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# Your Soil, Not Theirs

## Hook

Todd Graves, the founder of Raising Cane's - the fast food franchise that specializes in selling chicken fingers - succeeded in becoming a multibillionaire because he did everything he could within the constraints of his circumstances to make his business work. But the lesson is not "don't give up when you face challenges"; it's more subtle: constraints are fuel for success.

## Fuel Explanation

When I say fuel, I don't mean like the gasoline that cars use; non-renewable resources, I mean like the fuel that helps seeds grow into plants. Renewable sources that get transmuted and channeled to propel life and proliferate prosperity. 

## Intro Startups and Plant Analogy

In the startup world analogizing companies to plants is not new, its just under explored even though the analogy has a lot of depth to it. I fucking hate that the startup world is so lazy with explaining the significance of concepts like this, so I'll do it here. 

## Germination of Plants and Humans

For one, startups are like plants because their stages of growth are similar to those of a germinating seed. 

For startups and plants to grow they cannot fight their environment, they must synthesize it. Plants start their journey when a seed is nestled into damp soil; it sits, dormant, holding onto a complete set of instructions waiting for the ingredients it needs to begin the germination process. Germination is the process where an organism grows from a seed.  Like seeds, human organisms grow from cells following instructions of DNA; what we do, who we become, our potential is locked inside of that genetic code waiting to be activated by the situations we put ourselves in. This isn't just some simple nature vs nurture, its about how they are two sides of the same coin. Jordan Peterson said it best:

> "... the better the goal the more full and rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it...when you do something new, there's information in the action and then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions so there's more to you because you've tried something new. That's one thing but the second thing is, there's good biological evidence that if you put yourself in a new situation, new genes code for new proteins, and build new neural structures, and new nervous system structures - same thing happens to some degree when you workout, because your muscles are responding to the load...if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest thing, so that would be the abyss, that would turn you on maximally. You're the potential composite of all the ancestral wisdom that's locked inside of you."

In the same way that seeds absorb water from the surrounding soil (a process called imbibition) entrepreneurs subsume non-financial resources from their environment that wake up the potential in their DNA. 

## Securing the Lease

Consider Todd Graves' dream to open his first chicken finger restaurant in Louisiana in \[insert year]. Everything from the funding to the ground underneath his first restaurant had to be won; so he packed a business plan inside of a cheap briefcase and took them to every bank in town. He received no, after no, after no. They said that he wasn't ready. Said "*You don't have any money, but you have a college degree, why don't you go work in the industry for ten years and then do that."* The soil he'd hoped to root in — bank financing — wasn't available. So he had to abide with the reality of his circumstances and move forward in the most efficient way possible. 

With his chances of an SBA loan looking slim - unless he could inject more equity into his business - the broker, Red Reynolds, advocated for him; he convinced the landlord, Tulula Arbor, to hold the space letting her know that even though it might take him a year to put it all together, once he did, and she would have a long-term tenant. She was tired of a revolving door of tenants. He needed somewhere to root that wouldn't pull him back out. It was a win-win.

***

## Earning the Equity

And with the location being held for him, he started to think of the possibilities, if he could make enough money on his own, by working extremely hard in a single summer, he could raise the rest of the money needed to make himself more attractive to banks. He got a job at an oil refinery through a friend of a friend, first in El Segundo, then Torrance, doing boilermaker work; fabricating steel, iron, and copper into vessels meant to hold hot gas and liquid. He worked ninety-hour weeks, leaning into California's overtime laws once he cleared the threshold. That's where he met a guy named Bill Tolar who would help him to get the rest of the money he needed by flying to Alaska and working as a fisherman. So Todd flew to Anchorage, flew to King Salmon, hitchhiked to Naknek, and spent a summer gill-netting sockeye salmon. By fall he'd pulled together $60,000 from working in the refinery and money raised from coworkers, and combined that with a $90,000 SBA loan. His chicken finger dream was coming true. None of it came from the soil he wanted. All of it came from the soil he was already in.

Most people do the opposite. Instead of drawing on their own circumstances — their own soil — they try to import someone else's inputs. I want to say that you can't copy and paste their style or playbook, but its weird because sometimes hearing about the ways other people solve problems, jars something loose in your mind. So you can copy and paste, but its like you just get distracted from seeing the opportunities in front of you if you get too focused on doing things how other people did. As human beings we can only hold one idea in our minds at a time. and i think that's essentially what I love about Todd's story. He ran his actual conditions through the process and let whatever grew, grow. The distinctiveness people respond to isn't a trophy he earned. It's the visible byproduct of not faking his own soil.

## Renovating the Restaurant

One of the best examples of this is the moment after he secured the lease for the dilapidated building near LSU's North Gates. Every tenant before him had done the same thing to the space: cover what was already there with something new. Laminate over stucco, drywall over whatever came before. Todd did the opposite. He took a crowbar and pulled the construction paneling off, using it to tear across the stucco like scraping egg off a saucepan. Underneath, he found exposed brick — the leftover exterior wall of a building that used to stand next door, still bearing a faded advertisement mural for a bakery in downtown Baton Rouge, painted in firetruck red, pearly white, and corn-on-the-cob yellow. Ironically, that same bakery was where Todd had developed his first bread recipe for Cane's. He took this as a sign the business would work and used the same colors and font as inspiration for the Cane's logo.

"I learned this stuff 'cause I didn't have enough money," he told David Senra — and the distressed, half-brick, half-stucco wall is still standing in that first location, uncovered, not replaced.

Everything after that — stem thickening, branching, budding, flowering — is just this same conversion process compounding over time, shaped entirely by that plant's specific soil, light, and climate.

## Contrasting With Other Restaurants

Other restaurants look assembled from a catalog, a carousel of the same Instagram references everyone else pulls from: laminate surfaces and overhead lighting because "it pays to brighten the space up a bit." Cane's took a different approach. Everything he couldn't afford to remove stayed, and the wacky furniture pieces (like the tiger-striped couches that still adorn the restaurant) were not fashion statements but financial ones. Tacky furniture turns out to be the cheapest. These wacky pieces became fundamental parts of the Cane's brand and the store design of new locations across the country. Instead of a brick mural, the wall has a painted mural that replicates the brick wall Todd found—this time with the Cane's logo instead of Wolf's Bread Bakery, because that specific, accidental, unique wall is part of the soul of the restaurant.









# Appendix



Powered by that stored energy, the radicle — the first root of a germinated seed — pushes downward, anchoring into the soil and starting to draw up water and minerals.

***

Shortly after, the hypocotyl — the stem — pushes upward toward light, often arching to protect its delicate tip as it breaks through the surface. At this stage, the plant still lives entirely off its seed reserves. It hasn't made a single calorie of its own yet. Only once the first leaves unfurl and reach open air does photosynthesis begin. Chlorophyll starts capturing light, CO2 is pulled from the atmosphere, water splits, and sugar is made. This is the handoff moment: the plant switches from living off what it was given at the start to living off what it can convert in real time from wherever it is rooted.





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As an aside though, I just want to make a comment; this laziness comes from the conservatism that Paul Graham speaks about in his essay on Conversational Resourcefulness. People who aren't conversationally resourceful traverse idea space as "gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world" and 

Fossil fuels were not found through half-hearted pursuits.

\- of companies as plants - 





 they synthesize it and germinate because of it pushing up out of the soil and flowering.

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