The Founder’s Secret Sauce: Andris Lagsdin's Recipe for Entrepreneurial Success
If you've ever watched a pizza being made in an Italian restaurant, you've probably seen the pizza stone. It's that round lump of ceramic or terra cotta that the chef slams into the oven to preheat before sliding the dough on top. The stone helps transfer heat from the oven walls to the dough faster and more evenly than if you just slid the raw dough straight in.
But here's the thing: a pizza stone isn't perfect. It can only absorb so much heat, which means it can only give off so much heat to the dough. And that's where Andris Lagsdin saw an opportunity.
Lagsdin is the founder of Baking Steel, a direct-to-consumer kitchenware business in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that makes the original pizza steel - a thick slab of steel that goes in your home oven to heat faster than stone, hold more energy, and produce crisp bottoms, better oven spring, and faster bakes.
The pizza steel wasn't Lagsdin's first foray into entrepreneurship. He was already running Stoughton Steel Company, a family business that manufactures metal products. But when he read in Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine that steel conducts heat better than stone, he decided to prototype a pizza steel from a steel slab at his factory.
That was 2012. The rest is history - or at least, the kind of history you can Google. The pizza steel launched on Kickstarter in 2012 and took off after Kenji López-Alt reviewed it on Serious Eats. Baking Steel has since expanded its product line to include griddles for stovetop use, cherry wood pizza peels, pumice cleaning bricks, dough recipe kits, and accessories. They sell direct via bakingsteel.com (Shopify), on Amazon, and at Sur La Table.
But what about the secret sauce? What's Lagsdin's recipe for entrepreneurial success?
"I've always been a practical guy," he told me over the phone. "I don't like to take risks unless I have to."
Lagsdin's approach is all about taking things one step at a time, doing what works, and staying flexible enough to change direction when necessary. It's not rocket science - or modernist cuisine, for that matter. But it's effective.
"I don't think there's any secret sauce," he said. "It's just about being practical."
And that's the thing about Lagsdin's recipe for success: It's not fancy or flashy. It doesn't involve a lot of hype or jargon. It's just about doing what works, staying flexible enough to change direction when necessary, and being practical in your approach.
"The key is to be practical," he said. "If something isn't working, you have to be willing to change directions."
That's a lesson worth remembering for anyone looking to start their own business - or even just looking to make a better pizza at home.
