Weekend Update #045

Oct 15

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Welcome to Blue Room's Weekend Update. Each week, we're sharing what companies we're researching and the what, the who and the how that we think makes the companies interesting and unique. This roundup is brought to you weekly by a group of interns, creative minds, artists and investors who believe that through best in class investing along with the democratization of financial education we can do great things together. Enjoy, Explore and Share.

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REVEL

IN THE

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FUND ONE
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{Pre-Launch}

Celebration
Dinner

10.14.21

Denver, Colorado

Photos by Jeff Fierberg

Chef Kelly Whitaker and Chef Taylor Stark
take us through the ethos of The Wolf’s Tailor,
Id Est’s shared vision with Blue Room,
and the evening’s tasting menu.

On Thursday, October 14th, Blue Room hosted a private dinner at The Wolf’s Tailor to celebrate the upcoming launch of Fund One. The Wolf’s Tailor is one of the five restaurants operated by Chef Kelly Whitaker, Blue Room’s Sustainability and Hospitality partner.

We spoke with Chef Kelly and Chef de Cuisine Taylor Stark about how The Wolf’s Tailor approaches each menu, the mission and sustainability behind each plate, and ultimately, how ie hospitality and Blue Room share the same ethos: that we are all interconnected - and together we can do anything.

Blue Room: First of all, thank you for taking the time! Can you please introduce yourselves?

Chef Kelly: I am Kelly Whitaker, one of the co-founders of The Wolf’s Tailor, working on the culinary side. And today we have Chef Taylor Stark who is our current Chef de Cuisine, who manages the kitchen on a day-to-day. He’s largely in charge of a lot of creative ethos around the ideas that we try to create within the group, and he articulates a lot of that onto the plate for us.

Chef Taylor: That was a very supportive opening statement from Chef, but yes, I’m Chef de Cuisine at The Wolf’s Tailor. I’ve been here for about a year. You know when I first came to The Wolf’s Tailor, we were just doing to-go food, so it’s pretty unique to reflect on this past year. I’ve been working really closely with Chef Kelly, not just on food, but on ethos, culture, the kind of vision we have for The Wolf’s Tailor as we move forward.

Blue Room: How would you describe The Wolf’s Tailor’s ethos?

Chef Taylor: It’s organic, it’s ever-changing and evolving. Our vision has less to do with the finished product, less to do with the amount of people we can necessarily get in the door, or even the revenue behind it, but more with the soul and integrity behind the food. What's our imprint on agriculture, what's our imprint on the economy, how do we create sustainable, healthy environments for everyone? That is going to be a part of the mission in this group.

Chef Kelly: We talk a lot about what is our gift back to the world, to humanity, and to people. It's ridiculous because we are talking about a restaurant that cooks and serves food, but you know, really for us it’s the big picture and the idea of what a restaurant is supposed to look like - especially through a time like this. I think we're all missing something so it's really great to bring the neighborhood together.

It’s an ever-evolving idea trying to define exactly what The Wolf’s Tailor is - we’re more defining what our culture is, what our path is, how we keep growing and evolving. Sometimes that means tasting menus and sometimes it means we're just going to cook pizza on a certain night. Currently The Wolf’s Tailor is a tasting menu restaurant. We serve 10 to 12 different things throughout the course of the evening, and we offer beverage pairings. We’re never stuck on one thing and we kind of just like to figure out what's working in the moment, but most of all, we want to support, we want a supportive system around what we're trying to create.

Chef Taylor: The kind of statement we like to have here in the kitchen is identifying less with our finished product, obsessing less over our finished product, and putting more of our energy into our procedures, our systems, our people, where our food comes from, our milling - that really is at the core of our values here. We kind of look at The Wolf’s Tailor as a testing ground for some of these ambitious ideas and, you know, some things click and some things don’t, but we’re not scared to do things a little against the grain.

Blue Room: Chef Kelly, can you tell us about your partnership with Min and how your ethos mirrors Blue Room’s approach to investing in the community?

Chef Kelly: Min is a very close friend and watching his journey, while not being part of that world, I think that we do share some similar thoughts around the system being, over the years, stuck in a rut. He asks himself a lot of the same questions I do: ‘Why is it this way?’ It helps you find the place where you’re really needed. How do we solve this world’s problem? Maybe something that hasn't worked perfectly over time just seems to be a waste of time. And right now I feel like time is precious and I think it's our most valuable commodity.

I’ve watched Min find the different buckets and find the connectivity throughout them. A lot of times people say we have a hospitality group, and we actually took ‘hospitality group’ off of id est because I said, ‘That's just too limiting.’ I think what Min sees specifically is that with housing investments and hospitality and food supply chain and art, these things are interwoven with each other. Min sees that connection when it comes to ‘how do we have impact?’ Through his money or through his time, he's investing in people - I don't see him investing necessarily in just the project ever. He's invested in us, he's investing in art with Eduardo Sarabia and housing with Liminal space.

Min knew right away that great restaurants are created not just because there was a creative chef, it was because someone was thinking about how the building was next to a bike path, and not just what an apartment looks like, but how it is designed, how it is laid out…. because that's where you start to see a community kind of rise up together.

When I look at Min and the work he's trying to do, I think he sees the same thing that we see, that this is something that we all need to move towards in our own right. So for us, maybe it's more restaurant-directed or it's growing grain or working with our farmers or building a grain mill or whatever it is we're doing. We’re moving in that direction for specific reasons: giving back to the planet, people, and ideas that are sustainable for the future.

Blue Room: Can you tell us about tonight’s menu?

Chef Kelly: We're really excited to have everyone in The Wolf’s Tailor tonight. I really love it when these two worlds collide and we get to serve the Blue Room community. It’s a tasting menu, a combination inspired by the time of the year, the season, the cooking method, and the people that we have in the kitchen that drive a lot of the creativity. I’ll let Chef Taylor get into some more of the specifics of the menu, but the idea is a very communal, fun evening that we're very much looking forward to.

Chef Taylor: We were just really excited - everyone, full team effort - to really try and create something very unique, very special for us here. If you look at The Wolf’s Tailor’s stations, being a cold side in addition to a pastry or pantry, we have a sauté station where we're doing pasta, we have a woodfire grill attached to a robata grill and then a hearth oven. So really part of this tasting menu experience is highlighting all those different aspects and all those different cooking techniques. Cold plated grains pasta woodfired where we're celebrating smoke and flame and ember coming into a hearth oven where you're going to replicate some of those deeper, charred flavors. Trying to highlight things that are part of our blueprint and DNA - some of the byproduct from us butchering and cleaning bison and proteins and vegetables will be the first bites tonight. Some of them will be byproduct with an eye for limiting waste, fermentation, how do we extend seasons, how do we alter flavors and present things in a way that people might not have seen before. You guys are going to see Colorado grain incorporated on three different dishes on tonight's menu as well. When it comes to the menu we're kind of at the mercy of some of our like hyper seasonal local purveyors, but that is very intentional - we don't want to be a restaurant that is selling tomatoes and may, you know, or melons in October. We let them drive our menu. What is the farmer excited about? What is our purveyor excited about? What is our seafood rep, and our Colorado livestock rep excited about? That's what's going to drive our menu and that's very much what you guys are going to be seeing for tonight, presented in a really elegant and also fun, playful way.

— THE MENU —

AMUSE BOUCHE

Toasted Rye, Fermented Cashew Cream

Bison Tartare, Sesame Seed Crisp

Oyster, Plum Mignonette

Raw
Kampachi, Nam Prik, Taro, Mango

Salad
Golden Beet, Beet Namh Jim, Pink Celery, Citrus

Robata
New Zealand Vension, Date, Pistachio

Grain
Yecora Rojo Agnolotti, Wild Mushroom, Goat Cheese

III

Colorado Bison Striploin
Benne Seed Pesto, Pear Tare

Sunomono
White Ponzu

White Sonoran Sourdough “A La Minute”
Cultured Butter, Garden Peppers

Red Cabbage
Scallop XO, Kumquat

Sweet Corn Custard
Corn Husk Meringue, Lemon

Chef Cassie Borshorff: We really just wanted to highlight local Colorado corn - give you one little bite that just like crushes you with that corn flavor. And in the process, make sure we utilize the entire ear of the corn, from the husk down to the cob.

Apple Abruzzi Rye Cake
Koji Persimmon Marshmallow, Almond Praline, Jam

Chef Cassie Borshorff: We're cooking a bunch of apples down into apple butter, and that is then mixed into this fried cake with some cardamom so it has like a really nice warming spice to it. We're toasting it to order and it's getting this really good, crispy, buttery layer on it, so that you have to break through it to actually get to the cake.

Following the incredible success of the evening, Blue Room Founder & Director Minyoung Sohn shares, “I’d like to thank everyone for making it out and thank all the partners who are intimately connected with us. We couldn’t have had a more perfect group of 45 people. The evening touched on all of the elements of the key human capital stories that we are founded on, and has given us continued confidence in what we are doing here at Blue Room.”

ENJOY

Video Credit: Nicholas Nazmi

Adjusted Retail & Food Services Sales SA (Seasonally Adjusted) Total Monthly % Change from the U.S. Census Bureau came in at a monthly increase of 0.7% in September which was a surprise relative to consensus estimates of -0.2%. This could be seen as indicative of continued economic strength but could also be a reflection of consumer price increases as opposed to volumetric increases in sales.

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.4% in September on a seasonally adjusted basis after rising 0.3% in August, on a MoM basis. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 5.4% before seasonal adjustment. The data came in relatively close to economists expectations, but it is still one of the highest levels since 2008 for CPI including gas and food.

NFIB Small Business Optimism Index fell one point to 99.1 for the month of September, representing its lowest level since March, as five out of the ten components declined. Expectations for better conditions also fell five points to its lowest since December 2012, while the NFIB Uncertainty Index increased five points to 74. Overall, owners have grown pessimistic about future economic conditions, and over half reported job openings that could not be filled.

For August 2021, Total U.S. Job Openings fell to 10.4 million from a July high of 11.1 million, surpassing the expected decrease to 11.0 million. There are still 2 million more job openings in the U.S. than unemployed laborers who are seeking employment, but that gap started to close slightly in August. For October 2021, University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment fell to 71.4 from 72.8 in September, falling more than the expected increase to 73.1. Consumer sentiment is at the second lowest level seen since 2011.

Thank you Blue Room Analysts OMAR GUZMAN, IAN CARTER. NICK PEART, JARED FENLEY.

Moderna operates as a clinical-stage biotechnology company. The Company focuses on the discovery and development of messenger RNA therapeutics and vaccines. Moderna develops mRNA medicines for infectious, immuno-oncology, and cardiovascular diseases.

Ambarella, Inc. was incorporated in the state of California in 2004. It is a leading developer of low-power systems-on-a-chip, or SoC, semiconductors for AI processing, advanced image signal processing and high-resolution video compression. Ambarella Inc. historically sold its solutions for human-viewing applications for public infrastructure, internet protocol security cameras, sports cameras, wearables, and aerial drones. Since 2018, the company has gone to market with its next generation of artificially intelligent, computer vision SoCs under its CVflow architecture, a suite of software and hardware that run convolutional neural networks and deep neural networks for environmental adaptivity architecture, a suite of software and hardware that run convolutional neural networks and deep neural networks for advanced t. The CVflow product line includes programmable wafers that can run commonly used AI software programs like Tensorflow and Caffe in order to customize AI applications. Because CV SoCs are programmable, they provide customers with the option to run customized software that is unique to their specific needs. Some of the notable applications of CVflow technology include terrain mapping, object detection, stereo object detection, classification and tracking, image processing, semantic and instance segmentation, and facial recognition. Since 2018, Ambarella has sold more than 450,000 CV units to over 100 customers.

Corporate Profile:

Coinbase, Inc. was founded in 2012. The Company operates globally and is a leading provider of end-to-end financial infrastructure and technology for the cryptoeconomy. The Company offers retail users the primary financial account for the cryptoeconomy, institutions a state of the art marketplace with a deep pool of liquidity for transacting in crypto assets, and ecosystem partners technology and services that enable them to build crypto-based applications and securely accept crypto assets as payment. In May 2020, the Company became a remote-first company. Accordingly, the Company does not maintain a headquarters.

On September 6, 2021, $300-per-week enhanced unemployment benefits from the federal government ceased, but throughout September, employment did not rebound as quickly as expected. In a recent Federal Reserve virtual conference, “Fed Listens: Perspectives on the Pandemic Recovery” (video link), business owners detailed the struggles they’ve faced throughout the pandemic and have continued to face following the end of federal unemployment benefits. There are around 2 million more job openings in the United States than there are unemployed individuals.

Why are there 3 million more unemployed Americans compared to before the pandemic when there are more than 3 million more job openings than before the pandemic?

3 Reasons:

Shifting job priorities during the COVID-19 era
High personal savings rate seen during the pandemic
Skill mismatch

Tuesday
October 12, 2021
9:30 AM

__________ __________

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Join the Blue Room team for a feedback session about 13D Research & Strategy.

Who is 13D?

Founded in 1983 by Kiril Sokoloff, 13D’s original, eponymous project allowed subscribers to piggyback on the ideas of the investment greats—the Warren Buffetts and Carl Icahns. At the time, 13D filings (notifications filed with the SEC when a company or individual purchased a 5% share in a public company) were totally ignored. Sokoloff saw their immense value as thousands of U.S. public companies were selling way below their break-up value and visionary investors were generating huge returns.

Over the decades, 13D has continued to apply a unique and open perspective in order to find investment opportunities for its clients. Our research is not generated behind closed walls - it’s generated on the streets of cities and towns around the world and over dinners with today’s most promising thought leaders. We read and re-read the lessons of history - they are integral to making sense of the world today.

Tune in to learn more about the impact 13D Research & Strategy has had on the BlueRoom team