I recently attended an event in Boston where I was fortunate enough to meet the co-founders of CoachUp, Jordan Fliegel and Arian Radmand. CoachUp is an online marketplace that connects athletes with private coaches. Their site launched this past summer and has been building a lot of positive buzz, particularly in the Boston tech scene.

I first read about CoachUp when the Fall 2012 Boston TechStars class was announced and I immediately thought it was a great idea. At the time I was still determined to stay in NYC, so I didn’t reach out to them about an internship or job, which in hindsight was a mistake. Once I decided that I was willing to move anywhere for a right opportunity, you would think that CoachUp would’ve been one of the first companies I reached out to. Unfortunately not, as I had completely forgotten about them…oops! In the future when I’m on the job hunt, I’m going to keep an excel doc with a list of all the companies I’d be interested in working for.

Thankfully— luck, chance, fate or whatever you want to call it was on my side, as Jordan, the CEO, happened to be on the panel for an event I attended a couple weeks ago. He was a last minute substitution so I didn’t even realize he was speaking until I got there. After the panel ended, I approached him about the possibility of doing some indentured servitude, err I mean the working as an unpaid intern for CoachUp. After following up with him and exchanging emails to learn more about what the internship would entail, we set a time later in the week for me to come by their offices, meet the rest of the team and discuss further. Everything went great, and I started an internship the following week and have been on my grind ever since!

I’m incredibly excited about this opportunity for a few of reasons. First, and most importantly, I am a huge believer in the power a great coach can have on a young athlete, not just on the field but off the field too. As someone who has played sports their entire life, I’ve experienced this power first hand and working for a company that I have a personal connection to is incredibly important to me. Secondly, I really like the idea and think it’s a really large opportunity with the potential to be huge. And last, but certainly not least, I’m pumped to be joining CoachUp while they’re currently going through TechStars. The chance to experience firsthand what the program is like is an amazing opportunity and something very few people will ever get to do.

My blogging will likely be sporadic over the next couple months, as I want to be focusing all of my energy on getting the most out of this opportunity. I’m going to work my ass off and hopefully prove that I can be a valuable asset to the team in a full time capacity. Wish me luck!

In case you haven’t heard bye now, KitchenAid sent out an offensive tweet involving President Obama’s recently deceased grandmother during the debates Wednesday night, which promoted them to quickly issue this apology:

Deepest apologies for an irresponsible tweet that is in no way a representation of the brand’s opinion. #nbcpolitics

— KitchenAid (@KitchenAidUSA) October 4, 2012

Lately these twitter PR faux pas seem to be accuring with increasing frequency. Particuliarly in the form of a tweet that was clearly meant for someones personal account, but ended up on being sent from the company account. My personal favorite was when The Red Cross tweeted about getting #Slizzerd (additional here). Each year more and more companies are embracing and expanding their usage of social media, so I wouldn’t expect to see these slip-ups stop anytime soon. If anything they will probably become more frequent, so I would expect to see functionality introduced to try and prevent it.

Unfortunately I don’t see Twitter being the one to help companies curb these fuck ups – user experience is something, in my opinion, they don’t do well or seem to care much about. So a TweetDeck or a HootSuite or someone else who actually does care about improving the Twitter experience, should create a quasi “two-factor authentication” setting. When you send a tweet you’re shown a preview of the tweet and asks for confirmation before sending. This would give you one last chance to check for benign mistakes like typos and provide an additional opportunity to notice if you’re using your company’s account accidentally.

It’s a relatively simple feature that I think all companies would appreciate and take advantage of. I know I’ve personally made the mistake of sending a tweet from the ShopCube twitter, rather than my own. Fortunately it was nothing embarrassing or damaging, and I noticed immediately and quickly deleted it, likely before anyone noticed as we have so few followers. For larger brands with huge followings, there is no grace period; the second an inappropriate tweet is sent the damage is already done and depending on the nature of the message, can cause irreparable harm to your brand.

Paul Graham published an essay this past weekend titled “Startup = Growth” and while I recommend it to all, I couldn’t help but find myself disagreeing with his main point. Heresy I know, as I can only dream of having the amount of startup knowledge PG possesses, but I’m not gonna give him a free pass just because of who he is. I decided I should write a post about my issues, but before I was able to finish, Mark Suster beat me to it. His response, “Is going for rapid growth always good? Aren’t startups so much more?” highlighted many of the same issues I had with PG’s essay, but far more eloquently than I could have hoped to.  That being said, I felt compelled to finish what I started and add my two cents on the topic.

PG’s overarching theme is that a company is only truly a startup if it achieves massive, rapid growth, and as such, growth should be their only focus. I found this statement tough to swallow. While I agree that the term “startup” might be thrown around a bit too cavalier these days, this definition seems overly restrictive. I think a more fair statement would be if you want to be an ultra-disruptive and hugely successful startup, (AKA one that PG wants to invest in) you need rapid growth. Without it you probably won’t ever be a $500+ million company, but that doesn’t mean your company is not a startup or that it can’t be successful.

Mark Suster makes a similar point in his article. He uses the first startup he founded as an example of a company that did not experience nor-strive for rapid growth, but was nonetheless a success. He goes on to say that he blames this SV culture of wanting only rapid growth as a contributing factor for many recent failed ventures that might otherwise been avoided if the companies had been less pressured to be HUGE, and instead, been more patient with their growth. PG is looking at this from an investor’s perspective and not a founder’s perspective. The majority of the money he makes is from hitting big homeruns. So despite the fact that a $30-50 million deal can have a profound positive impact for both founders and employees lives, it doesn’t move the needle for a big time investor such as PG.

My other main issue with PG’s article was the insistence that a startup’s only focus should be on growth, and achieving it by any means necessary (PG footnotes this point saying that the long-term benefits must outweigh the costs). I know startups need to grow in order to command high valuations, so in theory that should mean that growth is all that matters (especially from an investor’s perspective), but why can’t they be about more than that? What about creating a startup that helps change the world positively but slowly, or one that is hugely helpful for a small but dedicated core group of users, or something that is much more long-tailed and so rapid growth is not part of their plan, or anything that the primary focus isn’t purely about growth? Maybe I am being overly idealistic, but part of the reason I decided to ditch my finance career path in favor of startups is because I thought they allowed for more diverse ways of measuring success… that they didn’t necessarily have to be driven purely by the desire to maximize profits. But if our focus should purely be on growth then that doesn’t seem to be all that different.

I want to emphasize that I found PG’s post to be very educational, and I highly recommend it, but I think he needed to clarify that he is discussing this subject from an investor’s standpoint. I am curious to hear your guys’ opinions on the relationship between startups and growth in the comments.

The entrepreneurship bug has taken hold in America… I LOVE IT! It’s tough talking to anyone these days without startups being mentioned; whether they just discovered a new one, they’re thinking about joining one, or they have an idea for one. Startups are in vogue, or as one recent blog post I saw on HN put it, Startup is the new Hipster. Yet all is not roses and butterflies in this new landscape dominated by “rock stars” and “ninjas”.

Recently Uber, the amazing town car and taxi service, has been in the news because of legislative threats in the cities they operate. Their service threatens the business of longtime taxi operators, who haven’t taken kindly to the recent competition. As a result, they’re using their friends in government to try to strong-arm Uber into shutting down. Luckily those attempts have failed so far, but it got me thinking about the future of super-disruptive startups in America, and how their biggest obstacle might very well be the government.

Recent attacks on Uber as well as legislature such as SOPA, ACTA and PIPA demonstrate that the American Government is more concerned with keeping the status quo and protecting their special interest groups, then fostering innovation and advancement. Of course there are outliers in government who are trying to facilitate change, but they’re in the minority. It is a sad commentary given that our country was itself a radical shift from what was considered the norm, a startup of sorts, less than 350 years ago. You could write a thesis on how our government has become so stale, and I’m sure someone has and I’d love to read it, but the more important question now is; how can we right the ship?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer and this isn’t a political blog so I don’t want to write a long-winded post on this subject. I only wrote this post because it’s something that I have been increasingly concerned about. When I recently read about the progress Google has made with their automated cars, my first thought should have been, “OMG cars that drive themselves – how awesome!!!” but instead I thought, “I hope the government doesn’t fuck this up.” I’m afraid that unless things change, we will begin to get left behind by other countries, and people will talk about America as the country that used to lead the way in innovation and progress, not the one that still does.

What do you think – are American politics getting in the way of progress or are my fears unfounded? Let me know in the comments.

I’m using my email more than ever these days, so making sure it provides maximum utility has become something I take very seriously. I have been trying different 3^rd party add-ons to help with a variety of things: organization, reminders, information, automation and more. All of these add-ons are free, so I figured in lieu of donations the least I could do was give some positive press about the three that I’ve found to be most useful. So without further ado… if you are looking for ways to improve your email productivity and experience, I highly recommend checking out the following products.

       ● Rapportive: www.rapportive.com

“Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.”

Whenever you send or receive an email, Rapportive displays an array of personal information to the left of the email. This includes: a picture, their name, links to their social media accounts (which you can scroll over to see their most recent activity), as well as any personal notes you have added about them. Rapportive has helped me make my emails more personalized by having quick access to information about my recipients. Here is what it looks like when I send an email to myself:

(Note to self: add my Quora to account)

       ● Boomerang: www.boomeranggmail.com

“Take control of when you send and receive email messages … create follow up reminders … remind yourself if you don’t hear back”

Boomerang is a simple add-on that I find super powerful. You can schedule emails to be sent at a specific time or remind yourself to write a follow up email after a period of time or if you don’t receive a response. The scheduled emails are great for when you’re working on a bunch of emails at night, particularly on a Friday. Instead of sending them at a time when there is a good chance your recipients will miss them, you can set them to be sent at a time that has a higher chance of being seen, such as early in the morning. The reminders have been very helpful when I am reaching out to a bunch of people in quick succession. I won’t necessarily remember if I don’t get a response from one particular person, so I set Boomerang to let me know if I don’t get a response within 4 days.   

       ● Unroll.me: www.unroll.me

“Unroll.me is the free and easy way to end unwanted subscriptions”

This app is awesome for getting subscription email clutter under control. I used to be very careful about what I signed up for using my primary email account for fear of losing control of my inbox. Unroll.me has completely eliminated that fear. Unlike the other apps, you don’t have to install anything. Simply visit their website, connect your email account and they will generate a list of all of your subscriptions. They then bundle all of your subscriptions into a “roll” that they deliver to you once a day. So instead of getting tons of emails every morning, you get just one. You can also choose to have certain subscriptions appear in your inbox as they normally would rather than include them in your “roll.” Unroll.me also offers the ability to remove yourself from any mailing lists with just one click.

Let me know in the comments what apps/add-ons/products you use to improve your email experience!