The Mind of TCHO

One of my favorite times of the year is late summer when the peppers and tomatillos come in to the farmers market and it’s time to make salsa. With fresh organic produce you can’t go wrong. Let the vegetables express themselves—keep it balanced and it’ll be great.

I’m also making a salsa for TCHO’s IT guy Cash Shurley. He’s from Texas and I want to make him something punchy so he’s getting my special salsa fresca. This recipe goes: jalapeños chopped with the seeds and veins for extra heat, much less tomato, raw tomatillos (this adds brightness), onion, garlic, cilantro, salt, and, most important, lime juice. This makes a very fresh green tasting salsa, pretty hot, with a bright pleasant sour taste.

Had him facing off against Michael Dell and Hopper below on leadership. But since he’s probably the most successful CEO in the world, wanted him back for “one last thing” on running a company, from a recent interview:

At this time of the year in the San Francisco Bay area, early mornings (by that, I mean very early mornings) are warm and incredibly clear. This morning I was rowing out on the Bay before dawn.  The water was flat, stars were twinkling and I saw the moon set behind Mt. Tamalpais as I rowed toward the city.  When I turned to return to the boathouse, I was treated to the most spectacular sunrise over San Francisco.  I often wonder why more people aren’t up, enjoying the silence and scenes of the early morning.

I then spent the entire day at a chocolate factory having my olfactory senses bombarded and my taste buds teased. Some people call what they do during the day work. They go to work. I go to a chocolate factory—how can that be work? Fun people, fun location, fun products, fun challenges.  Of course, some people question what I consider fun—getting out of bed at 4:15am to row is questionable fun for most people.

Before sunset, I picked up my dogs and took them to a remote and almost deserted beach.  The wind had picked up a bit, just enough to spray us with water from the breaking surf. What a great smell. We spotted a pod of whales just offshore, breaching and tail slapping. Odd for this time of the year.

Before climbing back up the cliff to my car and a nice dinner, I sat on a rock to watch the sun disappear over the ocean, thinking, “What a great day and I’m not even on vacation.”

A buddy named Noah Brier started something called brand tags, an application that lets people tag brands with words.

What results are tag clouds for brands, i.e. an ingeniously simple way to gauge how consumers feel about different brands.

Ever since I started using del.icio.us, I’ve wanted to do this kind of thing for, well, everything: political candidate tags, musical band tags, and of course, TCHOcolate tags.

But a pretty great application could be wine labels, which oftentimes feel irrelevant to the point of satire and are written by only a handful of wine connoisseurs.  No offense, they certainly know their wine, but how much more meaningful might wine labels be if they were crowdsourced to consumers via a wine tagging app?

A tag cloud as a wine label might not only be meaningful, but beautiful.

I was at my desk the other day and I heard my voice coming from across the room. It took me a second to recognize it because I don’t hear my own voice recorded often. Louis was watching a video on Wired of me in the lab talking about some of the steps of how we make chocolate.

So, I’m a big time Ska fan...Specials, The Selector, The Beat...most of the 2 Tone stuff.  I was really getting deep into this music while growing up in the “shining buckle of the Bible Belt”, Dallas Texas. 

Suffice it to say, this little gem of a video of a Jesus Ska Band I just found on Boing Boing really, really cracked me up.

Enjoy!

I’m considering transplanting myself from San Francisco to New York, but if eating out here is already pinching my wallet, eating out in there is gonna be worse. 

Even though my friends and I can make delicious food ourselves, eating out is somehow more social, exciting—it is, after all, eating out. 

So how about a kitchen-bar-thingie where you bring your own ingredients, pay a minimal fee to use a high-quality kitchen, and make your own food communally, with access to a bar?  You’d get the best of both worlds: pay less for delicious food and enjoy the eating out experience. 

Live music would be pretty awesome too…

Don’t know where I read it, but someone in Legacy Media once asked Michael Dell and Steve Jobs their takes on what it means to be CEO. This was back when Michael Dell was king of the computer hill and his company could do no wrong, famously telling Steve Jobs, who had recently taken over the ailing Apple, that he should do his shareholders a favor and just liquidate the business.

Perhaps the reason that Apple is now worth three times Dell can be found in the answers the two CEOs gave.

Dell, who pioneered web sales and just-in-time manufacture, gave a very B-school answer: His job, he said, was to empower his managers, providing them whatever they needed so that they could do the best job they were able to.

Jobs’s answer? He said his job was to inspire his staff to achieve what they had previously thought was impossible.

Don’t know that there’s a right answer.

What I do know is what Hopper said: