#341: Nick Kokonas — How to Apply World-Class Creativity to Business, Art, and Life
The Tim Ferriss Show
How I Learned Options Theory From Scratch
"It's like paing a huge, multi faceted chess game that no one's going to get exactly right," he says. "You need to be quick on basic mental agilityso if you bought, if you bought and it was 450 contracts, you needed to be able to do, what's 20 % of the time?" He left his job as an options trader after just six months but has been with him for 25 years. 'I wanted to be the captain of my own ship'
Nick Kokonas (IG: @nkokonas, TW: @NickKokonas) is the co-owner and co-founder of The Alinea Group of restaurants, which includes Alinea, Next, The Aviary, Roister, and The Aviary NYC. He is also the founder and CEO of Tock, Inc, a reservations and CRM system for restaurants with more than 2.5M diners and clients in more than 20 countries.
Alinea has been named the Best Restaurant in America and Best Restaurant in The World by organizations and lists as diverse as The James Beard Foundation, World's 50 Best, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Gourmet Magazine, and Elite Traveler. His restaurants have won nearly every accolade afforded to them.
Nick has been a subversive entrepreneur and angel investor since 1996. He spent a decade as a derivatives trader, has co-written three books, and believes in radical transparency in markets and business. His latest effort is The Aviary Cocktail Book, which is perhaps the most gorgeous book I've ever seen. It is self-published, has already pre-sold nearly $1M in copies, and is being released and shipped in October of 2018.
We've been trying to get this interview going ever since Nick was of immense help to me for The 4-Hour Chef, so I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. We talk about much more than the restaurant business, including philosophy, derivatives trading, favorite books, and how Nick tends to break every industry he enters in the most productive way possible! Enjoy!
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