Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS]
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Welcome to this classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past 10 years, published once a month. These are end-of-one conversations with end-of-one people. Sean Feeney makes you want to be a better person, friend, and leader. His story never gets old and his out-of-the-box thinking will have you questioning the rulebook. I hope you enjoy it. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing.
You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus.com.
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Visit WorkOS.com to get started or just hit up their Slack support. Yes, they have real engineers in there who will answer your questions fast. WorkOS allows you to build like the best with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and smooth developer experience. Go to WorkOS.com to make your app enterprise ready today. Today is Sean Feeney. Sean is the co-founder of Grove House Hospitality Group and the owner of Lilia and Missy, two of New York City's most sought after restaurants. He left his job in trading to chase down a dream with Michelin star chef Missy Robbins. Sean leveraged his finance background, He was actually introduced to me through past guest Scott Goodwin to write his own rule book for the restaurant industry, crafting several establishments that now boast several thousand people on the wait list on any given night.
His story is as entertaining as it is inspiring. As we go step by step through his business endeavors, he points out all the times he was told it's just always been done this way and how that revealed to him where he could innovate. Sean's restaurants are the perfect example of building a business into the fabric of a community, collaborating with other brands in authentic ways, and staying true to oneself along the way. Please enjoy this awesome conversation with Sean Feeney. All right, Sean. So you have one of the most interesting stories that I've encountered in a long time. And I'm especially interested because I love the category of people that had a long, successful career in finance and then do something completely different, but approach the new business, restaurants and food and hospitality in your case.
with all the lessons and what they've learned in finance applied to the new place. And I find that it just sometimes leads to these fantastic outcomes because people will be familiar with some of the restaurants, but maybe not with your story. Maybe you could just start with that transition, like bring us to the end of your finance career and kind of what you were doing and the story of seeing this window of opportunity in restaurants to do something wholly different. And maybe even how you process that psychologically, like it's a big switch. It's hard to leave finance. Not many people do, but you've done it with spectacular success. So maybe just bring us into that moment of transitioning from one to the other.
In 2003, I started in finance. 2009, I was married and moved into an apartment in the West Village in a townhouse where there was three apartments in that building.
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