Jai Lott, 41, began working in the coffee industry as a teenager in Australia before moving to the US and joining the coffee chain Bluestone Lane. He later became Blank Street’s first employee. After recently leaving Blank Street to move back to Australia, Lott reflected on some of the things he learned while helping grow the coffee chain, which now has more than 100 locations globally. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
In my career, I’ve been responsible for as many mistakes as good moves. The good moves, they 100x the bad ones, and the bad ones were always learning points. They were never one-way doors, which was good.
My big mistake at Blank Street was a close call with the blueberry matcha. I was on vacation when that got created by one of the guys who reported to me. Then it launched, and I think that if I had been there, I would not have launched it. It didn’t fit within the framework of how we were creating drinks at the time.
I was going so deep on innovation, trying to come up with new things no one had ever done. We did a sparkling grapefruit cold brew spritz. I was trying to be too complicated.
Blueberry matcha was so simple that I would have probably been like, “That’s not for us.” Yet it really changed the baseline of how we do things.
Six months after we launched it, I was like, “I have to readjust my entire framework for development.” Blueberry matcha changed the entire company. Blank Street is now 50% a matcha business, and our customers are expecting this sort of innovation every few months.
That was a really big learning moment for me: to really pay attention to everyone else’s ideas on the innovation side. I gatekept that for the first few years. I always had thought partners on it, but I was always sort of the final call. Had I been there in that moment, I probably would have said no, and God knows what would have happened.
A good litmus test
When you’re building a business, you spend more time with the people at work than with your family. If I’m going to be building something with someone, it really has to be someone that I would professionally work with, but also outside the office, we would be friends.
I have had a “no knucklehead” policy in my career. I’ve had plenty of job offers over the last 20 years from people who were in it for the wrong reasons, or from people I knew I couldn’t spend 12 hours a day with, five days a week.
Humor is a big part of it. Maybe it’s the Australian larrikin cliché. Really, talking about anything except work is a good litmus test. If a conversation can flow for five to 10 minutes and it has nothing to do with work in those early interview moments, that’s a huge signal to me.
In my first Blank Street interview with founders Issam Freiha and Vinay Menda, we talked about the vision for half of it, but we ended up talking for an hour about life and things we loved. We had little in common, but there was all this sort of open-minded policy on all things.
Open-mindedness from an employer is such a wonderful gift, and I was lucky enough to get that twice in my career, where there was just so much trust.
Push in your chair
In my interviews with job candidates, if I sit down with someone for a one-on-one chat and I bring in two glasses of water or two coffees, the interview could be incredible. They could hit every single thing on our checklist, but when we hop up, if you don’t push in your chair and take your cup out to the sink when I pick up mine, it could be a red flag.
As much as that seems silly, it’s a really interesting, almost hospitality-checklist moment. Do you think someone else is going to pick up after you? Or are you the kind of person who is selfless, projects hospitality, and would never want that to happen?
The kind of person who takes their own cup to the sink during an interview is the person I want to work with.
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