Life-Long Learning

Conserving Energy and Why I Have A Pushup Alarm Clock

This post originally appeared on LessDoing, a project of Ari Meisel, an entrepreneur and productivity geek who decided to share his knowledge of and experiments in efficiency. Ari is an Achievement Architect, helping individuals become more effective at everything.

At SinglePlatform we do pushups on the hour every hour. I love this practice and the benefits extend beyond just making us barrel-chested.

The trigger for my pushups each hour is an alarm clock I’ve installed on my desktop. When the clock strikes 12, a window pops up notifying me its time to drop a give me 20 (actually 34 this week!)

Though practically simple, the pushup alarm clock exemplifies a broader approach I’ve taken to energy management in my life.

We cannot create more time in the day. We can only maximize our effectiveness within a given time window. When I take an introspective look at my performance, it’s very clear that the single greatest determinant of output in terms of quality and quantity is energy; the more energy I have, the more effective I am. It’s why people slam coffee and 5 hours like it’s going out of style.

But instead of lambasting our bodies with caffeine or 80 days worth of B12, an alternative approach to optimizing energy is to practice strategic conservation. It’s important to recognize we have a limited capacity to process data. Continual processing depletes our energy stores and less energy equates to lower levels of output. Hence, to maximize our effectiveness, you must pick and choose where you’re going to channel your mental bandwidth.

In the case of workday workouts, it’d be very easy to divert my attention to monitoring my clock in order to stay accountable to the “every hour on the hour” protocol. But by relying solely on my periphery, I’m creating one more thing I have to process/worry about which requires energy.

My alarm clock limits the amount of energy I spend triggering the desired action. It leaves me with more energy for the tasks that are vital to me being effective at my job. In general, the less we have to think about non-critical actions, the more we can focus on important things at an optimal level.

Other instances where I use systems and routines in order to conserve energy:

Morning routine: Wake up at 6am -> make eggs -> prayer/read scripture -> shower -> write or go to the gym -> go to work. I more or less do the same exact thing every weekday morning unless I was out late the night before. Adopting a morning routine that limits my decision-making has had awesome effects on my energy and productivity not only before I enter the office, but after as well. 

Workout regimen: I log all of my exercises, how many reps I got, and whether to increase the weight/repetitions next week. Because I always know exactly what I’m going to do each workout, I can focus on having a quick, upbeat workout instead of meandering around the gym thinking about what I want to do next.

Moleskin to do: anytime I think of something I need to do I put it on the back pages of my Moleskine notebook which I keep in my back pocket at all times. By logging “to-do’s” as they enter my mind, I can focus on important things instead of “having to remember to do x.”

It may seem trivial to worry about conserving energy on something as small as identifying that a new hour has approached. But it’s not about the pushups. It’s about all the value created when I’m not thinking about doing them. And the smallest changes, multiplied over a lifetime, have the greatest impacts.

Are there activities in your life that you’re expending energy on that you shouldn’t be? Are there ways to conserve energy here so that you can channel it towards something more important?
 

There’s No App for That?

Apps make our lives easier…but they aren’t going to actually do the heavy lifting for us. 

One of the attendees of my last skillshare class expressed some disappointment after I described how I manage my network. My personal CRM methodology is built on Google Docs. Specifically, I use a spreadsheet to keep track of the last time I connected with select people amongst other notes).

“I was really hoping that you had some type of app that you used for managing your network. Spreadsheets don’t work for me” he said.

Like anyone who takes pride in their work, I took some time to chew on this comment during my subway ride home…

The reason the spreadsheet “didn’t work for him” is because he wasn’t willing to give that system the diligence and care it deserved. It wasn’t due to it being over-complicated or ineffective.

If you’re serious about anything in your life, the existence of a mechanism to make it easier should never prevent you from achieving success. If it does, you need to step it up or come to terms with the fact that you’re not that serious about it. Even when an app does exist, the effectiveness of any system relies upon the consistent execution of the process.

I feel like the firehouse of apps that are making our lives easier are great in that they do exactly that. Though I fear that amongst some it has created an expectation that magic bullets should exist anytime something is less than incredibly easy to do.

Their is a reason that the things we deem worth doing are typically hard. It’s because we desire what is scarce. Having a great body, a successful career, or even a vibrant, powerful network are scarce. That’s one reason we attribute value to them. Conversely, things that are very easy typically yield common outcomes/results which is often why they’re not as desirable.

If you find yourself longing for certain apps because you’re coming up short I think you need to ask yourself this question: Is the presence of an app really the issue or your commitment to the labor it takes to be successful?

BD 101: Don’t Be A Cyborg

Usually within the first 5 seconds of picking up the phone I can tell if its a cold call. A creative mispronunciation of my name followed by monotone script reading typically give it away.

The person on the other end could have the greatest offer in the world for me. But it doesn’t matter. For better or worse, I’ve conditioned my brain to turn off as soon as I recognize these interactions. Its as if a trigger goes off that immediately diverts all of my focus towards determining how I can politely extract myself from the conversation…I might as well be talking to a machine.

                                 

Pro-active business development often requires a lot of cold outreach. When I’m reaching out cold via email or phone, I always try to be cognizant of the interaction outlined above. Specifically, how to avoid being bundled in with the armies cyborgs I just described; my success depends on side-stepping this perception.

I’ve found that navigating cold outreach by the 3 principles below not only prevents me from seeming irrelevant right off the bat, but also yields the best results.

Keep it Short

Keep your dialogue short and to the point. In a world with more choices and less time, our attention spans have been diluted. We’ve created filtering mechanisms in order to brush over things we don’t perceive will add value to our lives. 

The result: If I don’t know the sender, I don’t read the email - I scan it. Packing more information into an email means a higher likelihood that I’ll unknowingly gloss over your value proposition; I miss the value and never respond.

The same goes for overblown phone pitches. If you’re not engaging me in a way that elicits a response in the first 30 seconds, you’re toast. Have you ever got a member of the opposite sex to like you by them by rattling off why they should like you in the first 2 minutes of meeting them? No. Unless you’re really, really ridiculously good looking.
 

Be Human

People like having conversations, not being talked to. Long winded phone scripts and 4 paragraph cold emails don’t exactly feel like a conversation. They feel a pitch.

I find it much more effective to present myself in a humanistic way - WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? It means writing/talking as if you were having a normal conversation with someone. Sometimes that means assuming familiarity. Other times it means making fun of yourself and intentionally speaking with pauses (on the phone). Hopefully the juxtaposition below will speak better to this than my JV explanation.

Human Phone example:

“Hey x, my name is Scott Britton and I’m calling from best company ever.  Maybe you could help me out here…(intentional pause to capture attention)…I’m having a really tough time finding the person in charge of designing your new supersoaker. Any chance you might be able to point me in the right direction”

Cyborg Phone example:

“Hi this is Scott Britton calling from X company. I’d like to talk with the supersoaker designer regarding a product enhancement that will add 1300 rpms to its stream. Currently we work with all the other supersoaker companies and have generated an additional 3x return on their investment.”

Human Email Intro:

Hi X,

I noticed you guys didn’t have an map widget on your site. Would love to talk to you or the appropriate person about taking care of that….[state some street cred here]…I’m curious, have you guys ever thought to include one?

Cyborg Email Intro

Hi X,

My name is White Goodman and I work for X. Our company works with fortune 500 companies and is backed by Patches O’houlihan and Bill Murray. We have put over 6,000 map widgets on sites increasing user’s time on site by 6 minutes on average….

Can you see the difference between what a human call/email is vs. a cyborg one?

Truth be told many other “sales/BD gurus” have preached to me that should state x, y, and z impersonal importance indicators at the beginning of a cold interaction “to capture their attention” or “let them know you’re worth talking to.”  Well I tried that and have found a much higher success rate by taking a human, conversational approach.

My hypothesis to explain this is in alignment with my personal behavior when I’m on the other side - most people are faced with so many daily decisions that they’ve conditioned themselves to filter out anything that appears to be a blanket interaction void of value. Remember the goal is to provoke a response, not tell them as much you can about yourself and your offering within the first interaction.

Be Personal/Relevant/Informed

Keeping it short and talking like a human is a good start to disarm my anti-spam filter, but it doesn’t always make me feel compelled to respond. You know what does? Demonstrating to me that you went through the extra effort of learning about me or my company.

Bringing up a piece of recent news, referencing something specific to their site, and even going as far as mentioning something unique to the person you’re emailing IN PASSING is a great way to signal your email wasn’t #1 of 10,000. People appreciate it and feel more obligated to respond. At least I do.

I could write an entire post on how to subtly lace your emails with personal context, but for now I’ll just highlight one of my favorite tactics. Within the first sentence of an email, I like to throw in a provocative hyperlink that references the problem you have a solution for. The hyperlink should direct to the portion of their site where they’re lacking and you hope to supplant a solution. An example I’d use if I worked for a company with a comment API:

“Hey X, I noticed that your article pages don’t have a comment section.”

In this case, I’d link to the page on their site that lacks a comment section. The goal here is to make their problem obvious before I propose my oh so perfect solution. In the process I signal that I’ve taken the time to do my homework and that its not a blanket email, rather one that was crafted specifically to address something I can help them with.

The strategies described above don’t guarantee that you’ll get a deal or even a response for that matter. That comes down to having a compelling offering. However, these are practices that I’ve noticed can improve your chance of getting to that point. By not acting like a cyborg you give yourself a chance.

It definitely takes a lot more work navigating pro-active BD using these principles. You move slower. But the idea is to maximize return not get through your target list as quickly as possible.

Think about the cyborgs you encounter. Think about your cold approach. Would you respond to your pitch?

Hacking Quora

If you think of Quora as just a Q and A site, odds are you aren’t getting as much out of it as you could be. In addition to a playground to satiate my curiosity, I use Quora as a channel to create value in my life. Below are some of the less obvious way that you can leverage Quora to your advantage.

Content Syndication:

Quora is a great place to re-syndicate content you’ve already created. Every time I write a post, I check to see if I’m unknowingly answering a question on Quora. If I am and can provide some unique insight, I will insert content I’ve already created while linking back to the full post for additional context. Here is an example of how I used a post I already created when answering the following question: How do you approach a company you want to create a partnership with, if you have no contact person at the company? View it in full here



By leveraging digital asset that I had already created, I’m funneling new people to my blog which yields the capital an audience provides. The heavy lifting had already been done. Quora just allows me to squeeze more juice out of the fruits of my labor.

Penetrate New Audiences

But what if you’re not answering a Quora question says the pessimistic guy in the back…

Quora’s latest functionality allows you to push questions out to silos of people following certain topics…wheels turning…this setup empowers users to create opportunities for content syndication. Here’s how:

Ask a question anonymously and push the question out to relevant interest groups. Wait a few days, than answer your own question!

Yes, no one likes people that throw their own surprise parties. But the bottom line is you can create opportunities to penetrate new audiences. If the content you contribute adds value, audiences will be grateful you brought it to the limelight.

You can imagine that there are many things that you’d like to subtly expose without looking desperate for attention. Maybe you’re company is hiring, maybe you own the best biergarten in Union Sq? In each case the formula of anonymously asking then answering the question yourself is a useful marketing hack.

Just a quick sidenote - Quora did not always allow you to push questions to topical followers that were not in your network. Thus, answers to anonymous questions were few and football fields between. When I found myself wanting to ask a question anonymously, I’d combat the empty restaurant problem in the following manner:

Ask a question anonymously, answer it myself as well as I could, then tweet out my answer. This was a great way to draw attention to the question I had while avoiding the transparency that I wanted others opinions on it. Sketchy…maybe. Effective…definitely.

Grievances and Requests to Compel Action

Ever notice that getting to customer service on twitter often addresses your issue faster than calling or emailing? It’s because you’re stating your grievance or request amongst the public. Putting a company on the spot compels them to take action or respond at an expedited rate.

The same phenomenon exists on Quora and guess what…you can do it anonymously! I’d argue that Quora might even be more powerful because the greivance or request exists staticly; its like a giant whitehead on the corporate complexion until its addressed.

When you can you use this? Maybe you’re dying for a new feature, maybe you’re wondering why Chipotle charges ⅓ of a full burrito to add  guacamole, or are just unsatisfied with how your gym treats its members. In each case, stating your thoughts in the web’s town hall can push people to shuffle their feet.

And don’t let the ol “they’re probably not on Quora” prevent you utilizing this tactic. They are most definitely using a google alert which will push your Quora content their way.

Monitor Competitors

Its pretty obvious that you can monitor competitors by subscribing to questions that directly address the space you’re in. A far less obvious tactic is to analyze the implicit signals available through their activity. If you’re not familiar with the term implicit signals, it refers to instances when actions/data imply meaning, yet don’t state it outright.

Did they just follow an ancillary space they could be shifting into? If they’re answering questions here that could mean they’re pondering doing so. Did they just follow a chanel parnter of yours? If they did on top of recently connecting with them on LinkedIn they’re probably talking…read between the lines. You get the picture.

Guerilla Interview Prep

                                

Quora is an incredible information gathering tool for startup job interviews that definitely goes underutilized. Before an interview you should always try to anticipate questions you’ll be asked and have solid responses prepared. If you’re uncertain about a question make a b-line to Quora. You have a pool of engaged experts to act as a sounding board for any question you may be battling with.

On a more personal level, you can do additional reconnaissance on the people you’ll be interviewing with. What topics do they follow? How do they answer things? What questions have they upvoted? The more data collection you engage in, the more prepared you’ll be for the interview.

If nothing else, Quora demonstrates how powerful open access to a highly engaged audience is. It has democratized the attention of the masses and by doing so created many opportunities to create value beyond simply having your questions answered. Content drives purchasing decisions and that will never change.

Are there any other unique or original ways that people use Quora? I’d love to hear them

I’m Starting A Blog…About Tech!

I was one of those guys who thought they needed a thesis when I started blogging. Why? Because people told me I did. After a few hearty sips of kool aid, I remember deciding to keep it tightly focused on entrepreneurship and tech.

A year later, the contents on this here tablet stray pretty far away from the theme I originally proposed….and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Here’s why I blog about more than tech and why you might also want to consider doing so:

Purpose:

The primary reason I publish things is that I believe others might derive value from it. Taking an introspective look at my own life and career, the greatest catalysts for growth weren’t lessons learned on product market fit or user acquisition. They were lessons about people, adversity, fear, and self-awareness learned through trial by fire. Thus, in light of my personal experience and motivation for blogging, it’s pretty limiting to only write about tech and entrepreneurship.

If I was solely in the business of propelling my career, focusing on tech would probably serve me well…audiences tend to stray from topics they’re disinterested in. But my motivations exceed solely building “startup social capital.” I’m far more interested in imparting thoughts that improve others’ lives.

People:

One of my favorite elements of blogging is that it creates opportunities to meet new people. Compelling content and the topics you focus on are touchpoints for connectivity. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a ton of people through my blog.

By focusing solely on technology, I limit the content touchpoints through which someone could reach out to me to these subjects. I love tech, but this is just one of many interests I have and talking about the same things over and over again gets boring. ”Did you hear gnarlystartup.com just raised a mill!”

I’d much rather surround myself with a divserse ecosystem of people spanning a variety of interests. It stretches my brain while subtlely combatting my proclivity to stray from balance.

If you talk about what you believe in and enjoy you’ll attract people who believe in and enjoy the same things.

Continuity:

There’s probably a lot people you know that started a blog, wrote 3 posts, then stopped. You might even be on of them…and that’s totally cool. This happens for a lot of reasons including not enjoying the process. When you don’t enjoy the process blogging feels like work. When it feels like work you find reasons not to do it. You write three posts and slink back into the shadows of the blogosphere.

If I wrote only about tech, I’d probably blog far less. Again, it’s not that I don’t like tech, it’s just that I’m not all tech, all the time. Writing about it when I’m teched out would feel like work. Conversely, when I limit writing to things I feel like writing about, I enjoy the process. I never feel like I’m working and happily churn out content.

For now, these are the main reasons why I blog about more than tech. As I continue this practice, I hope to encounter more experiences that strengthen my case for writing about things you enjoy, not what others tell you will further your career etc…

How I Got into BD - Part 3

The first two parts of this post are good context for the third and final part below. It probably makes sense to read part 1 and part 2 here.

Now let’s talk about where BD came into the picture.

While I was working on Sfter I got to know Charlie O’Donnell through his softball team which I joined through twitter. I was excited to get back on the diamond, but I have to admit that a strong motivation stemmed from the desire to get to know Charlie. He’s definitely a cornerstone of the New York tech scene and someone I wanted to know. I had a great time that season and enjoyed getting to know Charlie.

It was through Charlie that I found myself in the SinglePlatform office one day. He connected us when Kenny Herman the EVP of Business Development was on the hunt to find a right hand man. I didn’t know much about the company, but had heard through the grapevine that Kenny and Wiley, the CEO, were badasses. I decided it was worth the trip to the SP office to learn more about the opportunity.

I went down to the office and quickly learned about the company, role, and vision from Kenny. I was blown away.

As I left the office I knew that this was an incredible opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. Kenny shot me a note hours later asking where I stood if offered the position. I followed up with an email indicating my interest as well as providing some additional ammunition for my case. Let me explain.

Interviews are not only auditions, but also opportunities for data collection. Spending time with Kenny enabled me to extract what was important to him for this hire. From what I could gather, he seemed to want an aggressive, persistent hustler that fit the company culture. I leverage my response email as an opportunity to point to a collection of blog posts that described instances over the past year which I thought demonstrated these characteristics. This is a perfect example of why everyone should blog.

I was fired up when peering out from my inbox a few hours later was another email from Kenny. He asked if I could come back down to the office that evening to spend some time with Wiley. I journeyed down to the SP office for a second time and grabbed a cold one with the boss. Through the course of an inspiring conversation about Wiley’s life and his vision for SinglePlatform he offered me the job!

I think there is a lot to take from this story away from this BD if you’re looking to get into BD. The biggest thing I’d say is getting a BD gig with a good company doesn’t happen overnight. At times I get the impression from some folks that they think a simple resume drop will do the trick. It doesn’t work like that in this market. At least it didn’t in my case.

For me it took a year of tireless networking. I bought more coffees and lunches than I can remember. I volunteered and did projects for free all the time to ingratiate myself with people I thought could help me some day. I went to countless events that I didn’t want to go to.

Ultimately, it was the relationships and personal growth forged through a collection of these efforts and experiences that I think put me into a position to get the job. These were built at times when I found myself sleeping on couches and not always knowing how I was going pay the bills. These were built during days where I had to eat humble pie and invite all my seemingly flourishing finance friends to support me at my 2nd job. These where built as I was struggling to start my own company.

At a 30,000 ft level, my efforts over the course of a year are how “I got into BD.” The seeds I had sown for a very long period of time like networking and blogging allowed me to capitalize when the opportunity presented itself. 

I distinctively remember Kenny commenting during our interview how he noticed we had “18 connections in common on linkedIn.” Finding content for the followup email wasn’t that hard because I had written over 55+ posts at that point. These assets weren’t built overnight. 

All this networking, learning, and writing wasn’t instigated by a job posting. It was motivated by the notion that some day all this labor would eventually bare fruit. Hence, my advice would be to those looking to “get into BD” someday is to get moving. Don’t wait for a BD job posting to start putting yourself in a position to capitalize by networking, helping others, writing etc.

So that’s it. That is my story on how I got into BD. If you’re reading this and thinking about where to start stay tuned…I will be writing about that in a future post.

How I Got into BD - Part 2

In the part 1 of this post, I described how I broke and entered the startup scene. This outlines the initial trajectoryof how I ended up in BD. It probably makes sense to read first before continuing.

During the  denoument of my YouAre.TV days, I secured a product consulting gig for a technology consulting firm. My initial outlook was that this would keep me afloat while I saw my subscription commerce project through. I had met the founder of the firm that hired me through an event I put together. I guess I must have made an impression on him. My assignment was to figure out how to make their consumer web product that was receiving little traction “work.” The gig started as a one month trial to see how we worked together.

The product I was consulting for was in the social search space. After some customer development during week one, I had convinced my employers to build a prototype for a new product that embodied the same “social search” theme that they loved. Instead of focusing on recommending businesses and services from your social graph, it would recommend content; something we could scrape. In 3 days we had a prototype that everyone was excited about. We called it Sfter (pronounced sifter).

                                              

During the course of that month, I decided to shelve the subscription commerce product for the time being. We were clearly trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and the team was getting pulled in different directions.

Amidst the euphoria of a product we all loved, my employers proposed spinning out Sfter into a new company at the completion of my one month assignment. They wanted me to run it as a co-founder and would provide me with the internal development resources to build it. Wearing the ship captain’s hat sounded awesome. I jumped at the opportunity.

I spent the next 6 months working on Sfter. “Working on” Sfter meant a lot of things. It ranged from leading product development to design to pitching investors only to consistently be told I should be working on something else. At the end of the day, I was more or less a product manager.

The final iteration of Sfter was an application that pulled in all your tweets, parsed the links from them, and served up ones related to keywords and phrases users indicated that they we’reinterested in. Think of it as Summify or News.me with a granular search technology built on top of it. It’s still around and pretty awesome.

The developers I was working with are incredible guys, but they live in Uruguay. The guys who were supporting me are amazing, but they had their own business to run. So majority of each day I spent on my own. Absent of company and enough skills to actually build the product, it became a lonely slog quickly.

This period emcompassed some of the most mentally and emotionally challenging days of my life. Though I had a bit more cash in my pocket, I was still more or less living paycheck to paycheck. Buying Starbucks stressed me out, let alone going out to dinner. But the financial challenges weren’t the reason I was tore up from the floor up.  The barrage of emotional knife fights I endured stemmed from the realization that I had no idea what I was doing and had hastily thrust my self into a situation where I was not poised to succeed. For someone hellbent on progress, this was a hard pill to swallow.

I’m not a native technologist or designer, yet I was managing two developers to build a product supposedly going after a “big data play”. I had no insight into how long development tasks took, the cost-benefit of certain technologies, and what was actually going on under the hood. Most of the time this ambiguity left me feeling helpless which compelled me to learn basic front-end development and design skills. While this satiated my learning addiction, it failed to relieve my frustrations around the opacity of Sfter’s development or the nagging “is this what I should be doing with my life” feeling.

My initial mindset when I started working on Sfter full time was I needed to be “heads down.” I still networked when I could, but not nearly as much as I had done previously at YouAre.TV. At the time, I thought that getting the product out the door as fast as I could was the best use of my time. Considering I had an incredibly limited ability to actually move the product forward, I maniacally wasted time over-analyzing minute product decisions to occupy my thirst for feeling busy thus productive. 

After about 4 months of subscribing to the “heads down” philosophy, I decided to shift gears by getting back on the pony that had got me to this point. I focused on relationship building. I started intentionally networking again and blogging more. Damn it felt good. I was engaging in activities that I was good at instead of trying to learn enough PHP to have some semblance of what was going on. I kept thinking to myself, it feels great to optimize around the things that come natural, instead of willing myself to get good at something I wasn’t designed for nor enjoyed.

Despite the raging pity party I just threw, the feelings I described didn’t stop me making an effort to push the ball forward on Sfter. After about 6 months we had a couple hundred people using the product or our engagement metrics were very good. Despite the positive steam it was picking up, it was around this time that an opportunity entered my hemisphere that I couldn’t resist getting excited about. SinglePlatform needed to hire a 2nd member of their BD team…

In part 3, I’ll conclude exactly how I ended up joining SinglePlatform and what someone looking to get into BD can learn from all this.

How I Got into BD - Part 1

A lot of people have been asking me how to get into BD recently. Similar to Venture Capital, I don’t think there is a boilerplate prescription for getting into BD. There are definitely things you can do to put yourself in a favorable position like networking, blogging, and gaining an understanding of what BD actually means. That’s all great, but I’m here to tell you that I think getting a job in BD is about putting yourself in a position to capitalize when a “right time, right place opportunity” presents itself by working your ass off.

I think it’d be useful to outline how I got into business development by re-telling my startup journey. More than anything else, I want people who read this to realize that getting a good “BD job” doesn’t happen overnight. At least for me it didn’t.  It came after a year of sacrifice, hard work, putting myself out there, and a ton of learning…

I left my first job at SFX Baseball and a  brand new 2 bedroom, 2 bath apartment overlooking the Chicago skyline to do an internship at a startup called CollegeOnly. It was started by a Princeton classmate named Josh Weinstein who I didn’t know all that well in school. I got the gig by reaching out to Josh cold and convincing him and his other co-founder to take a chance on me over the phone in a parking lot during my lunch break. When I got the nod from Josh, I moved back with Mom and Dad to Newtown, PA. My commute to NYC would be a cool 2.5 hours each way.

At CollegeOnly, I started off doing “community management.” I had no idea what that was when I joined, but was just happy to be there and soak up as much information as I could. My wages started as reimbursement for lunch and travel. I became well acquainted with exspensify. 

I told my friends I was coming back to NYC “to work” for Josh at his cool new startup. I left out the part that it was just an internship unless prodded because I was a bit self-conscious about it. After all, the captain of the Princeton football team is supposed to be doing something prestigious like working at Goldman Sachs after graduation, not clutching to lunch receipts for dear life so he could pay for train fare next week.

After one week, and about 25 hours of commuting I decided going back and forth everyday was a royal waste of time. I got a membership at the Princeton Club ($150 a year!) so I’d have a place to shower. From week 2 on, I started packing a huge gym bag full of clothes and embraced life as a vagabond. I remember my friend told me I looked like I was carrying a camping bag around New York City. For the next, couple months I slept in the office, at my cousins in Hoboken, and at friends often showering at the gym of the Princeton Club. Scrapping baby!

My time during the early days of CollegeOnly was spent doing whatever needed to get done. This ranged from learning what twitter was to detailing product specs and organizing focus groups. I spent my spare time networking as much as I could. I’d go to events, cold email people to buy them lunch or coffee in exchange for their insight, and tried to get to know anyone who was involved in the startup scene. Slowly but surely I built a nice little network predicated on the tenet of providing value to anyone I met without expecting anything in return. Big ups to Keith Ferrazzi.

Somewhere 1-2 months into my internship I became a full-time employee and started getting paid a very small, but livable wage. I wanted to move to New York, but still was strapped for cash. I decided to get a bartending job at McFadden’s at night.

Part of my job was getting my friends to come to the bar. They all came time after time. I couldn’t be more grateful for their support. But at times, I felt embarrassed. “Why do you have a 2nd job”…“Did you hear Scott is bartending.” Statements like these don’t exactly engender pride. Whatever I thought. This is what I need to do and last time I checked the people who make a dent in this world don’t let other peoples’ expectations sway their decision making.

After about 4 months at CollegeOnly, it became clear that it was not going to be successful. The company pivoted to a new product called YouAre.TV that was essentially producing online game shows where viewers could become contestants from their webcam.

Josh had taken notice of my proclivity for networking and decided that I should spearhead business development for the company. In this case, BD meant getting sponsors for the shows. I was excited about the new role. It’s important to reiterate that I did not start with this role. I created it over the fortitude of 4 months  working for peanuts, networking my brains out, and instilling confidence in my employer that I could preform this role.

In conjunction with the company transition, I was able to move into a sublet with some college buddies. I finally had saved enough between YouAre.TV and bartending to make the move.

I spent the next 4 months doing BD for YouAre.TV. It was extremely challenging because we didn’t have a working product and our viewership was in the double digits. Not exactly an extremely attractive opportunity for sponsors. Still, I learned a lot about knocking on doors, networking, and the challenging aspects of BD. I was able to get a few sponsors due to personal relationships, but it’s never fun when the value chain is one-sided.

I also was exercising my BD muscles with my nights and weekends project. I was working on a birchbox clone that centered around delivering healthy food options to your door monthly with two friends. This was an awesome experience to cut my teeth. I reached out to over 50 brands and secured over 1,000 free samples before I decided to shelve the project for reasons described here.

After 8 months at YouAre.TV I decided it was time for a new challenge. I learned a ton, had built a great network, and was ready to go out on my own…or so I foolishly thought….

In part 2, I will talk about going the challenges of going out on my own and how I ended up at SinglePlatform.

What All Humans Crave

It sucks to be cold. It sucks to be hungry. It sucks being lonely. It sucks to be sick. A lot of harsh realities suck.

But you know what sucks more than anything else? Feeling like you’re a lesser human or even worse, like you’re not one at all.

I’ve come to realize over the past year nothing makes people feel better than making them feel special or appreciated; more or less, giving them dignity. At the same time, nothing makes people feel worse than depriving them the dignity that all human beings deserve.

Yet everyday we walk by those in need. They ask for help and we pretend not to hear. They stretch their hands out and we intentionally act like we don’t see it.

For a fleeting moment acting in such a way might make us feel better, but for far longer, the other side feels worse. By failing to acknowledge people, we deprive them the dignity that all humans deserve. We signal to them that they’re lower than us or not one us at all.

Maybe you haven’t lived on the streets, but you may have encountered a variation of this scenario. Have you ever been talking in a group of people and tried to chime in only to be completely ignored? It feels awful. Imagine having that done 50 times a day while you’re cold, starving, and lonely.

I have a proclivity to talk to strangers. When I do its never the small amount of change I may give them that inspires a cascade of tears down their face then subsequently mine. It’s the fact that someone actually stopped to talk to them. Because “no one has ever done that before.” Verbatim countless times.

It’s unrealistic to give to every person you see or to chat up every stranger you encounter who may have fallen on hard times. But it is realistic to treat everyone you encounter like a human being. I think we can all respond when spoken to and acknowledge someone else when they acknowledge us. A simple “sorry, I can’t” or “I can’t today” is a vast improvement from the subtle dagger thrust by a total lack of response.

I think it should be noted that this heart-wrenching epidemic is not limited to the people we encounter on the streets. To some degree it happens to waiters, cashiers, the people who hand out papers, and service professionals everyday. Yeah, they’re there to do a job. But guess what? They have feelings, families, and interests just like you do. So smile and ask them about themselves once in awhile instead of expecting clock-work subservience.

All humans crave dignity and are crushed when deprived of it. I think this is an important thing to keep in mind as we go about our lives.

Big thanks to my friends Jon and Shaun for their friendship and helping me realize this insight.

Do More than Be A Great Employee

Most young people working at a startup have aspirations of starting their own company some day. If you’re in this camp, I think its important to aspire to more than just being an excellent employee. Your tenure working for someone else is an awesome time to also familiarize yourself with the unique challenges of starting and executing on something. Gaining insight into what it’s actually like will better prepare you for the day you ultimately go out on your own.

As an employee you often have the luxury of:

   ⁃    Structure: your work starts and ends at a certain time at a designated place
   ⁃    Direction: an understanding of what you’re to accomplish and how to do that
   ⁃    Goals: some measurement of success to calibrate your performance with
   ⁃    Built in Accountability: goals, teammates, and a desire to keep your job keep  you accountable to performing at a high level
   ⁃    A Warm Start/Momentum: you’re working off something vs. a cold start
   ⁃    Support: there are people there to give you guidance and assistance
   ⁃    Safety in Numbers: if you don’t bring you a game,  hopefully your company is  still going to push the needle forward today

When you go to start something you typically don’t have any of this. You need to create it. This can be extremely daunting at first which is precisely why you should not wait until you go off to start your first company to familiarize yourself with this scenario and the feelings that accompany it. A great way to accomplish this is by executing on side projects. Don’t worry non-coders, this is not limited to building your own web-app. Side projects can be all sorts of things. The important thing is that you familiarize yourself with what it’s really like “starting something” and finish once you’ve started.

Examples of side projects you could start:

   ⁃    A meetup
   ⁃    An event
   ⁃    An app
   ⁃    A blog
   ⁃    A painting
   ⁃    A book
   ⁃    A community
   ⁃    A non-profit group

The first side project of mine was an event I put together with my friend Matt Shampine called “Startup Breakfast.” We’d get together 8 different people every other week working on different things to collectively talk through each other’s greatest challenges. It was more or less a peer mentorship/networking group. It was awesome.

I had the idea a couple of months after I started working for my first startup. I wanted to meet more people and hated having to wait for events at night to do this. Aha!

From an execution standpoint, I had to send 7 emails twice a month, buy bagels, and wake up 45 minutes earlier than I normally would. The fact that I wasn’t reinventing the wheel here didn’t matter. I was damn proud of my little breakfast and it felt amazing to call something my own. Though I did a pretty crappy job of keeping this going after a few times, I learned a lot about taking the initiative to start something and in retrospect finishing it. Specifically I learned that when starting something:

• The needle doesn’t move unless you move it
• Creating your own gameplan is more challenging than following directions
• It’s easier to execute on something with an accountability partner
• Creating something from scratch is tough, but very rewarding

In addition to my learning, this was a great experience because it gave me the confidence to spearhead more ambitious side projects. My hope is that the more challenging each project is, the better off I’ll be next time I go off to start a company.

For young people content with their job situation, doing an excellent job for your employer should always be numero uno. But if you’re a budding founder, don’t stop there. Put yourself in a better position to succeed when you’re number is called by getting acquainted with what its really like to start something. It will serve you well.