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What “replicable by a stranger” actually tests
The first thing we ask of a concept is that it survives its founder leaving the room.
Almost every early business works because one person is holding it together. That person tastes the food, reads the room, knows which supplier to call. It is genuinely why the first unit is good, and it is the exact reason the second one usually is not.
So the test we apply is blunt: hand it to someone who has never met you and has no feel for it. If the quality drops, the thing that made it good was not in the system. It was in you.
This is not a test of how good the founder is. The best operators fail it most spectacularly, because they have compensated so well for so long that nobody ever had to write down what they were doing.
What passes is unglamorous: a narrow menu, a decision the system makes rather than suggests, a standard that is enforced rather than hoped for. Concepts that pass this look smaller on paper than the ones that do not. They are the ones that reach a hundred units.
Send it when
it is ready.
We read applications all year round. There is no batch to wait for and no deadline to miss.
Applications open year-round
You cannot open physical stores in batches. Every unit needs its own lease, build-out and team — so we take ventures on one at a time, and start each one when it is ready.
We answer every submission ourselves, usually inside two weeks.