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ian87701

A startup founder mindset is all about creativity, curiosity & calmness

I love great pizza. There are two challenges in my life: I never have the willpower to completely ignore pizza on a restaurant menu or walk past a bookshop. I'm working on realising the difference between the occasional craving and the compulsion to mindlessly consume as a feeble means of self-medication. Pizza and books.


Wood fired oven pizza is best. Crispy, don't overdo the sauce, but a well-done, wood-fired cheese heavy pizza is my jam. The best pizza I’ve ever had was at Altalena Vinoteca at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a Quattro-Formaggi. It was an event. As I was seated with a good view to the kitchen my pizza order went in.


I watched the spectacle as the pizzaioli spun the dough. The shaping was meticulous, the topping applied with artistry, placed in the wood oven lovingly. When it arrived a few minutes later, it was a beast of a Quattro-Formaggi. Mozzarella, Asiago, Gorgonzola, Pecorino Toscano refracted through the lens of pizza sensibility.  Ok, this is a term of my own invention.


Their standard for pizza hegemonised what greatness meant in pizza. Preparation of a fragile dough and prolonged cool fermentation, delicate and swift stretching, shaping, and topping to achieve a very thin centre balanced by a rim of appropriate thickness and volume, followed by cooking in a piping hot oven for under four minutes. There. It almost sounds like I know what I’m doing.


The centre of the Quattro-Formaggi pizza is hot, wet and muggy – caldo e umido as the Italians say. But beware, if it goes wrong, it’s like soup. Success depends on firing the oven to the correct chamber temperatures, then loading and rotating the pizza to achieve even cooking, all within a small-time window. If these stars all align, the Quattro-Formaggi pizza emerges leopard-spotted from the oven, as the pressure of steam in the base holds the moisture in the topping at bay.


A great pizza temporarily achieves a seemingly paradoxical state of being dry and wet, soft and crunchy, crisp and tender, all at once. The key is a thoroughly aerated crust that is crunchy, chewy, and tender, and a centre moist and lush retaining enough structure to remain in its deliciousness for fifteen minutes by which time I have usually eaten it all. A great pizza is a work of art in the moment. 


My pizza fixation has bloomed into a potentially life-threatening obsession as I’ve mixed my own different flours and learning how they behave when made into doughs at different levels of hydration and with different fermentation regimes, blending the flour and mixing the dough. It’s become the latest expression of my entrepreneurial endeavours.


My most recent creation was wild garlic stems, leeks, scallions, Chinese chives, mushrooms, and a spiced tomato sauce. I brushed the rim with lemon juice after baking, preserving delicious aeration in the rim, crisp yet tender, with an appealing flavouring and chewiness. The end product represents a mini constellation of aligned stars. There, I did say it was an obsession! 


My pizza creations are like all entrepreneurial endeavours, requiring a vision, passion and a  clear mind-space for contrarian ideas, possibilities on the edge of time, yielding something that has not yet been.  Innovation comes out of human ingenuity and personal passions. The great thing about entrepreneurship is that there are few limitations when you are equipped with the right mind-set.


A kitchen is a cauldron for a creative experience as much as any tech incubator, where inspiration can lead to great success and personal fulfilment. In front of you a blank canvas of ingredients sat on the kitchen worktop, awaiting your spirit to infuse them with life. It’s a simple set up, but I create a vision that existed nowhere else but in my own mind, and make it happen. That’s entrepreneurial thinking.


With my pizza adventure. I'm reliving memories of all the TV cooking shows I watched, from Fanny Craddock and Johnny to the Galloping Gourmet to Delia, Rick Stein. I’m also an avid reader of cookbooks for inspiration. Giorgio Locatelli’s big Italian book is a great read, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s books always have a load of good ideas and Rosemary Shrager’s recipes are simple and fool proof, so ideal for me. Heston Blumenthal is just too posh and too fussy. I spend more time trying to use the letters of his name as an anagram and spell something rude. That lush nobleman is my best effort.


My pizza  passion is trivial and insignificant in the greater scheme of things. Failing at pizza dough just means eating less delicious pizza. The stakes here really could not be lower. But for me, creating your own pizza is both relaxing and fun, whilst also testing myself crating ambient uncertainty in which my entrepreneurial spirit can flourish.


Good questions always lead to great answers. So having unpacked and decluttered my mind, here are my ‘thinking outloud’ takeaway reflections from my pizza addiction, a stream of random consciousness and musings that I hope give you some insight into my thinking on how to help your own entrepreneurial journey.


1. The greatest reflection of yourself is how you use your time Whatever you say about what really matters to you, the true test is where you place your time. If you say your priorities are your kids or your health or learning to make great pizza or play better chess, that statement will only be true if your calendar reflects it. The only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once, but don’t wait, the time will never be right.


2. To know what you think, write it down I write things down about my pizza crafting in a notebook, to let it see light, it’s the best way for me to clarify what I was actually thinking about. Writing is the painting of the voice said Voltaire. I realised that writing generally is the best way to talk without being interrupted.


3. Replace fear of the unknown with curiosity Having to think for myself, with just radio on in the kitchen made me curious. You can’t artificially generate curiosity, so you have to follow where yours actually leads. Curiosity ends up being the driving force behind learning and the thirst for knowledge. Millions saw the apple fall but Newton asked why said Bernard Baruch. Curiosity did not kill the cat, conventionality did.


4. Get outside Sometimes you need to step outside, get some air and remind yourself of who you are and who you want to be. Being on a break gives you freedom from the usual routine without interference and to just do stuff. What you think of yourself is much more important than what other people think of you. Be yourself, give yourself some space, so I always do the pizza prep, then have time outside before starting the cooking.


5. Pay close attention to what you do when you’re alone When no-one else is around, when the afternoon is yours alone, what you choose to do says a lot about you. Pay close attention to where your mind wanders. Your natural wanderings are your compass to what’s truly interesting to you. Equally, it’s bad enough wasting time without killing time. Do something that matters to you.


6. Self-control is a finite resource I'm good company for me, I like the idea of solitude, being alone and being content with myself, but I fear loneliness, the pain of being alone, and I’ve never been lonely, an exposed position. However, you can only ask so much of yourself each day. You have a limited capacity to direct yourself a certain way. I now realise there are boundaries to being independent, but pizza in the moment gives me enough time to have an internal window on myself.


7. Listen to your own pulse Money can’t buy you happiness, but consciousness can. I picked up Laura Vanderkam’s book, 168 hours: you have more time than you think from a charity shop. She talks about thinking of your week in terms of 168 hours, instead of seven 24-hour chunks. When you look at your week from that perspective, you have more time than you think. This book is a reality check that says I do have time for what is important to me.


8. You never know where you are on the big wheel You never know what’s coming, you have to have some faith that your moment is coming, but you don’t need to be Speedy Gonzalez all the time. Travel has many joys, luggage is not one of them. Live for the moments of serendipity and synchronicity. Sleep. Hydrate. Move. The basics are key. You strive to be conscious in all areas of life, relationships, raising c



hildren, your work, but we need more awareness and clarity.


9. Sitting idle and doing nothing is often viewed as a bad habit, yet researchers have shown that there are several advantages of ‘doing nothing’. Electrical activity in the brain that seems to set certain sorts of memories is more continuous and frequent amid downtime, offering your brain a reprieve from work without completely surrendering cognizance.


10. Walk the dog once a day on the beach It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. The best listener has fur and four legs. In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn’t merely try to train her to be semi-human - the point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.


A fairly eclectic mix of reflections from being an over enthused pizza enthusiast, but as I’ve got older I write more of this stuff down to shape my mindset – and also not forget the good thoughts, the grey matter isn’t as sharp as it was ten years ago so keeping memories recorded becomes important.


As a founder, it’s always good to turn one hundred and eight degrees and retune to do something different. You find a lot out about yourself and also inspiration lies in hidden corners. The simple act of pizza creation works for me on several levels, both calming and firing up my mindset to make stuff happen.

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