4 Years, 4 Lessons: What Betting Everything on Bagels Taught Me
Today marks four years since I walked away from a $200k cushy corporate job to go all in on scaling BagelFest.
I was scared to take the leap, but BagelFest was a unique confluence of opportunity, skill, and passion. I visualized how I would feel at the end of my life if I never gave BagelFest my full energy and attention. I decided I couldn’t live with that regret. Worst case, the corporate world wasn’t going anywhere, and I could always return - poorer but wiser from my experience.
Four years later, I have zero regrets. Here are the four biggest lessons entrepreneurship has taught me.
1. Add value, add value, add value
Be a giver before a taker.
Back in 2017, I had the idea to throw BagelFest and exactly zero connections to the bagel industry. So instead of pitching anyone on anything, I started an Instagram account and spent two years reviewing bagel shops and singing their praises (when warranted). There was no ask attached. I just expressed a genuine appreciation for a craft that had never received that sort of attention on social media.
By 2019, when I actually asked shops to participate in BagelFest, I'd built up enough goodwill that they said yes- even though none of us really knew what we were signing up for.
My BNI Chapter One group has a phrase for this: givers gain. When you give, people want to reciprocate. And even if they can’t do so directly, it all comes back around in unexpected ways.
2. Gather data with small bets to make big, high-conviction bets
After I quit my corporate job and BagelFest 2022 wrapped, I decided I’d try to make a living by productizing my expertise and emulating Scott’s Pizza Tours with NYC Bagel Tours. I ended up running hundreds of tours for thousands of guests.
While the tours had minimal overhead, on their own, I couldn’t figure out how to make them a sustainable long-term business (huge kudos to Scott Weiner, by the way- a friend and mentor who has figured it out, and now has two decades of pizza tour experience under his belt). But they gave me something incredibly valuable: a direct line to every single customer.
Through actively listening and pattern-recognition across thousands of conversations, I noticed something I never would have guessed from behind a computer screen: a lot of these guests didn't just want to eat bagels. They wanted to make them.
The tours were a low-risk bet that allowed me to collect the data for the next, bigger bet.
3. Your reputation is everything
It'll open doors - or close them - that you could never even imagine.
Starting a bagel baking class sounded like a great idea, except for two small details: I didn't know how to make bagels, and I didn't have a venue to teach out of. But because I'd spent years building a reputation as a giver and a connector in the bagel world, both problems solved themselves.
I got introduced to Reva Castillenti, an award-winning baker and bread consultant who partnered with me to develop the class from scratch. She taught me everything I know about making bagels, baking, and bread. She's since scaled up Small Good Bakery, her own bread consultancy. If you ever need dough help, she's the one to call.
I also got connected with Jimmy Stathakis, owner of Bagel Market, a newer shop that was looking to make a splash. Jimmy is a gentle giant- a shrewd, talented businessman whose success comes from a willingness to take risks and a habit of structuring every deal as a win-win. He'll probably hate this shoutout, since he prefers to operate behind the scenes, but I'm infinitely indebted to Jimmy and the whole Bagel Market team for their partnership.
Neither of those relationships happened because I asked for them directly. They happened because of who I'd already become in the community.
4. Success is not linear
Things are always harder, and take longer, than you think.
When I left my job four years ago, I wrote down a vision: grow BagelFest's prominence in New York, and eventually take it on a national tour. I studied the feasibility and had a sobering realization: we weren’t actually ready in 2022 to do the thing I’d quit my job for.
It took four more years than I expected. But in April 2026, we finally launched our first-ever BagelFest West. The goal I set on day one finally happened. Just not on the timeline my younger, more impatient self had in mind.
If there's a meta-lesson underneath all four of these, it's this: the returns on trust, reputation, and patience compound slower than you want them to. But with sustained effort and grit, they do compound.
What's next
Another ambitious project, leveraging nine years of data collection to take another big bet: the Museum of Bagels.
My vision is to create a mecca for bagel culture that can best be described as part Museum of Ice Cream, part Eataly, part Tenement Museum.
If that sounds crazy to you, so be it. And if that sounds interesting to you, please drop me a line.
No matter what, there is one lesson that’ll never cease to be true: keep on rollin’.