Scott Norton co-founded the successful condiment brand Sir Kensington's, acquired by Unilever in 2017. Prior to Sir Kensington’s, Scott worked at Lehman Brothers in Tokyo and traveled across Asia on a folding bicycle.

Today, Scott is the founder of N+1 Ventures, accelerating businesses cultivating their “onlyness” to make an impact on culture. He serves on boards of purpose-driven companies including MUD\WTR, Smallhold, and Firstleaf.

In this conversation, Scott shares valuable lessons learned along the journey from brand conception to strategic exit. You’ll learn the foundational elements of identity for companies and for people so you can leverage your brand, share your story, and build a reputation that resonates with anyone you want to bring into your orbit.

For the video, transcript, and show notes, visit forcingfunctionhour.com/scott-norton.

Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.

Prior to Sir Kensington's, Scott worked at Lehman Brothers in Tokyo and traveled across Asia on a folding bicycle. So cool. Today, Scott is the founder of N+1 Ventures. He accelerates businesses, cultivating their onlyness to make an impact on culture. Scott serves on the boards of purpose-driven companies MUD\WTR, Smallhold, and Firstleaf. The title of today's conversation is, "Before the Brand." Today we are going to explore the foundational elements of identity for companies and for people. You'll learn how to leverage your brand, share your story in a way that stands out, and create resonance with anyone that you want to bring into your orbit. Thank you so much for joining us, Scott. Really looking forward to this.

Well, thank you so much, Chris. It's a pleasure to be on your show. And great to see you again.

Likewise. So, we're talking about brand today, so maybe we start there. What does that word, "brand," mean to you?

Great question. I think a lot of people will confuse "brand" with "branding." And they're two very different things. So, branding is how something looks, right, to some degree how it feels, the logo, the imagery, the color, right? Which is ultimately kind of these surface-level distinctions. But brand—Actually, I think even a better word for "brand" is "reputation." Right? Brand is of course many things, but reputation is really what we're talking about when we're talking about brand, and when we talk about reputation we talk about trust and identity. So those are the two big elements of brand.

To think about this a little bit more deeply and to wonder kind of where does it come from and how does it work and a little bit about how I think about my philosophy in sort of building brands, let's recognize that we're so biased towards the recency of the life we live now, right, the last couple of hundred years that brought the Industrial Revolution, the last couple of dozen years that brought technology and the internet and all the cultural change that comes with it. The concept of brand, and actually the concept of companies and organizations communicating with brand, is a fairly brand-new phenomenon, when we talk about human history. But what isn't brand new is reputations and relationships.

And so one of the ways I think about brand is if we go way back to our like caveman days, our primal days, all of the things that we use to understand a quote/unquote "brand" today the way that we understand a company, the way that we understand trust, about identity, of belonging, it all comes back to how we relate to each other as people, and all the cues that we have around language, around whether we're similar, whether we're different, should I trust this person, you know, how we band together and consider ourselves part of family, part of that inclusive unit together, or part of a villainous group. Right? Someone that we're competitive with, challengers or interlopers. That is all, essentially, the underlying mental technology that we use today to understand brands, and not just relate with other people, as we do, you know, in our daily lives and relationships, but relate to organizations that are essentially drafting on this psychological technology that was originally developed through evolution to how we relate to each other.

And so I like to think about, let's go back, whenever we're building a brand, let's go back to this kind of fundamental primal understanding of how we relate to each other, and recognize that those are the technologies that we're drafting off and those are the technologies that we're using.

I love that. I think it's really cool to recognize how we think that things are changing so quickly and everything is new, but we're building off of this ancient foundation that while technology may change, humans don't change, and that we are still looking for different manifestations of the same signals of where we belong and who else we belong with.

I'd love to kind of touch on that. Something that you said to me is that everything that we do is marketing, and differentiating between brand and branding. Like you said, a lot of people will think, "It's our logo," you know, "We use this packaging over that packaging," but really that everything you do from the way you communicate to the way that you prioritize internally to what you stand for is just another signal of who you are and what type of relationships you're looking to cultivate. Maybe speak to some of these intentional choices that companies can make to communicate or signal some of these aspects.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think touching on the difference between brand and branding, and some of the choices that you make around kind of what we'll call like the aesthetic differences or the surface-level differences, I would say that from a design perspective, amateurs really design more from the outside-in, and professionals design more from the inside-out. And so actually, the other analog that I like to use here when it comes to brand and when it comes to communication and reputation is actually religion. And talk about another kind of ancient technology that we've used to make sense of the world, and to think about belonging and identity and relationships, and I think a great hack whenever you're developing a quote/unquote "brand" or a brand culture, and we can go into what that means, is really thinking about, like, "Let's first start by developing a religion." Right?

And so it's starting with understanding, like, what are the core values? What are the tenets of this company, this brand, this religion, in the same way that your ten commandments would be. Right? What are the sacred texts of this that in long form, you know, kind of detail the, whether it's the culture or some sort of canonical representation of what great behavior is in this culture. What is the Promised Land, right? What is the mission that we're on as an organization, as a company, that's part of the salvation. And then of course, like, what is the sacrament and the occasion of how this product or service is used, in the same way that there are different actions and activities, right, that people make sacrifices around in a religion or in brand-building and as a producer or as a consumer.

And I think that when we think about what branding is, like, on a surface level, the optics, right, and the pomp and circumstance of these things are also extremely important. The clothing that we wear, like, the text that we publish, the aesthetic distinctions and definitions, all those things are really important, but what we start with is really the core values, the purpose, what we stand for. And really, it's about—And this is a definition of marketing from Yvon Chouinard's book, The Responsible Company, about Patagonia, which is that marketing is telling the world who you are. And telling the world who you are is very much an inside-out mentality, and the way that I think about it is you start with what we'll call this internal brand culture. And so that is really like the religion and the beliefs that are practiced by you and the other employees at the company, your founding team, your core community. And the external brand culture is the people that are your customers, right? It could be the press. It's basically the public sphere and how you're observed.

And what I think an old and less effective way of kind of branding or marketing is really not paying much attention to this internal brand culture and paying way more attention to how you create an artifice of external brand culture and external branding. But I think the cultures that win and the companies that win in the contemporary world especially, as the world gets noisier and more competitive, are the ones that really know their internal brand culture, and the external brand culture is essentially an extension of that.

And so what that means is customers, consumers, the public sphere, they look at a company, they look at the type of people that company celebrates, they look at the type of people that company employees, they look at the communications and the values that are coming out of that company, and they see what I like to call "the me I wanna be." And they craft their own identity by enrolling in that company, in their products, in their culture, and becoming (even if they're not on the payroll) they become part of the external brand culture, right, of that company, and they become a basically a card-carrying member, a badge holder of that company, just in the way that like I am, like, I've read the Patagonia books, I've read the Patagonia interviews, I've, you know, watched the films that they produce, like Artificial and Damnation, and I've got a lot of Patagonia gear, and it's gonna last me forever, and I'm happy to rock the logo.

And not only, right, are the products great and I share the values, but also, you know, it tells the world about who I am, and that logo, that represents something about my values and it tells the world, like, who I am and who I wanna be, and I think that once you get to that level, right, as a brand builder when you start to have your logo and your products represent a belief system and a way of living, that's when you've really unlocked the power of brand and unlocked this continuum between an external brand culture and an internal brand culture.

Outstanding. There are so many things I want to underline there. The acceptance of the game we are playing where in modernity capitalism has replaced religion, but all of those same elements are there, they've just been co-opted by companies, so rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, in a sense, using these same elements that have worked, but for a company, for a person. And that the reason we make purchases is because the purchase affirms something that's aspirational, that we'd like to believe about ourselves. It signals an aspect of our values. It resonates. And something that I see often, especially with larger companies, that consensus is a central value. That their internal values become watered down over time, because there's more and more constituents to satisfy. It's trying to match internally what they believe the outside expectations are, and thus coming up with values that aren't sharp enough. And I like to think like a good value is something that you could argue the opposite. If you can't argue the opposite, it doesn't feel strong enough to me, it doesn't feel like something that you are really standing for.

Yeah. And sometimes, I mean, values are tested when it's inconvenient and difficult to follow that value. Right? You can argue the opposite, and it's a very strong argument, right? Integrity is not a true culture-shaping value because of course we should have integrity, right? And it's the definition and interpretations of these things where the rubber really hits the road.

I also wanna be clear that I don't—You know, yes, there are big organizations and many companies, and I think the bigger it gets the harder it becomes to kind of hold this together, but I think there are also big companies that do a great job on culture and a great job on values, and make difficult choices. But certainly especially if you're a publicly traded company, then your eye is on a very different ball, because survival is more challenging, you're much less protected, and you live and die by your quarterly results. And so if your eye is on that short-term ball, it's very easy that even some of the brightest, strongest people get kind of caught up in those details, in those challenges. So that's a much harder arena to play in from a brand values and brand continuity perspective.

When you're working with a founder, say they're at the early stages, and they're trying to discover internally what makes them unique, do you have questions that you like to ask to help them think this through in a way that they're not trying to take signals in from the outside but really come from these internal truths?

I think, you know, probably the most pointed question I ask is, "How does your personal purpose intertwine with the company's purpose?" And paired with that—So I think that's a very important question to ask and understand, and then I think another question that I ask is, "In ten years from now, when your company is successful, how will the world be different?" That's really the way that I define mission and purpose, and how I understand whether founders and founding teams kinda have a concept of it. They'll have a vision for the future and they'll have a sense of how they're repairing the world. That's a big part of what I would look at, there. But, you know, to be honest with you, by the time that I talk to most entrepreneurs, they have a pretty damn good idea of that already. And I gravitate towards purpose-driven entrepreneurs that already have a natural sense of how to tie the brand that they're building and the reputation they're building with kind of a personal purpose and a human purpose, human values. And so I typically don't get involved with companies where we have to jury-rig this in, because you can't just spackle it on top. I look for companies and people that have this DNA from the beginning.

But I would say that, you know, for the audience out there that's sort of at the beginning of a venture or starting to like explore some of these headier topics, or maybe they have a really strong business but they want to take it in a direction where they all of a sudden have more cultural relevance and are able to, you know, attract stronger talent, I do think that this question of like how does your personal purpose, your legacy, and the story that you want to live is part of that.

What types of advantages do you see accrue to companies that have this purpose-driven DNA? You mention advantages in recruiting, retaining employees, presumably more of a platform to tell their story. What else do you see? Why is this so essential for a brand that stands out and lasts?

Yeah. So, you know, in the framing of that question, you know, I recognize that this podcast is about performance, and so much of it is framed with a competitive lens. And the businesses that I like to get involved in are fundamentally creative, versus fundamentally competitive. And there's, like, Peter Thiel has that great quote, "Competition is for losers." So to unpack your question a little bit, I'll get to the advantages, but I think it's really important to recognize that thinking these things through is not the fast track to success, and it is not something that I think is done on a surface level for a competitive advantage. I actually think these are the things that ultimately feed people's souls. And you know, if I could be most clear with this answer, it's that early stage companies, starting a business, growing a business, running a business, it's really hard. There are really high highs, really low lows, the roller coaster, you know, goes up and down. Some days you feel like you're on top of the world, you have everything figured out, and sometimes you feel like you're at the bottom of the barrel.

And when people have organized their livelihood around their personal purpose, and when they've organized their livelihood and their colleague's livelihood around a collective purpose that is bigger than themselves, what I have witnessed and what I have felt myself is that in those hard moments they have the ability to endure, they have the ability to have that resilience, because they're actually playing a different game than other people that are in transactional business.

When I was in college, I took an entrepreneurship course, and the professor (who I love dearly) said, "There's only one reason why companies fail, and that's that they run out of cash. So you always have to be focused on the runway, focus on cash, cash flow, cash generation." I've now realized after twelve years of entrepreneurship and six years of investing that companies die for two reasons. The first is that they run out of money, but the second and more common reason is that the founders give up the will to fight.

And it happens more often than you think, and I think it happens more often in companies where your personal purpose isn't as infused with ultimately the purpose of the company. So I think it creates resilience, I think it creates a long-term focus, and it creates the ability to bring people together in those challenging moments.

So that's my core answer. But on the other hand, like, well, let's go back to this concept of internal culture versus external culture. You know, what's gonna make your business successful is, right, strong margin, union economics profile, a well-run operations, you know, and operational excellence, of course you have to have an efficacious product, but really like there's so many amazing solutions to most problems out there, and really with customers—You wanna create a sense of purpose and a brand reputation where, again, customers want to enroll in that greater purpose and choose you as your solution. They don't care what your margins are, they don't care, really, that you have operational excellence beyond the product being delivered to them, but what they do care about is, "Is this company the me I wanna be? Does this product say about me what I want it to say about me? And is this the kind of group of people (this company) that I wanna be associated with?"

And so I do think that you attract customers, and I do think that you have better customer loyalty, and I think incredibly so you have stronger ability to retain top-tier talent because the best talent in the world, they have their pick of the litter where they can go functionally work, and people will, you know, to some degree make trade-offs about how much money they earn, certainly in the short term, versus what type of mission that they are ascribing themselves to, especially when they're later on in their career.

So I think you get better customers. I think you get better talent.

Scott, I'm so glad that you shared that. I think getting out of this competitive lens is so critical. The saying that I love here from Tao Te Ching is, "The biggest winners don't compete." It's finding a way to collaborate, and I think it's another sense of tapping into what makes you unique rather than looking to everyone else for signals of what we should be doing. If you think about this competitive lens, it can create this mental ping-pong ball, in a sense. You're constantly shifting towards what everyone else is doing and trying to follow that, rather than coming from this sense of, "Hey, this is who we are, this is what we do, and we're gonna continue to iterate and build on that."

I think this is inherent in the name of N+1, that it feels like branding is this dance between, you know, logic and intuition, that a lot of times, especially these days, we have lots of data to go off of, lots of research that we can use, but at the same time it'd be very easy to over-orient on all of this coming in. Maybe talk about your experience at Sir Kensington's. How do you see navigating this line between logic and intuition when it comes to being authentic?

Yeah. So, what I would say is it's definitely not an either/or. It's really both. And like the truth is if you don't have that operational excellence, if you don't have a product that the physical experience of it, the sensory experience of it is superior or at least sufficiently differentiated so that you can find your true fans that can sustain your business. Actually, like, the purpose and the brand doesn't really matter, because the purpose and the brand will be temporary. Because what ultimately creates this purpose and that catalyzes the change in perpetuity is that it is a going concern as a business. Right? And so it really is an either/or. You can't market your way out of a great product, and you can have a great sense of purpose and a great set of values, but if you don't have an engine that is essentially a flywheel or a business to carry that forward, it's not really relevant.

The reason I got into business, I was always really skeptical about business like growing up in kinda hippie Northern California, but what I learned as I started to like consider less sort of extractive businesses and think more about creative businesses, like even a business was like IKEA, or the original business that I got excited about, which is Dance Design, which is a ceramics business that started in a tiny shack on an island in Denmark. And the founder of that was a potter who would row every morning to this little island in Denmark and throw pots on his potter's wheel, and he met this American businessman who found his products and was like, "We can actually manufacture these. They're beautiful, we can manufacture them at scale, we can ship them around the world, we can build a big company around this." He was super skeptical about this, but ultimately they were able to figure it out. They were able to manufacture at scale and maintain their product quality and ultimately bring Scandinavian design to the rest of the world.

And that taught me that business can take a good idea that's small and turn it into a good idea that's big. But you definitely need to have the bones of a sustainable business at the core and get those fundamentals right in order to really—In order to have the space, in order to have the resources to be communicating on a purpose-driven level, and communicating with that kind of culture at the core.

You mentioned this concept that I think originally came from Kevin Kelly of a thousand true fans. That you can build a business by giving the thousand who are most excited about what you do, giving them what they want and continuing to double down on them and listen to them and advocate for them. How did that look for you guys at Sir Kensington's? How were you able to identify who these key customers were and advocate for them internally so that their interests would continue to be served?

Yeah. Well, I did use the term "true fans," but I left out the number one thousand, because I would love to find a business that can sustain itself on a thousand true fans, but I would call, like, any business where you have a team, I'm gonna go ahead and call it a hundred thousand true fans is really what you need to be able to get to, because, you know, you could be a solopreneur, you could be a creator, and you might be able to make that thousand true fans work as either a livelihood or even a side hustle, but the fact of the matter is that I do think it requires a bit more scale than that. And what I will say, though, is that ultimately you gotta find the distribution channels. You've gotta find the awareness channels that have the highest concentration of people that share your psyche, or at least share the psyche of the people that you're there to serve. Right? And so for us, what it looked like was, you know, we make with Sir Kensington's, we make condiments with character. So all-natural, delicious ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise.

And so for us what that meant was that, you know, certainly we could go to Walmart like the year that we launched, or Target, or Costco the year that we launched, but what percent of people walking in the door of Walmart have that, you know, we'll call it the culinary adventurer mindset, right, or that curious consumer within them is relatively small. And so we started just to sort of pull another concept that sits next to this thousand true fans concept, is really the bell curve of adoption, where a product goes from innovators to early adopters to early majority to late majority to laggards, and really the bulk of the business, like who, you know, Walmart and Costco serves, that's your early majority and your late majority, and to some degree your laggards, but you've gotta find the channels that really have a high concentration of those influencers and tastemakers and early adopters. And so for us that was like Dean & DeLuca and Whole Foods and independent cheese shops that were not the biggest customers or not the biggest companies, but they're the ones that are gonna embrace your product, and they're all of a sudden gonna be the tastemakers that other people look to as they're making their own decisions.

And so it's really about phasing where you show up to make sure that you can both succeed and survive in those channels, and also create a cultural snowball moving because you're in those influential places.

Shout out to Murray's Cheese Shop. That was probably the hardest thing to give up after—

Shout out to Murray's. One of our first customers.

—After I found out that cheese wasn't so good. Man, that was a tough day having to walk out of there.

This brings up, for me, this idea of focus. So as a founder, there are just so many opportunities. Thinking about distribution, you mentioned, I'm sure you're getting offers. "Hey, I want to stock your mayonnaise at our shop in Texas," or in Arizona, but maybe not having the resources or the concentration of customers to support. How did you learn this lesson of knowing what opportunities to pursue?

We learned the lesson by mistakenly expanding too quickly and then failing in those stores. And, you know, so many businesses are not in a position to have the luxury of turning down customers, and so of course you can put a strategy in place of, "All right, we're gonna go to these people first and these people second," but yeah. I mean super early on, we had Target come to us and want to do a test, and we failed that test miserably. And that was a lesson to us that we have work to do on the product, we have work to do on the proposition, the pricing, we have work to do on just our general awareness. Because, you know, physical products, they very, very rarely go viral the way that, you know, digital products that have basically zero cost of transmission and are often like free to consumers, it's much harder to create that virality, and so things just take time. So we learned that lesson by making mistakes and having our fair share of failure.

It reminds me that we like to think of a business as just a direct relationship with the end consumer, but that it exists within a larger ecosystem of stakeholders that on one side you have the investors, you have employees, on the delivering side you have the suppliers, you have distribution channels or channel partners, you have the ultimate customer. There's lots of different constituencies to think about and to satisfy. In this case, how did you think about the balance between giving our true fan, our loyal customer what they want, but also catering to the needs of a distribution partner like a Whole Foods?

So, it's a great question, but I think the simple answer is that if you take care of that ultimate customer, if you actually really develop a proposition that serves them, that is what the entire ecosystem is oriented around. So actually, if you can keep the customer happy, like the consumer happy, and attract their demand and attract their attention, you've served Whole Foods in the way that they need to be served. You've served your investors the way that they need to be served. You've served the rest of your company the way that it needs to be served, because the entire system, right, they are the only source of dollars that are coming in. Right? The actual consumption dollars that are coming in. Everybody else is just a kind of a player in the system, right, a bit player in the system. Whole Foods might provide you, you know, the shelf space, and they're of course gonna take a margin, but they ultimately—They're not eating all the ketchup, right? And your investors are putting up capital, but at the end of the day all your investors are buying or hoping to buy is the forthcoming demand from those end consumers.

So it's really, it's all about the end consumer, and if you've got that then you can make the entire system work.

It feels like everyone these days wants to create a premium product. So you see something out there that's competing on price, you write it off as a commodity, and you say, "Hey, this is a great opportunity to make something that's better, that's luxury, that's differentiated, that's premium." And it seems that often lost in that conversation is that premium costs more, and there are features that customers are willing to pay more for and there are features that customers aren't. So creating Sir Kensington's, you know, premium ingredients, premium packaging, premium positioning, how were you able to identify what customers were willing to pay more for and where it was best to just conform to industry standards?

Yeah. That's a great question. We're definitely still figuring it out. And you know, when we think about, like, this balance between the magic and the logic, this is definitely an area where we would skew more towards the magic, because it's really hard to tease out an individual discrete feature that people are willing to quote/unquote, like, "pay more for." Like, it really all hangs together. Right?

So if you were to do a test, right, a consumer test, a focus group or a survey about, well, how much is nonGMO worth? How much is a glass package worth? How much is organic worth? All of these different things. Like, you'd get a bunch of data that would fool you into thinking that you had an answer. Like, it would fool you into thinking that you had sufficient evidence to make a decision. And in reality, like, going back to brand, like, this is where I wanna touch on this concept that I like to call world building, which is a storytelling and writing technique that, you know, H.P. Lovecraft and Isaac Asimov were really famous. And world building is when you create every last detail of a world to make it this hermetically sealed environment that transports someone in their own head to a time and a place and makes them feel like they're there.

And so with Sir Kensington's, at the beginning, we recognized that we were competing with this monopolistic, you know, company and product, Heinz, and if we were to make it like Heinz but just like a little bit better, or Heinz but organic, we kinda get lost in that, and almost be thought of like Heinz only less so. We'd still be in the Heinz conversation. So how do you get completely out of the conversation? You do the opposite. If they're plastic, now you're glass. And if they're squirting, we were scooping. And if they were Americana, then we would be English. It would be exotic, it would be charming, it would be quirky. And let's take that to the next level. And so we created this elaborate backstory for Sir Kensington's going to Cambridge and Oxford and writing a treatise on Ionian chutney for the Queen of England, and throwing these salons, and all these, like, you know, he won the Tour de France riding a penny-farthing bicycle. Like all these, like, little details, you create this world and you transport the customer and you just change the conversation from one specific feature, right, of non-GMO, and you all of a sudden start to build this world of humor, and that's when you really touch on the "me I wanna be."

And so of course, like, non-GMO, organic is important as a feature, but it's a feature in service of building the customer's identity. Right? You cannot really taste the difference in a ketchup between organic and non-organic. You can't taste non-GMO. Right? It's a completely conceptual identity thing. And so that is, I think, an important distinction, that—Don't necessarily try and tease out what features people will pay more for. It's different than putting together an automobile, right, when you assemble an automobile online that you wanna buy. But even then, you know, someone's going through this process online and selecting different features. Actually the question that they're asking themselves is, "Well, am I a base person or am I a premium person?" Can you really tell the difference between a standard sound system in a car and the upgrade sound system, or is it more important that you provide the option for people that they can self-select and say, "Oh no, I'm a premium sound kinda guy." Right? "That's the kinda person that I am."

I think you're in a unique position to talk about taste. So, I was a psychology major back in the day. One of my senior projects was trying to uncover what makes something taste good. And I think taste is a really interesting interface for understanding how humans work.

Gosh, totally.

And how skilled we are at updating our beliefs in such a way to rationalize our actions—

Absolutely.

—And to pat ourselves on the back for our identity. Something that you said that really stood out to me was, "We taste with our eyes before we taste with our tongues." Would love to hear more about what you discovered along this journey about how we taste.

Oh, my gosh. Well, you said you were a Japanophile, right?

Absolutely, yeah.

So you've been to Japan?

Yep.

And you've had Japanese breakfast?

I've gone to the fish market and got just a bowl of rice covered with whatever they caught for that day, yeah.

That sounds amazing. Have you ever had natto?

I don't think so. No. What is it?

So, natto is a fermented soy bean product that's very polarizing. And so natto is very funky, very savory, and it's sticky. It has this almost saliva-like texture. And so most people, most foreigners, don't like natto. But when I lived in Japan, I tried natto for the first time, and I was like, "I love this." And, you know, was it because I actually, like, truly like craved the taste of natto, or was it because like I'm the kind of person that when something's new and different that's put in front of me, I'm a card-carrying member of the club that's like, "I wanna be into it, I wanna like it." You know? And so it wasn't like I was sort of like muscling it down, saying, "Oh, I like this," like, for anyone else's benefit, but it was really I think—Like, I couldn't really tell you whether I was naturally inclined to like it from pure taste buds, organoleptic perspective, but I loved it from an identity perspective.

And so taste is very interesting, because so much of it is contextual, and also so much of taste is around memory. And one of the reasons why ketchup in particular is a hard category to crack is because ketchup is one of our earliest taste memories, as Americans, because if you give children ketchup it's a sweet food that's designed to work with savories, so there's a lot of sugar in it, and they can basically control the taste of any food that they have in front of them, whether it's broccoli or chicken or mashed potatoes, they can make anything taste familiar. And when people try Sir Kensington's ketchup and they'll be like, "Eh, I don't really like it, it's not for me," I'll be like, "Totally cool. All I ask is you give it three tries. If you don't like it by the third try, it ain't for you. But if you like it, like, it grows on people. It's an acquired taste."

So I think if you give yourself the time to acquire a taste, you probably will acquire it. And then also, so much of it is context. You know, things that you would never order or try at a restaurant, especially if it's like omakase or sent out to your table, you're going to try it. Wine tastes way better on vacation. There's so many stories of people that, you know, drink a white wine in Greece, and they're like, "This is amazing, we need to buy a case of it," and they take it back to, you know, New York City or New Jersey and they're like, "This doesn't really taste that good." Right? "This tastes like normal wine." Because the context that we're in is so much of the taste.

Yeah, I think so much of our behavior is contextual, and our concept of choice is a lot more limited than we think. It makes me think that getting someone out of their habits is putting them into a context where changing their habits is the norm. You mention, "Hey, well, if this is what people are eating for breakfast in Japan, and I'm someone who belongs, I'm someone who is adventurous and tries everything and assimilates into new and exotic cultures, then yeah, I must like this too." That you're out of your normal day-to-day context, thus what normally would be new, unfamiliar, becomes accepted, becomes the default towards liking.

Yes. And that's how I'm wired, personally. Like, my personal purpose is to lead adventures that turn outsiders into insiders, and to me adventures is about newness, it's about challenge, and it's about embracing the unknown and pioneering and pushing into the unknown. And so I'm just like, if something is new, if something is novel, if something is weird, like, just let me go deeper. Like, let me pull on that thread. You know, I wanna find the most interesting, the most different, the most uncommon, like, foods, people, parties, art, like, just see how deep the cultural rabbit hole goes.

And it illustrates how much values, when you get in touch with them, can be a leverage point for shaping your life. Just one decision to identify with being an adventurous person, I'm sure, has pushed you into many adventures that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. And it's a great permission to do fun stuff too, because you come across things and you're like, "Oh, wow, that would be really awesome." And then you ask yourself, "Well, does my character in the book do this?" And you're like, "Absolutely my character in the book does this." Like, let's press go, let's do it.

It reminds me of one of my favorite exercises, when I think about trying to have a somewhat more objective lens on myself, is to think as if I'm a character in a novel that's being written in real-time, and I'm reading my own story, and you know how you're watching a movie, you're reading a book, and the next move is so obvious, but only because you're outside of the situation, essentially.

Yes.

It's like, "Well, the character wants this, they're doing this, why don't they just do this obvious thing next?"

I take the same philosophy. So perhaps we're in the same book, Chris. We are today!

Adventurers.

We are today.

We are today.

I think about ritual a lot. It's something that we see as creating a new product, putting something out into the world, whether that's technological or a consumer packaged good, is that you have to overcome customer inertia. People are just habitual. Like, any software product, essentially, is competing with Excel, because that's what everyone uses and that's the default. If you're making ketchup, you have to compete with what you're going to see any time you go to a restaurant, any time you go to a ballgame. But something that's really interesting about food, and I think about a lot of products, is that they are a part of these hidden rituals.

Yes.

So, eating, obviously one of these primal rituals that has been around a long time. And if you can insert yourself into ritual, you insert yourself into this conversation—I know something that was surprising for Sir Kensington's, at least for the start, was that mayonnaise became your largest and most bought product line. And I imagine part of that is that mayonnaise is part of this ritual of making a sandwich, which is presumably consumed more often, and it's just a necessary ingredient. Talk to me about ritual and the role that it plays within food brands in particular.

Yeah. I mean, this is definitely a Jedi-level question. Like, I think that this is something that it took us a long time to really figure out, and sometimes when I look at companies to get involved in today, and different products and businesses, it really is that question of, "What habit does this become part of, or what habit does this displace? Or are we even in habit territory here?" Right? And so there are some things that—I mean, I think it's much, much harder to build a business and earn your place in culture and earn your place in people's lives if there isn't a set occasion for something and there's not a ritual.

And so, I'll give you an example, which is that I think that, you know, basically there's a really sacred time in everyone's life, which is the morning. And so, it's like, the time before 9:00 AM, right, the time—Or, whatever the time is before you're actually going into work mode, where like all of a sudden things get totally wild and you're getting emails and text messages and like, you know, you've gotta go to the dentist and you have to do this, and there's just, like, life just gets chaotic. But before that, it's a very sacred time where it's like, "Brush your teeth, have your coffee (or morning beverage), eat your breakfast." And that is, I think, a special ritual time.

And so one company that I'm really, really honored and proud to be working with called MUD\WTR, as an investor and a board member, their product is essentially a coffee alternative. It's got far less caffeine than coffee. And most people are running around on drugs over-caffeinated without really realizing it. And I definitely was an over-caffeinator myself before discovering the product. But the fact that they are part of morning ritual means that people are interacting with them every single day, and it becomes part of people's sense of preparing for the day, it becomes part of their comfort, it becomes part of their energizing ritual, it becomes part of their grounding ritual. And then that develops a consumer relationship and a consumer behavior which you can actually build a sizable business on versus something that is sliding in and out of people's lives during a fun time. You know?

If you're in the sort of ketchup business that we are in, like a more premium condiment business, premium ketchup business for adults and not for kids, the occasions are not that common. It's like, okay, maybe it's weekend omelets, right, or maybe it's occasional summer barbecues, but ketchup in particular is really a spotty use product, and so mayonnaise definitely has a much more common kind of everyday use, it's a lot more diversities of use, and so suffice it to say that I like to think about getting involved with businesses—And you can make your life a lot easier for yourself if you build in an occasion for your products, and you're drafting on an occasion that already exists.

I work with a lot of high performers, and something that I see with creatives in particular is a resistance to new habits. A sense of, "Well, you know, I thrive in this chaos and I gotta keep things open-ended." But then when you start to lean into, "Well, what does your morning look like, what are the things that are happening every day?," you start to uncover, "Well, I have to have a coffee to start my day," or, "I listen to my favorite album," "I brush my teeth," "I sit down and I think about what I'd like to do for the day." That these habits just become solidified as someone's identity, they become assumed, they almost become invisible. I think the same thing—

Yeah, invisible.

—Can count as habits of thought, is the way that we think about things—

Effortless.

—The way that we see things becomes completely effortless. So leaning into these edifices that already exist while you're creating a product, when you're looking to change a behavior, and using these as triggers for the change, rather than trying to replace them. Or when you think about trying to change your own habit, rather than trying to remove this part of your identity completely—For example, if you're trying to limit your caffeine usage, instead of drinking a giant cold brew you switch to an herbal tea. You still maintain a lot of the aspects of the ritual without all the costs.

It feels like these rituals are just so ingrained, so universal, that we forget that they exist.

Well, precisely. And I think that that is kind of the definition of a habit, is something that doesn't take willpower or doesn't take exertion. You probably have other episodes about this. Like, I know you've interviewed my friend Khe Hy, twice, and where he turned me onto this book, "Atomic Habits," and like the concept of a, you know, a habit is something that—It's a change that you make that all of a sudden no longer requires effort. I definitely self-identify as a creative, and I'm not against habits, but man it takes a lot of willpower to create new habits. So that's not a skill that I've developed yet, though it would be a nice superpower to have.

Speaking of superpowers, you said that our secret ingredient at Sir Kensington's is people.

Mm-hmm.

Something that I think a lot of founders of companies struggle with is how to take a set of values, a set of principles, and make them the company ethos. I like to think, personally, of culture as decision-making at scale. That you provide the guidelines and empower people to act within those guidelines. And especially after the acquisition, that Unilever, being incorporated into a large organization, I'm sure this was something that's top of mind is, "How do we not lose track of what made us us? How do we keep the bar for quality high? How do we not have our sense of mission diluted?"

When you think about building a culture, or when you look at the companies that you're investing or advising in, what thoughts do you have around what makes a strong, lasting culture?

Yeah. Great question. One is, I think, don't try to define it too early. Because I do think it's really difficult as an individual or even just as a small group of even three or four people to try and craft a culture and write down a culture. It's probably gonna look really different than if you actually start to have an organization that's working together that's beyond just really strong one-to-one ties. So that's something I would say, is like it's okay to wait a little bit and not think that you need to have a set of mission values, or at least like values from day one, because you actually want that to be a collaborative process that invites people from all ranks of the organization and diverse backgrounds to actually craft that culture.

And then two, I would say, that it is, yes. Culture isn't what you say, it's what you do. But it's also really nice to have things written down in black and white, to communicate them to each other, and to hold the organization to different standards. And so I will say, also, that once you do get to a point of some scale, writing things down and being able to repeat them and talk about them and use them as a decision-making lens is very helpful.

And in the process, as a leader, it's also really important to listen. Right? So it's not necessarily from your own head, but when we went about this process at Sir Kensington's, actually about five years into the company of shaping our mission and values, we did it through a listening tour and a survey with members of our team where people would answer questions and actually force-rank different priorities and define what was important for us that way. And so that was really the output that we used to sort of craft these into more poetic and more polished statements that we could then start to canonize.

Yeah, I think the concept of buy-in is really important when it comes to anything in terms of culture, and I think applies a lot in terms of setting metrics, KPIs, and objectives. If there's a sense that these are assigned to you, well that becomes an obligation to fulfill, to just get something above the line. But if it feels like a co-creation process, something that everybody has fully bought into, everyone can then hold each other accountable, because this is a shared mission, not an assigned mission.

Yeah. I think that's beautifully well put.

Something that you really illustrated to me was just how a founder's core role is sales. You're selling investors, you're selling distribution partners, you're selling customers, you're selling employees. How did you level up your own sales skills?

Oh, that's another great question too. And you're right. I kinda have a joke that everybody that decides to be an entrepreneur, six months into it they realize that they actually need to become a salesperson. And maybe there are entrepreneurs that are unlike that, and I would love that job, but sales has always been a—What I've realized is that whenever I want to get to the next level of achieving my dreams, I need to get better and better at sales. And I'll use that term very directly. Sales. You could call it influence, you could call it relationship development or business development, but it's really about how do you take people that their head is in one place and move it, right, to a place where they are aligned with you and allied with you, and you unlock something with them together?

And so, again, necessity is the mother of invention. And just like we went in and we failed in certain retailers early on, we would go into these kitchens where we would want Sir Kensington's to be served in great New York City restaurants, and we would deal with chefs who, I mean, are some of the most challenging people to sell and to move, because these are people that work with their hands, right, they're essentially running urban factories, they have a lot of challenge, you know, getting the right labor in the door and on the line, and they're the ones ultimately responsible for the profitability of the food and keeping food costs low and being able to keep the food prices, right, what they charge, high.

And so their job is not to buy fancy, expensive ketchup. Their job is to invent something like the bloomin' onion, which has a food cost of like six cents, and then they can, you know, make it look beautiful, fry it, mark it up, and sell it for fifteen dollars on the menu. Like, that's the job of a chef. Right?

And so it was really just going from, you know, place after place, restaurant after restaurant, not getting any calls back, and then figuring out what works, becoming more empathetic, leading with numbers, right, instead of just thinking, like, "The price is gonna be an afterthought." You actually really have to own the price and affordability conversation up front. And you've gotta create emotional reciprocity. You've gotta create people that want you to win and that believe in you, and ultimately that's gonna be how you graduate into a going concern as a business, and how you ultimately find product market fit.

I wanna conclude our conversation today by talking about what you're doing now at N+1 Ventures, and kinda taking some of the lessons that you've had from your experiences building a company, and how you use them to not only recognize potential but help to bring it out of, you know, young and emerging teams. So, as you've been into this for a while, have you recognized any commonalities amongst the companies that you're really excited to get involved with?

Yeah. I mean, I—Going back to the name N+1 and language and mathematics on equal footing, and the magic and the logic, like, let's start with the boring stuff. Like, I look for businesses that have really strong bones and really strong, you know, economics, growth profile, margin profile, so that we can kinda get that stuff out of the way. Right? They have a working engine. But what gets me really excited, and the reason I look for those things first, is because what thrills me the most is when you really find someone that wants to make part of history. Something that is actually going to make a cultural impact that is going to push culture forward and that really has true verve and artistry in what it creates.

So, that's really what I look for.

And I think you see the same things around gender and sexuality. There are a lot of cultural changes that are happening that I think twenty-five years ago generationally, people saw as taboo or exotic or as fringe, but now people kind of see as mainstream. And so that's kind of the definition of what makes a good early-stage consumer/investor, is can you find things that aren't just fads but true generational secular trends, and find the businesses that are best suited to push those trends forward and capitalize on those trends. Those are the types of businesses I'm most excited to back, alongside that creative verve.

A friend of mine, Taylor Pearson, who we had on the show, the way that he described it to me is that you're already living in the future. You just don't recognize it yet.

Yes.

It's this classic William Gibson quote that the future is already here, it's just not—

Evenly distributed.

It's just not evenly distributed.

Yes.

Exactly. So thinking about yourself as a founder or looking for founders who live in a unique corner of reality where what is normal for them soon will become mainstream for everyone.

Hundred percent. Hundred percent.

It begs this question, I have to double-click here. So you talk about working with founders who have a compelling vision of the future in ten years. Particularly a future ten years where they're successful. What types of things if we look forward ten years do you think might become socially acceptable, socially normalized that are currently fringe?

Yeah, great question. I'll give you one that's a little bit low to the ground, kind of pun intended, which is I'm an investor in a sustainable jewelry and lab-grown diamond startup. And so lab-grown diamonds in 2018 were two percent of all diamonds used in jewelry. Now it's five percent. And there are estimates that in 2030, lab-grown diamonds will be up to fifteen percent. And so the idea of a diamond, right, especially for engagement and bridal, was all about rarity, it was about sacrifice, and it was a very opaque and complex industry. And so, you know, now because of the awareness around environmental challenges and climate change and also, you know, social and labor inequities in Africa where many diamonds come from, not to mention Russia, where many diamonds come from, now that those things are actually out in the open thanks to the internet and a lot of great investigative journalism and challenges, all of a sudden lab-grown diamonds, which are physically and chemically indistinguishable from mined diamonds, will all of a sudden become part of culture. Right?

But again, this goes back to the fact that consumers are just inherently illogical. Right? I always, people talk to me about all sorts of health benefits of this product or that product, and I said, "Look, if people were logical, there would be no smoking." Right? People know that smoking kills you, they know that it's bad for you. Right? And so, but the satisfaction of our conscious desires do not actually satisfy us. And that's one of those great tensions of consumer businesses.

It comes back to those age-old patterns and elements of ritual and what does what you consume say about you—

Totally.

—Especially here in Texas, if I were to go to my friends and say, "Hey, I've become a vegetarian," I would get some weird looks, but perhaps if I'm in the Bay Area—

Where are you in Texas?

I'm in Austin, yeah.

Oh, well, Austin's full of vegetarians.

Meat culture, yeah. There are, it's—

You should try dropping that line in Houston.

That's true. That's true, yeah. It's all relative, right?

Yeah.

There's always somewhere that's a little bit more extreme in any dimension that you might look for. And thinking about the ritual of diamonds, you know, as marketing would tell us the ultimate ritual and signal of sacrifice to—

The ultimate ritual, right.

—Signify your level of dedication to someone as denominated in months of salary.

Yes.

It's really interesting when you start to peel up the carpet a little bit.

Absolutely. And that to me is the most fun, is we take so many things for granted, and then we realize that actually like we're in this existence that is so random and so arbitrary, and if we can kinda rewind the clock or fast-forward the clock and see what would need to be true for something to change or can we find one great storyteller to champion a cause, those are the exciting stories that I want to be a part of.

Yeah. The classic saying is, "History is written by the victors." And the victors are this current dimension, this alternate universe that we find ourselves in, and something that I'm constantly talking about when I work with a fund manager or a venture capitalist is, we live in a probabilistic universe. What has occurred is just one permutation of the many things that have occurred. And this thinking about probabilities can get us out of our heads in terms of what is possible or even what is already happening, but not being recognized?

Mm-hmm. Definitely. Definitely.

So, I've noticed this pattern where founders-turned-investors tend to resist investing in their former industry. It doesn't matter what industry it is. Like, man, someone sells a retail business and is like, "Oh, man, I would never invest in retail. Oh, I would never invest in dev tools, I would never invest in a travel business," because they understand just how hard it is to make it there. You touched on a little bit that, you know, hey, ten years at Sir Kensington's, it was an up and down ride with lots of moments that I'm sure you questioned whether you were going to make it. How does that inform your investing now? I imagine because of your experience you see a lot of consumer packaged goods opportunities, a lot of food tech. Are you scared there, are you traumatized? How does this affect your bar of what to invest in?

Trauma. Trauma and scarring for sure. However I would say that it is very much a balance, because I am aware of the fact that every other industry looks easier because you haven't lived the hell of it, right, but actually it's its own hell, it's just a different—There's just different challenges. And so you're gonna naïvely get involved with those challenges anyway. So for me it's really a balance between how do you take the lessons that you learned and start to pattern-match and ask the question of, "Well, what was really inconvenient about the business that we happened to be in, and what was really convenient about the business that we happened to be in? And then how do we find things that are a similar business model that I know how to diligence, that I understand the bones of, where I'm maximizing what's convenient and minimizing what's inconvenient?" And that's, you know, one of the show notes, what we can point people to, is we published a shareholder letter at Sir Kensington's every quarter in the business, and our final shareholder letter that we wrote after I left Sir Kensington's, we had ten lessons that we learned from the ten years of running the business, and we actually published that kind of open source. And there's some lessons in that that I think inform what I do and don't get involved in today.

But I will tell you an anecdote, because you made that great point about, you know, former operators. I do remember, it was late at night, because these things always happen late at night, that we had finally negotiated and were signing the acquisition agreement with Unilever, and we were going through our employment agreements and the noncompete agreement, and the fact that we couldn't get involved in a condiment business after Sir Kensington's, and I remember Mark, my co-founder and I, we looked at each other and we thought, "There's no way in hell I'm getting involved in a condiment business after this." So we had no problem signing that noncompete.

Sometimes burning the boats can be a relief. Last question, and this has been a phenomenal conversation, and thank you so much. I'm interested in how you differentiate as an investor, and everyone has their particular lens. There's the classic, "Hey, we focus on really large markets," or, "We focus on really compelling founders." Today we've been talking about brand. You see it on company balance sheets in terms of intangible value, you hear it talked about as a brand moat when you're competing against Heinz. Like, how do we assail this moat that's been just built up over time. Is this something that you tend to focus on companies that you find have a really strong brand, a really good go to market strategy, over—Like, another lens would be, hey, to have a really compelling technology and a great engineering team. Is this an advantage that you seek out?

It absolutely is. Like I'd say, you know, there isn't one tip of the spear that I sort of categorically lean into, but I will say that what I'll call, like, go to market innovation and brand, that is what I know well, that is where I've seen success. And I like to say that, you know, compared to a technological innovation or a supply chain innovation, which might be important for building a breakthrough business, what is always important for building a breakthrough business is learning how to market and learning how to sell. And so if you can create an onlyness there, then that is a company that's gonna be valuable.

And what is interesting, especially in the consumer world and in the, you know, most consumer businesses, they don't go public, as a liquidity event. They get acquired. And generally the best outcomes are acquisitions by big, you know, multinational CPG companies and what are called strategics. And the strategies—Well, they're gonna eventually eliminate your sales force, and they're gonna eventually fold in your supply chain, and they're gonna eventually make your planning structure your planning structure, and they're gonna make your HR department your HR department. But the one thing that they buy, the one thing that they keep intact, is your brand identity and is your secret sauce with consumers. And so I think that that's one of the weird tensions, that when you're growing a brand it's all about recruiting great salespeople, it's about operational excellence, but ultimately those are the things that—They're important at the beginning, but at the end they ultimately get dissolved. And what endures is the brand.

And there's a great book, which I'm sure many people have read, which is Noah Yuval Harari's Sapiens. And he talks about, you know, Peugeot as a great example of, "What is Peugeot?" Right? Is it the company, is it the staff, is it the corporate entity? And no, it's this concept that's sort of held together, it's this myth that's held together. And it's building that myth that actually creates the value in these long-term franchises.

It's really powerful to recognize that the things that only exist in our conception of them, as Yuval would call an intersubjective truth, a truth only as long as everyone agrees that it's there—

Yeah, yeah.

That those are the things that have the lasting value after all.

Yeah. Yeah.

Scott, this has been a wonderful conversation. So much wisdom shared, so much actionable knowledge for anyone out there looking to build their brand, looking to build their company. Any final words, any place that you'd want to send someone listening to this conversation?

I would say follow your bliss and follow me on Twitter, @swhnorton, if you wanna hear more pontification and dad jokes.

I love that. Attaching getting a Twitter following to identity. If you are someone who likes adventure, wants to follow your bliss, this is the first step you can take.

Yeah. Well, I would say, "Follow your bliss" is one comment, and then, "Follow me on Twitter" is another comment. So they're not the same thing.

Ah, I'm just giving you a hard time.

Yeah.

I love it. Scott, this has been a really enlightening episode. Thank you so much for joining us, Scott. See you all again soon.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter, so you can join us live.