Hue's Blog

Equal In The Eyes Of Coffee

You can have a million more Twitter followers than me.

You can have a million more dollars than me.

But you cannot drink a million more cups of coffee than me, because you cannot drink a million cups of coffee.  Unless you drink 45 cups a day, every day, for 60 years.

Which means now matter how powerful you are in other arenas, you cannot use check-ins alone to elevate your favorite coffee shop into the stratosphere, leaving mine in the dust.

And I, in turn, can cast a vote for my favorite coffee shop every day, and no matter who you are I can probably keep pace with you.

That's not to say we are the same.  Anytime tallies are taken there will be peaks and valleys.  But with respect to location-based activity, those peaks and valleys are smoothed out.  A hundred Foursquare check-ins means a lot more than a hundred Twitter followers.

I like that.  All of us having a roughly equal vote about who makes the perfect cup of coffee.

Selling Does Not Equal Talking

Hang out at the New York Soho House long enough and you're going to hear someone pitching an idea.  I've heard two pitches for start-up money in the last two days.  What do both have in common?

The guys asking for money will not shut up.  Like they were using a verbal power hose to blast away all reluctance to invest.

I know in my bones that this is not the strong way to sell.  These tirades make me cringe and I'm only half-listening.  There's a small part of me (very small) that wonders if the investors don't like to see a little desperation, a little sweat.  Not because they're cruel, but because they need to see a level of eagerness that can't be fully controlled.

But still, come up for air at some point in the pitch.