Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Hey guys, it's Dad. Today's episode is about two of my favorite things smashed together: doughnuts, and a city on the other side of the ocean called Dublin — the capital of Ireland. Because believe it or not, this rainy old city famous for castles and brown bread went completely, totally doughnut-crazy — and the story of how it happened has queues of three hundred people, cars honking at two in the morning, and a tiny doughnut stand smaller than your closet that beat them all.
But first — where do doughnuts even come from? Hundreds of years ago, Dutch settlers made little balls of sweet dough fried in oil. They called them olykoeks — which literally means "oily cakes." Delicious name, right? The problem was the middle never cooked — you'd bite in and get raw gooey dough. Then, the legend says, in 1847 an American sailor named Hanson Gregory got so annoyed at the soggy middles that he punched a hole right through the center of the dough — and boom: the ring doughnut. No middle, no problem. The hole isn't missing doughnut, guys — the hole is the invention.
Okay. Now let's fly to Dublin. It's 1978. Ireland back then was not a doughnut country — it was a tea and bread and potatoes country. But a man named Michael Quinlan had an idea. He built a little traveling doughnut stand called The Rolling Donut — and he ROLLED it, just like the name says, to concerts and festivals and shows all over Ireland, frying fresh doughnuts and shaking them in sugar and cinnamon while the music played. Ten years later, he parked for good: a tiny kiosk — basically a doughnut booth — right on O'Connell Street, the biggest, busiest street in all of Dublin. It's about the size of a garden shed. And here's the amazing thing: that little kiosk is STILL THERE today. Grandparents who bought doughnuts there as kids now bring their own grandkids.
And Michael had a daughter named Lisa, who basically grew up inside the doughnut business — learning the dough, the frying, the sugar, all of it, the way you guys are learning our stuff. Remember Lisa. She comes back at the end of the story.
Now — fast forward to 2015. Something wild happens. A little hole-in-the-wall shop called Aungier Danger opens on Aungier Street, selling big, puffy, over-the-top doughnuts — and Dublin absolutely loses its mind. Lines down the street. Doughnuts selling out by lunchtime. And when other people saw those lines, everybody wanted in. Doughnut shops started popping up everywhere — near the train stations, in the shopping centers, on every corner. Newspapers called it the great Dublin doughnut boom. Within a couple of years there were so many doughnut shops that Dublin started a walking tour — a tour! — where guides march tourists from doughnut shop to doughnut shop like they're famous monuments.
And then came the biggest doughnut day in Irish history. September 26th, 2018: Krispy Kreme — the giant American doughnut company — opened its very first shop in Ireland, at a shopping center called Blanchardstown. Guys. Three hundred people were lined up before seven in the morning. But the real madness was the drive-thru, because it was open twenty-four hours a day. People drove across the country — in the middle of the night — for doughnuts. The line of cars wrapped around and around, and people got so excited they started HONKING. At midnight. At two a.m. At three a.m. Every night! The poor families living nearby couldn't sleep — a whole neighborhood kept awake by doughnut honking. After about a week, Krispy Kreme surrendered and shut the drive-thru down at night. But get this — that one Dublin shop sold so many doughnuts that it became the most profitable Krispy Kreme ON EARTH that year. They had about thirteen hundred shops in thirty-one countries — and little Dublin beat them all.
But here's the twist, and it's the most important part of the story. Booms don't last. When everybody piles into the same idea at the same time, there are suddenly way too many doughnut shops and not enough bellies. And that same year — 2018 — Aungier Danger, the very shop that STARTED the craze, ran out of money and closed its doors. The shop that lit the fuse got burned by its own explosion. That happens all the time, guys — in doughnuts, in toys, in video games, in the companies I work with. The people who start a craze often aren't the ones who survive it.
So who DID survive? The little kiosk. The Rolling Donut — the garden-shed-sized stand from 1978 — sailed right through the whole boom and bust. And remember Lisa, Michael's daughter? Right in the middle of the madness, in 2016, she opened the family's first real shop by the River Liffey, started making fancy sourdough doughnuts and doughnuts for people who don't eat eggs or milk — and today the family that started with one rolling cart has around seven shops. Forty-five years of doughnuts, one family, still going. The tiny turtle beat all the flashy rabbits.
So what do I want you to remember? Three things. One: the hole in the doughnut is the invention — sometimes the smartest idea is what you take AWAY, not what you add. Two: when you see everyone sprinting into the same craze at once — lines around the block, honking at two a.m. — be careful. Booms are loud, and busts are quiet. And three: be like the kiosk. Small, steady, a little bit better every year, for forty-five years. That beats loud and flashy almost every time. It's kind of why I named my company Slow.
Next time we eat doughnuts together, hold one up and look through the hole. Somewhere in Dublin, right now, there's a kid doing the exact same thing at a little kiosk on O'Connell Street. Love you guys. Talk soon.