When I was 16, I got rejected by 15+ restaurants and stores while looking for a weekend job. My dad jokingly told me to apply to McDonald's (my mom is a nutritionist) because it was National Hiring Day. I walked in, asked the manager for an application, and got hired on the spot.
$8.25 an hour to start. For the first three weeks, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., I made fries. And yes, I only made fries. I was the only person on the team who wasn’t fluent in Spanish (I was taking it in high school) and who'd never had a Big Mac (and still haven't to this day). I stayed at McDonald's for nearly four years, got promoted to Crew Trainer ($0.35 raise), became conversational in Spanish, and was even invited to Hamburger University for manager training - though I opted to attend the University of Illinois instead. I brought my friend John (now at Founders Fund) to work with me for a summer, and my brother another summer.
McDonald’s taught me lessons I still look for in early-stage companies:
The customer is sacred. Even if they’re wrong, they deserve the highest quality of service.
Process is king. Great systems make even complex tasks repeatable and scalable.
Speed only matters if quality scales. A 50-second Big Mac only counts if the next 50 are exactly the same.
Capital efficiency - $8.25 an hour teaches you how to make every dollar count
Lead from the back, not the front - The best managers at McDonald’s weren’t shouting - they were refilling ketchup, fixing ice cream machines, or plunging the bathroom at 11 p.m. That’s servant leadership.
The service industry is humbling. (I also drove for Uber for six months - but that’s a story for another time.) People can be impatient, dismissive, or treat you like you don’t matter. But those jobs taught me to really see people—the ones doing the hard, thankless work.
At 81, we try to do the same. Behind every business we meet is a founder who’s served someone - customers, patients, passengers, families. The best ones still do. So next time you’re in a service line and no one’s behind you, ask the person helping you how their day’s going. It’s a small thing. But the best companies - and the best leaders - start with small things done well.
