JJ Would Never

“JJ would never” is shorthand at Penny Jar for the bar we hold founders to when they’re building generational businesses.

Joseph Jacob (“JJ”) is the co-founder and CEO of Burnt, which builds an AI agent that pulls orders from the voicemails, emails, and spreadsheets food distributors are buried in and gets them into the ERP in seconds. Born into a fourth-generation food supplier family, JJ started on shrimp factory floors and founded Burnt to modernize how food moves.

On stage at our inaugural AGM in San Francisco in September 2026, he sat down with SriRaj Kantamneni, EVP and Chief Information and Digital Officer at Schreiber Foods, to talk about what Silicon Valley gets wrong about traditional industries. Sri is a member of the Penny Jar Collective, the senior operators and executives who support our founders. The takeaways:

Tech aversion is learned. The assumption is that traditional industries are antiquated and resistant to change. In reality, many adopted technology in the first wave, then got abandoned by vendors who folded or walked away. Their hesitation comes from a negative experience with technology partners, not the tech itself.

Trust is earned. Where family businesses are empires, trust is the barrier to entry. Today’s multimillion-dollar company was once someone’s dad working out of a truck. JJ gets it. Burnt is a family business too (his wife is his co-founder), built to last generations. He proves it by showing up, whether that’s another cross-country flight or 6 AM at the distribution warehouse.

Right of first deployment. Trust gets you in the door. Solving the first problem keeps you there, because you’re the one they call for the next one, and the one after that. Burnt is now its customers’ second-largest tech spend after ERP. Knowing JJ, he won’t settle for second.

Plenty of AI startups want into traditional industries. Few will take the red-eye for a 6 AM warehouse visit. Skip it? JJ would never.