Nicolas Jammet was a senior at Georgetown University with a clear next step in front of him: graduation. But before he could get there, he and his two friends, Jonathan Neman and Nathaniel Ru, decided to take a chance on a business of their own. The three co-founders saw an opportunity to offer farm-to-table food at an accessible price. In 2007, they opened the first Sweetgreen near Georgetown’s campus. What started as a single restaurant has since grown into a national chain with hundreds of locations. Building a company to that scale hasn’t come without its challenges. For Jammet and his co-founders, that has meant not only figuring out how to scale the business, but also how to grow alongside a company—and a partnership—that started when they were in their early twenties. Now, nearly two decades after opening that first location, Jammet is focused on keeping Sweetgreen hungry. “Once you don’t see yourself as an underdog, even if in reality in the space you’re not in the same position you were before...I think it’s kind of dangerous,” Jammet told Founder Brew. Jammet looks back at growing up alongside Sweetgreen, maintaining an underdog mentality, the importance of building the right team, and what it takes to stay customer- and product-obsessed as a company scales. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You mentioned that your parents were entrepreneurs. How do you think growing up around business owners shaped your understanding to start something of your own? My parents were in hospitality, so they never wanted to push me into the restaurant business. At the same time, all of our parents believed in the value of building something, creating something. We watched our parents work so hard, blood, sweat, and tears. The line between work and personal is very blurred when you’re a founder and entrepreneur. We grew up understanding that and knew what it took to really build something. Have there been moments where the growth of the business has ever put a strain on the relationship with you and your co-founders? Obviously, being co-founders for 20 years and working together so closely, there’s moments where we don’t agree on things. Over the years [we] have done a really good job of spending a lot of time together talking through those things, and ultimately, a lot of those things were kind of some of the smaller parts of the business. We were always pretty aligned on what we wanted to build and what Sweetgreen could be, but also, that’s kind of the point of having three founders. There should be, you know, a healthy tension, different viewpoints. If we all sat there, all believing the same exact thing, then there would be no push and pull. And so for us, even sometimes when everyone agrees, one person would just take the opposite point and poke at it. And we always believe that the fact that there were three of us [meant that] we ended up with a better decision or better outcome. Read more about how Nicolas Jammet and his co-founders are navigating Sweetgreen’s growth.—JH | 
