He had a 9-Figure Exit (Then Almost Lost It All) | Steve Salis

He moved to New York at 21 as a college dropout, slept in a one-bedroom apartment with four other guys, and put every dime he had into a pizza shop in a neighborhood his own brokers said was financial ruin. Eight years later, he sold that company for a nine-figure valuation. Then COVID took a business doing hundreds of millions to zero overnight, with a lender on the phone demanding $47 million he had personally guaranteed. Steve Salis is the founder of &pizza and a hospitality entrepreneur who has built, scaled, and exited multiple restaurant brands, taken companies public, and set out to build the luxury conglomerate model in the restaurant world. In this conversation, he breaks down how he thinks about risk, scale, and survival, and why endurance beats every other trait in business. In this episode, Steve explains the exact epiphany that launched &pizza, watching people line up at a Qdoba below his West Village bar and realizing no one had brought that build-your-own, quality-first model to pizza. He breaks down his framework for quantifying risk using known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, and why most people talk themselves out of opportunity by jumping to a doomsday scenario with a less than 1% chance of happening. He shares the principle of premium and approachability that lets him own and scale multiple brands the way luxury conglomerates run dozens of labels under one belief system. He gets brutally honest about COVID as the ultimate unknown unknown, financing payroll out of his own pocket with no revenue, while a lender threatened to seize his business. And he opens up about the real cost of building at the top: the loneliness, the mental stamina, and the underdog motivation that traces back to a lower-income childhood in New Hampshire, where his mom worked four jobs, and his dad lost his business in 2008. If you are a founder weighing a risk everyone around you is warning against, an operator trying to scale past a single location into a real brand, or someone grinding through a moment that feels like rock bottom, this conversation gives you both the mental framework and the proof that the difference between an idea and an empire is execution. 00:00 The Grind Nobody Tells You About Owning Restaurants 03:30 Why Restaurants Are Really Beacons for Community 07:15 The Qdoba Epiphany That Created &pizza 12:40 Opening His First Store Where Brokers Said Not To 16:50 How to Quantify Risk: Known Knowns and Unknown Unknowns 22:10 Idea vs Execution: Why Most People Never Build Anything 27:30 Premium and Approachability: The Principle Behind Every Brand 32:45 COVID, a $47M Lender Call, and Going to Zero 38:20 Why Endurance Beats Grit, Talent, and Timing 43:00 The New Hampshire Underdog Still Chasing Act Two