Shane Parrish

Harrison and Wallace were salesmen.

They could talk their way into any factory or any bank, but they hadn't the slightest idea how to design a processing plant.

So they did what great founders do when they hit the edge of their own competence.

They went looking for the best person in the world who could.

They found Olaf Pearson.

He had a degree from MIT and actually developed frozen French fries in the 1940s.

He designed the first French fry plant ever built.

And he was, by all accounts, a creative genius.

He'd sketch plant designs on the back of cigarette packages and constantly forget to add essential components like conveyor belts.

But he was brilliant in exactly the way early ventures need brilliance.

He was uneven, unpredictable, and capable of solving problems no one else could even frame.

They built the plant on a cow pasture along the banks of the St.

John River.

On February 23, 1957, it opened with 30 employees.

They had a capacity of about 1,000 pounds of frozen produce per hour.

The early days were chaos.

One of the first employees described it perfectly.

It was management by crisis.

You never knew what you were going to be doing on any given day.

Harrison's title was president, but that didn't mean much.