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The CEO of Naya calls his mom daily, refuses to have an assistant, and no longer sends 11 p.m. emails

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Hady Kfoury, the founder and CEO of Naya, a Middle Eastern-inspired food chain. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I created Naya to share the authentic Middle Eastern flavors I grew up with, in a modern and fast-casual way. Today, we have 43 locations. We’re adding 12 more this year, and 25 next year. Our goal is to reach 200 locations by 2030.

It takes a lot of work and it’s a competitive environment.

I’m very proud that I’m a CEO and still so hands-on. I work a lot — and I’m not saying this is a healthy lifestyle.

I wake up around 6 a.m.

I try to have a peaceful hour before the rest of my family wakes up. Recently, I’ve been exercising in the morning because I find it difficult to do it after work, especially if I get home late. So I try to work out between 6:20 and 6:50.


Naya founder and family

Kfoury said he walks his kids to school after they eat breakfast every day. 

Nico Schinco for BI



I call my mom at 6:50 a.m. every morning

I call my mom usually every day at 6:50 a.m. We speak for about five to 10 minutes.

My mom is an unbelievable cook and she hosted a lot growing up. She would have 20 to 100 people over for dinner and cook everything from scratch, with flower arrangements and everything. She’s a great resource when it comes to understanding the food trends in Lebanon.

I don’t eat breakfast during the week

Monday through Friday, I drink tons of coffee but no breakfast. On weekends I eat a heavy breakfast. I don’t know why, but that’s how my body works.


Naya founder and family

Kfoury grew up speaking French as his first language and wanted to pass that on to his children. 

Nico Schinco for BI



I wake up my kids and my wife prepares breakfast for them. Then we leave home by 7:50 a.m. and walk to school. My children go to a French International school. Lebanon was a French colony for many years and it was my first language. So I wanted to pass that down to my kids.

I refuse to have an assistant

Our office is next to Grand Central and I head there after dropping my kids off around 8:15 a.m.

I refuse to have an assistant and I schedule everything myself. I’m very into routines and habit. I don’t want to have to talk to someone right after I finish a call. I’d rather take a half-hour break and tackle my emails first. It would be very hard to have someone schedule my day and not know what I really need between meetings.

I go to Naya every day

We’re surrounded by roughly eight or nine restaurants within a few minutes walking distance. So I go to one every day.

I switch up a lot, but my go-to order is a chicken kebab with a lot of tahini. 70% of our sales go to chicken shawarma. So I try to have that as well, to confirm consistency.


Naya food bowl

Kfoury tries to visit a Naya location every day during lunch or before opening. 

Nico Schinco for BI



I try and be as incognito as possible. If I go during a lunch rush, I avoid talking to the team and just evaluate the experience. The quality of the food is extremely important.

Sometimes on my way to work, I’ll go into a restaurant before opening. I try to make it feel like I’m a partner — not the boss — and everything is business as usual. I ask workers if anything is bothering them, how things are moving, and then I do some spot checks on food quality and cleanliness.

I have a lot of calls to import ingredients

I don’t want to turn Naya into an import-export business but I’d love to get 20 to 30% of our products to come straight from Lebanon. We need to be authentic and true to our toots.

It takes a lot of coordination because there’s a seven-hour timezone difference. Lebanon also operates differently and that’s another challenge. Samples can take time, especially when it’s a refrigerted product, so it’s a lot of communication.

The tariffs add another layer of complications. I’ve been trying to negotiate and split the difference between us and our manufacturers. It hasn’t been so bad for Lebanon so far, but the uncertainty stresses us.

I have dinner with my aunt once a week

Similar to my mom, my aunt is an unbelievable cook. We have dinner together once a week at her place and she cooks a little bit of everything, but with a big focus on Lebanese food. It’s very hard to take her recipes and scale it commercially, but she’s an unbelievable person to go for new ideas.

I work 14- to 16-hour days


Naya

Kfoury tries to get home to his family by 7:30 p.m. so he can have dinner with his kids. 

Nico Schinco for BI



I try to get home by 7:30 p.m. It’s important for me to have dinner with the kids. I try to limit myself to two to three business dinners or events per week. When I have those, I go straight from the office to dinner and then I’m back home by around 10 p.m.

I’m constantly working. I check my emails on the subway and while I’m walking on the streets of New York. Even when I watch TV, I try to shift to something industry-related, either from an entrepreneurial perspective or cooking.

Right now, we’re emerging and there’s so much going on, that I think my presence is very important. So it’s an easy 14- to 16-hours a day.

I used to get copies of every review

I can’t sleep well knowing that I have so many unread emails. For almost 17 years, I would get a copy of every customer review from Yelp, Google, or customer support.


Naya founder

Kfoury said he learned that it’s best not to send late-night emails. 

Nico Schinco for BI



About three months ago, I handed it over to someone that I trust who has a great grip on the customer experience. Now she sends me weekly reports on how things are going and I reduced my email intake by at least 150 emails per day.

Sometimes I would get emails with a complaint and even if it was 11 p.m., I would email the general manager and ask what went wrong. I learned I should not do that because it stresses out the team and it’s not healthy.

I spend my summer weekends in Connecticut

I try to disconnect as much as possible on the weekends, but I still have to spend four or five hours catching up. I love to work a bit on Sunday just to get ready for Monday before it gets crazy.

I spend my summer weekends in a town called Litchfield, Connecticut. We’re part of a community that has tennis courts. I play four or five hours on Sunday. It’s a lot of socializing and fun.

I play chess before bed


Naya founder and family

Kfoury tries to disconnect before going to sleep. 

Nico Schinco for BI



I was told to stop playing chess before bed and give myself an hour break. I’m hooked on Chess.com, where you can play with real people. It’s a great way to end my day.

I try to read half an hour before bed and completely disconnect. I love reading, but I don’t do more than five to 10 pages a night.

I go to bed around 11:30 p.m. My sleep score varies, but it never goes above 80. I’m trying to get better at that. I try to avoid wine at night. When I don’t drink and I disconnect from screens an hour or two before bed, I sleep much better.




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Pandemic watchdog calls the number of investigations into arts and restaurant bailouts ‘underwhelming’ and ’embarrassing’

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A top federal pandemic-aid investigator said the number of investigations into $43 billion in emergency grants to restaurants and entertainment businesses has been “embarrassing” and “underwhelming.”

William Kirk, the new inspector general for the Small Business Administration, urged Congress to give prosecutors more time to bring charges against people for defrauding two lesser-known pandemic aid programs: the $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund and the $14.6 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant.

“There is no possible way that our office would be able to investigate all of the outstanding referrals and cases that we’ve received in the SVOG and the RRF program,” he said at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. “The scope of the work is such that we would need much more time.”

Business Insider reported in 2023 and 2024 on hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed from SVOG to artists like Lil Wayne, Post Malone, Marshmello, and Nickelback. While those grants may have been legal under the extremely broad language passed by Congress, records showed that some artists spent their taxpayer grants on lavish parties, private jets, and multimillion-dollar bonuses for themselves.

Senator Joni Ernst has pushed to extend the window for bringing charges related to SVOG and RRF fraud. Ernst previously said her Democratic counterpart, Senator Ed Markey, wasn’t letting the bill advance, though Markey’s comments at the hearing suggested the logjam might be breaking.

“I am committed to passing this legislation as part of a comprehensive set of reforms and look forward to working with the chair to advance it, along with other bipartisan priorities,” Markey said. “That said, our efforts to fight against fraud should not be limited to going after small restaurants and theaters, especially when President Trump is letting off fraudsters left and right.”

The bill had been caught up in a larger dispute about other small-business programs that provide research funds to early-stage tech companies. Markey said in a statement that a deal had been reached to extend them for five years.

Kirk, who was sworn in early January, said in prepared testimony that while hundreds of complaints have poured in about potential abuse of the Shuttered Venues program, his office has six open investigations. He said that while his office’s investigators and auditors are “dedicated professionals,” they were focused on other areas of fraud in recent years.

In response to questions from Ernst, who leads the Senate small business committee, about whether Kirk’s office would have time to bring charges before time runs out in April or May, Kirk called the office’s work on those programs “underwhelming.”

“The handful of investigations — quite honestly, it’s an embarrassing number — of investigations we currently have underway, those would probably time out,” he added.

Congress has already extended the statute of limitations to charge some fraud related to the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans, two larger and better-known programs, tacking on another five years to the normal five-year window to bring charges.

Some Democrats at the hearing pressed Kirk to investigate the activities of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency at the SBA.

Asked by Senator Jeanne Shaheen if he was concerned about the office’s activities, Kirk said, “Not currently, no.”




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Gary Marcus calls out viral AI essay as alarmist ‘hype’

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If that viral essay about AI had been printed on paper, there’s a good chance AI researcher Gary Marcus would’ve ripped it up in disgust.

Marcus acknowledges something is happening in AI — just nowhere near the scale described in the recently viral essay, which predicted a looming disruption “worse than COVID.”

Marcus, who on X criticized the essay written by entrepreneur and investor Matt Shumer as having “not a shred of actual data,” dismissed its contents as alarmist in an interview with Business Insider.

“Hyped-up views have gotten us into a bad place, possibly one that’s going to lead to a serious economic recession or something like that,” Marcus told Business Insider. “And I guess I think that one should work from the facts rather than just trying to cause an alarm.”

In his essay titled “Something Big is Happening,” Shumer, whose past startup sells a subscription-based AI-assisted writing tool, warned that AI would upend not just software engineering, but most jobs done “on a screen.” Shumer also has a small VC fund.

Marcus said that while AI will replace some labor and affect jobs, the process will be much slower than what Schumer and others are describing.

AI can do some things well and help speed up work, but it’s just not near the point of replacing humans, Marcus said.

“AI can do a small subset of the tasks, and that sometimes speeds up human beings and things like that, but it rarely does all of what a human being can do in any particular domain,” he told Business Insider. “This will change over time, just to be clear. It is likely that AI will replace most human labor over the next century, but it’s not likely that it will over the next year or two.”

Companies that move too quickly to replace jobs with AI are likely to find themselves in a similar position as Klarna, Marcus said. In 2024, Klarna touted an AI assistant that could do the equivalent work of 700 people. By May 2025, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, long a proponent of AI, said that “as cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality.” He added that “investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us.”

“Six months or a year later, they come back with their tails between their legs because it turns out that the AI systems don’t do things as well as the human,” Marcus said. “So, I’m not saying that there’s nothing going on. I’m not saying that there’s no value in these AI systems, but they’re premature.”

Klarna told Business Insider that the number of its customer service queries handled by AI has increased “as it gets better at more complex requests,” and the company “has not reversed or scaled back its AI strategy.”

Marcus said that the more likely outcome in the short-term is not that AI will replace junior employees but rather that executives think it’s capable of doing so — and make what could ultimately prove to be a costly gamble.

“The biggest thing I think junior people have to worry about right now is a misapprehension by the C-suite that these techniques work better than they actually do,” Marcus said.

As of Friday morning, Shumer’s post has been viewed more than 80 million times on X alone. In a Substack post expanding on his criticisms, Marcus called Schumer’s post “weaponized hype.”

“The general impression that he conveys is basically that the sky is falling now, and at most, I think what’s really happening is the junior people are under some threat, and I think that threat is actually exaggerated,” Marcus told Business Insider.

Shumer previously told Business Insider that he wrote his essay in part to reach people like his dad, who may be skeptical or avoid AI entirely. He felt compelled to warn them about what might be on the horizon, even “if there’s just a 20% chance of it happening.”

Marcus’s biggest critique of Schumer’s post is that it doesn’t take into account current data and research showing that AI still has a long way to go, and that it didn’t present the full context behind a famous Model Evaluation & Threat Research graph assessing AI progress.

He said that other studies, including a June 2025 paper published by Apple’s Machine Learning Research Group, found limitations in what current models can do.

Marcus also said that many leading AI CEOs who have made bold predictions about the future of work have failed to deliver on past ones. He points to xAI CEO Elon Musk’s frequent rosy outlook on the number of robotaxis Tesla will put on the road (Musk once said one million by 2020) and to Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton’s 2016 statement that the world should stop training radiologists. (Last May, Hinton told The New York Times that his prediction was poorly worded and that while he was wrong on the timeline, the general direction for AI’s capabilities in radiology was correct.)

“What they have all learned to do is to sell the rosiest picture possible, and the media rarely calls them out,” Marcus told Business Insider.

On Thursday, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman made waves by predicting that most, if not all, white-collar tasks could be automated within the next year and a half.

One of the industries Suleyman mentioned is accounting. Marcus isn’t convinced.

“Think about accounting in particular,” he told Business Insider. “Even one mistake can cost a client hundreds of thousands of dollars or get them sent to jail or whatever. Accounting is a business that is built on accuracy. If you’re not accurate, you don’t have a business.”




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Washington Post union calls for Jeff Bezos to sell the paper after CEO resigns

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Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

  • The Washington Post’s CEO, Will Lewis, departed the paper on Saturday following sweeping layoffs.
  • The Post’s union, in a statement, called Lewis’ exit “overdue.”
  • The union also called for Jeff Bezos, who owns The Post, to sell the publication.

Unionized staffers from The Washington Post issued a statement supporting the abrupt Saturday departure of the publication’s CEO, Will Lewis, and called for Jeff Bezos to sell the paper.

“Will Lewis’s exit is long overdue,” the Washington Post Guild’s statement, which was published on X, read. “His legacy will be the attempted destruction of a great American journalism institution. But it’s not too late to save The Post. Jeff Bezos must immediately rescind these layoffs or sell the paper to someone willing to invest in its future.”

Representatives for the Post union did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

On social media, laid-off reporters celebrated the news of Lewis’ departure. Jada Yuan, a former culture writer at the Post, wrote that she had “never been more thrilled with a news alert.”

“Will Lewis, the absent, ineffective publisher of @washingtonpost has resigned. Or been fired,” she added. “It sucks that it happened after he couldn’t even show up on zoom to lay off 1/3 of the company. But the important thing is he’s gone.”

Lewis’ exit was announced Saturday afternoon, just days after sweeping layoffs hit the legacy publication, leaving hundreds of reporters out of work.

The publication’s unionized employees held a “Save the Post” rally earlier this week, focused on Bezos and Lewis, and said there were risks to press freedom and independent news if legacy publications like the Post are unable to continue operating.




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America’s largest labor movement calls for ICE to leave Minnesota before ‘anyone else is hurt or killed’

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America’s largest network of labor unions has condemned ICE after a federal agent on Saturday shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident.

The AFL-CIO, which represents nearly 15 million workers, called Pretti’s death “senseless.”

“As tens of thousands of Minnesotans made clear peacefully and powerfully yesterday, the Trump administration’s horrific operation — and their actions aimed at stoking violence and chaos — must end,” the labor group said in a statement.

“America’s unions join the call for ICE to immediately leave Minnesota before anyone else is hurt or killed. We demand local authorities conduct a full, transparent investigation that will lead to accountability for this tragic and violent act, and for Congress to use its power to hold ICE accountable.”


Alex Pretti of Minneapolis

Residents mourned Alex Pretti, who was killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis on Saturday.

Scott Olson/Getty Images



A federal agent fatally shot Pretti in Minneapolis, where he worked as an ICU nurse at a US Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. Minneapolis police confirmed on Saturday that Pretti is a US citizen. He had been filming the agents when the confrontation began.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Border Patrol and ICE, said Pretti was carrying a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun and “approached” agents at the scene. The department said officers tried to disarm Pretti, but he resisted. In multiple videos of the incident, however, Pretti is never seen threatening agents and is disarmed and subdued before he is shot. Minneapolis police said Pretti had a permit to carry the weapon.

The DHS deployed ICE and other federal agents to Minnesota as part of an immigration enforcement sweep called Operation Metro Surge, which began in December. The department says it has deployed around 2,000 federal agents across the state to detain and deport illegal immigrants. Trump has made securing the border and deporting those in the US who lack proper paperwork a central part of his administration’s agenda.

Local residents and business owners, however, have criticized the tactics federal agents are using to find and detain those people, resulting in protests across the state. Tensions further escalated after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, on January 7.

The CEOs of Minnesota’s largest businesses, including Target, Cargill, Allianz, and UnitedHealth, called for “immediate de-escalation” in a joint statement on Sunday.


Protests against ICE in Minnesota

A federal agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7.

ETIENNE LAURENT / AFP



On Saturday, Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bernie Burnham shared a statement calling for a “full and transparent investigation” into the recent shootings.

“‘Operation Metro Surge’ is not and has never been about enforcing immigration law. This is about a President who is angry with the people of Minnesota for disagreeing with his policies and is weaponizing the federal government against us in retribution,” Burnham said.

The American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing Pretti and other federal workers in the US, also criticized the Trump administration in a statement on Saturday. As an employee of the VA hospital, Pretti was a member of AFGE Local 3669.

“While details of the incident are still emerging, one fact is already clear: this tragedy did not happen in a vacuum. It is the direct result of an administration that has chosen reckless policy, inflammatory rhetoric, and manufactured crisis over responsible leadership and de-escalation,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in the statement.

Kelley said the presence of federal agents has stoked fear and division in the community.

“I urge everyone to remain disciplined and measured in public, even as we are rightly angry. Still, we must do what we can to maintain peace and calm,” Kelley said. “But do not mistake restraint for acceptance. Accountability will come, and AFGE will not be silent about the policies and decisions that led us here.”




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Trump calls for a one-year 10% cap on credit card interest in a Truth Social post

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  • President Donald Trump said that he was calling for a 10% cap on credit card interest for one year.
  • The President cannot unilaterally cap credit interest rates; it would require an act of Congress.
  • This week, Trump has also announced proposals to address the affordability of housing.

President Donald Trump has taken another shot at big business, this time targeting banks.

On Friday, Trump said on Truth Social that he would call for a 10% cap on credit card interest for one year.

“Please be informed that we will no longer let the American Public be ‘ripped off’ by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%, and even more, which festered unimpeded during the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration,” Trump wrote in his social media post.

“Effective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%,” he added. “Coincidentally, the January 20th date will coincide with the one year anniversary of the historic and very successful Trump Administration.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. The president cannot unilaterally impose such a cap; it would require an act of Congress to advance. Similar efforts that have been advanced in Congress have yet to become law.

The announcement, made on Truth Social, is the latest in a series of swipes at big business this week.

Earlier this week, he announced that he is instructing “representatives” to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds, aiming to lower interest rates and monthly payments. He also said he was barring “large institutional investors” from buying up single-family homes and signed an executive order that would limit defense contractors’ corporate spending.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.




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