Ray Kroc didn’t invent the McDonald’s hamburger. He invented the system that could reproduce it perfectly in thousands of places, and that distinction is really the whole book.

He was obsessed with consistency and quality control, with QSC (quality, service, cleanliness), long before anyone was saying “scalable platform”. Reading him I kept recognising the problem I work on in software. How do you take something that works once, in one place, with great people, and make it work everywhere, every time?

He’s also a study in patience. He was in his fifties when he bet everything on this, and the book isn’t romantic about it. The title is Grinding It Out for a reason. It’s a good antidote to startup mythology, a reminder that most businesses that last are built on unglamorous repetition done extremely well. I think about that whenever I design a process meant to outlive the team that built it.