Sushi-Biotech Revenue Contrast

A story about how Shaan Puri's father convinced him to pivot from the restaurant industry to biotech by explaining the difference in scale between industries.

"My first startup was a sushi restaurant chain. My dad, who worked at BP in oil and gas, tried to convince me to come work in the energy industry. He used a poker analogy, saying 'When you go to a poker table, you can sit down with $100 or $100,000 - you're still playing the same game, still sitting there for 6 hours. Why not play the bigger game?'

He explained that in the energy industry, the minimum stakes are in the millions. Nothing happens in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. A restaurant location, if it works, can produce $100,000 or $125,000 of net income per year. But he said a small project and a big project both take the same amount of time and are both all-consuming, so might as well do the one with the bigger payoff.

When he said it like that, I stopped the food thing and went into biotech. We made one deal that was worth $5 million. That would have taken us 5 years and 25 locations to do in the restaurant industry. Instead, it was one great meeting, one great presentation, and a year of technology development - boom, $5 million came through the door. I got to taste both sides of it."