August 12, 2024 • 11 mins
Braeden Anderson is the dynamic CEO and co-founder of Absecon Capital, Inc., a pioneering hospitality management and ownership group, with innovative subsidiaries Kook Burger and Black Turtle Coffee. Under Braeden's visionary leadership, Absecon Capital is transforming the U.S. coffee and casual dining industries. Our brands are not merely acquired; they are meticulously crafted from the ground up, embodying our core values of exceptional craftsmanship, uncompromising quality, and fresh, innovative experiences.
Braeden Anderson is a multifaceted leader—an author, attorney, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is the author of BLACK RESILIENCE: The Blueprint for Black Triumph in the Face of Racism, a groundbreaking work that provides a powerful strategy for Black empowerment and success. Braeden also founded the Black Resilience Foundation, dedicated to advancing this mission.
A former Division I college basketball player, Braeden achieved remarkable success on the court with the Seton Hall Pirates, winning the Big East Conference Championship while attending law school. He made history by becoming the first active male Division I basketball player to complete law school full-time while playing. Braeden's journey of overcoming socioeconomic and racial barriers, defying expectations, and conquering adversity has been featured in Forbes, Law360, The New York Times, ESPN, Bloomberg, NBC Sports, USA Today, and more. to the hospitality industry, inspiring others with his relentless drive and vision.
Social Media and Websites:
Braeden Anderson is a multifaceted leader—an author, attorney, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is the author of BLACK RESILIENCE: The Blueprint for Black Triumph in the Face of Racism, a groundbreaking work that provides a powerful strategy for Black empowerment and success. Braeden also founded the Black Resilience Foundation, dedicated to advancing this mission.
A former Division I college basketball player, Braeden achieved remarkable success on the court with the Seton Hall Pirates, winning the Big East Conference Championship while attending law school. He made history by becoming the first active male Division I basketball player to complete law school full-time while playing. Braeden's journey of overcoming socioeconomic and racial barriers, defying expectations, and conquering adversity has been featured in Forbes, Law360, The New York Times, ESPN, Bloomberg, NBC Sports, USA Today, and more. to the hospitality industry, inspiring others with his relentless drive and vision.
Social Media and Websites:
- Instagram: @kookburgerbar, @blackturtlecoffee, @kbraedenanderson
- Web: Black Resilience Foundation, kookburgerbar.com, blackturtlecoffee.com
- LinkedIn: Braeden Anderson
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm the rain ballad well with CEOs you should know,
brought to you by Comcast Business.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
My name is Braden Anderson. I'm the CEO of Absecon Capital,
or hospitality company that owns Black Turtle Coffee and Kockberger
and Bar.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
What is the mission of your company?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
So, Upseeking Capital's mission is to disrupt the hospitality industry.
And I think that looks different depending on the area
of hospitality that you're looking at.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
It's a big industry.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
So with Black Turtle Coffee, our goal was to kind
of study the business of coffee and in the evolution
of coffee, and most folks break it down into waves, right,
So the first wave of coffee was the first time
that coffee is being recognized as a global commodity that's
being regularly consumed in the household, right early nineteen hundred.
(00:47):
Second wave of coffee, Starbucks really gets the credit for
leading that revolution. Right of the second wave coffee is
a retail experience, right, experimenting with different flavors, all the
different flavors of law that we have that's been made mainstream, right,
is is second wave. Third wave is the rise of
specialty coffee. Coffee is a craft coffee is an art
(01:09):
where we start to focus a little bit more on
where did the beans come from? And Black Turtle is
focused on pioneering that fourth wave, which is more radical
transparency in terms of the crop date, right, so when
were these beans harvested and grown and taken from that farm?
Adding the single origin and fair trade focus that you
(01:29):
see bubble up a little bit in the third wave,
and then you know small bashed coffee roasting right, roast
dates being really really transparent about the freshness. Most of
the quality aspects of coffee comes from freshness, and so
in order to really compare being to bean, you got
to look at the crop date, when was the coffee roasted,
(01:49):
and where's the coffee from, right, and be able to
tell that story. And I think in most cases and
for most products, and this is certainly true in hospitality,
if there's not a great story to be told, usually
you don't hear the story, right. And so we try
to just kind of have a great story right, don't
make any sort of compromises on freshness or quality. And
Kuckburger really does the same thing. So never frozen certified
(02:12):
it and gets beef one hundred percent. We handball and
smash our smash burgers on the grill, to order handcut fries,
you know, freshly baked bunds, all those kinds of things.
I think just take things to another level for the
for the retail consumer. And I think the retail consumer
is demanding more.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I think that in hospitality and again in every industry,
the consumer is smarter and smarter and knows more and more,
and so I think that there's a big opportunity for
us and our brands, Black Turtle and Kuckburger to really
stand out.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Tell me a little more about Kuckburger. Heard quite a
bit about Black Turtle coffee. So what is Kuckburger?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
So Kuckburger, So the name comes from it's a surfing term.
So a kouk is is somebody out there on the ocean,
out there on the water who doesn't really know what
they're doing. They're kind of KOOKI they're kind of silly, right,
maybe they own a second home.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Our first location was in Brigantine, New Jersey, big surf
community down there, and you know, we just thought it
would be really funny, right, if you're going to start
a burger joint, A lot of the folks coming through. Right,
people get called kuks. I would be called a kook. Right,
I'm not local. I'm not local to the island. I
only serve a couple of months out of the year, Right,
(03:23):
I'm a transplant. And so I just thought that would
be kind of funny because that's the majority of the
customer base.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Rights, It's kind of a seasonal.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Island from a business standpoint, gets really really busy in
the summer, kind of slows down a little bit in
the winter and in the fall. And so we came
up with Kuckburger just to kind of own that, right,
So people call your name sometimes.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
It's just like, yeah, it's Kuckburger. Right.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Another word that sometimes people use as shoeby, which I
think a lot of people have heard of. It is
a little bit more common. And so our big shakes, right,
our twenty six down shakes, we have cakes on them
and you know, all different things on the rim. We
call those shoeby shakes, right, just kind of making the
vibe fun. Right, So our slogan is we take fun
(04:05):
food seriously.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Right, We're serious about fun food.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
And I think that there's often a misconception about like
can you have a fun restaurant and a fun vibe
that's surfing, that doesn't take itself too seriously.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
We got sports memorabilia all over the walls, right.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Like, it's a really fun place, but we take the
food really seriously and we have a scratch kitchen. And
so Kook is really about blending those two things together.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Very cool. Now you've written a book called Black Resilience,
The Blueprint for Black Triumph in the Face of Racism.
Tell us more about that.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, So I have a crazy story and in terms
of my upbringing and the certain things that I went through,
I grew up in a small town in Okatok's, Alberta, Canada,
where I was the only black kid in my entire
school for every school all the way up through high school.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
And then about halfway through high school.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I moved to North Carolina right into an all black school,
right and you know, from there, played college basketball mostly
black teammates and kind of learned black culture the reverse
way and had to grow up in an environment where,
for lack of a better term, was kind of behind
enemy lines.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I would get called the N.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Word every day, treated poorly, dealt with racism every single day,
and I didn't have the support, but I think that
that gave me an interesting perspective on race relations in
the United States, kind of being almost an outsider who's
lived here now for fifteen years and has been able
to watch everything that's going on. And Black resilience is
(05:38):
all about spreading the message of resilience, of positivity, of
what are some other stories that we can tell. Because
during twenty twenty, with George Floyd and all of the
really horrific things that were going on, there was a
huge push for the awareness campaign, right, and the awareness
campaign is very effective when you focus on narrative narratives
(06:00):
of trauma, right, when you focus on narratives of pain,
and you know, I don't want to discount the value
of those narratives as a tool to drive awareness, but
I was seeing something on the other side that I
think a lot of folks weren't seeing in the black community,
where you see boys and girls looking at that stuff
in those images and watching those videos and being bombarded
(06:20):
with that stuff and not having the other the flip
side of that message, which is that there are also
hundreds of thousands and millions of Black Americans who come
from difficult circumstances, who deal with racism, who've conquered it,
and who have excelled and achieved in every single industry
you can think of. And so I wrote that book,
Black Resilience. I try to tell my story and the
(06:43):
things that I overcame, and I tell various other stories
of very successful, black, excellent people, just to give that flip.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Side of the coin.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
And then I founded the Black Resilience Foundation, which its
goal is to spread those messages and raise awareness on
that side and try to really embolden the attitude of yeah,
there's racism, and no, it's not going to stop me, right,
And I think, you know, despite the fact that there
is this reality, right of racism being very very real
(07:15):
and very very difficult to overcome, and in some cases
it can cost you your life. I don't want to
take away from the gravity of how serious it is.
But the attitudes that we need to instill in our
young people cannot be born out of fear.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
We do need to encourage and uplift our young people
and point them in the right direction so that they're
not growing up feeling like it's hopeless.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
You talk about resilience, and for anyone who's experienced, whether
it's racism or any kind of trauma. There are pivot
points where people can go one way which they are destroyed,
and they can go another way in which they overcome.
And I wonder if you can talk about what lesson
you've found in your own life that all allowed you
(08:00):
to choose the path of resilience as opposed to the
path of destruction.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
It's a really, really good question. I think the big
moment for me where I had to make a choice
between going what I believe to be the right path
and what could have been a bad path for me
to go down when I was dealing with adversity and
racism and really the victimhood mentality right, and kind of
jostling back and forth in my mind where to go
(08:25):
and what decision to make. I was fourteen years old.
I had been homeless for about two years. I was
sleeping on different friends couches. I only had to sleep
outside maybe a half dozen times, so I wasn't outside
right there, you know, but being at that age, being
without a permanent home hurts, right. It's something that you feel.
And between that and you know, I grew up in
(08:48):
an abusive household.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
There was a moment where you're thinking.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
To yourself, this isn't fair, right, I'm dealing with racism
at school. I'm being treated unfairly. There's a moment where
I'm dealing with racism at school. I'm being treated unfairly.
Things aren't going my way. I'm fourteen and homeless, and
you start to put the pieces together enough to say,
this isn't fair, right, like this is, this is bs right,
(09:14):
this is I can't this isn't fair. I shouldn't be
dealing with this. And I think that there's that place
of hopelessness that you can get to, and you got
to decide which way you're gonna go. And for me,
I just decided I wasn't going to let whatever was
going on when I wasn't gonna let it beat me.
And the narrative that I still that it wasn't still
(09:36):
to me at that moment, that I still it's still
my mantra to this day is take inventory of the
things that you can control. Right, focus on the things
that you can control. I say it over and over
and over again in my book, and I honestly cannot
be more profound and important. Whatever it is that you're
going through in life, however overwhelming it may seem. Try
(09:58):
to just take a moment your breath and think about
what are the areas in my life that I have
some influence over? What are some areas in my life
where even if I can't control it, can I make
an impact?
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
What are some things that I can do? And I
think if you focus on that diligently and for long enough. Right,
it's not easy, But if you can be relentless in
your approach and focus on those variables that you can control,
there is really nothing that can stop you. And I
think that is that's the secret. And I think there's
(10:32):
some folks who have been through a lot, who have
been through a lot of pain, who aren't ready for
that message. And to those people, I love you and
I understand. But I think it's all about how can
we get you to that place where you can hear
that message and you can think about your life in
that way.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
If people want more information about your company and your products,
how do they find out more?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, so you can go to black Total Coffee dot com.
We sell bag beings online. You can order from our
shop online Grandpa Buber Eats find out where our shops
are located. You can go to Koockburger dot com and
make a reservation book a private party catering whatever your
needs may be. And you can go to pseconcap dot
(11:14):
com to kind of learn more about obsecing capital in
general and to learn more about the book. You can
visit Black Resilience Book dot com.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
CEOs you Should Know brought to you by Comcast Business,
offering the complete connectivity solution cybersecurity, Internet and mobile, all
from one provider, Comcast Business, powering possibilities
I'm the rain ballad well with CEOs you should know,
brought to you by Comcast Business.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
My name is Braden Anderson. I'm the CEO of Absecon Capital,
or hospitality company that owns Black Turtle Coffee and Kockberger
and Bar.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
What is the mission of your company?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
So, Upseeking Capital's mission is to disrupt the hospitality industry.
And I think that looks different depending on the area
of hospitality that you're looking at.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
It's a big industry.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
So with Black Turtle Coffee, our goal was to kind
of study the business of coffee and in the evolution
of coffee, and most folks break it down into waves, right,
So the first wave of coffee was the first time
that coffee is being recognized as a global commodity that's
being regularly consumed in the household, right early nineteen hundred.
(00:47):
Second wave of coffee, Starbucks really gets the credit for
leading that revolution. Right of the second wave coffee is
a retail experience, right, experimenting with different flavors, all the
different flavors of law that we have that's been made mainstream, right,
is is second wave. Third wave is the rise of
specialty coffee. Coffee is a craft coffee is an art
(01:09):
where we start to focus a little bit more on
where did the beans come from? And Black Turtle is
focused on pioneering that fourth wave, which is more radical
transparency in terms of the crop date, right, so when
were these beans harvested and grown and taken from that farm?
Adding the single origin and fair trade focus that you
(01:29):
see bubble up a little bit in the third wave,
and then you know small bashed coffee roasting right, roast
dates being really really transparent about the freshness. Most of
the quality aspects of coffee comes from freshness, and so
in order to really compare being to bean, you got
to look at the crop date, when was the coffee roasted,
(01:49):
and where's the coffee from, right, and be able to
tell that story. And I think in most cases and
for most products, and this is certainly true in hospitality,
if there's not a great story to be told, usually
you don't hear the story, right. And so we try
to just kind of have a great story right, don't
make any sort of compromises on freshness or quality. And
Kuckburger really does the same thing. So never frozen certified
(02:12):
it and gets beef one hundred percent. We handball and
smash our smash burgers on the grill, to order handcut fries,
you know, freshly baked bunds, all those kinds of things.
I think just take things to another level for the
for the retail consumer. And I think the retail consumer
is demanding more.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I think that in hospitality and again in every industry,
the consumer is smarter and smarter and knows more and more,
and so I think that there's a big opportunity for
us and our brands, Black Turtle and Kuckburger to really
stand out.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Tell me a little more about Kuckburger. Heard quite a
bit about Black Turtle coffee. So what is Kuckburger?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
So Kuckburger, So the name comes from it's a surfing term.
So a kouk is is somebody out there on the ocean,
out there on the water who doesn't really know what
they're doing. They're kind of KOOKI they're kind of silly, right,
maybe they own a second home.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Our first location was in Brigantine, New Jersey, big surf
community down there, and you know, we just thought it
would be really funny, right, if you're going to start
a burger joint, A lot of the folks coming through. Right,
people get called kuks. I would be called a kook. Right,
I'm not local. I'm not local to the island. I
only serve a couple of months out of the year, Right,
(03:23):
I'm a transplant. And so I just thought that would
be kind of funny because that's the majority of the
customer base.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Rights, It's kind of a seasonal.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Island from a business standpoint, gets really really busy in
the summer, kind of slows down a little bit in
the winter and in the fall. And so we came
up with Kuckburger just to kind of own that, right,
So people call your name sometimes.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
It's just like, yeah, it's Kuckburger. Right.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Another word that sometimes people use as shoeby, which I
think a lot of people have heard of. It is
a little bit more common. And so our big shakes, right,
our twenty six down shakes, we have cakes on them
and you know, all different things on the rim. We
call those shoeby shakes, right, just kind of making the
vibe fun. Right, So our slogan is we take fun
(04:05):
food seriously.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Right, We're serious about fun food.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
And I think that there's often a misconception about like
can you have a fun restaurant and a fun vibe
that's surfing, that doesn't take itself too seriously.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
We got sports memorabilia all over the walls, right.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Like, it's a really fun place, but we take the
food really seriously and we have a scratch kitchen. And
so Kook is really about blending those two things together.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Very cool. Now you've written a book called Black Resilience,
The Blueprint for Black Triumph in the Face of Racism.
Tell us more about that.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, So I have a crazy story and in terms
of my upbringing and the certain things that I went through,
I grew up in a small town in Okatok's, Alberta, Canada,
where I was the only black kid in my entire
school for every school all the way up through high school.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
And then about halfway through high school.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I moved to North Carolina right into an all black school,
right and you know, from there, played college basketball mostly
black teammates and kind of learned black culture the reverse
way and had to grow up in an environment where,
for lack of a better term, was kind of behind
enemy lines.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I would get called the N.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Word every day, treated poorly, dealt with racism every single day,
and I didn't have the support, but I think that
that gave me an interesting perspective on race relations in
the United States, kind of being almost an outsider who's
lived here now for fifteen years and has been able
to watch everything that's going on. And Black resilience is
(05:38):
all about spreading the message of resilience, of positivity, of
what are some other stories that we can tell. Because
during twenty twenty, with George Floyd and all of the
really horrific things that were going on, there was a
huge push for the awareness campaign, right, and the awareness
campaign is very effective when you focus on narrative narratives
(06:00):
of trauma, right, when you focus on narratives of pain,
and you know, I don't want to discount the value
of those narratives as a tool to drive awareness, but
I was seeing something on the other side that I
think a lot of folks weren't seeing in the black community,
where you see boys and girls looking at that stuff
in those images and watching those videos and being bombarded
(06:20):
with that stuff and not having the other the flip
side of that message, which is that there are also
hundreds of thousands and millions of Black Americans who come
from difficult circumstances, who deal with racism, who've conquered it,
and who have excelled and achieved in every single industry
you can think of. And so I wrote that book,
Black Resilience. I try to tell my story and the
(06:43):
things that I overcame, and I tell various other stories
of very successful, black, excellent people, just to give that flip.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Side of the coin.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
And then I founded the Black Resilience Foundation, which its
goal is to spread those messages and raise awareness on
that side and try to really embolden the attitude of yeah,
there's racism, and no, it's not going to stop me, right,
And I think, you know, despite the fact that there
is this reality, right of racism being very very real
(07:15):
and very very difficult to overcome, and in some cases
it can cost you your life. I don't want to
take away from the gravity of how serious it is.
But the attitudes that we need to instill in our
young people cannot be born out of fear.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
We do need to encourage and uplift our young people
and point them in the right direction so that they're
not growing up feeling like it's hopeless.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
You talk about resilience, and for anyone who's experienced, whether
it's racism or any kind of trauma. There are pivot
points where people can go one way which they are destroyed,
and they can go another way in which they overcome.
And I wonder if you can talk about what lesson
you've found in your own life that all allowed you
(08:00):
to choose the path of resilience as opposed to the
path of destruction.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
It's a really, really good question. I think the big
moment for me where I had to make a choice
between going what I believe to be the right path
and what could have been a bad path for me
to go down when I was dealing with adversity and
racism and really the victimhood mentality right, and kind of
jostling back and forth in my mind where to go
(08:25):
and what decision to make. I was fourteen years old.
I had been homeless for about two years. I was
sleeping on different friends couches. I only had to sleep
outside maybe a half dozen times, so I wasn't outside
right there, you know, but being at that age, being
without a permanent home hurts, right. It's something that you feel.
And between that and you know, I grew up in
(08:48):
an abusive household.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
There was a moment where you're thinking.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
To yourself, this isn't fair, right, I'm dealing with racism
at school. I'm being treated unfairly. There's a moment where
I'm dealing with racism at school. I'm being treated unfairly.
Things aren't going my way. I'm fourteen and homeless, and
you start to put the pieces together enough to say,
this isn't fair, right, like this is, this is bs right,
(09:14):
this is I can't this isn't fair. I shouldn't be
dealing with this. And I think that there's that place
of hopelessness that you can get to, and you got
to decide which way you're gonna go. And for me,
I just decided I wasn't going to let whatever was
going on when I wasn't gonna let it beat me.
And the narrative that I still that it wasn't still
(09:36):
to me at that moment, that I still it's still
my mantra to this day is take inventory of the
things that you can control. Right, focus on the things
that you can control. I say it over and over
and over again in my book, and I honestly cannot
be more profound and important. Whatever it is that you're
going through in life, however overwhelming it may seem. Try
(09:58):
to just take a moment your breath and think about
what are the areas in my life that I have
some influence over? What are some areas in my life
where even if I can't control it, can I make
an impact?
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
What are some things that I can do? And I
think if you focus on that diligently and for long enough. Right,
it's not easy, But if you can be relentless in
your approach and focus on those variables that you can control,
there is really nothing that can stop you. And I
think that is that's the secret. And I think there's
(10:32):
some folks who have been through a lot, who have
been through a lot of pain, who aren't ready for
that message. And to those people, I love you and
I understand. But I think it's all about how can
we get you to that place where you can hear
that message and you can think about your life in
that way.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
If people want more information about your company and your products,
how do they find out more?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, so you can go to black Total Coffee dot com.
We sell bag beings online. You can order from our
shop online Grandpa Buber Eats find out where our shops
are located. You can go to Koockburger dot com and
make a reservation book a private party catering whatever your
needs may be. And you can go to pseconcap dot
(11:14):
com to kind of learn more about obsecing capital in
general and to learn more about the book. You can
visit Black Resilience Book dot com.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
CEOs you Should Know brought to you by Comcast Business,
offering the complete connectivity solution cybersecurity, Internet and mobile, all
from one provider, Comcast Business, powering possibilities
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