Startups’ Annus Horribilis—and What Comes Next
Layoffs. Ego-shattering down rounds. Startup failures. We review the tech carnage of 2023 and why some investors think 2024 could be worse.
f 2022 was a year of shock and denial for tech founders and investors as stocks collapsed, 2023 was a year of acceptance of their harsh new reality.
Startups slashed headcount. Founders swallowed their pride and accepted ego-shattering down rounds just to survive. Venture capitalists cut ambitious targets for the size of their next funds and made tough choices about which startups in their portfolios they would keep supporting—and which ones they would leave to die. They soured on many of the sectors they had once celebrated, such as fintech, cryptocurrency and the creator economy. And big swaths of Silicon Valley had a momentary panic attack with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier in the year.
But what made 2023 more extraordinary was that the party music got louder in one corner of tech—artificial intelligence—even as it fell silent throughout the rest of the industry. Money poured into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI startups from venture capitalists and big tech companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google. “The only people that had a good time [this year] were early-stage AI companies,” said Immad Akhund, founder and CEO of fintech startup Mercury.
THE TAKEAWAY
Despite a boom in the AI sector, tech startups had a brutal year, with widespread layoffs, funding struggles and outright business failures.
The split-screen realities between the AI sector and everything else baffled even seasoned Silicon Valley veterans. “You have a boom and a downturn running in parallel,” said Peter Wagner, a longtime venture capitalist who was a managing partner at Accel before launching his own fund, Wing Venture Capital, in 2013. “I can’t think of a time that’s happened.”
Still, the euphoria over AI couldn’t drown out the steady drumbeat of layoffs, distressed sales and startup implosions, such as that of logistics company Convoy. Startups scrambled to get profitable quickly by slashing spending, while big companies similarly turned to cost cutting as their growth stalled. That led to an astounding number of job cuts—almost a quarter of a million of them in tech, many of them from big companies like Meta Platforms, Amazon and Microsoft, according to layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. That figure was up 50% from last year.
For younger companies, the root cause of their suffering—rising interest rates—cut them off from the cheap capital that had sustained them for so long. Any hopes for a near-term resurgence in the initial public offering market were dashed by the underperforming IPOs of Instacart and Arm. And while inflation eased as the year progressed, rising tensions with China and the conflicts in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza helped keep the specter of a recession alive.
“In this year, you’ve had the confluence of changing geoeconomics, interest rates going up, the rise of inflation, and you have now two hostile conflicts,” said Paul Kwan, a managing director at venture capital firm General Catalyst and the former head of West Coast technology banking at Morgan Stanley. “Stop and think: When was the last time you had all those factors?”
As bad as it got this year, worse pain may lie ahead, investors and founders say. Many investors believe the carnage in the startup sector will increase as companies that haven’t raised money since 2021 simply run out of cash. An intensification of the Middle East or Ukraine conflicts, for example, could turn those into global black swan events—a term investors use for unpredictable, momentous occurrences that can reshape economies and societies.
“We are just seeing that reality kick in,” said Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList, a startup that connects companies with investors. “We are going to see a lot more [startup] shutdowns coming up.”
A Landslide
This year’s numbers show just how brutal things were in the startup sector.
In total, U.S. startups raised $126 billion in the first three quarters of 2023, according to financial data firm PitchBook, a significant decline from the $195 billion raised in the same period in 2022 and $239 billion for the same period in 2021. The third quarter was the slowest period for fundraising since early 2018. About 20% of financings in that period were down rounds, compared to just 6.5% in the third quarter of 2021, according to data from Carta, which sells financial software to startups.
At least those companies are alive. Many others can’t say the same. Zume Pizza, a startup that raised $445 million from investors to automate pizza making with robots, as well as pet health company Fuzzy, real estate startup Zeus Living and healthcare startup Olive AI were all among this year’s startup casualties.
Two companies competed for the biggest megaflop of the year. Convoy, which had raised nearly $1 billion in funding and once garnered a valuation of $3.8 billion, wound down its operations in October, wiping out its investors (the logistics business Flexport acquired its technology assets earlier this month). Then there was former real estate titan WeWork, which filed for bankruptcy protection in November. The company’s biggest backer, SoftBank, lost more than $14 billion on its investment, according to the Japanese conglomerate’s recent earnings report. WeWork, at least, has hopes of living on after it reorganizes.
“If you’re a founder who was only able to get funding because it was this period of 2021 where everyone was feeling pretty flush, I think you’re feeling really scared right now,” said Chrissy Farr, a health tech investor at early-stage venture firm Omers Ventures.
Of the startups that use Carta’s software, 543 shut down in the first three quarters, compared to 467 for all of last year. And the numbers keep climbing: In the third quarter, the number of Carta startups to fold reached 212, the highest peak yet.
“The consensus is that we will all lose companies,” said Karen Page, a general partner at B Capital Group, a venture firm formed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and a former executive at cloud software company Box. “That’s the nature of the beast.”
One sign of the turmoil: Martin Pichinson, a co-founder of Sherwood Partners, which specializes in restructuring failing startups, said his business is booming, and he expects it to get even bigger in the coming year. He has doubled the headcount of his firm to 40 to handle an increase in demand for Sherwood’s services.
“This is the great awakening,” he said. “We are now in a new era.”
For their part, venture capitalists faced fundraising struggles of their own. Venture firms raised only $42.7 billion in the first three quarters of this year, less than a quarter of the record $172.5 billion they raised last year, according to PitchBook. The limited partners who supply those funds have retreated, largely because they found themselves overallocated to private investments when the stock market tanked, a phenomenon known as the denominator effect. In some cases, the LPs were disappointed with VC returns and with how VC managers handled their money.
Either way, the lack of LP interest forced many venture firms to rethink and refine their strategies, cut headcount and perform triage on their portfolios, leaving the weaker companies to fend for themselves. “This is basically a landslide” of startup shutdowns, said Pichinson. Venture “firms are realizing that cash really is king and it has to be protected.”
The transformation of Tiger Global Management, the hedge and venture fund that once shook up VC with its frenetic deal-making pace, is an especially stark illustration of the new mood in startup investing. After participating in more than 350 VC deals in 2021, Tiger inked only 37 this year, according to PitchBook. Those deals were largely small checks or follow-on investments in their strongest companies, such as enterprise software firm Databricks, which earned a valuation of $43 billion in September, up from $38 billion in 2021.
Tiger’s slowdown was likely the result of fundraising challenges. The New York firm reportedly cut its fundraising target for its upcoming megafund twice this year, a sign that it had inaccurately predicted demand from its LPs, the institutions and wealthy individuals that invest in venture funds. Embattled venture firms may end up cutting staff, just like their startup counterparts.
The tech industry’s job losses were at their worst at the start of the year. In January, 90,000 workers across 275 tech companies were laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi. But the layoffs continued for the rest of the year, including some at once high-flying tech unicorns.
In the past month, non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea, which was valued at $13.3 billion in 2022, cut 50% of jobs; wholesale marketplace Faire, valued at $12.4 billion in 2021, cut 20%, or 250 workers; and Flexport, valued at $8 billion in early 2022, axed 20% of its workforce, a total of 660 people. Unfortunately, the sizable job cuts at Meta, Google, Qualcomm and LinkedIn made it harder for some people laid off from startups to find a soft landing at bigger employers.
Reasons for Optimism
Still, many of them did find new jobs.
The overall number of tech industry jobs in the U.S.—including technical and nontechnical jobs such as marketing and legal positions—was around 5.6 million in October, comparable to the number at the start of the year and roughly 6% higher than in October 2021, according to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Computing Technology Industry Association, a tech trade group. The data suggest that hiring by tech companies, including those that laid off workers in some parts of their business, outpaced job eliminations overall.
It’s possible that some of the laid-off workers found their way to the booming AI sector. AI startups raked in cash, raising $25 billion in the first half of the year alone, according to data provider Crunchbase. That was down slightly from the same period the prior year, according to Crunchbase, when some financings at the tailend of the bull market occurred.
The vibrancy of AI, among other things, has helped founders and venture investors, many of whom are naturally inclined toward positivity, to hold onto their optimism. The companies getting started now in the furnace of hard times will likely end up more resilient than those founded during the record bull run, when it was far easier to launch and scale a company, founders and investors say.
“When you don’t have that capital availability, you’re forced to do things in a more grounded way,” Wing’s Wagner said.
To survive in this market, he advises startups to be pragmatic. “Manage expenses, capitalize the company on terms that fit the current world if you have capital available and [don’t] get emotional about last-round valuation,” he said.
Sánchez faces vote to win new term as Spain PM amid growing anger over amnesty deal
Conservatives and judges say Socialist leader’s pact with Catalan separatists damages country’s rule of law
Spain’s acting prime minister Pedro Sánchez is on course to secure a new term in a parliamentary vote on Thursday as anger grows over an amnesty deal for Catalan separatists that has become the price for the Socialist leader to retain power.
The speaker of Spain’s Congress of Deputies said a two-day process leading to Sánchez’s expected confirmation would begin on Wednesday, almost four months after an inconclusive election in July in which his party finished second.
Late on Monday the Socialists published the official text of an amnesty law for Catalan separatists, which is a precondition for Sánchez to secure the votes he needs from smaller parties to reach a 176-seat majority.
The amnesty will end the prosecution, prison terms and other penalties facing pro-independence leaders and supporters who backed a bid by Catalonia to break away from Spain that culminated in a referendum in 2017.
The plan has sparked fury among conservatives and traditionalists in the Socialist party, who accuse Sánchez of cynically granting special treatment to separatists at the cost of trashing the rule of law.
The amnesty is likely to benefit more than 500 people, spanning those in criminal cases and others facing administrative penalties such as bans from public office, said one official in the Catalan independence movement.
Its most high-profile beneficiary is expected to be Carles Puigdemont, head of the hardline Together for Catalonia party, who six years ago led the push for an unlawful referendum and a futile declaration of independence. He has since been living in Belgium as a fugitive from Spanish justice.
The proposed amnesty has drawn condemnation from prosecutors, judges, lawyers, police officers and Spain’s main business lobby, the CEOE. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of cities across Spain in protest against the plan on Sunday.
Fears that the amnesty law is opening the way for parliament to interfere in court decisions prompted an extraordinary statement from Spain’s supreme court on Monday. Its government chamber emphasised the need to “guarantee judicial independence from all institutions” and underscored the courts’ duty to safeguard “equality in the application of the law”.
The text of the amnesty law says it will cover not only people who helped organise the referendum in 2017 but those who committed crimes with a “profound connection” to the independence bid, including public order offences and the misuse of public funds. It specifically excludes intentional acts “resulting in death”.
Lawyers were surprised by the period of time covered by the amnesty law, stretching from the first day of 2012 — the year when a pro-independence majority took control in the Catalan regional parliament — until November 13 2023.
Who benefits from the amnesty will be decided by judges on a case-by-case basis, with public prosecutors and the individuals themselves able to argue for their crimes to be erased.
José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the Madrid office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, said the publication of the law would only heighten anger over the amnesty plan.
“There’ll be two very tense days in parliament on Wednesday and Thursday. It’s going to be very rough. I think we’re going to hear terrible things and that, logically, is going to stir people up.”
Elon Musk says X is changing its algorithm to highlight smaller accounts
The company formerly known as Twitter is preparing to roll out a “major update” to its algorithm, according to a recent post by X owner Elon Musk. While today the app’s For You feed surfaces popular and trending posts from its broader network alongside highlights from those you follow, the new algorithm will surface posts from smaller accounts, Musk said.
The posts and accounts will include those outside users’ “friends and follows” network, he noted, meaning the change will attempt to expose users to new accounts they may find interesting but haven’t yet discovered. It would also allow smaller creators the opportunity to be discovered by a wider audience, which fits into Musk’s plan to turn X into a creator platform.
Over the past several months, X has targeted creators with features like support for long-form posts, that extend the character limit to 25,000 for paying subscribers, the ability to upload two-hour videos, and, importantly, the opening of an ad revenue-sharing program that has now paid out nearly $20 million to creators, according to statements last month made by X CEO Linda Yaccarino.
The larger idea is to allow creators to build their audience on X and then monetize their posts through a combination of ad revenue sharing and subscriptions, where fans can pay for exclusive content. Other features have also been designed with the one-on-one fan-to-creator connection in mind, including support for receiving message requests from subscribers, and more recently, the addition of audio and video calling features, which could turn X into an alternative to Cameo, in addition to being basic social features.
To date, however, creators’ embrace of X is uncertain. While there are some building small audiences on X, more often than not, creators looking to monetize turn to larger platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram to reach their followers and a wider audience. But an X algorithm change, if successful, could potentially give smaller creators greater reach on X — which, in turn, could increase X usage and improve discoverability. Or at least that’s likely the working theory here. Whether or not it will work is another matter entirely, given X’s alleged dwindling traction in the year since Musk took over and the rise of new startup competitors, including Bluesky, Post, Spill and others.
Musk noted on Friday, Nov. 10, that the recommendation algorithm update would roll out in the next few days — which would mean this week — and would be made open source as it undergoes continuous improvement.
Middle Eastern carriers place orders worth tens of billions of dollars
Deals for over 100 aircraft on first day of Dubai air show cement industry rebound despite regional tensions
Middle Eastern airlines have placed orders worth tens of billions of dollars for more than 100 aircraft on the opening day of the Dubai air show, underscoring the rebound in the aviation industry even as regional tensions run high.
Emirates, the local carrier, placed an order for 90 of Boeing’s coming 777X aircraft, the world’s largest twin-engined jet, valued at $52bn at list prices. Its low-cost sister airline, Flydubai, followed up with an order for 30 Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners, the first widebody aircraft in its fleet. The US plane maker also picked up a commitment from Royal Jordanian for its 787 wide-body.
The flood of orders comes despite concerns over a fall in demand for air travel in the region due to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Bookings for flights to the Middle East fell in the three weeks following the Hamas attacks on Israel, dropping from 13 per cent above 2019 levels to 13 per cent below, according to industry data provider ForwardKeys.
Sales for flights from the region fell 10 percentage points.
Yet demand for the industry’s biggest jets is soaring after a prolonged downturn following the coronavirus pandemic, which severely dented long-haul travel.
Much of the demand is expected to be driven by Middle Eastern airlines over the next two decades. Boeing is forecasting that wide-body aeroplanes for long-haul travel will make up 45 per cent of deliveries to the region over the next 20 years — the highest regional percentage worldwide — as it expands into an international transit hub.
The US group projects delivery of 3,025 new commercial aircraft in the Middle East by 2042, including 1,350 wide-bodies.
“The big Gulf carriers continue to believe strongly in the superconnector model and therefore anticipate some growth,” said Edmond Rose, an aviation consultant who works in the region.
“If you believe there is going to be growth in air travel because of global economic expansion then those Gulf carriers are still going to be well placed to pick up some of that.”
Middle Eastern airlines are forecast to grow over the next two years, and reach 115 per cent of pre-pandemic capacity by 2025, a stronger recovery than any other region, according to the International Air Transport Association, a trade body.
Regional profitability is forecast at $9.41 net profit per passenger this year, in line with the US and more than double that of European carriers.
Beyond the Middle East, Boeing won an order for 90 of its narrow-body 737 Max jets from Turkey’s SunExpress, while European rival Airbus reached an agreement in principle with Turkish Airline for what it said was a “significant commercial aircraft order”, understood to be for as many as 355 jets.
Airbus also agreed a follow-on order for 30 of its A220-300s single-aisle jets with Latvian carrier airBaltic.
Industry analysts said they expected more orders to come at Dubai this week as airlines jostle to lock in delivery slots from both Boeing and Airbus.
Airlines are having to replace older aircraft in their fleets as well as place orders to support future growth, said Stuart Hatcher, chief economist at consultancy IBA, who predicted significant deals at the show.
Order backlogs for the two plane makers are at record highs, totalling more than 13,900 aircraft to the end of October, according to data from Cirium, the aviation consultancy.
“I am not sure where the [manufacturers] are finding slots for these and I suspect there is a significant amount of slot double booking going on as [they] gamble on some customers seeking to rearrange delivery slots, perhaps in 2026 and later,” said Rob Morris, head of Cirium’s consultancy business Ascend.
AI robot uses meteorite from Mars to help make oxygen from water
Chinese experiment raises hopes for viability of mission to red planet and planetary colonisation
A robot has used meteorite extracts from Mars to help make oxygen from water, melding artificial intelligence’s powers of chemical discovery with efforts to explore and even populate the red planet.
The automated experiment boosts the possibility of sustaining future manned outer space missions, according to the paper published on Monday in Nature Synthesis. The authors estimated that it would have taken 2,000 years of human labour to achieve the same result by trial and error.
The AI robot used the rock samples to make a catalyst — a substance that speeds up chemical reactions — to produce oxygen from water. The work, from a multidisciplinary team at the University of Science and Technology of China in the eastern city of Hefei, taps into rapidly growing interest in colonisation of the cosmos and possible exploitation of extraterrestrial resources.
“The biggest implication is that an AI-guided robot is able to produce useful chemicals in unknown conditions with unknown materials,” said Prof Jun Jiang, a co-author of the Nature Synthesis paper. “My dream is maybe we can send several robots, to the Moon firstly, and start to use the local resources to prepare the necessary chemicals and materials for human beings.”
“There’s no more important resource than oxygen to breathe,” said Charles Cockell, professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the research. “This is a thrilling example of how we can send robots to Mars and have them extract minerals that catalyse oxygen production from abundant Martian ice, making it possible for us to build a permanent self-sustaining settlement.”
The researchers tasked their robot with making materials capable of producing oxygen from water sources that previous research had identified on Mars. The team gave the automated chemist five different meteorite samples to use to design a catalyst.
Within six weeks, the robot analysed 243 experimental data sets and almost 30,000 theoretical simulations to pick and synthesise a viable six-metal catalyst from 3,764,376 possible formulas. The researchers successfully conducted the experiment at Martian temperatures of minus 37C. They demonstrated they could run the operation remotely, by setting up and controlling similar laboratories in three Chinese cities hundreds of kilometres apart.
A video accompanying the new paper shows the AI chemist shuttling solo between workstations to produce the materials needed to generate oxygen. The scene has echoes of the 1972 film Silent Running, in which the robot Dewey tends the last remnants of earth’s life-giving forests in a capsule hurtling through deep space.
Countries such as China and the US are increasingly interested in both AI and space science. Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder, has longstanding plans for a mission to Mars.
But huge obstacles to colonising other planetary bodies remain. Remote AI laboratories and manufacturing would need high process efficiency and considerable computing power, either in situ or off-planet. In the case of Mars, the set-ups would have to be resilient to much higher levels of radiation than penetrate Earth’s atmosphere.
The Martian rock research, nonetheless, raised many interesting possibilities, said Dr Stephen Thompson, a planetary expert at Diamond Light Source, the UK particle accelerator. These include that an AI laboratory could act as an interstellar “filling station” for spacecraft by capturing hydrogen left over after the extraction of oxygen from water.
The paper represented another advance in the fast-developing field of using AI for materials discovery, Thompson added.
“AI is making great strides because it can process huge amounts of data,” Thompson said. “It’s highly efficient in identifying new materials in a way that would take humans year and years to do.”
The research’s combination of chemistry, robotics and software design was “really cool”, said Mark Symes, professor of electrochemistry and electrochemical technology at the University of Glasgow.
“That’s what we are going to need if we’re going to colonise Mars — all the disciplines,” said Symes, who wrote a separate commentary on the research, also published in Nature Synthesis. “We will need materials wherever we live — and we are going to get them through chemistry.”
UK M&A laws: tweak government has no power to rally animal spirits
Nervous tinkering will have little impact on deals and stock market valuations
Flip flops look good on a beach, but bad in politics. So it is easy to see why the UK’s plan to pare back recently introduced powers to screen foreign takeovers is inspiring snarky comments. This seems like the umpteenth attempt to revive London’s moribund stock market, this time by making M&A easier.
The Takeover Panel, the UK’s statutory mergers and acquisitions umpire, has slipped into a loss. It is financed by fees on deals and filings. City types blame red tape for sapping animal spirits. The government obligingly ditched beefed-up governance legislation last week.
Deal doers should also welcome changes to the National Security and Investment Act. This was too broad when it came into force in 2022. Mooted changes appear sensible enough, even amid rising geopolitical tensions.
The NSI is similar in inspiration to US Cfius national security legislation and some EU laws. It mandates any buyer who acquires significant control — say 25 per cent — of a company operating in any of 17 strategic sectors to notify the authorities. In addition, the government can review virtually any transaction it feels concerned about, even if it falls outside designated sectors.
Oddly, the NSI lacks a minimum size threshold. Even the acquisition of a company with no revenue falls under its remit. Buyers do not need to be foreign to attract scrutiny. Even internal reorganisations are caught in the net.
As a result, in the year to March 2023, the UK had 866 notifications under the NSI. That is almost double annual notifications in the US, points out Veronica Roberts, a partner at law firm Herbert Smith Freehills.
Less than 2 per cent of deals that were notified required conditions or triggered prohibition, according to analysis by Ian Giles, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright. In contrast, almost 15 per cent of deals reviewed across the EU were either mitigated, prohibited or withdrawn.
That suggests that the UK net catches too large a flock of butterflies. Careful rewording should hone the NSI’s scope, reducing the legal costs of companies and investors.
It would, however, be foolish to imagine that nervous tinkering will have any impact on M&A and stock market valuations. London has been enervated by Brexit, witch hunts against business, and economic uncertainty. A government with little hope of reviving itself has no hope of reviving the City of London.
Mario Carbone Shares the Key to Getting a Reservation at His Restaurants
The chef and restaurateur, best known for the celebrity hotspot Carbone in Greenwich Village, on the routines that help him manage a growing hospitality empire
Mario Carbone is famous for his spicy rigatoni vodka. But the chef has set his sights far beyond pasta.
With 25 restaurants around the country, he and his partners Rich Torrisi and Jeff Zalaznick have established a hospitality empire that includes a luxury apartment building, Villa Miami; a private members’ club, ZZ’s, which charges a $20,000 application fee; and a consumer-goods brand, Carbone Fine Food, which launched in 2021 and introduced jars of his famous spicy vodka sauce earlier this year. Carbone, 43, said he hoped hotels were in the future.
The trio’s best-known business remains Carbone, the Greenwich Village celebrity hotspot where it’s nearly impossible for a mere mortal to snag a reservation. Carbone said that to have a leg up booking a table, you had to know one of the secret email addresses.
“There are several that exist, and there’s basically a control room somewhere in the world run by one of our partners,” he said. “She’s been doing it for over a decade now, taking tens of thousands of reservations every single day.” Now there are several Carbone locations around the world, including in Miami, Dallas and Hong Kong.
Carbone was born and raised in Queens and now lives in New York and Miami with his girlfriend, the publicist Cait Bailey. Here, he discusses his love of cigars, why he thinks social media has hurt restaurant culture and the moment he felt he’d made it.
What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do after waking up?
I get up at 5:30 a.m., and the first thing I do is let my dog Bronco out. I make myself a coffee and usually a small breakfast. By 7, I’m trying to get my morning exercise in—playing tennis, going for a run. I have a makeshift gym in my garage.
How do you like your coffee and breakfast?
I drink pretty much exclusively iced coffee. I like it very strong, I usually do two shots of espresso and cold brew. My breakfast is usually a banana, a little bit of yogurt, egg whites and a wrap and avocado. Boring, healthy, just to get something in my stomach before I go.
In the midst of a busy work life, do you find time to meditate or reflect?
I’m pretty peaceful by nature. If I don’t have quiet time to do my work and be in my thoughts, then I’m easily thrown off.
What’s the most important thing for you to delegate to your assistant?
Travel is something I have no interest in dealing with on my own. I find it time-consuming and mind-numbing.
Is there anything you refuse to delegate?
That is a very long list. I’m manic about the smallest things that I could probably not do myself. My assistant is critical in my world, and she allows me the opportunity to touch all of these really small [details] that I believe if I was to give up, I would be doing whatever the project is a disservice.
Do you think people will ever get sick of Carbone’s spicy rigatoni vodka?
I hope not. I haven’t, and I’ve eaten it more than most.
What do you cook for yourself at home?
Usually pretty simple stuff. Ten to 15 minutes max is my attention span during the week to cook for myself, a quick steak or a simple bowl of pasta. The only time of the week where I get even the slightest bit ambitious is probably on a Sunday, whether it’s just for me and my girlfriend or friends and family who are coming over.
You designed the kitchens for The Villa, the luxury apartment building you’re opening in Miami. What’s your favorite thing in them?
We designed a small version of the pasta cookers, the tanks that I use in the restaurants, which are sunken wells of water. At any time, you can drop pasta in. You have all your burners free, and you have this very sleek countertop-height sunken tank for boiling water the way we do at the restaurants.
When, in the 10 years since Carbone’s opening, did you feel like you’d made it?
Maybe having President Obama for the first time. Even if we had lots of celebrities and big moments early on, I was able to really soak that one in.
Are there any food trends you can’t stand?
Certainly the food world has become very susceptible to cooking for social media. I do think it’s a wonderful thing that everyone now has the power to render a judgment or support their favorite location through their own channels. On the other side of that is when you get too distracted by it as an entrepreneur or chef and you start trying to make things for that Instagrammable moment. You’re generally going to fail, because your end goal is no longer to make the most delicious thing possible.
What do you do to relax?
I am an avid cigar smoker. Usually I’m sharing it with someone, my father or a close friend. It gives you some time where you know you’re not going anywhere.
Is there a kitchen product people spring for that you think is unnecessary or overrated?
There are too many kitchen gadgets in the world. When I’m cooking at someone else’s house, their drawers are ridiculous. The amount of work I can get done with a singular good knife and a cutting board could probably replace an entire junk drawer of QVC-type items people have purchased in their lives.
What’s a piece of advice that’s guided you?
I remember my dad talking to me when I was younger and trying to find my path. His great fatherly advice was, “I don’t care what you choose to do with your life. I do care that whatever you choose to do, you pour yourself into it, you give a damn about it and you try to be the best at whatever it is.”