#429: Nick Kokonas on Resurrecting Restaurants, Skin in the Game, and Investing

If you're acting as a reaction to a bad situation, it's easy to make bad decisions quickly. If you've considered the various possibilities that can occur and what you'll do at that time, it's like being an athlete that says, 'Okay, if we get to this part, this is the play we run,' and you just do it—it's not a hard decision.

This [COVID-19] is not a unique situation as much as we'd like to think it is. Pandemics have been going on throughout human history—it's just that none of us have lived through one before.

Early on [during the COVID-19 pandemic], there were some folks in the industry that were calling for restaurants to not be allowed to offer carry out. Is it 100% safe? Well, it seems to be the case—and there's broad consensus on this—that food is safe and packaging is probably safe.

On March 8th [2020], I tweeted that the hospitality industry in the United States was about to be decimated. It's 4% of GDP. Then, hotels and airlines would follow soon after.

The companies that I like to look at are the ones that go into a very established industry and say, 'Hey, this is ripe to be blown up and done better.'