"There it is," she said quietly. "That's the engine, isn’t it? No brilliant strategy. No secret advantage. Just a stubborn refusal to accept the premise of the barrier."

“The sheer, reckless stubbornness to fight against everything others know to be true, huh?” He laughed. “Y’know, they always did tell me I had a hard head.”

She leaned forward. "You heard 'you need three million dollars' and your brain went: 'skill issue.' Tim-- You don’t need me to tell you that’s not normal, right?”

“Okay, but to be fair, it’s not like I tried to figure out how to get three million. That’s linear, goal oriented thinking, which...” He trailed off, gesturing vaguely.

"Which... what?" She leaned forward. "Linear thinking versus what?"

"Versus questioning the premise itself," he said. "Why three million? What made up those three million? Once you broke it all down, what was that number actually based on?"

“Hmm...” She tapped the pen against her lips absentmindedly. "So instead of stressing over the amount..."


“I started to think-- How can I do it for less? What’s the bullshit I can cut?” He grinned. “It’s something I call subtractive reasoning and decomposition.”

"Wait, hold on." She scribbled quickly, trying to keep up. "You're... taking apart the whole concept to see what's actually necessary versus what's just assumed to be necessary?"

“Yeah, exactly. I started breaking down what was needed-- It’s a technique that I call decomposing, now. What made food factories so expensive? What was actually needed? What were the parts?” He starts counting it off on his fingers. “What were the skills? The machinery? The certifications? What really made it all tick?”

"That sounds like—what do they call it?” She furrowed her brow, trying to find the words. “First... first principles thinking or something?"

“Funny thing-- I had no idea what that was until just a few months ago. At first glance, yeah, they can seem pretty similar. But, decomposition and what I call subtractive reasoning uses a subjective, taste-oriented approach, instead of the ‘objective’ principles that--” He paused. “Okay, I won’t get into that here.”

“Oh, come on.” She groans loudly in protest. “You’re doing that thing where you bring something up and don’t finish again.”

“What, did you WANT me to go off on a three hour long tangent instead of finishing the story you’re actually here for?” he responded with a laugh.

"Alright, alright, fine.” She grumbled in playful exasperation, scanning her notebook for where they’d left off. "Sounds like the lessons from your parents paid off… and sounds like something you’d see on a poster with a kitten or something."

“Funny thing, actually,” he said with a chuckle, “My dad did actually hang a poster up on my wall one day when I was a kid. The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do, it said. Guess it influenced me more than I thought.”

"Of course there was an actual poster.” She rolled her eyes and laughed. “And at this point in the story, most people would've started looking for investors, or loans, or grants. 3 million’s a lot of money. Or, whatever less than 3 million you figured out?"

“Yeah, well, I didn't want to look at VCs and angel investors. First off, it was something I was uncomfortable with, for the whole profit over people kind of thing they’re famous for. And also...” He trailed off.

“Also?” She could tell there was a deeper level of something he didn’t want to admit.

“Also... VCs and investors meant reports, meant... well... people. My autistic ass would rather just learn the skills the hard way, if it meant I could avoid putting on that cheerful, ugly corporate mask, and navigate that painfully cold and mechanical structure.” He shook his head. “I hate it. I hate that fakeness, the plastic smiles and formalized greetings, the dumbing down of people and the performative nature of it all. It makes me sick.”

She stopped writing and stared ahead, finding herself momentarily speechless.

"Hold on.” She jabbed her pen in midair at him. “You’re telling me you... you chose to learn food manufacturing from scratch, something that normally takes people years or even decades, over... over talking to VCs?”

He pondered this perspective for a moment.

“...Yeah. I mean, beyond the whole abusing people for profit thing they like to do--”

“Tim.” She shook her head in dismay, and looked at her notebook. “Your... and I quote, ‘autistic ass,’ would rather do these incredibly difficult, near impossible things... instead of dealing with reports and social performance? Am I-- Am I really hearing that right?”

He scratched his head.

“...Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, hey, look, we can’t discount the morals and ethics part of it too but--”

“But that fundamentally connects with it all too, doesn’t it?” She replied, “Because that same fakeness that you despised so much...”

“Enables the kind of distance you need to place profit over everything else,” he says quietly. “When we start seeing people as numbers, as data and statistics, that’s when we gain the ability to do terrible things to them.”

Realization dawned on her face, and she nodded slowly. "...so you questioned where the three million was going, or if it was even necessary. Because it was rooted in people being just numbers, not... people."

She set her pen to paper once more. "So. What did you find when you pulled back that 3 million dollar curtain?"

“Well... I found out that people used way too much automation where it didn't matter, and way too little of their own elbow grease. They spent money to look efficient, not to actually be efficient.” He shook his head. “I came from the Michelin Star kitchen where we needed both efficiency AND skill. The one I was part of was especially insane-- we were a Michelin Star restaurant and all the detail and precision that demanded, but also served the entire hotel, and a separate lounge bar on top of all of it. All the speed and chaos of a hotel kitchen, while maintaining the rigors of keeping that coveted Michelin Star.”

He looked at his hands, covered in faint lines and discolored patches, signs of countless burns and cuts from years ago.

“And I wanted to have people who were skilled on the line. Actually trained, not just warm bodies filling a spot. And I wanted to give them the respect that I never had. I'd been exploited, overworked, barely paid, yelled at every day, walking into the kitchen with enough anxiety that it was a normal sight to sometimes see people throw up before they went in, and we thought... yeah, that’s just how it was.”

A certain conviction sets in his eyes. “I wanted to create a place that was how I believed it should be. PTO, fully paid healthcare, vision, dental, mental health days...”

The conviction suddenly deflates from his eyes, and his eyes flick up and to the right, brow slightly furrowed and a chuckle escaping his lips.

“Which, also, by every metric WAS VERY STUPID.”

She laughed. “Stupid, huh? Isn’t that the kind of place that everyone talks about as what should be?”

“And also, the kind of place that has the most trouble making profit, yeah.” He leaned forward with a conspiratorial hush. “But I had a secret advantage that the others didn’t have. Which I’ll--”

“Don’t you dare--” she started, pointing her pen accusingly at him, “Don’t you DARE do that thing again where you start and never tell me what--”

“Okay, okay, fine,” he said with a laugh, throwing his hands up in mock defeat, “I’ll tell you. See, one of the biggest advantages I realized we had was that I could actually BE on the line. I wasn’t just willing to work the line for a few days. I had my pride as one of the best damn cooks on the line when I was cooking in those kitchens, and that pride demanded I’d also be the best and fastest here, too.”

“So...” She held up her hand. “You’re telling me that from the very start, you were intending, as the CEO and founder, to work on the production line? Most owners can’t last a day working the job they actually own. They-- they made a whole TV show about that. How were you going to do all the other things you needed to do? And how does that even make it more efficient compared to an engineer who can calculate everything?”

“That one’s easy.” He paused. “Tell me, can you predict the future with 100% certainty?”

She cocked an eyebrow at him, unsure where this was going. “Nah, of course not.”

“Exactly. See, an engineer can see the theoreticals. They can map out the theories of the distances, time, people, and get deep into numbers and linear algebra and simplex and duplex optimizations and whatever else... But at the end of the day?” He flicks at his forearm, covered in just as many marks as his hands. “There’s just no replacement for the experience of doing it yourself. There’s so many little things that you’ll never understand floating above it all, but when you’re in the thick of it, doing all the things yourself... There’s so much you can make more efficient, even while making it easier and better for the ones who will be working it full time.”

She nodded slowly in understanding. “If you want something done right…” she mused, her pen finally catching up to Tim’s words. “But at this stage, you haven’t actually done anything yet, right? We’ve talked about analyzing, and plans for workers, and ideas and theories and all of that-- but what was the actual first step to opening for business?”

“Ha. Yeah, so about that... we had our own theories... but we had to make the recipes, didn’t we?”

She set her notebook down, pen on top of the half-filled page. “Okay, but when did you actually start making it real? Because all of this, as fun as it seems... it’s all still theory.”

Tim rolled his shoulders, thinking for a moment. “I guess we kind of tricked a certified food technologist into teaching us industry secrets?”

She blinked.

“Sorry, what?”

—--

Next week on the Built By Spite: The story of Vite--

How we learned an entire career's worth of food science in one day (then ate 18 bowls of ramen to celebrate), how we funded a factory without VCs, and the video that was so catastrophically bad that every marketing agency who'd agreed to work with us immediately dropped us.

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