What does Nick Kokonas mean when he says every arbitrage is about timescale?

Nick Kokonas says every edge he has found came from a step that moved slower than it needed to. In trading it was the 30-second paper order. In restaurants it was booking by phone and prices fixed on a menu printed once a quarter. He argues that any such window always closes, quickly or slowly, as others copy it and computers speed it up, so the opportunity is in spotting the next slow step.

• Kokonas says he turned down podcasts for about three years until this idea gave him something new to say.
• He says his trading arbitrage shrank the following year as competitors caught on.

▸In their words

“Once I was in the restaurant business, the slow thing became, how do people make reservations?” Nick Kokonas · at 44:02 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on My First Million (2026-10-26). Read the whole episode summary →

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