[This is the story of the start-up and app Purposely™. Each week I’ll chat about its purpose, progress, and possibilities. Let’s consider this the memoir of an app <smile>. If you’d like to be in touch, please drop me a line to [email protected]. And please take a peek at my latest book, Choose Your Life Purposes, which spells out the principles upon which Purposely is built.]
And so, that is where Bharath and I meet. No doubt many startups populate offices, certainly after they’ve grown to a certain size. But why rent an office when the two of you can meet in a Starbucks or a Peets? Not only do you save a ton of money by meeting at Peets, you have a certain intimate experience that can be found almost nowhere else. Two people at a café table. Close to heaven.
Once it was Paris. For some, it still is Paris. For most, it can’t be. How to get that bohemian experience today? It’s unlikely at some quaint neighborhood café where you can sit all day—they hardly exist, and those that do have two tables and four chairs and want you out the door with your mocha. So, a Starbucks or a Peets must do. Let’s not look a gift café in the mouth! It really is better than nothing.
I bring my own coffee in a thermos (don’t tell Peets) and I “rent” our table by buying a blueberry chocolate Kind bar. Bharath and I typically spend ninety minutes together. We are always happy to meet—it is a respite from whatever else is going on in the world and fraught with the possibility of future success. Millions of users! Billions of users! Sugar plum fairies!
We see the same people. An old codger reading a very heavy-looking text on celestial mechanics. Retired astrophysicist or looney? A young guy with two laptops open and constant neuronal energy, on the phone, back to the computer, back to the other computer, clacking keys, making quick calls, calls so quick that it’s hard to imagine what information is being communicated. Maybe buy! Sell! Buy it back! Sell it again! Could be …
Like them, we are completely in our own world and completely safe here, protected by an agreement dating five or six thousand years ago about not disturbing folks sitting in a café. No employee is going to say, “We need that table.” No grump is going to demand that we leave and give him a seat. Written in the Declaration of Café Life, right at the top, is the commandment: “This table is yours for as long as you like.” Right below that is Commandment Two: “Never pester a bohemian.”
Bharath and I are meeting today and I am writing this while I wait for him. When he arrives, he will show me that certain bugs have been worked it; we will laugh a bit and shake our heads at the world; we will make little jokes about becoming a zombie company, the living dead of life organization apps, and whether that might be worth a Netflix limited edition series.
Good times at Peets. Maybe you’ll have a Peets startup in your future. Here’s wishing you that beautiful dream.
[Purposely is slated to appear November, 2024.]
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
