Brian Tate spent a decade as a professional high-stakes poker player, competing against poker legends in the largest mixed games in the world. Brian left poker in 2016 to start creating homemade oatmeal. Under Brian’s leadership, Oats Overnight is now a vertically-integrated breakfast brand with tens of millions of meals served.

In this conversation, Brian and Chris discuss principles you can apply from gaming and poker to take yourself to the next level in entrepreneurship. Brian shares what it takes to launch a retail brand, strategies for building a high-performing culture, and how to reinvent yourself to create career inflection points.

For the video, transcript, and show notes, visit forcingfunctionhour.com/brian-tate.

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.

The title of today's conversation is, "The Next Level." At Forcing Function we obsess about dissecting the mindsets of elite performers. When you're climbing a mountain, it's never clear what's beyond the next switchback. If we make it past this current level, what will it take to make it beyond the next level? In this conversation you'll learn principles you can apply from gaming and poker to entrepreneurship, what it takes to launch a retail brand, and how to reinvent yourself to create career inflection points.

Thanks for joining me, Brian. I'm very excited for this conversation.

Yeah, thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me.

So, why don't we start with Magic? So, for those of us who haven't had the pleasure of playing Magic: The Gathering, what's it like at one of these tournaments?

Yeah, so it's a big convention center, picture this, or as small as a card room, but players will either pre-construct decks and test them before the tournament and apply that learning and testing in the actual tournament itself in sort of a round robin format to top eight, or they'll do, you know, sealed decks, or open the packs, construct the decks on site, and play the games. But it's a fun, very long, you know, opportunity to play games with people and compete for prizes.

What do you think makes a great Magic player?

It's interesting, good question. There's a lot of preparation that goes into it, a lot of kind of basic game theory and logic that goes into, you know, all the different variables, from deck construction to gameplay, and a lot of trial and error. It's a fun experience.

What do you think you took away from your Magic career? Are there any key principles that you find come up, you know, in your day to day life now?

Yeah. So, Magic—It's funny, I group Magic and poker largely into the same bucket. And there's tons, right? Tons of principles. I think there's no real boundaries with Magic and poker. You're kind of facing the market directly. And so one way that applies is, you know, you can always take time off, but you're not getting better, right? When you're taking time off. And your opponents or future opponents in theory are probably practicing or getting better in some way. And so sort of this nine to five world or the business world, corporate world, it's just so much different than Magic and poker, where you know, you're facing the market and there's no real boundaries on when you should be working or shouldn't be working, or should be or shouldn't be improving your game.

My understanding of Magic, something that I think is unique to the game, is that new decks are always coming out. So you can't just find your perfect strategy and keep executing on it. As the game evolves you continually need to update your strategy, and if you find something that works really well, people will be able to counter it, so there's this aspect of continually needing to adapt and evolve. What do you think that looked like for you in your career?

Yeah, definitely. So yeah, when you're playing a game and you're playing a pre-constructed deck, you know, you might be thirty percent likely to win against a certain archetype of deck, or eighty percent to win against a different deck. So sort of understanding this is the beginning of separating expectation versus realized results. You know, you start to understand that you can maximize the chances of the likelihood of a certain outcome, but there are sort of prefixed expectations based on the match you're playing. So you know, you can run bad or run good, and you know, you consider that lucky or unlucky, and you start to get into this type of thinking, which I think you can go down a rabbit hole, of course. But yeah, separating that in performance is really important. I think things like looking at luck as favorable variations instead of luck, or being unlucky as unfavorable variants. I think we start to build these habits, I guess, of just knowing that it's the little decisions that add up, and you gotta put your best foot forward and maximize that outcome.

Talk to me about this probabilistic thinking. You mentioned that, all right, you have two decks matching off. If you assume that the players are of equal skill, that they'll play a reasonably correct strategy, that one deck will be favored over the other. I think often in life we see an outcome and we assume that that outcome was preordained, that was the only way that it could be. But in this case, let's say you were thirty percent to win. How do you approach this where you are just trying to increase your edge by just maximizing your chances of making it to the next round in the tournament, for example?

The way I like to think about it is if you run something out into infinity, or run it out ten thousand times, you know, what's the chances of something happening? And so in the situation where you're playing against an opponent and it's thirty percent for you to win, of course it's not favorable, but looking at that as making the best of that opportunity. Like, if you can get that to thirty-two percent. Right? In the long run that will be a much more favorable result. If you're not on your game, maybe you're going into it with a slightly pessimistic mindset, or you're not pushing every single edge in every single decision, you know, that might drop to twenty-eight percent, which can make the difference in, you know—Of course, we talk about this in the long run, but you only ever experience one of these outcomes. Right? And so the difference between twenty-eight percent and thirty-two percent in that situation where the expected result might be thirty can make or break that exact—Like, there will be, out of a hundred there will be those certain occurrences where you won when you shouldn't have, maybe.

And so I think it's—Thinking about that in Magic, poker, or business, I think it's a really healthy way to look at decisions, and it kind of inspires you to always try your best and always look for ways to get that extra one percent or extra edge.

So, talk to me after you finish a tournament, what that process looked like. When examining your deck, you're thinking about, "Hey, I should have played this move, this card, not that card." What's your postmortem for a tournament? You know, keeping in mind, you know, you're a fifteen-year-old kid, I'm imagining, but I assume that you know, to get to the top of any game there was this process of examining what you could do better. What did that look like for you?

Yeah, I think the best part about Magic was that it was such a group environment for me. I think poker ended up being a little more solitary at times, and more siloed. Same with business. You know, at different points you're working with teams, different points you're sort of deep diving independently, but with magic it was almost always with people, right? So it was like friends that we'd play with. You couldn't really play-test without playing against somebody, and this was probably well before Magic: The Gathering Online which changed the game a bit. But yeah, so it was always very much a team effort. Right? Like, you'd think about where you got unlucky or you got lucky, what type of variance there was. And you know, decisions you made, usually they stick out. Sometimes they don't, though, and sometimes it'd be just chatting through the gameplay with friends and facing those hard questions. "Well, why did you play that card?" Or, "Why didn't you wait to, you know, play the other card?" And so yeah, it always spawned into interesting stuff.

At that point you started to learn also that post mortems are important. And I think that was another great lesson learned at such a young age.

So, talk to me about this transition to poker. What did that look like for you?

Yeah. So Magic cards, when you play—It was fun, right? You're playing a game, effectively, and not really at that point, you know, at fourteen, fifteen years old, not really thinking as much about money—Although it's hard to ignore that the prizes weren't that great. Right? So you're—It's a five dollar buy-in, and you might win a box of cards, or something. Or booster box, or something. Which, you know, as a kid you're stoked about that. But poker came along, the poker boom happened maybe 2003, 2004 when you saw Chris Moneymaker win the World Series and you started seeing it on ESPN. Every once in a while there'd be a poker game happening at a Magic tournament. There'd be like one table in the corner where people are shuffling chips and everyone was really curious about what that looked like. And yeah, so slowly but surely the whole Magic community really transitioned into poker, just because it was a very similar type of competitive landscape with a lot of similar thinking, but just the stakes were so much higher, because you know, you were buying in with real dollars.

So, for those of you guys who don't know—You know, Brian and I had different trajectories through the poker world. I was primarily a no-limit player, and Brian was a limit player who transitioned to playing mixed games. And I think something that's really unique about mixed games is that you're often playing a game that you barely know how to play, and you're sort of learning the rules and the nuances of the structure of the game as you go, and sometimes games are invented or variations are invented, and you go with it.

Talk to me about this dynamic where you're often playing games that you haven't had the opportunity to master yet.

Yeah. So, you're constantly in a state of learning, which is why I really like mixed games. I think in no-limit Hold 'Em, a game that's so fully developed and understood, and of course it's still evolving with solvers and things like that—But you know, I think about it on a ten scale. Like, everyone's a 9.95 versus a 9.92 versus a 9.93, and then there might be like an 8.6 that is just losing all the money. Right? In mixed games, you might have some people that are the best in the world at a certain game type, and it might not be a game that you play often. In some cases, some extreme cases, like you said, maybe you don't even know the rules. Right? They'll explain the rules when you sit at the table, which is always fun at high stakes.

But everyone has kind of their edge, and it just adds more variables for people to determine, you know, what is my edge in this game? And you know, I might be the best at these two games at the table, but I'm definitely not good at these other four games. How does that turn into a win rate or a loss rate for the session that I'm about to play? And so just a lot more reverse-engineering when you sit at the table, because of course you might look at someone who's the best in the world at PLO and they make a play and it's something that you wouldn't have done. You're probably going to assume that you're wrong not to have done that or not to be thinking along those lines. And so it starts this idea of sort of reverse-engineering strategies, which I think is fascinating and also applies directly to business. A lot of that skill is just what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to.

And so that can go down—I think it's ultimately really the best way to learn as well, is having a sort of guide, in a way, whether they know it or not. People that you can sort of model after. And there's this idea of incomplete lessons. Like, not every lesson has to be complete. It's just sort of a catalyst for thinking about something in a different way. And so mixed games are fascinating to me, in that you're always thinking about, you know, there's just so many unique situations. No two scenarios are the same. There's common themes, but over and over you're constantly trying to figure out what the best strategy is for a certain decision.

I'm really interested in this concept of what to pay attention to. I think something that we talk about a lot here is that our working memory is limited, and there's so many things that are coming at us that a lot of success is knowing what to pay attention to, what to ignore. What's signal and what's noise. So as an example, you're sitting playing a high stakes game, some of the games you're very familiar with, some of the games you're not so familiar with. Just kind of put us into the room, what are you paying attention to?

Yeah, so there's a lot, right. Even if there's a bad player that isn't a professional player that's there. Of course, that's noteworthy. Right? It might make the game return higher than average. But also the best players in a certain game type. A lot—In poker, there's a lot of balancing ranges. Trying to be unexploitable, playing GTO, as you'd say. And so you're just looking at making sure things line up. So if something doesn't line up, it's information. You know, maybe they raise pre-flop, but then they check the flop. They don't always check the flop. What does that mean about their hand, what does that mean about their range of hands, and how does that range develop based on subsequent actions in the hand?

And so in poker, it's a lot of balance, it's a lot of sort of understanding how frequently players are making a decision with what types of hands, and then deciding what thought process is sort of driving that decision. You can learn a lot about how people think about a game or how people think about, you know, playing a plus EV or a high expected value style based on those decisions and just thinking about it through the hand.

I'm interested in this concept of 'guides'. That feels like one of the cheat codes to progress up the ladder quickly, is to have someone you trust and respect who's laying out the roadmap for you. Would love to hear about a guide that you've had along the way, and more for a meta-level, how do you identify a good guide?

Yeah. So, I've had a lot of guides along the way. I think that's—The interesting part about this is guides don't even have to be necessarily the best at what they're doing. Like I said, there's this idea that incomplete information can help you think about things differently. It could even be a player that isn't necessarily a winning player who does something that's a bit off the wall, and you kind of wonder why he would do that with that part of the range, and you might draw a conclusion that you weren't thinking or that put you at a perspective that helps grow your game. But generally, yeah. Generally guides are gonna be just the best players that you're playing with. And I think this applies to business as well. You know, having good advisors or just people to talk to, people in the mix that help you level up and can kind of be that source of truth, so to speak. And I think that as you're growing through these levels, sometimes the source of truth at a certain stage might turn into—You might outgrow them, for example. So it might no longer be a relevant, or like a leveling up type, source of truth.

But yeah, in poker—Most of my friends were professional poker players at that time, and so—One friend of mine might have been the best player at this game type, another friend the best player at a different game type. And so just a lot of talking about strategy, and at the tables, you know, "Hey, why did you bet that? Why would you bet that river?" And you would have a two hour conversation about a river bet, and learn a lot.

When I talk to investors, this comes up a lot. I think there is a default tendency to see someone doing something irrational and somewhat dismiss it, and to assume on the opposite side that what we're doing of course is completely rational and well thought out. And I think a very helpful frame that you laid out is that not all lessons need to be complete. That everyone has something to teach us, even if it's just helping us see things from a different perspective.

I think a real critical skill from poker that translates to everything, but particularly running a company, is empathy. Is understanding that everything that people do does have a reason behind it. Even if you don't think the reason is rational, there is rationale. So understanding what does this person need to believe, how do they see the world in order for this to be a decision that they would make? And thus being able to work with them and understand them that much better.

I'm curious about this aspect of understanding the other person, empathy, how it's translated from poker to hiring to managing team dynamics for you. Is that something that you've seen?

Absolutely. I think one of the things—Poker trains you the least for the team dynamics, because it's totally new. Right? Generally in poker you're responsible for yourself, and you know, the work you put in, that translates to expectation and results, and over time, you know, that will line up, or the work you don't put in will translate to losses. With work, though, with business, it's a different setting, in that it's so much on the team. Right? You can work so hard as a leader. You still might only put in maybe three percent of the organization's effort. Right? There's so much more that's being done. And so, yeah. And having empathy for, you know—Everyone's different. Every teammate's different. Our COO says, you know, you hire teammates, you get people. And they're all different, right? And motivated by different things. And there's a lot of beauty in that. It can definitely be frustrating at times, it can be surprisingly positive at times, it's just a different thing.

And so, yeah. First few years, a lot of growing pains and a lot of lessons learned. Still, of course, plenty of lessons learned. But I think we try to align around a mindset at the company that is very rational, in the way that maybe poker players would define rational, and try to sort of teach that and encourage that type of thinking to get everyone sort of on the same page. Like at—We like to say we're never going to agree with all the decisions that are made, but as long as there's, you know, rational thought behind that decision to reach it, then it's okay to make mistakes. Right? Of course it's okay to make mistakes in that sense.

But yeah, it's a journey. Still ongoing.

Kinda takes me back to my poker coaching days. I used to coach a lot of poker players, and it felt like I was being paid to just ask annoying questions, and one of the annoying questions is, "Why are you doing that?" Where you know, every move can be great or not so great, depending upon the reasons behind it. So I say, "Hey, you're betting. Okay. Why are you betting, what are you looking to accomplish with that?" And learning a lot about someone's thought process behind the actions, where the actions themselves don't carry much meaning, but if you can change the rationale that's being used to make decisions, that's at a much higher level of abstraction.

So thinking about placing a bet, for example, what are the reasons to place a bet, what are the contexts necessary, what are you looking for in those situations? And I think the same thing happens here too, with team culture, where I think of culture as decision-making at scale. So if you have a core set of principles from poker and other places that team members, that people can adopt and use to make decisions, that allows for a much greater sense of scale. Plus, when things don't go as planned, it's looking at was the rational decision-making in play here? Like, what were the assumptions behind this decision, and which of these assumptions were invalidated at the time or have become invalidated with this new information? I would love to hear a little bit more about, you know, your framework for bringing on new employees, for onboarding, you know, I imagine scaling out to a hundred and twenty employees now—You know, some of those in office, some of those in your manufacturing facility, which is just a wild thing to say. What does that look like? As in, you know, you can't be working with every person individually anymore. How do you train them in this type of mindset?

Yeah. So leadership is just everything, right? Leadership is important. Culture's important. I think culture's also something that I feel, at least in my short experience, you can't just build. Right? Culture's like a byproduct of decisions, and so when you make decisions that represent how you want your organization to be run, over and over and over and over that the byproduct there is culture, right? Good or bad.

And so I think the framework for hiring leadership is just so key, right? I think there's a lot of these sort of like mantras that we have internally, but one of them that we like to align on is that there's always, back to this thing you were speaking about before, there's always like an optimal answer, or an optimal decision when you're looking for a certain outcome, especially when it's like numerically based. And so you're just limited by the data and effort to get there. Sometimes it's not worth it, you know, like if you're driving to pick up a pizza, is it eight minutes or seven minutes, you know, depending on what streets you take. You don't really care. You could study the lights, you could know exactly, you know, the route and try to get that down. It's just not worth it. For things like hiring or you know, for campaign strategy or product development, of course it is worth getting that granular. And so, finding leaders for each department that want to get curious about it, and curiosity's a big one. They actually care about being world-class about those decisions and strive for that, versus just sort of checking the box and treating it like a job, that's key, right? Because these businesses aren't built nine to five.

Of course, you know, that can go into culture too, good or bad. But generally it's a lot of hard work and you need to have that curiosity. So leadership—That's really the bar for leadership, is curiosity, really wanting to have a world-class result and a world-class effort and a passion for being really good at what you do.

So, I'm gonna jump back to poker. We're gonna come back to Oats Overnight, but I think this is really relevant, 'cause thinking about transitions, I first wanna know, as a poker player it's always been a dream for me to just step foot in Bobby's Room. I mean, even playing in some of the highest no-limit games in the world, that room just held so much mystique for me. I mean, these were the players that you look up to growing up, and just, man, they have just seen and done it all. I'm just personally curious about what it was like to play in Bobby's Room. I'm especially interested in what that was like playing the first time and starting to become a regular, to the point that you're respected and one of the guys. You know, take us inside.

Yeah. So, I was probably the youngest player to join that game right before the more mid-stakes games were cut out. So there was sort of like a ladder, if you will, to go from, you know, 100/200 to 200/400, 400/800 to 1,000/2,000. And the game was usually 1,000/2,000, or 1,500/3,000. So largely the 200/400 and the 400/800 stopped running when I got in there, so for like the last five years I was probably one of the youngest if not the youngest there. And so I was kind of the kid in that room. And it's funny, the first year or so I got to sort of just pick the game. Back to the mixed games concept, it's a heavy negotiation every time you play, and generally if someone comes in, you know, on that 10 scale against the 9.9s and the 9.8s and they're an 8, and they say they wanna play, you know, Badugi, like the game will probably include Badugi. That's just a four card poker game.

So, yeah, I got to pick the games, and ended quite well. I think coming in I was very good at Badugi and Triple Draw and some of the other games that were a little newer. Wasn't as good as the East Coast games like Stud and Omaha, but—So I could largely pick the games. So there was a really fun first year. It took about a year, and then I didn't really have a say in the games anymore. And then, you know, and then—

Victim of your own success.

Exactly, yeah. But yeah, it was awesome. I think I've experienced this in poker—The best people I've met in my life are all generally from poker. Met great people elsewhere, too, but they're the most honorable, like, just very self-aware, driven, rational people around. Certainly at that level, as well. And you know, there's some people you like more than others, certainly, but yeah. A lot of really good people. And you know, I feel like they could've put a camera on that table—Like, just the banter alone, it's so funny. Everybody's a comedian during the games.

I think that's another misconception, too, that you know, at the high stakes everyone's got glasses. And I'm sure you know this, but at the biggest games, people are pretty casual, because they're not worried about giving off tells based on their posture or whether they're telling a story. It's just sort of second nature to make those decisions while you're also being social and chatting at the table. It's hard to pick up a read.

It's a dynamic, particularly of live poker, that I don't think a lot of people appreciate a lot, because of the cinematic portrayal of poker, but that it's really more of a social role than a skill role. You know, navigating social dynamics, sometimes being a self-depreciating entertainer when necessary, negotiation, keeping the energy high, keeping the game going, oftentimes, managing your own psychology. There's a lot of soft skills that come into play that I know for someone like me who primarily had an online background. It was definitely a learning curve, where, you know, detecting and hiding my own behavioral tendencies that we would refer to as 'tells' was just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm curious about what your daily routine looked like during these days. I know you were really big into optimizing your own performance, because of the experimentations you did that led to Overnight Oats. What was a typical day looking like where you expected to play in one of these high-stakes games?

It was very difficult to keep nutrition and fitness in balance when you're sitting at a table. Like, to your point, sometimes the games would run for eight hours, sometimes they'd run for thirty hours, and you know, your win rate hourly would change drastically based on where you're at and how you're performing relative to the players at that table. Right? So hour twenty you might be just way off your game and tired, but if you're incrementally less tired than your opponents, it's probably a pretty good spot for you. And you can usually tell that when you're self aware and keeping attention. Sometimes—You know, I would never drink at the table, but sometimes they would like order a round of shots. And you know, at that time I probably had a better tolerance, and so you would take a shot or take a couple shots, Doyle Brunson would take a couple shots, and you know, he's a little older, and so it would make for a fun game.

But yeah, I think the routine element—Fitness was huge, nutrition was huge. That's actually where I first started making Overnight Oats was to have a reliable breakfast that didn't take a lot of time when the floor calls and says that there's a game starting. You'd have to be there in like ten minutes. And so no time for Starbucks, no time to cook. Overnight Oats were just the perfect solution there. And so fitness was big, too. I think—Some of my biggest leaks I think were probably playing too long, looking back at it. I just wouldn't leave games, and you know, would play for thirty hours, play for twenty-five hours. Like, quite regularly. And then be off the fitness routine, eat a little less healthy, and be a little sluggish. Maybe have to take an extra day to kind of recover after that.

But largely, you know, I would still work out five, six times a week. I was pretty diligent with that. Try to eat very healthy. Ebbs and flows. Definitely off my peak shape right now. CEO life is a little more difficult to stay—It's a little less defined from a schedule perspective.

That was definitely one of the knowledge bombs, from you guys who checked out our episode with Garett Adelstein, where he estimated, I think he said eighty percent of his lifetime earnings came after hour sixteen of a session. I mean, not only just talking about the extreme mental toughness that it really takes to succeed in the biggest games, but also that outcomes really diverge throughout a session. That everyone starts out around the same place, but as occurrences accumulate and people's response really causes those outcomes to diverge. So, you know, how do you perform when things aren't going so well? Do you hang in there when you're doing well? Do you keep your foot on the pedal? Are you able to sustain that level of focus no matter what happens, whereas Brian said you don't know if you're going to be playing for eight hours or sometimes thirty, and can you hang in there if necessary?

I find the founding story of Overnight Oats so fascinating, because it seems like there's something really important to personally experiencing the pain point of the product that you're making. Where for you this is something that you are creating personally just to solve a need that you had identified, to both have something that was healthy and would allow you to perform, but that could be made conveniently and quickly.

Tell me about those early days of Oats Overnight.

Yeah. So, exactly that. It was, I started out scooping some protein powder in the oats and, you know, looking at recipes on Pinterest or whatever, where they were. This was before Overnight Oats was mainstream, you know, in the US. It was around in a homemade sense, but no pre packaged versions or any brands that were doing it. And yeah, it was, you know, if you had told me seven years ago that I would be running an oatmeal company, maybe eight years now, I would have bet a large amount that you'd be wrong, and laid a pretty good price.

And so it seemed like, you know, other people were doing this. I had a pretty awesome formula, you know, we were doing it spoon free. It was just unique, in a shaker cup. And it didn't exist elsewhere. And so I thought—You know, I was naïve enough to think that food manufacturing and building a brand could be easy. Sometimes I think you need a certain level of that simplistic thinking to get into something so big, like starting a company.

What do you think you were the most naïve about? What was the thing that most surprised you about building a brand?

You know, so much, by the way. So I think manufacturing was probably the hardest part for us. Just like me and the early team. You know, we had some advisors around the table, but I think everything, really. I mean, I look back at the spreadsheets that we made, you know, how many oats we have to sell to get to a million dollars in revenue and profit, and of course there's just no expenses, right? It's just like pure profit. Just so simple in the thinking. And of course, like, we faced the market, we didn't have any padding, we didn't have any outside capital, it was all pretty much my money. And so forced to learn very, very quickly. Six months in, it turned into a full-time thing after seeing initial results on Facebook. And definitely a big leap. A huge leap. But I think I was ready for that at that time, and excited to scale something beyond, you know, kind of exchanging time for dollars at the poker table.

What were those early results that you saw that let you know you were onto something and that you could go it full-time?

There was this idea of sort of back to the, "What do you listen to?" Right? I think we got the biggest critique from the audience that we thought we were building it for. I actually built this thinking it was for, you know, fitness enthusiasts, people that you know, were waking up in the morning, hitting the gym, trying to get protein in. But we found out quickly that those people were actually our biggest critics. They like to, you know, build from scratch their breakfast and be very thoughtful about what ingredients are in there, you know, very particular about the macros. And so it was pretty good macros in the build we had, but those were actually our biggest critics. We found we were solving a better problem for more mainstream America, whether it's, like, nurses, healthcare, teachers, military, just people across the country that are looking for a more convenient breakfast in their chaotic morning.

And so kind of looking at the right data, knowing what to follow, we abandoned the fitness direction pretty quickly. I mean we still had plenty of professional athletes and different fitness enthusiasts that do it, but we found that our customer is much more looking for a direction for fitness and nutrition, and so we're providing a really delicious and easy solution for that.

Yeah. It brings to mind the jobs to be done, knowing very well who the customer is and what exactly the role that your product plays in their lives, how can they save them time and/or money being the usual ones that sell the best.

Absolutely. I love that framework for thinking, because there's sort of this—And this is maybe a little further, but where we're getting into, building Oats Overnight to where it is now, it's much more interactive in the way we develop flavors. We're really big on feedback loops, and so some of the things that we observed right away, with the way CPG brands are typically constructed, is that there's no real way to understand what product changes to formula will be favorable. You know, you can do surveys, focus groups, things like this, but they're pretty biased and just difficult to have solid data. But you know, the typical model for a brand is they build the product, maybe through a third party or an agency, and they bring that product to market, and then they don't really look back for five years. Right? They might not make a formula change, because you know, why would they? If it's doing good—Like, good's certainly the enemy of great, but how do you make that change to formula and know that it will be favorable without maybe risking, you know, the relationship you have with customers that liked that exact formula that you're producing.

And so we got really fascinated with, you know, seeing how formula changes—In the early stages, we had the luxury of looking at everything, right? The Facebook ads, the Klaviyo campaigns for email, the cohort analyses for repurchase rates and LTV. And so we would be making changes to Klaviyo or post purchase campaigns on Facebook and see a correlated, you know, uptick in repurchase rate, maybe, month two, month three, maybe by a point or two. But we changed the sweeteners, sugars, sodium ratios in the product, and it just, a ten, twenty percent lift in repurchase rate. So from the beginning we were really emboldened by that sort of full view of product formula and how it relates to craveability and overall customer satisfaction.

Yeah, the concept of feedback loops is probably one of the ones we come back to the most. That your speed of improvement, your speed of growth, is proportional to the tightness of your feedback loops. So what you describe, Brian, as having access to this data, but actually running experiments based on that data, and iterating very quickly. That feels really key to success, particularly in a field that you don't know super well, that you don't have a lot of firsthand experience. To be someone who's continually gathering data and pivoting off that data very quickly.

Yeah, absolutely. We look for any opportunity to put feedback loops in place. And to your point, poker, you have the luxury of just having this immediate feedback. Right? You're facing the market head on, deciphering, you know, variance from skill and edge, of course, is the challenge there, because there's almost so much feedback in such real time. Where business—Especially in the early days it can be difficult, because you're sort of building, you know, you're sitting in front of a computer, you're not really looking at the competition. It just feels like you're sort of making all of these decisions and, you know, they could all be wrong. Right? You don't really know. And there's so many other longer tail factors that might not even be realized until two, three years from now, after those decisions are made. So, yeah, really, from the beginning we've looked to sort of shorten that timeline and build as many levers and as many opportunities for feedback loops as possible. And it's also the reason we keep most things in house. Manufacturing fulfillment, we have four full-time food scientists. You know, most of our marketing functions and creative developments in house.

And you know, we feel that the more control we have over these different levers, the more we can connect the dots. And I think that it comes—Connecting dots to get sort of outsized returns, having those vantage points for each departments and seeing how we can kind of make the most of those when we're sharing the data across departments, rather than having decisions made in a black box at a third party or something similar. We feel that that's been a big key to our success so far.

Yeah. I wanna hear more about this decision to vertically integrate, which seems so key to your DNA. When I hear someone is creating an online brand, I assume that they're a marketer, maybe someone with an SEO background, and they're putting up a Shopify site and you know, putting some things on Amazon, and everything is drop shipped, and they work with agencies to, you know, do the branding, to do the marketing, to do the shipping and fulfillment. But I mean, I've seen videos, like you were in a production factory. Like, talk to me about that, like, the decision to maintain control of all of these different aspects that presumably you're having to learn from first principles what works.

Yeah. So I grew up in a small farm town, and my dad was a mechanic. And so at a young age, he left Pontiac and started his own shop. And so a lot of my best childhood memories are just being around his two stall garage with his two teammates, and they were just fixing cars all day. And so we'd bike around and see that. And I bring that up because I think part of it, I've learned this later, I was sort of drawn to that when deciding, you know, "What do we do here?" That was part of it. The other part of it was I didn't know what MOQ meant. You know, minimum order quantity. So having discussions with potential contract manufacturers, you know, no one wants to educate some young entrepreneur on how to start and make five thousand units of this new product that they're not really sure how to manufacture. So it was definitely a lot of friction trying to explore the best options.

I mean, looking back at the machinery we were calling on, it's, again, it's just all part of that learning journey. But we knew that we could make it on our table in our kitchen, and so we figured we could map that out to, you know, a small little two thousand square foot facility, register it with the FDA, hire an advisor to sort of help guide us to make the best decisions possible for food safety, and just learn as we go. So that's how we got started.

I wanna hear about Impostor Syndrome. Talking to a lot of founders, I learned that something that pretty much all founders have in common is a feeling that they have no idea what they're doing. That they've kind of gotten to where they are by this iterative process of trial and error, and even if they've been successful so far, they're not quite sure what they're going to be doing next, what that next level looks like. So coming into starting a retail brand (presumably from scratch) with limited experience and learning lots of hard lessons about manufacturing and retail along the way, I imagine that Impostor Syndrome has cropped up for you from time to time. How do you deal with it?

I've certainly dealt with it. Experienced it in the first few years especially. I think that I looked at myself as a poker player sort of posing as CEO for the first couple years. And of course, you know, I felt my identity was so strongly tied to the poker room. You know, I'd even go back to the World Series and play a couple tournaments once a year, and I'd feel, like, at home. And then I'd go back, you know, to the facility and go negotiate chia seed prices. So it was definitely like a big, drastic change.

It wasn't until the last couple years that I started to truly shake that, and get a lot more confidence in where I'm at. And I think what helped me the most was talking to peers. I think, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, it's a very solitary thing. You have a team, but you know, ultimately everything comes back to you. You're the one facing the market directly, and you're gonna have to decide when to expose your team to that, when to shield them from that, to try to keep building them up. And so it can be very lonely. I know that's maybe a cliché thing, but it's very true.

And so it wasn't until I started talking to peers that were doing some bigger businesses than me, some smaller, some much more experienced, some less. But you start to see this common thread that everyone's trying to figure it out, you know, in their own way. And certainly some people have more experience, or have different experiences that lend to better results, but everyone's trying to figure it out. And so if you can figure it out incrementally, with incrementally better logic or slightly faster than your peers or competitors, then you're probably gonna do well.

And I think especially in marketing, you know, the industries are changing so quickly. Right? Like the channels that we spend ad dollars on are changing pretty regularly. The strategies, the way consumers give attention to ads is changing, you know, really year over year. And so experience that happened ten years ago, you know, there's some core principles that are still applicable today, but we've found that those that are really leaning on successes they had ten years ago are the ones that are least equipped to succeed today, just because they're overvaluing those past experiences, which just aren't relevant today. And so I think it takes a certain combination of being humble enough to be open to learning, and knowing that like this next chapter of digital marketing or product development or consumer insights or data is definitely different than the last one. But also, you know, sharp enough to kind of just stay ahead and look for data in the right places, look for conversations in the right places, you know, with the right peers.

You shared a really interesting metaphor with me of climbing a mountain. I think this is something that is a commonality, whether you're trying to be the best at a game or build a big company or do anything where there is competition and there are many levels of progression. And I like the way that you put it to me, is that you see the next switchback, the next level up, but you don't know what's beyond that switchback, and you don't even know how many levels there are. So you've climbed a couple of mountains, and you're partially through climbing another. Talk to me about how this mindset affects the way that you approach things. You mention this humility, this readiness to reinvent yourself, to change your approach if new data presents itself. How do you think that this mindset allows you to stay humble, to stay adaptive?

Yeah. So, in switchbacks—We've all been hiking, right, where you think you're almost there, and then you turn around and it's like, "Oh, there's a whole 'nother hill." And then it just keeps going. Poker, ascending those ranks from, you know, $.50/$1.00 games to 1,000/2,000, so many different barriers and plateaus, most of them personal, whether it's like the way you balance work/life or the way that you look at postmortem on sessions or study game theory. With business, yeah, it almost lends itself to more Impostor Syndrome, because you know that the mountain is really, really high when you get to that level of playing a game where maybe forty people in the world played. And then, you know, then you're starting out from scratch, like not knowing what the acronyms are for this new industry. And so it definitely humbles you. I think in the right ways. It can be overwhelming, for sure. But I think the scariest thing is when people think that they're at the top of the mountain, but they're down there, right? And they act like they just reached the summit, and they don't realize that they need to turn their head and just keep walking.

And I think that's what we look for, back to the hiring talks. Like, we look for that type of mindset, right, is that curiosity. You know, what's next? You know, knowing that all the success you had last year was great, and good work, hard work, awesome. But what's next, that you have to, you know, you have to learn that you don't know now? And it gets scary when you don't know what you don't know. Right? Like that's kind of—As you get higher on that mountain, you start to realize, like, "Well, I think I understand it all, but I'm not Elon Musk, right? So, it's like, what am I missing?" So yeah, it's kind of like this balance. I think it can be—I've had good and bad experiences with it, because it can be overwhelming, but keeping this balance of staying humble but, you know, eager to learn, and also having confidence in yourself to perform when it's needed is really important.

What level do you think that you guys are on now? What's the current challenge that's keeping you up at night?

That's a really hard question. So we, yeah, we've done well. I think we've gotten to a great point. There's still so much to learn. I think, you know, we're fundraising right now, and even this experience has kind of pulled me out of the weeds, and it's forced me to look at business CPG, like, the economy in a more macro way. So even now, I think the last two months, I've probably learned more in that two month period, more valuable lessons than really the entire previous history, or more than at any point in the history. And, yeah, you know, it's just different. It's constantly new challenges, right? Like me, I wouldn't consider myself a good fundraiser, I haven't raised a whole lot—I mean, we've raised, you know, something like eight million bucks in capital, but just a different level now, with where we're going. And yeah, just learning so much. It is very humbling. But I think we have a long way to go. I definitely look at this like we're maybe at the bottom quarter of the mountain still, although I think, you know, friends and family would be like, "Oh, you made it." But it's like one very long session that we're playing.

I always loved that analogy. So, Brian's referring to this idea of the one long session, something that I see often is that we break time down into these arbitrary periods. And you'll hear poker players talking about having a good day or having a good month, and the problem is once we start to create these narratives in our mind about that things are going well or things are going poorly, we start to complete those narratives, and that changes the approach we take to things, where if we are losing perhaps we become a little bit more risk-seeking, and we do things that we normally wouldn't. Or if we're ahead, we can take our foot off the gas and maybe not take as many calculated, positive expected value risks, because we don't want to ruin a good thing. But when you realize that the journey is infinitely long, that it both gives you the confidence, "Hey, on average we are progressing. We are moving up and to the right." You know, the more you zoom out, you say, "Hey, we are on the path." But it also allows you to invest for the long run, to invest in learning, to continue to iterate, and to not let short-term incentives dominate long-term considerations.

So there's a lot that's unpacked there in this language. You know, Amazon always talks about that it's always day one. That as soon as a company starts to move into harvest most where we're just going to take cash out of the business and stop investing, well that's the day that the business dies.

You know, I'd love to hear about—You know, what does day one look like today for Overnight Oats? How do you stay hungry, particularly in this current, you know, macro environment? Everyone's wondering, "Hey, what's—" Everyone overreacts about these things, obviously, but everyone's saying, "Oh, you know, retail's dying, you know, consumers don't have money to spend." Like how are you guys staying hungry in the face of this uncertainty?

Yeah. So, fortunately we're selling oatmeal, right, which is a pretty—I think it's pretty insulated. It's premium oatmeal, of course, you can always make your own and save a buck or something. But I think we're fortunate that we're not selling designer backpacks, or something. Right? So that's number one. I think. But generally it's really just where we set the bar, right? Like we're not building a lifestyle business here. We wanna build something, like, really, really meaningful, and we want to change a lot of lives. And I think we're emboldened by, you know, the customer feedback. We have our VIP group on Facebook, and just hear these great stories all the time. And I think that motivates the team. The team is motivated by a lot of different things. But I think generally just setting the bar at world class. Like, we're always trying to get better.

I think one of our core values, which—Core values I always thought were just so kinda cringe in the first couple years, before we had a real, like, team together. It was just a lot of like-minded people just in a room making decisions. But as the team has grown, we have realized how important core values are to sort of set that ethos and align decision-making across a big org. Many people that I don't speak to, let alone once a day, like, don't speak to monthly. And so one of our core values that is maybe the most unique and my favorite is "plus one." And that's the idea of just always doing one more thing, always doing that thing, just, incrementally better than you did it before.

And you know, it's—It plays all the way through to our value prop to consumers, but you know, big decisions, big results come from little decisions. And you know, if you're trying to lose twelve pounds over the year, you can't just lose twelve pounds, right? You can lose a pound a month. And then you can't even lose a pound in a month, you have to start, you know, working out, you have to change your lifestyle slightly, or your diet. And you can start, we say, with breakfast. Just making your breakfast for the next morning.

So it really boils down to those little decisions. And having everybody aligned in trying to just be slightly better than they were yesterday produces insane results.

And, again, another huge recipe for our success is that. So it's sort of infinite in that way. Right? Like, you can have wins. We've certainly had great years, but you know, we have to continue proving ourselves, and continue getting better, because no one's comfortable or happy to just stop. Right? We're all trying to improve. And so I think that that together makes for big results.

So, six, seven years in, I mean, the amount that you've learned along the way is astounding. If you were to write a letter to yourself the day that, considering, "Hey, maybe I should do this full-time." What advice would you want to give to yourself?

I think I'm obsessed over all the little details, because in the beginning you don't really know what moves the needle and what doesn't. You try to do things right, and so you might see something like a reply to a comment on an ad. And just thinking about, like, what emoji do I use here? What tone am I trying to set? Like, we would go so deep on every little decision, and looking back at it, you know, I think it's that mindset that drove a lot of the success, right, but it also—It wasn't applied in the most efficient way, I'd say. And again, I'm not saying I would go take it back, but it certainly was—Maybe, like, you know, twenty, thirty percent more effort and long nights than needed, where I could have been focused more on optimizing for long-term goals or long-term educating, but I was just so head down on every little detail.

So I think that's probably one of the lessons, is to sort of just—You can't do this all in a year. Take it in stride, and learn as you go. But, yeah. You know, I think that that one comes to mind first.

Yeah, it always brings to mind opportunity cost, for me. Which I think is always the biggest cost. So just the red pill of what you are doing at this moment is coming at the expense of everything else that you could be doing. So it's not that having a meeting to discuss emoji comment policy is not a useful thing, but it's what is that coming at the expense of, what would you be investing those resources in otherwise. You know, particularly at the early stage of a company, you have unlimited dimensions, limited opportunities for improvement. And so being very careful about what decisions truly matter. And sometimes it's letting some decisions that matter less go by so you can invest more resources in the ones that matter the most.

I think a good place to end today would be transitions. It seems like you're someone who's really figured out how to negotiate transitions. So transitioning games and very much so transitioning careers. I'd love to hear what advice comes to mind for someone who's considering a large career transition of their own. Perhaps they're a really successful investor at a fund and are thinking about starting a fund of their own. Maybe they are an executive at a large company and they have an idea that they'd love to see if it could be their own company and start someday. What advice comes to mind for someone who's thinking about making this large identity change?

Yeah. I'd say that one of the issues with these decisions, one of the difficult parts is you don't really know—You usually think of them as binary. Like, "I'm gonna leave my job and start this. If that fails, like, I'm screwed." Right? But it's never that simple. Right? Like when you leave your job to start that, you get to experience that journey. Right? Like, you get to learn. If you fail, you get to see other areas where, you know, you can pick up and continue in a different direction. Right? So I think when these decisions are made, they're usually not properly accounting for all the ranges of outcomes. It's too narrow. And so thinking about, with me, for example, with poker—Of course poker was also, I was very financially stable and lived a pretty nice life—I mean, it was stressful and a lot of work, playing seventy hours a week, but I loved it. Right? I was passionate about it, and really still would be. But leaving—Like, I knew I didn't wanna do that forever. I didn't wanna sit at a poker table when I was forty, fifty years old, having to play. And so even if Oats Overnight failed, I would have learned about that alternative. Right? I might have started a different company that was similar, learning from those mistakes.

And of course, very favorable that this at least to date has worked. But I think accounting—Yeah, fingers crossed. But yeah, I mean, I think that accounting for all the other outcomes when you take that leap. It's never just you fall to your death, right? You get to experience that journey and make good decisions even after those outcomes are realized.

So, yeah. Just thinking about all those next possibilities.

So in your mind—We usually talk about this as framing an experiment. So some assumption that you're looking to test, some hypothesis that you have, and creating the experiment to see, "Hey, am I on the right track here?" That you can start to incrementally invest in the new idea, the new concept without creating this complete binary, "I'm going to do it/I'm not going to do it." Which, you know, the binary outcome puts you in a, "All right, I have to wait for this perfect timing," which is never going to come. But can I start to slowly shift resources to this new concept, to this new career identity, as I start to see positive feedback in that direction? Is that the way that you think about structuring something like this, or is it different?

Yeah, I think there's—It's good to dabble, first, because you might find out, of course, new information. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe, you know, you learned something while spending ten percent of your time on that new thing that you didn't know, but it was just a thought. So I think there definitely should be sort of a handoff period there, where you can just—And I think that probably changes, based on what it is. Some things you might need to fully commit to and jump. Some things you probably have the luxury of waiting longer. And so I think it's probably different.

But, yeah, I would say that that's gotta be the move. That's certainly what I did with Oats Overnight. And I didn't move away from poker full-time until we saw, you know, our CPAs, our cost per acquisition, on Facebook, and you know, the comments after people tried the product. And so we had some good product market fit, you know, at least at a very small scale before I moved away from poker.

Yeah, it's something when I talk to founders, particularly who haven't quite found that product market fit yet, is to really force their hand at describing what product market fit looks like. So what are those signals that you're on the right track, particularly objective signals that you can say, "Yes, this is true," "No, this is not true." What types of metrics do you need to see, what types of feedback do you need to hear, what types of experience do people need to be having? And not only does that allow you to know what to look for, which when you see it you can start to scale, but also that creates a most direct path to getting there. You can say, "Here are the signals that we need to see," it allows a concentration of resources to see, are these signals even possible? And what you want to do is you want to know—If you're on the wrong track you want to know that as soon as possible, so you can move on to the next thing and iterate it.

And I think really the key to this approach that you described at Oats Overnight is you guys are very willing to be wrong, but as soon as you find out that you're wrong you move on to the next thing. That it's not the amount of correct experiments that really makes the difference in the long run, but just the amount of experiments, and how quickly and how micro these experiments can become. I really think of, like, decomposing bets. Rather than, "All right, this is what I'm gonna be doing for the next ten years," it's, "All right, here—I have a long-term vision, but here's what I expect to see in this next month, in this next ninety days, is when I'm seeing that I can always double down on it and I can keep moving on this path. If not, I can move on to Option B, keep iterating from there." So, yeah, I really respect how you've brought this concept of iteration and feedback cycles. I love this "plus one" as a concept, and really turned it into a culture that seems to be working really well for you guys.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you're describing, too, on that transition, it lets you stay objective. I think one of the experiences I had was talking to friends and family. You know, we heard all the time, "Well, like, what's stopping Quaker from copying this and just, you know, destroying you at a certain point?" And it's funny, actually, to note that, they actually did release a product, and has since brought it back from the market. So they discontinued that product line. And they just missed. It just didn't taste that great. And I think that's—It's always easier to say why you can't do it. And I think it's surprising how—It just takes effort, really. And so staying objective there is always beneficial.

I saw this presentation that really struck me in the sense that the paths of failure are sometimes very obvious, but the paths to success are never obvious at the outset. And it was looking at machine learning generation, where you're trying to go from just random mutated images to something that looks like an object. So say, it turns out like a star or a character of some sort or a sunrise, but all you have to go off of is just random mutations, where you pick one of the random images and then you generate more random images off of that, and they found that you cannot get from A to Star or A to Sunset by picking the pictures that most look like a sunset. That the path could not be predicted in advance, but that the only thing that predicted whether you could end up at this final destination is how many iterations are you willing to go through to get to the thing that ends up there.

So I think that's a really interesting meta-lesson with entrepreneurship, is just this willingness to do what it takes in order to get where you want to go, and be willing for that final destination and certainly that path along the way to be completely different from what you would have predicted at the outset.

Yeah. It's the reason you have to be passionate about it, right? It's just so hard. You're gonna face so much adversity. There've been so many situations that looking back on, it's like, you know, I think there was probably some Sunk Cost Fallacy there, but thinking, like, "Wow, this is just—Like, should we give up? Like, this is just so difficult." Right? But we were passionate about it, and I think that's also key. But fascinating to see—And I'm sure that's the greatest analogy for this whole journey, is, you know, counting those iterations and giving it that effort.

Brian, I feel like we could go on for hours. I think you have so much to offer and share. Congratulations on your success. You're giving hope to all of us poker players out there who, you know, like to believe that there's more in us. That certainly if we can be competent in this one game that we can be competent in many activities. So, you know, thank you so much for blazing the path for us. Any final words, anywhere you'd wanna send listeners?

Yeah, thank you. Definitely a pleasure being on here. Definitely check out oatsovernight.com if you wanna see what we've created. Definitely have a lot of poker friends that eat this regularly. And if you wanna reach out to me, brian@oatsovernight.com, I'm happy to send you a discount code.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Brian, for joining us. See you all again soon.

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.