From Chef to Dad: David Chang’s New Definition of Success

Guy Kawasaki:
Hello everybody. Thank you for staying until the last few sessions of the conference. I didn't know they put me in the second to the last slot earlier. So about eight days ago, the world lost one of its most remarkable people.
And I wanna put a picture up there. So, the last time I saw Jane, it was a couple miles from here at the Salesforce building, and it was her ninetieth birthday tour. And just so you know, Jane Goodall, she was ninety at that time, at that birthday, and she looked a little peak at her tired. So I went up to her at the birthday party.
I said, “Jane, you should chillax a little bit. Take it easy. Come to our house. We have an extra guest house. You can stay in our guest house. We won't ask you for autographs. We won't ask you for pictures. Just relax. Jane, you travel 300 days a year.”
She traveled 300 days a year. Now, when speakers travel, we get off the airplane, the limo picks you up, you go to the hotel, you relax, you wake up, you give a one hour speech, you get back in the limo, you get back to the hotel, you go home. But when Jane Goodall travels from morning to midnight, she's meeting with schools and kids and nonprofits and all these things.
So her travel is a hundred times more difficult than most speakers. And so I went up to her and I told her this, and this is what she told me. She said, “Guy, I cannot rest because there is too much to do.” And that was Jane Goodall.
So listen, the day after she died. I was on my property and I have this UTV on this property and I'm driving around in our yard, and I look down and there's a frog on my leg. And my interpretation was that was Jane saying hello to me. So listen, you know, I know when someone passes like that, it's customary to give them a moment of silence, but I don't think that's appropriate for Jane.
I think we should give her a moment of applause for all she did. Yes. Standing ovation. Applause. I think I'm gonna begin every speech like you get a standing ovation at the start. Yeah. So now I wanna bring out another truly remarkable person and his name is David Chang.
So please join me to welcome David Chang.

David Chang:
Hi guys. All right, we're doing this.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, finally. So David, first question for you is, have you been able to get some good figs while you're in San Francisco?

David Chang:
I'm not sure if everyone knows, it's been some years. But I haven't had any figs in San Francisco. And Guy’s alluding to about fifteen or years ago, I got in a lot of trouble. I blame the late great Tony Bourdain because he got me drunk at a talk much like this.
And he said that, “The topic was ‘I Called Bullshit’.” And I called bullshit about at the time, the Bay Area only cooking things like figs on a plate. It got poll quoted as first of my life. Right.
But I was basically saying that San Francisco, the Bay Area has been at the forefront of sexuality, politics, technology, art, music, and I love Alice Waters. I love Chez Panisse, but it can't be the only thing that the Bay Area celebrates at the time.
I could have used better words at the time, but I was trying to express that. But till this day, sometimes I might just get a fig on the plate at a restaurant here.

Guy Kawasaki:
David, I read your memoir and I have come to the conclusion, and I say this with the highest degree of respect because I believe you are in the sort of tradition of Steve Jobs, you are a mission driven asshole. You truly are a mission driven asshole. And I was reading a memoir.
I said, “Man, that sounds like Steve Jobs with a knife.” And I think one of the things that separated Steve from everybody is a term that I learned from Brené Brown yesterday, which is Steve was a plumber and a poet, and not many people can be a plumber and a poet. And I would say you are a plumber and a poet.

David Chang:
Well, most people would say I'm a plumber at best. But, I've never heard that comparison. I don't wanna put myself in anything like that, but an asshole for sure I believe.

Guy Kawasaki:
I think you should go to your LinkedIn profile, say, “Steve Jobs with a knife.” So, you know, I'm alluding to when I read your book, or for one thing, I will never own a restaurant after reading your book. So talk about the plumbing of a restaurant and then the poetry of what you're trying to do.

David Chang:
Literally owning a restaurant, you better know the plumbing because more often than not you are going to be cleaning up shit. That is not a joke. That happens quite often.
And it sort of punctures any sort of beautiful idea, this romantic idea of opening a restaurant that might be romanticized on TV or the movies. And yes, The Bear is very accurate, but not exactly perfect. But it's great. It's a great show.
But, when you're running a restaurant as a chef, sometimes you forget that you have to be a chef as well because you have the bureaucracy, the politics, and Lord knows managing people that is not the easiest thing for anybody, let alone someone that started to cook so they didn't have to talk to people.

Guy Kawasaki:
And what is the hardest part there? Or everything's hard.

David Chang:
Everything's hard, so everything that will go wrong can go wrong.
It just, every day is like the worst day possible. And I joke, opening a restaurant and running a restaurant is like the great Kathryn Bigelow movie, The Hurt Locker. Except that you are not only diffusing the bomb, you are also creating the bombs as well. And that's sort of what it was like.
Every day you're diffusing problem after problem after problem. And you know at the end of the day when you look at the business. It's such an absurd thing that it truly is a passion project for most people.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. That's the plumbing part. What about the poetry part?

David Chang:
At the very best, cooking is not like any other discipline. It has to integrate food science.
So you need to know microbiology, biochemistry, you need to understand proportions. You need to know history. You need to have a way to express yourself. And if you asked me when I was twenty-two cooking, I would've said, “No, this is a craft. We’re just plumbers.”
But more and more, and actually talking about Chez Panisse and figs on a plate like I've learned that actually was like so punk rock, that was an ultimate form of expression. And food at its very best is like nothing else.
It's something you can express. It's a story. It can be delicious. And the absurd part of it is it's gonna be in the toilet eight to ten hours later.
No, listen, for those that don't know anything about a Tibetan sand mandala, nobody would build a business where like everything would disintegrate, if it wasn't refrigerated. It's a terrible business idea. Yet we do it all the time.

Guy Kawasaki:
This is the Masters of Scale Summit, so I feel a moral obligation to ask one question about scaling so that they invite me back next year. So as I'm reading your memoir, I'm looking at all the whales you try to scale. So, you try to scale by getting more butts in seats.
Then you wanna get butts in different cities in seats. Then you want to get butts eating different kinds of foods in seats. And then you want to get butts watching your TV shows, and then you wanna start delivering food to butts, and then you wanna sell butts consumer packaged goods.
Yeah. So let's talk about what you learned about scaling, trying all those things.

David Chang:
Well, this is an interesting topic because I think it is the hot button subject in food, at least, is the idea of scalability and food unlike any other form of culture that you consume, it is like not scalable. It really is not scalable. And I was just thinking about in 2013, 2014, I was friends with the former manager of U-Two, Paul McGuinness.
He was having a conversation much like this and he was like, “Your business is dumb, David.” And I was like, “No question about that.” Then, it's a dumb business, but one reason is you can't scale it.
You can't scale it like music or downloads or what is now like streaming in general. And I didn't know it at the time, but he was showing me what later was that U-Two download that every iPhone got, I think it was like iPhone Six or something like that. And I was like, yeah, that's definitely scaling. We can never do anything like that.
And that is the bottleneck with people that are looking to invest because you take this great idea and there's terroir, there's story, there's purpose in a specific restaurant at a specific city. And they are cultural banks. Like a great restaurant is a cultural bank to its neighborhood.
Yes, you can scale that. Yes, you have fast food. I have tried to do that. After that conversation I tried to do our first, what is now like the first ghost kitchen.
We did it with Thrive and we did another one called Ondo. So Maple and Ondo. And I knew that we had to scale, like we had to integrate technology at some point. But you know, like food and tech just don't go hand in hand.
It doesn't because at the end of the day, everybody wants to eat at seven o'clock, right? You cannot manufacture food fast enough. And it's still, no matter what you say you need people cooking. It is a workman's like job and it's slow and it's plotting and until somebody creates ways to make the throughput of food faster.
But I don't know if that's gonna be delicious. It's not gonna ever really scale. So knowing that and knowing that food is not scalable, the irony here is the fact that food is not scalable is why it is becoming infinitely scalable. Because what is being broadcast on social media now are really high-end restaurants or experiential dining that you cannot consume, but you can now broadcast and that becomes cultural currency.
So high-end dining restaurants, let's just say The French Laundry here, it's harder to get in than ever before because there's a limited amount of these reservations and the demand is growing and growing. So you have this barbell thing. You have super high end and experiential dining and weirdly that's becoming scalable and I don't know how to explain that. But they're able to expand.
But they're also, more importantly, being able to charge higher prices, which they should be doing. And then you have things that are gonna be cheaper and faster, not necessarily cheaper these days, but faster because we're gonna have food that you're gonna be able to order on your app, and it'll be at your door pretty instantly. I do believe that. My concern is everything in between.
But that is not scalable, and I'm mostly concerned about the things that are not scalable.

Guy Kawasaki:
But, Dave, I wanna point out to you that these people are altering how to scale, not that something cannot scale.

David Chang:
Listen, I've talked to so many people that are advanced in technology and they all say, “Hey, you can do this, you can do that,” but well, you have to design an oven that's faster and all of these things, it will take time, it will happen. All of this is gonna happen. It just can't happen at once. So, I think this idea of broadcasting this fear of missing out in food is good and bad.
But I think what we need to figure out, honestly, everyone in this room is like the restaurants that can't scale. My focus is like, how do you save those restaurants that are your neighborhood mom and pop, the diners? And I feel like we're losing the ability to actually judge the quality of what's good now, because everything's going to what is the best, this hyperbole in the media.
This is the best thirty-eight restaurants; this is the steakhouse you have to eat at. And I'm just telling you like; I think everyone should go to these lists and go to these restaurants and eat at the restaurant next door to these restaurants.
Um, and honestly, choose five restaurants that you wanna support and it may not be the best restaurant you've ever had. I think we need to be comfortable with just eating good, you know, like good's pretty goddamn amazing.
So I don't know if that answers your question, and I know I'm gonna talk to someone later, like, “No, I can definitely scale it.” And I've talked to a lot of very smart people, much smarter than myself, and I have no doubt that’ll happen. But you know, we should be worried about everyone else that are just sort of making a restaurant their livelihood right now.

Guy Kawasaki:
Alright, so one of the stories that I found most endearing in your book was the story of Marge. So tell us the story of Marge, who started as an intern and eight years later was CEO of Momofuku.

David Chang:
Marguerite Mariscal, she is our CEO. She started as an intern and then she had almost every position. And I remember telling our board when she was twenty-five, I was like, “She's gonna be the CEO.” And they all laughed at my face, “Oh, she's too young. You're crazy.”
I was like, “Yes, I'm definitely crazy, but I think that she's going to be the right person. And I'm not betting on her now to be this fully formed sort of executive. I'm betting on who she's going to be.”
And there's a saying in hospitality that we can teach anybody how to cook. We can tell them techniques and so on and so forth. But we can't teach people like to give a shit and she cared more than anybody else.
And over the first few years, no matter where I was, she didn't have to be there, but she was there adding value at all times. And that was an easy ask for me to be like, okay, I know that she's gonna be the best custodian of this brand and where we’re going.

Guy Kawasaki:
And did she go to the Culinary Institute of America and all that?

David Chang:
No.

Guy Kawasaki:
I mean, you say some places it's better to get a college education than a culinary education, right?

David Chang:
Yeah. I mean, uh, cooking schools don't love me so much. It's not perfect for everybody. Some people certainly benefit from it, but you're talking about a twelve month program.
So a twenty-four month program that might be like 250,000 dollars in tuition. They're not gonna make that back anytime soon in the workforce. Like when I started to cook, everyone calls me college boy because it was not like a cool thing to be as a cook at the time. And they were like, “Do our numbers, do our count.”
I was like, “I was a religion major guys. Like, you do not want me to do anything number oriented.” But what I learned was I learned how to critically think.
I learned how to put disparate things together that may not be in someone else's cup of tea. And I thought that learning how to think, learning how to communicate, gave me a leg up in cooking. And like everyone else in college, for the most part, you work a job and I think you should go to a really great state school and work at a restaurant before you want to become a cook. And before you work in a restaurant, you should wash dishes for six months.
And if you love it, then just maybe the profession's for you.

Guy Kawasaki:
In my podcast, I once interviewed Marc Maron, and he wrote the book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck, you know, and he told me that you'll truly know that you discovered what you love when it involves a shit sandwich, and you love the shit sandwich. And it seems to me the restaurant business and what you described, there's a lot of shit sandwiches that you love, right?

David Chang:
It's nonstop. It's honestly what people cook the best.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. This question, David, trust me, I'm trying to be deeper than it might seem, but I wanna know what is the ideal number of Michelin stars to get as a restaurant? Obviously, everybody wants three. Right?

David Chang:
No. We had the longest reign for two stars in New York City history. And for a while I wanted really three stars, but just, and I'm a highly competitive person and I wanted it.
And then at some point, like halfway along the way in fifteen years, I was like, I'm good with two. Because when you get three, you can only go down. They can only take it away, right? And two, I know what we can.
And you know what, that's when I knew like I was getting older and the things I cared about when I was younger, I don't care about at all anymore. And listen, I love when my peer group gets awarded with the highest praise and the highest honors, but I truly don't care at all about Michelin stars for myself anymore, but I want it for my team. It just doesn't mean anything to me anymore.

Guy Kawasaki:
So if you get one star, you're so thrilled. You got your star, you get two stars, it keeps you hungry, you get three stars, you always gotta be worried.

David Chang:
It can only go downhill. Truly. And two stars, just for those in the business, when someone's awarded two stars, that's the restaurant you want to eat at because you will need to make the decision, is this person gonna try to go get three?
And historically speaking, the restaurants that went from two to three, those are the moments they're just like amazing albums in like rock and roll, you want to go there. So you got a lot of great restaurants, a lot of two star, three star restaurants here. But if there's a new two star restaurant in San Francisco, or one that goes to two or Oakland area, you should definitely check those out. But also, who gives a shit about the Michelin Guide?
You can go to any restaurant, and it'll be fucking good.

Guy Kawasaki:
So the cover of your book shows, Oddjob pushing the peach up the hill. Right? And you're forty-eight years old now, right? I wanna know, has the Sisyphus Boulder changed for you?
What's the boulder now?

David Chang:
Yeah, I don't know. I think about that all the time. For those that don't know, the Greek myth of Sisyphus, right? He is eternally punished to roll this boulder up the hill, only to have it rolled back down on him when he reaches the top of the hill.
And I actually view it as an inspirational story.

Guy Kawasaki:
You're Asian.

David Chang:
I do because you have a choice. You can have a choice to be like, oh, I've been presented this really crappy situation, which we're all presented all the time. And you can bitch and moan about it.
Or you can actually say, “This is not gonna affect how I'm gonna think about this. I'm gonna roll this boulder up the hill better than anyone's ever rolled it.” And that's the mindset that I have, and I gotta be honest, now that I'm a father of two, I'm forty-eight.
It's like, maybe I don't wanna roll this boulder that much more anymore. That's just where I'm at. Yeah. I'm not as angry as I used to be, and I would much rather be a dad than be me.

Guy Kawasaki:
So having Hugo, your first child, was the turning point?

David Chang:
For sure. I mean, Hugo was born 2019, his first birthday, which is a big deal in Korean culture. You celebrate March First in 2020 and then the world ended. And that was tough for so many people, particularly restaurant business. And I think it was spending time with my son because I was on the road probably 175 days a year.
We had restaurants in Canada, Australia, a bunch of places. We'd opened up like nine restaurants in twenty-four months. Talk about not scalable. That was not a scalable pace. And then I just was like, you know what, I don't wanna do this anymore like this.
So thankfully we started to grow our CPG business and I spend less time on the restaurant now.

Guy Kawasaki:
So you're scaling.

David Chang:
And all of a sudden we're scaling. And the funny thing is no offense to certain parts of America, but I don't wanna fucking go there. I don't wanna open up a restaurant there.
And one of my investors told me, “You are the worst businessman I've ever met in my life, David.” Because I cannot tinker. If a restaurant's supposed to be the same, I will definitely screw it. And it'll be different.
Right. And I just have to, I can't do the same thing. It drives me crazy. And now we can have control. I'm a control freak. So we can work on a product. The only problem with consumer product goods and retail and grocery stores, it moves at a snail's pace.
And I'm an addict to a lot of things, but I'm an addict to action. And that's been hard for me is while we're scaling this consumer product goods business, it moves so goddamn slow.

Guy Kawasaki:
So, if there's anybody in the world who can answer this, it is you. So what is the impact of the, shall I say, war on immigrants that's going on right now? What's the impact is that gonna have on the restaurant business?

David Chang:
I always think about what, like Singapore, I don't know what they're doing right now, but they put a ban on immigrants, and I remember my friends at our restaurants in Singapore, we don't have any employees, no one's working. And I remember 2016, couldn't find a lot of laborers or cooks or dishwashers. And here's a problem, I think a lot of restaurateur chefs wanna speak out, but they don't want to become a target for the people that work there.
That sucks. Right. And, it's difficult. It's difficult right now it's not fair that a lot of people, and they don't have to be restaurant workers, that there's just too many people that live in a state of fear.
And that's just completely unacceptable.

Guy Kawasaki:
So have you done anything for Momofuku to help this situation, or can you do anything?

David Chang:
We can help as much as we can. And I don't wanna speak more than that. But we're helping.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Alright. I don't want to get morbid, but I wanna ask you, so at the end of your life, I'm closer than you. At the end of your life, what do you want your eulogy to be? Is it chef or father or entrepreneur, or Steve Jobs with a knife?

David Chang:
No. Asshole. That's what it is. Asshole. Um, no, I think people might think about it a lot.
And honestly, I was telling you before we came up here, I genuinely am shocked with myself that I don't care about the things I used to care about. I'm sure you guys know plenty of very wealthy, successful people. Let me tell you, no one's gonna care about them. Your legacy ultimately to me, doesn't matter.
It's all ephemeral and I don't care about it. I used to, but now it's I would much rather just be like a good dad and a good sort of executive and partner to the people I work with, but I'm not trying to think about those things.
All I wanted to do before is win every goddamn award possible, and I just don't care. I also understand when I talk to somebody that's younger and they're like, “Oh, I'm a semi-finalist for the James Beard Awards,” and lemme tell you.
I was like, “Dude, it doesn't fucking matter.” And they're like, “Shut up, Dave. You won a bunch. You can say that.”
And I was like, “I totally understand you, but I guarantee if you stop caring about it, you'll probably win a ton of them.”

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Okay. So we know what you don't wanna do. What's your eulogy say?

David Chang:
Well, let's put it this way. Dave Chang was an asshole, and he learned not to be an asshole.

Guy Kawasaki:
That's a higher bar. This is going down a real deep hole, but I'm very curious. So the cover of his book, I should have brought the book out with me. It shows this tiny little guy pushing this peach up a hill.
And the guy you say is Oddjob.

David Chang:
It's Oddjob.

Guy Kawasaki:
And Oddjob if you're old enough. He was the guy with the metal hat that threw the hat.

David Chang:
With the bowler hat. They're all too young.

Guy Kawasaki:
You all are looking at us like we're nuts. Right. So, believe it or not, that guy's name is Harold Sakata. He's from Hawaii.
My father and he served together in the Army. He and my father were gonna have a tag team wrestling professional wrestling team. Yeah. And he was a family friend.
So I got a ride with him driving around a Mercedes 280 SL and he was driving me around in that car and I said, “Guy, this is why you gotta work hard.” So what is your connection with Harold Sakata?

David Chang:
Well, it's not just him. I hate talking about like representation and stuff for the sake of it, but for me, my only heroes were people like Oddjob and Bruce Lee and anybody that was a villain in movies. They happened to be like a computer expert or demolition expert or something like that. And I was like, okay, like growing up, these were the people I would saw.
So I was like a huge fan of Oddjob. I'd watch James Bond. Everyone's, “I wanna be like James Bond.” I was like, “I wanna be like Oddjob.”
You know what I mean? Again, it's a very different thing in 2025, but you know, in the eighties growing up as a kid, you just didn't see anything like that. So when you see someone on TV that happened to be Asian, I was like, “Yeah, okay, let's go.” There was nobody on sports, I can tell you everybody.
There was Jumbo Ozaki, Japanese golfer, Jhoon Rhee in Taekwondo and that's about it. So yeah. In Hollywood, that was my guy.

Guy Kawasaki:
We're out of time, but my logic here is what are they gonna do? Not invite us back. Well, so since we talked about Oddjob, I gotta tell you a funny story about me. So, one day.
So this is about fifteen years ago. I had a 911. Okay. I'm driving in Menlo Park.
I’m in a 911. So 911 is a Porsche. So you know, all Porsche drivers are assholes. So with that caveat, I'm driving my Porsche.
I pull up to a stop sign. I look to my left, there's a car full of four teenage girls. They're giggling, they're laughing, they're making eye contact, and the one in the front seat says, “Roll down your window.” So I roll down my window, she sticks her head out and she says, “Are you Jackie Chan?”
So that's, we gotta have our heroes, right? Right. So ever since that day, my goal in life is that some girl in Hong Kong asked Jackie Chan if he's me.
So now I'm gonna let you close with a message to this audience about changing the world and being a father and not being an asshole. What's your final message here David Chang?

David Chang:
I wasn’t anticipating this. My God. It's like a commencement speech. Oh my goodness. Wow. This is now a lot of pressure.

Guy Kawasaki:
David Chang is speechless. Yeah.

David Chang:
Listen, this whole idea of scalability, I'll tell you like when we started Maple in 2015, it was one of the reasons why, again, from that Paul McGuinness conversation, I wanted to do something. I had never worked with people that were venture capitalists like we work with Thrive, and it was Josh and Will Gaybrick who's at Stripe now.
And I was blown away at the kind of big picture thinking that was possible. I didn't even understand the numbers that was being thrown around in the logistics.
And I learned so much that there is innovation that can be had in industries that you didn't think were possible and that are completely uncool. And food I think needs a lot of help. We need a lot of help. And I just would say, “If you're gonna scale food, don't make shitty food.”
Don't make shitty food. Don't make a bowl of slop. Try to make something beautiful with great ingredients and everyone's happy to work there.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right, so let's give it up for Steve Jobs with a knife.

David Chang:
Thank you guys.