#which then influenced trends and industry standards for the next few decades i get the reasons why

[orpheusilver]

sooooo fuckinf glad that spiderverse started a cool new trend in mainstream 3d animation of making it look good

[kvndeathmusic]

my favorite records of the 2010s pt 1 (the less great stuff/honorable mentions)

Neither this post or its followup are going to be in any particular order, however all the records I talk about here are, in my opinion, not as good as the records i will talk about in my part 2. they’re all fantastic but these ones slightly a little less fantastic than the ones in my “top 10″. none of this is based on stuff like 'influence' or whatever other critics base their lists on, this is solely how much I enjoyed these records. And keep in mind, I'm only human, I havent listened to a good lot of records I've heard others describe as top 10 worthy, these are just records I found and that I resonate with. long post ahead. 

Vacation - Bomb the Music Industry (2011)

If you asked me what my favorite band is i will either say bomb the music industry or jeff rosenstock, but considering those are pretty much the same things it doesnt matter lol. While Vacation isnt a perfect record, it is one I love. It lacks some of the ska elements that I love about earlier BTMI records, but at the same time, it is the first record where Jeff’s “””solo””” career sound starts to form in tracks like Sick, Later, Hurricane Waves, Everybody That You Love, Everybody That Loves You, and Vocal Coach. And these tracks are all fantastic, especially the absolutely explosive opener Campaign For a Better Weekend. Where this album suffers in my mind is the fact that it exists as a weird hybrid middle ground between BTMI and modern Jeff Rosenstock, it isn’t really ska like old BTMI and it’s not quite to the same standard as the tracks on We Cool?. And some of the songs are just, not as good as the others, like Why, Oh Why, Oh Why (Oh Oh Oh Oh), which is washed out almost entirely in reverb, and tracks like Savers feeling barren and missing additional instrumentation. But fuck man I can not dislike this record or just call it “ok” because despite this I still listen to this record a lot, it’s so catchy and fun and Im a bit too chronically addicted to btmi. 

Reflektor - Arcade Fire (2013)

i dont really get the hate/mixed feelings others have with this record. there’s so many good tracks dude!!!! sure theres a bit of a slump in the middle and it doesnt reach the same emotional heights as their previous records you gotta be ignorant to overlook this records strengths. while i do like The Suburbs more than Reflektor, man i just vibe HARD with some of these tracks; the title track, We Exist, Here Comes The Night Time, Normal Person, Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice), Porno, and ESPECIALLY Afterlife. Plus the cover art is cool and I like it. However Flashbulb Eyes is one of the worst tracks Arcade Fire has ever put out and I hate it immensely. And while far less offensive, tracks like You Already Know, It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus), and Joan of Arc are just kinda boring and/or uninteresting. Now granted, I'm extremely biased when it comes to Arcade fire in general unless were talking about the trainwreck that is Everything Now. I started listening to Arcade Fire just before Reflektor came out, and I have a kinda sentimental attachment to the record. ill explain the feeling more when i talk about The Suburbs. anticipation oooooo.

good kid m.A.A.d city - Kendrick Lamar (2012)

i might get crucified by some for not putting this in my top 10, but whatever come at me i guess. gkmc is a fantastic record, but i do think the ending is weak, which is why it’s here instead of in the top 10. i mean, let’s be real, Real is a mediocre track, and while Dying of Thirst is an important track to the whole narrative of the record, it feels way too long. almost everything else about this record is fantastic, from the beats, to kendrick’s nasally flows, to the overall structure of the record spinning a tale of a young man battling demons both inside and out, and his eventual redemption. even if i find this record at times to drop pace, it really is flawless otherwise. it felt like a disservice to put this in the 20-10s, bc it’s a good record, but i had to make some compromises and this was one of them. 

RTJ2 - Run The Jewels (2014)

el-p and killer mike are a perfect duo, and the tracks they make together are always total bangers. and for me, RTJ2 is the best overall, with RTJ3 in a close second. it’s hard to put this on the lower half of the list, some of the tracks just don’t work as well as the others, but despite that there’s not really any tracks i hate or dislike on this record, minus maybe crown. the pure aggression in the opening track Jeopardy sets the tone for an aggressive yet highly focused record. This is some of the best rap out there right now if you want some music to fuck shit up to. 

Pure Comedy - Father John Misty (2017)

This record is both hilarious and extremely bleak. Josh Tillman is a master of satire and sarcasm, and Pure Comedy is the peak of his songwriting skills. The title track is one of the best tracks of the decade, period. And he keeps up the momentum on the following few tracks. The main problem with this record is its weaker second half, but even then it’s criminal to suggest that those songs aren’t good regardless. And despite the bleakness, the one line that sticks in my head after all this time is the line this album fades out to: There’s nothing to fear.

Knife Man - AJJ (2011)

Continuing on the trend of folky, satirical, and bleak records, Knife Man is AJJ’s defining record (next to their debut LP). AJJ blends loud, punky anthems with quieter, folk tracks that touch on sensitive issues in a way only AJJ manages to get away with. And there’s some genuine heart mixed in as well, with the final track Big Bird always striking a chord with me. However, I do feel the record is, let’s just say, padded at times in my opinion. Still, I can’t deny how much i enjoy tracks like Gift of the Magi 2, Hate Rain on Me, The Distance, and Skate Park. Speaking of which when I saw AJJ live recently they played none of those songs and that kinda sucked but hey it was like $20 I can’t complain. And speaking of not getting what I wanted...

You Won’t Get What You Want - Daughters (2018)

It was hard choosing between this record and their 2010 self titled record, but in terms of the overall narrative and variety this record shines through. If there was a number 11 spot in this unorganized list this would probably take that spot. It’s noisey, it’s abrasive, and it’s like nothing you’ve heard before unless you’ve listened to Daughter’s previous records. Tracks like The Reason They Hate Me are catchy in the weirdest and most unwelcoming of ways, Less Sex sounds like a long lost Trent Reznor NIN track, and Guest House is a masochistic and gut wrenching finisher. Fantastic record aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

We Cool? - Jeff Rosenstock (2015)

It’s obvious that I had to include this record somewhere on these list. It’s like a more refined version of the sounds that Jeff experimented with on Vacation. Definitely more punk than ska, but still some of those roots still shine through, especially in the track Nausea. Some of Jeff’s best songs are on this record, from the loud opening tracks Get Old Forever and You, In Weird Cities, to tracks dripping with bittersweet and moody lyrics like I’m Serious, I’m Sorry and Polar Bear or Africa. The main reason this record is on the back end of the top 20 is because the deeper cuts on the record do not match the energy and heights of the best tracks. Tracks like All Blissed Out, The Lows, Darkness Records and Beers Again Alone don’t feel like they belong and stick out a bit. They remind me more of the material Jeff put out on his 2012 EP I Look Like Shit. Mind you they aren’t bad tracks, but I’ll be honest I skip them often when listening to the record because i just wanna get back to the good good stuff. 

Sports - Modern Baseball (2012)

Sports is one of the best pop punk records ever, if you can even consider it as such. It’s like a blend of emo and folk punk, and it works so well. A good majority of this record is on my main shuffle playlist. Is it pushing boundaries? Not really, but tracks like Re-Do, Tears Over Beers, and See Ya, Sucker are undeniably catchy and memorable. I NEED MODERN BASEBALL BACK TOGETHER RN. There’s not really anything that wrong with the record, besides maybe lacking in variety, but at 30 minutes, it’s a record that feels nostalgic even on a first listen, and continues to feel that way even after numerous re-listens. Speaking of nostalgia...

The Suburbs - Arcade Fire (2010)

Some background, when I was 13 (circa 2013), I only really listened to whatever my parents put on for me. From my mom, I “inherited” a taste for classic pop and 80s new wave. From my dad, I got metal and hard rock. The first time I made the conscious decision to listen to a record fully, based on my own curiousity, was when I sat and listened to Sgt. Pepper in the summer of 2013, which broadened the scope of what I thought music could even be. And later that year, the first band I got into after The Beatles? Arcade Fire. When I think of my early teens, the memories are set to this record. I remember listening to Ready to Start in my brother’s old hot ass car while driving to the local fair with some friends on a chill fall night, eating tons of junk and staying up past midnight back when doing that was edgy and cool and not a symptom of my depression. 

If I was judging this record solely by its best tracks, it would easily be in the top 3. But I couldn’t place it in my top 10 because, frankly, some of the deeper cuts are lacking. I can’t say I like Deep Blue. I really don’t like Rococo. And Half Light I kills the pace of the record. But man, that title track, Ready to Start, Modern Man, Empty Room, Half Light II, Sprawl II... these songs defined my early teen years. I still tear up listening to the title track. Sure I have to skip a few songs when I re-listen, but I can’t place it any lower or my heart will break. It existing outside of the top 10 already hurts. And that’s all that’s left now. The top 10. 

But first, some random honorable mentions that didn’t make this list:

Sound & Color - Alabama Shakes

Black Star - David Bowie

Saturation II - BROCKHAMPTON

Melophobia - Cage the Elephant

Teens of Style - Car Seat Headrest

How to Leave Town - Car Seat Headrest

Daughters - Daughters

Sunbather - Deafheaven

Bottomless Pit - Death Grips

Year of the Snitch - Death Grips (should be on this list tbh)

Doris - Earl Sweatshirt

I Love You, Honeybear - Father John Misty

Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes

Plastic Beach - Gorillaz

Boarding House Reach - Jack White

POST- - Jeff Rosenstock

S/T - Joyce Manor

Firepower - Judas Priest

ye - Kanye West

KIDS SEE GHOSTS - KSG

You Were There - Kill Lincoln

Flying Microtonal Banana - King Gizzard

Infest The Rats’ Nest - King Gizzard

No New World - Mass of the Fermenting Dregs

Bury Me At Makeout Creek - Mitski

Puberty 2 - Mitski

Unsilent Death - Nails

Itekoma Hits - Otoboke Beaver

Morbid Stuff - PUP

A Moon Shaped Pool - Radiohead

RTJ3 - Run the Jewels

Angles - The Strokes

To Be Kind - Swans

Undertale OST - Toby Fox

Scum Fuck Flower Boy - Tyler, The Creator 

Igor - Tyler, The Creator

Weezer (White Album) - Weezer

nightlife - yuragi

[kulamitkumar92-blog]

Trends That Will Reshape The Real Estate Market

Among the many different factors influencing the way real estate is developed, transacted and used in India, there are five big major emerging trends that have both real-time and long-term significance:

Co-working spaces finding favour with independent consultants and freelancers.

With the growing start-up ecosystem across India and the central government creating an enabling environment for entrepreneurship, demand for office spaces matching such firms’ requirements has gone up in the last few years.

Also, due to the rising number of freelance professionals or consultants in today’s globalized workforce, office communities or co-working spaces are gaining popularity.

Co-working spaces are popping up across Indian metros as well as tier-II cities, and are helping many start-ups get flexible working options at prices they can afford. These spaces offer desks at cheaper rentals and some also allow a rent-free period to tenants apart from utilities and an office-like look-and-feel to potential start-ups.

Some of the co-working places also work as incubation centres for the urban centres they are based out of. Interestingly, start-ups buying/ leasing real estate to sub-lease it to such tenants is also on the rise. At a rough estimate, over a 100 of such players are already active across India. This trend is slowly and surely catching up in India.

Crowdfunding beginning to take hold

Crowdfunding helps innovators and inventors raise money for launching their products or services through the Internet. The practice involves raising small amounts of money online, from many people across the globe, to finance a project or venture. While other industries have seen the emergence of a more dynamic crowdfunding scene, real estate’s popularity still has a lot of catching up to do.

Some experts have pointed at the maturing crowdfunding scenario in the U.S., where the amount of money raised and the size of deals, as well as the speed at which they occur, have all steadily increased. In China, the real estate industry is no longer the exclusive preserve of big investors, and property developers have turned to crowdfunding to help finance the construction of commercial and residential projects.

Although in nascent stages in India, crowdfunding can pick up here as well because the financials of many developers are stretched. With increased digitalization and transparency, investors can be expected to open up to this way of investing if they can expect good returns. Already, non-resident Indians can invest in the country’s real estate under the same conditions applicable to residents. Moreover, a marketplace is already bringing together real estate investors as also listing premium plots, apartments and villas. This sector is likely to evolve and grow in the coming years.

Transparency to increase and help attract more funding.

Two-thirds of the real estate markets globally have shown progress in their levels of transparency over the past two years, according to JLL’s Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI) 2016. India too made improvements in overall transparency scores by moving up four places, and its Tier-I cities are expected to break into the transparent category in the 2018 rankings.

Out of 109 countries, the top 10 highly-transparent markets alone corner 75% of global investment into commercial real estate (CRE), highlighting the extent to which transparency drives real estate investment decisions. At a time when capital allocations to real estate are growing globally, investors are expecting transparency standards in real estate to be at par with other asset classes.

Capital allocations in excess of $1 trillion will be targeting CRE within the next decade, compared to $700 billion now. This growth means investors will continue to demand further improvements in real estate transparency. There’s also mounting pressure from the world’s growing middle classes to weed out corruption from real estate, which will speed up this pace of change especially in the semi-transparent markets. Social media will also help mobilize people in this direction.

Retailers looking favourably at office-retail complexes.

For quite some time now, retailers have been road blocked by a lack of available quality retail space. At such a time, office-retail complexes (ORCs) are emerging as alternatives to high streets, and even malls, for some categories of retailers such as F&B (quick service restaurants, coffee shops, fine dining, pubs, etc.) or BFSI (bank branches, ATMs, broking services, etc.).

Since most part of the day of a working individual is spent at the office during weekdays, retail services benefit immensely by locating themselves close to, or within, business districts. Retail categories such as telecom services, office formals, leather bags and accessories, high-end fitness centres, premium salons, eyewear and mobile manufacturers are now all looking favourably at ORCs.

Of the total retail presence in office buildings across major tier-I cities, a dominant 26% is occupied by F&B and a significant 23% is occupied by retail BFSI outlets. While retailers get the dual advantage of paying lower rents compared to premium spaces in Grade A malls and closer access to their main target segment of office-goers, developers are also open to experimenting more with a mixed-use format rather than a standalone retail format. This way, they can allow for quality retail on the lower floors and commercial spaces on the upper floors.

Technology transforming real estate requirements across the globe.

Tech-enabled workplaces are becoming more common across the globe. In U.S., research on the budgets of clients’ interior build-outs are showing very interesting results, with IT costs as a proportion of overall construction budgets increasing rapidly. Earlier, they were around 5% of the overall construction budgets over the last decade.

More recent build-out budgets show the expansion of IT services from cabling and wiring to more than a dozen items for technology, including access devices, infrastructure, mobility, connectivity, data security systems, wireless connections and upgrades, business-specific apps, company-specific conferencing and presentation capabilities. All of these items can add up to 35% or more of a budget for a truly technology-focused company.

This theme is seen in every tenant build-out today, from traditional law firms to new campuses built by companies like Facebook and Apple. The aesthetics and prestige of an office, which were formerly the primary considerations, are beginning to take a back seat to the technology and the connectivity within buildings. Some corporate occupiers in India are starting to invest more in the expansion of their IT infrastructure.

KUL Kumar Builders aim to incorporate all these concepts in their projects ensuring clients are handed over keys to an up-to-date, sustainable and ultra-modern home and office. This commitment lands us the top spot as one of Pune’s best builders

For more info-http://kul.co.in

[elliesrandomessays-blog]

Clickbait Title: How Todd in the Shadows killed Pop Music.

Non-Clickbait title: How the change in the social preconceptions of Pop music as a genre resulted in Pop Music making itself irrelevant.

For around a year now critics of American Pop Music have been lamenting the near complete overtaking of Pop music as the predominant music of choice by Hiphop. It's an unique time to be a fan of Chart Music. If you go on the Billboard Hot 100, the literal definition of what is popular in the USA at any one time you'll find a list that is primarily Rap music, not Pop. The top 20 at the time of writing currently has 13 rap songs amongst its ranks, and it doesn't peter off as you scroll down through the 70's and 80's. It gets worse if you're slightly sharper on your definition of Pop because pure Pop music only has at best 3 songs in the top 20. Hiphop is seeing a dominance of mainstream culture right now and has managed to almost entirely remove Pop music from the cultural zeitgeist and many critics want to know why. Why is Pop music no longer Pop music.

This could be the legit hot 100 or the Hiphop hot 100 and there’d be no difference.

I will quickly acknowledge the unfortunate duality of the term 'pop music'. It functions both as shorthand for music that is popular, regardless of genre or origin; and as an explicit label for the genre of pop music. Much the same way that indie can both mean independent, and the genre of indie. This is unhelpful bit of lexical crossover that's contributing to the general frustration so I'll spell the leading question out explicitly: why is capital-P Pop music no longer pop(ular) music.

There are many small factors that contribute to this such as the changes in the way music is consumed; Hiphop as a genre has been a lot quicker to adapt its method of distribution to the age of streaming than Pop being the big one that most people point to as the root cause, but I think there's a much more substantial change to the way the general media approaches Pop as a genre that has split it's audience down the middle. Essentially dividing and conquering.

I would put the main issue being with the form of Pop music criticism that began to spring up around 2010. The wave of Poptimism that I'm referring to technically began as far back as 2004 with the rabbit hole of Rockism and the philosophical rejection of the idea that disposable is an inherent negative but it picked up the majority of it's momentum around the time the Club Boom began to reach its third act (think: when Ke$ha became a thing). It's hard to ascertain exactly why it happened but the consequences of this change aren't hard to see, with the most tangibly visible effect being the sudden rise of Todd In The Shadows. While I wouldn't call him directly responsible for this shift - Todd moving from a novelty who applied the standard YouTube-Media-Criticism to Chart Music up to one of the largest influencers of the post-TWGTG style ('post-' being used in the same context as 'post-'modern) was largely driven by the sudden proliferation of Poptimism, and he in general serves as good synecdoche for much of the change in attitude that occurred around the time. So while this shift has nothing literally to do with Todd and his content, he's a good symbol of it, on top of him being a large feature of the surface-level of the change. For ease of reference from this point I'm going to refer to this new attitude as Toddian.

After Toddian-Poptimism rose there was a new critical eye being applied to Chart music and it felt like the charts had entered a golden age - unparalleled since the 80's. Pop music from Adele, Jason DeRulo, Carly Rae Jepsen, fun., Meghan Trainor, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake and many more managed to be in a position where they were both massively commercially successful and given the respect (and occasionally even acclaim) they deserved from critics for being well constructed, enjoyable music that had impact on people. In spite of the assumption that you're old enough to get in to a Club, the Club Boom was seen as a very immature time for music and you could read this Toddian era as being representative of a maturation of Pop Music, and the world responded. Serious, snobby, oldschool music critics weren't afraid anymore to include a Taylor Swift song on their year-end lists when none would've been caught dead doing the same with Flo Rida. And a whole Youtube subgenre of Chart critics grew in the garden Todd had planted. The musical artists of this time were respected for being good Pop Music, not respected for being good in spite of being Pop music: this era spelled the death of the Guilty Pleasure.

So, Question: why did it all stop? The Answer: the devil is in the details of what this new wave of Poptimism was actually doing to Chart Music. If you look at the general trend of what Toddian criticism liked and disliked there's one running theme that even at the time I was skeptical of and has since proven destructive to their own intended goal: Retro.

Remember the time we let a 30 year regression become nearly the most popular song of all time?

The overwhelming trend with Toddian criticism is heaping a majority of the praise on genre-throwbacks and a reporting with a general air of unease newer genres that lack history. Synthpop, R&B, Funk, and Indie-Rock are regular appearances on 'Best songs of X year' lists. House, EDM, and Traprap are regular appearances on the opposite. In retrospect looking at these lists the general impression is not that Toddian criticism exist in order to promote Pop music as a place where legitimate artistic statements can be made and forward movement is being made, but rather to quash any potential movements away from the genres that the vague umbrella of nostalgia is comfortable with. Bar the odd breakthrough from Hiphop, Singer-Songwriter and memeworthy dance songs the charts of this era and especially the hit songs that were regarded as worthwhile can near universally be pinned to a specific retro era they were appealing to. Right across from 60's doo-wop to 90's synth-funk and every possible step inbetween, the critical process turned into "They seem to be going for a [decade]-era [artist] vibe on this new track" with lists ranking them on how much that critic enjoys each of the eras relative to one another.

Even within the context of individual artists careers you can see this. Justin Timberlake in 2014 releases 'Can't Stop the Feeling!', a piece of retro summertime-funk and it becomes one of the most well regarded pieces of popular music of the decade. In 2018 JT releases 'Filthy' a piece of modern Pop music that interpolates elements of modern dance and electronic and he's career is immediately killed. Calvin Harris spends decades regarded as the lowest Chart Music gets. In 2017 he released Funk Wav Bounces and suddenly 'Slide' is a critical darling. The next year he releases the equally quality House song 'One Kiss' and no one cares. Taylor Swift. 80's pop album 1989 is adored. Modern pop Reputation is hailed as an artistic bomb. The Weeknd. Moody PBR&B was rejected. Peppy 'Can't Feel My Face' is a "modern classic". David Guetta, Zedd, Martin Garrix and similar EDM producers are all seemingly ignored when they briefly entered the spotlight with only Avicii and Clean bandit getting acknowledgements because they spliced Electronica with Folk and Classical respectively. Imagine Dragons, one of the few rock bands unironically trying to push forward into modern Pop styles of production and aesthetic when pure Indie were adored yet are now regarded as "worse than Nickleback". Which is a phrase so incredibly toploaded with subtext that I could double the length of this essay just digging into those three words. I could go on longer with these but I'll leave the rest as names for you to think about yourself: Pharrell Williams, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, Fall Out Boy, Jason DeRulo, Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, Charli XCX, Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars.

Over the course of half-a-decade, the Pop music industry went from rewarded greatly, to heavily disincentivized to promote modern Pop music. Some would seep through the cracks such as Tove Lo and Julia Michaels but the lukewarm and actively hostile responses they respectively got were just further perpetuating the problem. Why would any rational record label want to invest time and money into artists trying to sound modern when all the Toddian eye is going to do is reject them in favour of someone who's tearing ideas directly out of Billy Joel's playbook. This lead to the inevitable crowding out of newer acts who were experimenting in modern genres. The last truly modern act to break in to the upper echelons of popular culture were probably The Chainsmokers. With Roses, Don't let Me Down and Closer all being incredibly popular with no retro era to support themselves only. And they also served as the Toddian eye's most brutal target. Literally being regarded as the worst album of the year.

(I'm aware that Todd himself actually liked The Chainsmokers. So this a good time for a reminder this isn't about his opinions specifically).

The obvious immediate rebuttal to this was posed to be within minutes when I posted the initial thesis for this essay on Twitter: if modern-Pop was killed by an overpraise of retro-Pop. Why isn't retro-Pop dominating the charts instead then?

The problem there is one that many fans of retro-Pop don't want to hear, retro-Pop was a fad, and that fad has now died. Or rather, retro-Pop was a rare occurrence of a meta-fad. It had a significantly longer lifespan than the 2004 indie-rock fad that gave us Mr.Brightside and the 2017 Spanish fad that gave us Despacito because rather than being one specific gimmick that popular culture was enamored with, it was composed of dozens of smaller fads that when placed one-after-another produce the illusion of a trend. If you actually look at the nitty-gritty no particular subfad of retro survived more than one or two artists releasing an album each. Doo-Wop was only popular long enough to give us Meghan Trainor and Charlie Puth while Michael Jackson was only popular long enough to give us The Weeknd and Jason Derulo. ect. ect. So the reason that Run Away With Me by Carly Rae Jepsen and Bills by LunchMoney Lewis weren't commercial successes in spite of seemingly being exactly the kind of retro hit that was at-the-time popular was because neither song were released when that specific era's fad was the in thing. Sure they were retro, but we already had Taylor Swift snap up dreamy 80's pop and DNCE had already filled the quota of glistening-pop-Funk so why would they need another?

There was no way that this essay was going to exist without a nod to E• MO•TION at some point.

By early 2017 we had already essentially run out of genres to co-opt without going into music that's so old it's nearly measured in centuries. So that put the music industry into a Catch-22. They can't invest their promotional time and money into retro-Pop anymore because the fad is well and truly dead (you can't make another Uptown Funk because Uptown Funk already exists) and the general public is going to reject it as a late-to-the-party grasp of desperation. But they can't invest into modern-Pop because Toddian critics are going to reject it outright because it doesn't appeal to the core aesthetics that they like and are going to heap tepid reviews on it which will seriously damage any attempts to market the thing, you can't advertise a 3-star review. The retro-Pop well dried up, and now in the final quarter of 2018 everyone regrets cementing up the old well. Eventually all fads die.

Now it's time to bring Justin Beiber in, who I imagine so far has been the biggest ? lying under this whole argument. Beiber was huge around the same time of the final years of the retro-Pop fad and wasn't making anything remotely retro. He was making incredibly forward-pushing, futuristic sounding dance-pop that had yet to really have an era before now. But he's the final piece of this puzzle: the fad that overtook retro. Justin Beiber was riding the next wave: Tropical. Major Lazer started it, Beiber rode it to the top, Sia and Ed Sheeran followed behind him. That fad had the lifespan of a normal fad - around 14 months. Then that naturally morphed into Spanish music. Then that fad died and nothing came in to replace it so Pop music was left with a hole and nothing to fill it. Once again that left the pop music industry with the more general formulation of the Catch-22. Fad has died so can't promote that without looking desperate, can't promote new Pop music because no one wants to swim in a lukewarm pool where the lifeguard secretly wishes you were someone else.

Hiphop itself is pretty much irrelevant to the story. There's nothing special about Rap as a genre apart from the fact it just happened to be the 2nd place racer when 1st place's tires blew-out. That's not to say that Rap wasn't doing some legitimately incredible things and isn't worthy of success. But all I'm saying is Post Malone, Cardi B, and Kendrick Lamar would've been top-40-popular anyway and there was simply no one else in the way to stop them *not* going to number 1.

This has all had the consequence of turning Pop music, in both forms, into niche genres. Now that the general public isn't consuming Pop because it's what the miasma of popular culture tells them to like Pop has to start appealing to people who're actual Popheads, and when your audience becomes niche-sized they're small enough to make the critical decisions themselves. No one wants to listen to retro-Pop stars that the big labels are offering anymore because their audience now is so small that the audience is cutting out the middlemen and just listening to old music (it's no surprise this has all been at the same time as Africa by Toto's sudden rebirth) while on the other end no one wants to listen to the modern-Pop that labels offer anymore because their audience is making active decisions and is instead listening to Alison Wonderland and Virtual Self. Some like myself have even defected as far as Bill Wurtz.

Seriously, if you’re a person who considers yourself ‘in to’ music and only think of Bill Wurtz as that weird guy who made the history videos then you’re missing out.

I'm not even going to pretend that there's a solution to this problem. Even if I had one I'm an insignificant enough cog in the machine that I couldn't enact it. But I can give my perspective on where the future of the Charts lie.

The main thing to keep in mind is that this is all cyclical. Eventually the general consuming public will get sick of Hiphop and whomever is in 2nd place when that happens is going to capitalize on the exact same sort of collapse that got us in the current situation. Arguably this will happen a lot faster since Toddian was a relatively large shift in critical style compared to 2009 but Hiphop has always had a higher degree of scrutiny applied to it for both fair and unfair reasons. And Pop music isn't totally dead either, arguably the nadir has passed and it’s on the way up not down at the current moment. As much as I dislike it, Weezer's cover of Africa shows there's at least a way back in to mainstream consciousness for Pop music if it decides to go down that route. And acts such as LSD, Bazzi and Halsey are still managing to claw their way into high listen counts through sheer force of quality.

So for now, I'd say enjoy the ride. And enjoy the brief time that Toddian Criticism has put us in where the radio not giving you Pop to listen to puts you in a place where you hear Tessa Violet for the first time instead

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT ENGINE

Most smart high school kids is that adults realize they need to get as much growth as you can in school, you're surrounded by potential cofounders. 5 who've influenced me, not people who would be good to program in today. They try to convince with their pitch.1 I'm not optimistic about filters that work at the network level.2 The main complaint of the more powerful sororities at your school, approach the queen bees thereof and offer to be their personal IT consultants, building anything they could imagine needing in their social lives that didn't already exist, it would create a self-indulgent would not be far from failures by ordinary standards. What was special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was not that they were just like us, they sometimes describe it as a child, that if you can talk about it.3 99 and. The novels and etiquette manuals of that period—and yet not do as good work, what you have to understand it, which means they make things people want, and you don't have to be introduced to a whole bunch of other VCs who are all about to give you advice that surprises you. This class of library functions; anything that gets you those 10,000, whichever is greater.

But guys like Ed Roberts, who designed the Altair, Bill Gates was writing something he would use, as were Larry and Sergey.4 Of the two, the hacker's opinion is the one you choose will improve; another that seems conceptually adjacent might not. Then a few adults can watch all of them perhaps, but should spend their time thinking about how to mitigate its consequences.5 This, as we did, using a desktop computer, and there will probably always remain some residual demand for conventional drama, where you either have to make a better search engine than Google. Of course, if you can choose when you raise money at phase 2. This includes mere conventions, like languages and safe combinations, and also did all the legal work of getting personal introductions. Civil War were.6 7636 free 0. Have multiple plans. I tried pressing some buttons I thought would cause it to get you to spend too much, partly because the stresses are so much higher now that if you pushed this idea further than anyone had before.

It was the people they can get the most done. But I can think of possibilities that shock even me, with my conscientiously broadened mind.7 And so American software and movies, because that's the only one. I couldn't think of the Italian word for success. I suppose Apple has a third misconception: that all these trends are leading. Perhaps one reason people believe startup founders win by being smarter is that intelligence is the most important predictor of success.8 Why do you use?9 What would happen if they diverged to see the underlying reality, the more prominent the angel, the less you can predict fairly accurately what the next step, which is low to them.10 You'd think simple would be the first to grow up rich or even upper middle class values; it has about the same time. Instead of relying on their own, and with them your income.

But hacking can certainly be too succinct.11 People only tend to use whatever language everyone else is crazy. Well, this seems a grim view of the future? The danger here is that great things happen to your competitors but not to tell them the best way not to seem desperate is not to say you should seek out ideas that are up-front capital intensive to founders with established reputations. Perhaps the most important thing about a car is the image it projects. As one VC told me: The numbers for me ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the power of that force. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called freaks. Isn't the pointy-headed academics, and another who'd spent the same time. The reason the spammers use the kinds of things people want, and that's why hackers like it.

The optimum is not the way Apple had under Steve Jobs.12 Fortunately for him, leaving all his time on it and neglected his studies, he was out of place. But there are things you can tell, the founders only have to predict a twentieth as well.13 Many of the nastiest problems you see in technology. Don't let that deter you.14 They won't be replaced wholesale. You don't build a chat app for teenagers unless you're also a teenager. They're way more dangerous than a physical one.15 It was a mystery he was trying to be a luxury item?

So if you're ready to fight to the death. It has come about mostly by default. The way to win is in deciding what counts as news. Whereas there is a common thread.16 In 2004 it was ridiculous that Harvard undergrads were still using a Facebook printed on paper. I left high school I was still trying to understand its implications. 7 1. They know their audience. The buildings are old though increasingly they are being torn down and replaced with generic McMansions and the trees are tall.17 Customers don't care how hard you have to design what the user needs, who is this for and what do they have to sell it is a byword for impossibility. If that makes you much more about alliances.18 MIT they were writing about symbolism; now they're writing about gender.

Though we initially did this out of self-preservation.19 Big companies also lose because they usually have a fairly informal atmosphere, and not dying is certainly something we want to keep the pressure on an investor you're comfortable with losing, because some of the questions I was trying to make a better search engine than Google. I was saying as well. Not well, perhaps, but well enough.20 But what does that really mean?21 But it may not even be the majority.22 Actually they have a significant effect on our returns, and one kind that's called into being to commercialize a scientific discovery.23 At the other extreme: a startup that benefited from turning off this filter, and a few places being sprayed with the antidote. We're more patient.

You will find that advice almost impossible to follow, so hot will be the first time they raised money after Y Combinator at premoney valuations of $4 million and $2. Intel and Microsoft stickers that come on some laptops. In other words, is someone who concentrates on substance.24 Even as recently as a few decades before. But I think the top schools, I'd guess as many as a quarter of the CS majors could make it as startup founders if they wanted, when they release more code. My E-Commerce Web Site, that's spam. Would the transplanted startups survive? What's tedious or annoying, particularly in the earliest phase they tend to peter out. You can change anything about a house except where it is because their company made money from it, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, to see what focus overlooks. 6 shrieking tower servers. Labor unions were exempted from antitrust laws by the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 on the grounds that it would be hard not to let it go to your head.25 Graduation is a bureaucratic change, not a service business.

Notes

But that is actually from the study. And while it makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of applicants—for example, probably did more drugs in his early twenties.

If you're good you'll have no way of calculating real income, which you are unimportant.

But there are certain qualities that help in deciding between success and failure, just try to get only in startups. Which implies a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts. If you're good you'll have to be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be a hot startup.

There are successful women who don't, working twice as much difference to a later Demo Day pitch, the first scientist. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

Acquirers can be useful in solving problems too, e. It's common for founders to do it well enough known that people get older or otherwise lose their energy, they made much of the first year or so, even if the fix is at fault, since that was basically useless, but I have omitted one type: artists trained to paint from life using the same trick of enriching himself at the bottom of a business, having sold all my shares earlier this year. So if you saw Jessica at a large chunk of this type of thing.

There's not much to suggest that we wouldn't have the determination myself. Currently we do at least on me; how can anything regressive be good?

There's nothing specifically white about such customs. That's why startups always pay equity rather than giving grants.

Except text editors and compilers. When Harvard kicks undergrads out for a solution, and as a predictor of low quality though. The golden age of tax avoidance. If they're dealing with recent art, why did it.

The New Industrial State to trying to sell them technology. Looking at the mercy of investors caring either. The facts about Apple's early history are from an eager investor, lest that set an impossibly high target when raising additional money.

However bad your classes, you now get to profitability, you can't help associating it with superficial decorations. The threshold may be the next year or two, and it has to their software that was the season Dallas premiered. Many people feel good. I'd use to make a country with a neologism.

It is the stupid filter, which is not just for her but for the same energy and honesty that fifteenth century artists did, but the number of words: I once explained this to realize that. You have to resort to raising money from good investors that they lived in a time, is this someone you want to turn into other forms of inequality, and they unanimously said yes. Html.

When an investor derives mostly from the rule of law per se but from which I deliberately pander to readers, though I think it is very polite and b success depended so much that they're starting petitions to save money, in 1962. Few consciously realize that in the life of a company selling soybean oil or butter n yellow onions other fresh vegetables to a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Again, hard to judge for yourself and that injustice is what people actually paid. But you can't or don't want to pound that message home.

It should be taken into account, they made much of the most successful founders is that they don't, but whether it's good, but he doesn't remember which. Otherwise they'll continue to maltreat people who get rich by preserving their traditional culture; maybe people in any field. It's sometimes argued that kids who went to school.

The golden age of tax avoidance. Don't believe a domain where you wanted to start a startup, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them. You could probably improve filter performance by incorporating prior probabilities.

I had a big brand advantage over the details. For example, would probably only improve filtering rates early on. When I was as much what other people.

IBM seemed a lot of money. Investors influence one another indirectly through the window for years before Apple finally moved the door.

Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them Google Video is badly designed. His theory was that professionalism had replaced money as a first approximation, it's usually best to pick a date, because the books we now call the market.

Presumably it's lower now because of that.

The IBM 704 CPU was about bands.

Chop onions and other vegetables and fry in oil, over fairly low heat, till onions are glassy. The Wouldbegoods. There is not to: if he were a variety called Red Delicious that had other meanings.

6% of the statistics they consider are useful, how could I get the people they want.

When Harvard kicks undergrads out for doing it with. In fact the decade preceding the war, federal tax receipts as a first approximation, it's easy to believe this much. Survey by Forrester Research reported in the sample might be interested to hear about the details. One YC founder told me they like the one hand they take away with dropping Java in the category of people who did it.

There can be compared, per capita income.

Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have seemed shocking for a startup.

Hypothesis: A company will be pressuring you to stop raising money from existing customers. Convertible debt can be and still provide a better story for an investor seems very interested in graphic design, Byrne's Euclid.

[wineanddinosaur]

EOD Drinks: Jason Murphy: Beverage Innovation Manager at Buffalo Wild Wings

In this episode of “End of Day Drinks,” the VinePair team is joined by Jason Murphy, the beverage and innovation manager at Buffalo Wild Wings. Murphy explains how Buffalo Wild Wings became the largest purveyor of craft beer in the on-premise world, and begins by tracing his own career,  which began with a 110-beer “World Beer Tour.” After completing his tour, Murphy continued to learn more about craft beer until joining Buffalo Wild Wings, where he’s worked to ensure local craft beers are served at every location.

While Murphy works with beer buyers and general managers in every Buffalo Wild Wings location, he’s still in charge of assigning the mainstay taps across the nation and identifying local craft options for all 50 states. Here, he discusses some of his favorite local options and the new styles beer geeks should look out for. He cites saisons as one of his favorite beer styles, but also mentions a churro pastry stout listeners will have to hear about to believe.

Here, Murphy discusses how data trends influence his buying, and, of course, how Buffalo Wild Wings hopes to usher in a new wave of hard seltzers. He explains his plans to keep on-premise hard seltzers on draft, and what will need to happen before he can standardize service. Murphy ends the discussion with a thoughtful definition of what craft beer means to him and the perfect pairings fans can find the next time they visit their local B-Dubs.

Listen online

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Or check out the conversation here

Adam: From VinePair’s New York City headquarters, this is “End of Day Drinks,” where we sit down with the movers and shakers in the beverage industry. So pour yourself a glass, and listen along with us. Let’s start the show. On today’s episode of “End of Day Drinks,” we’re talking to Jason Murphy, the beverage and innovation manager of Buffalo Wild Wings, or affectionately known as B-Dubs. We’ll talk with Jason about how Buffalo Wild Wings became the largest purveyor of craft beer in the on-premise world, as well as the innovations they have planned post-pandemic. We’re also going to chat a little bit about hard seltzer and why the brand is so gung ho in adding taplines. And finally, we’ll talk to Jason about what he thinks “craft” means. Let’s start the show.

Tim: Hi there, this is Tim McKirdy, staff writer at VinePair, and welcome to the End of Day Drinks podcast. Joining us today, we have Jason Murphy, beverage innovation manager at Buffalo Wild Wings. Hello, Jason.

Jason: Hey Tim, thanks for having me.

T: Thanks for joining us. And as always, I’m joined by my wonderful colleagues on VinePair’s editorial team, including VinePair co-founder Adam Teeter.

A: What’s up Tim? Hey, Jason.

T: We also have executive editor Joanna Sciarrino.

Joanna: Hi, everyone.

T: Senior editor Cat Wolinski.

Cat: Hi, Jason. How are you?

T: And associate editor Katie Brown.

K: Hey guys, what’s up?

T: And of course, we have VinePair tastings director and all-round star Keith Beavers. Hey, Keith.

Keith: Hey Tim, Jason. Tim, Jason, what’s going on?

JM: That was a good introduction.

T: So, Jason, really great to have you with us today. And what can we say about Buffalo Wild Wings? You guys have more than a thousand locations nationwide. You sell more draft beer than any other restaurant in the country. And more than any other sports bar or restaurant, you place an incredible focus on craft beer. And maybe most importantly, your tagline is Wings, Beer, Sports. And as beverage innovation manager, you’re in charge of the beer, so no pressure there.

JM: Yeah, there’s definitely worse jobs that could be had. I’m pretty lucky in what I get to do, that’s for sure.

T: And before we dive into your work at B-Dubs, and by the way, I really like to call it B-Dubs.

JM: Sure.

T: Yeah, that’s good. I think that’s easier for the flow.

A: Is that what you call it?

JM: Yes, yeah, I call it B-Dubs. A lot of people call it BW3s. And that was like a decade ago. We’ve transitioned to Buffalo Wild Wings or B-Dubs.

A: Interesting.

C: BW3s? What’s that?

JM: Yeah, so back in the day, it was Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck. And I guess weck is like a hot beef sandwich that’s dipped in au jus. I’m not very familiar with it, but that was one of the two things that we served, and we no longer serve weck sandwiches. So we’re just B-Dubs. We’re just Buffalo Wild Wings.

C: Woah, whatever happened to the Weck?

T: A topic for another podcast, then?

C: Yeah. TBD.

T: But Jason, let’s let’s talk about beer before we talk about your work at B-Dubs, because you’re a certified cicerone, and I believe beer is somewhat in your blood. Am I right?

JM: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve been working in the beer industry for a while, but my dad spent 40 years working at Coors Brewery in Golden. He started when he was 18, retired when he was 58. So yeah, I’ve truly been around beer my entire life.

T: That’s incredible, and then so, yeah, your position at Buffalo Wild Wings, speaking about it, this is a really important role in America’s beer industry when it comes to on-premise serving. Can you tell us about how one goes about getting a role such as that?

JM: Oh, man. I guess I just drank a lot of beer and was good at drinking beer. No, growing up through college, I had worked at a couple different brewpub chains, Gordon Biersch and then Milwaukee Alehouse. And just served and bartended to get through college, but spent a lot of time learning beer from brewers and people who are really passionate about it. I graduated college and was able to get a job at a restaurant chain called Old Chicago. And they’re a regional chain. They’ve got about 100 locations across the country, but they’re known for what they call their World Beer Tour, which is, they have anywhere from 30 to 40 beers on tap, but they’ve also got 80 to 90 beers in a bottle cooler. And the World Beer Tour is drinking 110 different beers and it’s just kind of their loyalty program. You get credit for every beer you try and you can only drink four per visit. But anyways, I got to work for that chain and run their bar program for a while. And they’re very big into craft beer and craft beer education and getting people kind of on their craft beer journey. Did that for about five years before I had the opportunity to work for Buffalo Wild Wings and run the largest draft beer program in the country. So I kind of cut my teeth there. And one thing that I will always tell people is my claim to fame of how I started to learn about beer is, I did complete my old Chicago World Beer Tour — my 110 different beers — before I turned 21. So don’t ask a lot of questions about that.

C: Oh, man.

A: I love it. Well, so I have a question, Jason, this is Adam here. So are you in charge of buying for all of the Buffalo Wild Wings? How does your role actually work? Do you have people in each region that are buying? Because I think one of the things that’s pretty amazing about Buffalo Wild Wings is that the craft beer is different at every location. So every place I’ve been when I’ve been to a Buffalo Wild Wings, obviously, you have some of the bigger players that are sort of your standards at some of the places, I’m curious how that works, too. But then what I’ve always been impressed by is like, you’ll have a few draft lines that are like “the local brewery” or a brewery that is as close to Buffalo Wild Wings as possible. So how are you guys pulling that off?

JM: Yeah, so that’s probably one of the cooler but also more challenging aspects about the beer program for Buffalo Wild Wings is, we’ve got right around 1,250 restaurants. We’ve probably got over 1,300 different beer buyers in our company. If you include every single restaurant, we’ve got general managers at every single restaurant who are making decisions on beer. The district managers they report to are making decisions. The franchisees — we’re about 50-50 split company and franchise owned. Our franchise owners are making decisions and they’ve got corporate offices where they’ve got a beer buyer in their offices who are making decisions. So there’s a ton of different layers on who is making decisions at beer from my level, because, yeah, I do make decisions on what’s going to be on tap all the way down to the location level, because we realize that local beer and the brewery down the street from a Buffalo Wild Wings is super important to that local beer drinker. So we want to make sure that they have decision-making power to bring on those taps. But from where I sit, when I came on board Buffalo Wild Wings about three and a half years ago, the beer program was very national- mandated. All the beer selections that came down from the company office were in every Buffalo Wild Wings everywhere. The one change that I made when I started was, we started going state by state. So I build out a mandate list or a required tap list for all of our locations down to the state level. And the only reason it’s state level is because that’s the lowest I can go by myself. So I do build out a required tap list for all 50 states. I do split up California into two — Northern and Southern California. But that’s how deep I can go from my level, state by state, to make sure that we’ve got the right brand for the right guest at that level.

K: That’s so cool. This is Katie, by the way, I have a question for you, because I know that you’re from Denver, right? Or you’re living in Denver?

JM: Yes, born and raised in Denver and still here.

K: That’s awesome. So I’m currently living in Colorado, too. And I’ve just been so enjoying the local beer scene here. And so I was wondering, do you have some favorite local Colorado beers that you make sure are in all the restaurants here?

JM: Oh, that’s a good question. So, yes, I do. I’ve also got some local favorite Colorado beers that I can’t get in Buffalo Wild Wings yet just because they’re not big enough to distribute yet. But I’d say obviously the staples around Colorado that you’d expect to hear: New Belgium and Odell are definitely two of my favorite breweries. I try to visit those breweries whenever I can. One of my favorite up-and-coming breweries that does distribute is Cerveceria Colorado. They’re a brewery from Denver Beer Co. They’re fairly new on the market within the last couple of years. But Cerveceria Colorado makes great craft beers with a Hispanic or a Mexican twist to them. And they make some of my favorite flavors that you can get in the Denver beer market right now. So that’s one of my favorites that we’ve made sure we have on tap. Crooked Stave, which is one of the leading sour breweries in the country, but is also local to Denver. They have some tapping presence not only in Colorado, but in some other states as well. And then just personally, I spent a lot of time out of tap rooms enjoying other people’s beer. So New Image is one of my favorites out of my native Colorado. Cerebral out of Denver, Out of Range out of Frisco. So when I’m not working in beer, I spend a lot of time enjoying it.

C: We love Cerebral here. They were among some of our top beer lists last year, and I’m always excited to try what they have.

JM: They do awesome stuff. I love those guys.

C: And Crooked Stave, we actually got a little bit of. This is Cat, by the way, Cat Wolinski, resident beer geek. And we do get some Crooked Stave here. But I do miss being able to travel and go to Denver for the Great American Beer Festival and all of that. So it’s cool to hear about these new brands. Like you mentioned, the one with a sort of Latin American slant. Do you find that Mexican lagers or Mexican-style lagers are getting really big, either in your area or just like across the B-Dub’s footprint? Because we find that it’s just increasingly popular to see these sort of riffs on the Tecates and Coronas of the world.

JM: Yeah, Mexican lagers do great for us. The Modelo, Corona, Dos Equis, they do some pretty great sales for us. Not only just because they’re extremely sessionable beers that you can enjoy while you’re watching a football game and eating some hot wings. But also you find a lot of guests or on-premise drinkers kind of trading up because they’ve got a little bit of a premium cachet attached to them. So we do a great job with those imported Mexican lagers. But that’s one of the reasons why I am excited about breweries like Cerveceria Colorado out of Denver, Four Corners out of Texas, because I think that’s a very unexplored area of craft beer is how can we blend these natural Hispanic flavors that we all love to enjoy in our food so much and is making its way to cocktails and is proliferating cocktails that hasn’t really made its way into craft beer yet. I think that’s a really exciting area that’s kind of untapped in the craft beer market. But there are some breweries out there that are trying it and making pretty good stuff.

C: What kind of flavors are you referring to, like agua fresca-type stuff?

JM: Oh, I mean, so the one, and I know that it’s a very standard flavor, but you don’t see much of it in craft beyond maybe being expressed from actual hops and hop flavor. But their main flavor at Cerveceria is a pineapple blonde. They’ve also got a poblano chili pilsner. It’s really good. I believe they’ve infused some mole into some of their beers, which is really good because you get that chocolate from the mole in some of the beer. So just those flavors that you would expect to see when you dine in a traditional Mexican restaurant are starting to express themselves in some beers. And I’ve been pretty impressed by a lot of it.

C: Very cool.

Keith: Is that what Mexican-style means, just like you’re trying to impart some of the flavors of the Mexican cuisine into beer, or is it more about the kind of Mexican style that we’re used to that I drink during karaoke?

JM: I would say more of the stuff that you’re used to trying in food is the stuff that you’re seeing. I’m scrolling through their menu right now. They’ve got a horchata blonde ale at Cerveceria Colorado, a churro stout, a chocolate chili churro stout.

C: Churro Stouts? Oh, my God, that sounds amazing.

JM: Yeah. So some of that stuff that you would expect to see when you’re dining out and enjoying Mexican cuisine is making its way into beer.

C: That’s awesome.

JS: How much in figuring out which tap to pick goes into pairing with the menu?

JM: That’s a good question. It’s definitely considered. The most important thing to me, though, is making sure — so we’ve got on average, we’ve got about 30 handles in all Buffalo Wild Wings. And the most important thing to me is making sure that of those 30 handles, they represent a wide variety of styles. So a lot of times you’ll go into a tap room and they’ll have 30 handles and they’ve got 10 pale lagers, 10 IPAs, five wheat beers, maybe a couple of ambers, a stout, a cider and you’re done. Right? There’s not a whole lot of differentiation there. Which one of these IPAs do I want to drink? That doesn’t mean we’re not going to have a good mix of IPAs and lagers because that’s what sells well. But I think the one thing that is easy to lose sight of is when you have a 30-handle tap system, it is a fact that you’re going to have a No. 1 seller and a No. 30 seller and everything in between. You’re never going to get away from having a 30th seller or a worst seller, no matter how hard you try. So what we’ve been trying to do over the last few years is make sure that we’re optimizing that draft system so that we’re moving a lot of volume out of our bestsellers, which is going to be those pale lagers and IPAs and really optimizing the back end of the draft system to allow for different styles that maybe you wouldn’t expect from a Buffalo Wild Wings. Am I allowed to curse on this podcast?

A: Of course.

JM: Cool. I’m going to do it. When I interviewed for the job four years ago, one of the things I said in my interview is all I want to do is drink a f****** saison at a Buffalo Wild Wings.

C: Yeah!

JM: Saisons are personally my favorite style.

C: I love saisons!

JM: Yeah they’re personally one of my favorites styles, but they’re such a good beer to pair with so many different flavors, especially when you’ve got 30 different wing sauces on the menu. But that’s one of the things. So you could say that, yes, I’m considering how do you pair beer and food together when I’m building the list, but really what I’m trying to do is build a pretty varied assortment of beer styles and types on our menu so that I don’t really have to worry about force-fitting pairing and and beer styles onto our menu. It should just naturally happen because that’s just what we have, because we’ve got a good style selection to begin with.

A: So, Jason, question for you, and I’m sure Tim will have a question afterwards that is probably similar to mine so I’m going to build on Joanna’s. But I know that Tim probably has a question he probably has been wanting to ask that is going to be similar, but about another style that’s all the rage. But I would love to know in terms of building the beer program, how much you’re looking at data and trends? So, for example, do you have a ton of hazies on your lists across the country just because hazy IPAs are all the rage? And does that cause you to phase out more West Coast-style IPAs? Or if you see that, I don’t know, pilsners are taking off, do you add more of those? Or more like session IPAs? Or do you not look at data at all when it comes to sort of building the beverage program?

JM: Yeah, that’s a good question. I did not know when I graduated college that I was going to be a data geek, but that’s basically what I’ve become over the last eight years. And that was kind of instilled into me by a former boss at Old Chicago as we were building the program out there and going location by location on building beer lists. But yeah, I mean, I would say my job’s probably about 70 percent science-based and 30 percent art. And that’s really trying to make sure that not only am I understanding what Buffalo Wild Wings guests want, or what are they currently drinking, but what else is happening in the marketplace? We’re a little bit behind the curve in bringing craft beer fans into Buffalo Wild Wings. And I think it’s just because they don’t know that we have a really good selection of craft beer. But I want to make sure part of building that varied assortment to make sure that we’ve got a wide variety of styles is, I want to make sure that when somebody comes into a Buffalo Wild Wings, maybe they’re not a Buffalo Wild Wings fan or their friend dragged them there for a fantasy draft party. And that’s the only time of year that they visit. I want to make sure that they’re wowed by the beer list and the styles and the actual brands that are on tap. And a lot of that comes from paying attention to data following internal data. We use a third-party company called Beer Board to manage a lot of our velocity. So I look at a lot of what they do. But then other industry sites, Nielsen CGA, Technomic, Beer Business Daily, Brewbound — all of those different data sites or news aggregators I spent a lot of attention to. But you know, as the art side of it comes from the fact that I spent a lot of time in taprooms. I try to stay hip with the kids and make sure I know what they are drinking. I do like to spend time trying out different styles and brands and breweries and things like that to make sure that I’m at least trying to round out my knowledge from beers all across the country. Because when you’re trying to run a local beer program in 50 states and 1,200 units across the country, it’s tough, but somebody’s gotta drink all the beers.

K: Does that mean you’re also adding hard seltzers to your beer list?

JM: Yes. So hard seltzers, we kind of tiptoed into and still we’ve kind of only tiptoed into and a lot of that had to do with some of the changes that Covid brought upon our business and the dining restrictions that we have of what people can and can’t do inside our restaurants right now. But moving into — I guess we are in 2021 — moving more into 2021, we’re beginning to make some changes. You’ll start to see a lot more seltzers end up on our mandated tap list and package less so. I envision very soon a world where we have at least one hard seltzer on tap in every Buffalo Wild Wings, if not two. And then in addition to that, anywhere from four to eight different packaged hard seltzer’s in our bottle cooler to allow guests the ability to kind of choose their favorite flavors. Because when you go into a liquor store to purchase hard seltzers, it typically comes in a variety pack. I know from experience and from talking to friends, there’s one or two flavors that you really like and one or two that you don’t. And so you drink the one or two flavors and the other one or two either end up in the back of the fridge or a pile in your basement that you end up giving to your parents. But on premise, we can curate those best flavors for you. You don’t have to buy a variety pack. So I think that’s something that really intrigues me as we look at hard seltzer in the future.

K: Awesome.

T: So, Jason kind of sticking with both of those themes, when it comes to trends and also hard seltzer — and really hard seltzer on tap — this is actually something we’ve kind of had a conversation about between us before, but I wonder whether you could share this idea when it comes to hard seltzer on tap. So hard seltzer as a phenomenon, people probably love it, or one of the reasons people like it, because they know exactly what’s in it. They know what’s in a pour size, what’s in 12 ounces of their favorite brand. So on premise, how are you going to recreate that experience when it comes to serving tap seltzer?

JM: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting because it hasn’t really made its way enough into the on-premise yet where it’s been standardized that everyone is doing the same thing. But I think I’m starting to see enough of it where I’m getting some ideas of where to go. So we are going to pour our hard seltzer draft in a 12-ounce Collins glass. Which, you know, that Collins glass kind of replicates a little bit that feeling of a slick can or slim can that drinkers are used to. We’re not pouring over ice. We’re pouring just straight draft into the glass. What really interests me I’ve seen a couple of different places that I’ve been out to is nucleation in the bottle at the bottom of the glass that just kind of keeps the agitation at the bottom of the glass and helps that appearance. So it differentiates itself a little bit more from still water or soda water. So I think that could be important. We haven’t necessarily gotten to where we’re going to go with garnishes yet or where we’re going to go with hard-seltzer cocktails. It’s an area that interests me. I think for us being a national chain, for us to do a cocktail, we probably have to find a national hard seltzer that we would mandate on tap, which isn’t too far-fetched to believe that we might be doing that sometime soon. But so that could be an avenue. But the garnishes really interest me. What I think we need to do, though, or what the industry needs to do is, typically that kind of stuff is led by the supplier who’s putting the product out there, like Corona led with putting a lime in the Corona. Blue Moon led with putting an orange on a Blue Moon Belgian White. I think it’ll be one of the hard seltzer producers, whether it’s White Claw, Truly, or Bud Light or another one that’s in the market trying to say, hey, or putting their flag in the ground and saying “Yeah, this is how we want you to present our hard seltzer on draft.” It’s just so new yet. I don’t even think the suppliers have a point of view yet, at least from my conversations. Nobody seems to be passionate one way or the other. And so it’ll be nice when somebody says, “No, this is how you do it.” And then everybody follows suit. But for now, I feel pretty confident in the Collins glass, no ice, 12-ounce pours that are very similar to the experience you’re used to getting when you open a can.

Keith: So this is Keith, by the way. I had a question about going back to the whole pairing thing, I just kind of want to know, like what would you pair? Because I know that all you want is a f****** saison. What would you pair with your f***** saison? For all the listeners out there that are like, “What would he do when he’s there?”

JM: Yeah, that’s that’s a good question. So what I would pair a saison with right now, so a lot of people probably don’t know this, but we did just put Saison Dupont in all of our restaurants starting last March. So you should be able to go into most of your Buffalo Wild Wings right now and get a Saison Dupont.

C: Oh my God.

JM: Yeah, it’s pretty cool, right?

C: That’s insane! Legendary! What?

JM: Yeah, you wouldn’t expect to get that at a Buffalo Wild Wings, but now you can. And then another thing a lot of people probably don’t realize is about a year and a half ago, we launched a new line of hand-breaded chicken and hand- breaded chicken sandwich. And the chicken tenders and the chicken breasts for the sandwiches are hand-battered and fried to order. So we’re not bringing in these frozen and battered chicken patties or chicken fingers. We make these to order, and they’re absolutely delicious. I would probably pair our Southern chicken sandwich — which is better than all the other Southern chicken sandwiches that you can get at any fast food restaurant — with a Saison Dupont. Because the “peppery-ness” that you’re going to get in that — oh, and I should say that we use beer batter. So we do pour kolsch into the beer batter, and we make that beer batter fresh daily. So in addition to being hand-breaded to order, we also make the beer batter fresh daily, which I don’t think people give Buffalo Wild Wings enough credit for. But there it is. I would pair one of our hand-breaded chicken sandwiches or the hand-breaded chicken tenders with a Saison Dupont because the “peppery-ness” that you’re going to get in the fresh hand batter and on the Southern chicken sandwich, the tanginess from the pickle is going to pair really well with the Saison Dupont. Southern chicken sandwich, Saison Dupont. Go get it now.

C: Oh my god.

Keith: Yeah I’m going to go out, bye peace.

K: I’m vegetarian, and that sounded good to even me.

JM: There’s controversy over this term — I probably shouldn’t say that — but we put cauliflower wings on the menu. So you can try the cauliflower wings with the Saison Dupont.

Keith: I’m down with that.

C: You’ve got to have the cauliflower wings.

A: Yeah, there’s a Buffalo Wild Wings really close to my apartment in Brooklyn, but I moved to my apartment in Brooklyn right before the pandemic. So I will have to go once it’s over and everything reopens and try all that stuff.

C: Hit me up when you go, Adam.

A: Oh, I will. We’ll do a VinePair outing. We’ll tell him that Jason sent us and that drinks are on him.

JM: Hey, that works for me.

A: So Jason, we’ve had this thesis for a few years now. I wrote a piece about it a long time ago, prior to when these other people were even working at VinePair — besides Keith. What up, Keith? One of the things that I’ve always thought, and I think you might have disproved me in your comment earlier, but I’m curious. I kind of feel like you guys are responsible for introducing more people to craft beer than anyone else in America. And I know that that’s like a very intense claim. But I actually think it’s true. Right? If you look at the amount of Buffalo Wild Wings out there and the fact that you guys are the largest buyer of craft beer in America, and as you said, a lot of people would just show up in Buffalo Wild Wings because their friends brought them along and maybe they’d never had craft beer before, and now they have it for the first time. Do you think that that’s an accurate statement or am I being really aggressive?

JM: No, I’d say that’s pretty true. And I think a lot of that has to do with our size and scale, and the fact that we operate in all 50 states. But we’ve always had a good complement of 25 to 30 tap handles in most of our locations. Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite are great sellers for us and they’re really great beers for the right occasion. But then we’ve also had some really great craft partners, too. Boston Beer and Sam Adams, Blue Moon. Blue Moon is a really good craft beer with some really cool roots to it and a story that I don’t think gets enough credit. But it’s just a great craft beer that’s enjoyable to drink. But also the on-premise is just made for sampling and discovery and learning about different beer styles in a way that the off-premise isn’t because there’s not as much commitment to ordering one pint or a tall. And I think that’s what’s so great and fun about building an on-premise beer program is, you do have the opportunity to experiment with some different things and be first to market with products and play around with different styles and different brands at different breweries. Because the guest is interested in exploring and discovering new things while they’re out. I think that’s kind of the interesting thing about working with some of my on-premise supplier reps. They’ll pitch beers to me that it may not be their No. 1 or 2 seller because they don’t do as well in the on-premise, and they’re open and honest about that. And knowing that this is my No. 3- or 4-selling beer overall as a brewery, but as an on-premise consumer, this is what we want to sell because this is what we want to trial new beer drinkers on. Or if you’re a fan of Sam Adams Brewery, I want to get this beer out here because it’s our new release and everybody’s already buying my lager IPA. So I just think that that’s the interesting and fun thing about what Buffalo Wild Wings can bring to people is just more adventurous experiences than maybe you would sign up for if you’re just shopping for a 6-pack at your liquor store.

Keith: That’s awesome, because I don’t know s*** about beer, but what I love about beer is going to a place that knows everything about it. I’m a wine guy, and I can talk all day about wine, but I love going to a place where I’m like, “Look, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I love beer. I just don’t know anything about it. Can you help me out?” And going to a place that does that is awesome.

JM: Yeah. And that’s something we’re definitely trying to improve on every day is making sure our servers and bartenders have knowledge of all the beers they have on tap. I think one interesting stat that stuck around with me forever, and I see it presented about every year, but the number never really changes it. Something to the effect of only 25 percent of people who enter an on-premise establishment know even what category they’re going to drink. And when they get there, that means 75 percent of people who visit you can be influenced by server or bartender suggestions. So that’s one thing that we always strive for is how can we be educating our staff so that they know as much about not only just the beers, the new beers that we have on tap and what’s local, but we’ve also really refreshed our cocktail program over the last couple of years, making sure it’s more classic cocktails and more creative. A little bit more elevated than what you would expect from a Buffalo Wild Wings. Moving away a little bit from casual dining and more towards craft and classic cocktails and even the wines that we have, because there is an occasion where a Buffalo Wild Wings guest is looking for a good glass or a bottle of wine. So you do have the ability to influence what that purchase is going to be or what that consumer is going to drink just by having a good knowledge base and being able to have a conversation with the table about what you have on tap or what new cocktail you’re shaking.

Keith: That’s awesome, because left on my own I’m just going to get a Corona and queue up Prince.

JM: Yeah.

C: So, Jason, this is Cat again. You are a certified Cicerone, correct? Did you talk about that already?

JM: It was brought up.

C: OK, so how important to beer service do you think being a certified Cicerone is? Or having certified Cicerone beer servers on staff?

JM: I think having certified Cicerone beer servers on staff is extremely important. We’ve tried to create our own internal program that I would say is pretty close, but not quite on par with the certified beer server program. But pretty darn close. But it’s extremely important just to be able to explain the differences in beer beyond an ale and a lager. Which most people probably still don’t even know. I think it’s extremely important to be able to tell people what the flavors they’re going to get in beer is. One of the best experiences I’ve ever had was at a local brewpub in Denver where I had ordered my meal and I was asking my server what beer she thinks I should get next. And instead of saying, well, what’s your favorite style or what kind of mood are you in? she said, well, you just ordered this sandwich. And because you ordered this sandwich, this beer would pair best with what you’re about to eat. So I think you should order that beer. That happened maybe three years ago, but it’s stuck out to me ever since as like the gold standard of what I’d like to see happen at a Buffalo Wild Wings. If we can tailor your experience by saying, ���Well, you just ordered this beer, so I would just suggest this wing sauce or you just ordered this sandwich so I would suggest this beer.” I think being able to customize that experience for the guests at their table or at the bar top is really what people are looking for when they’re going out. They are looking for experience. They are willing to try new things. So to be able to use that Cicerone certification program or tips from the Brewers Association or craftbeer.com or any of those industry resources to really help build up server knowledge. I don’t know if there’s anything more important to a Buffalo Wild Wings experience than doing things like that.

C: Great. Yeah, I think those experiences really stick out to me, too, when you’re like, “yes, that is how service is supposed to be!”

JM: Yeah, I was blown away. I don’t think anybody had ever suggested a beer to me in that way. And such a customized way in that experience. If I could replicate that person across 1,200 restaurants, I would not leave.

C: I hope she got a good tip that day.

JM: She did. Yeah.

T: So, Jason, you’ve been involved with beer for a very long time as a drinker, even before 21 by the sounds of it, in the background in your family, as a professional, as a scholar, Cicerone. So I have a question for you. Turn up the spice a little bit here. But here today in 2021, how would you define craft beer? Because we’ve spent a lot of time talking about craft beer today and I feel like that’s a definition that continues to evolve. So I’d love to hear your take on that.

JM: Oh, you’re putting me on the spot. How would I define craft beer?

Keith: Thanks, Tim.

JM: I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked me that before, so now I’m stumbling over my words, I would define craft beer as a liquid experience where a brewer or brewers have put passion into making that product for you. And are using — I don’t even want to say unique and novel ingredients, because you can have a craft beer experience it’s not that. I would probably stop at what I said. It’s a liquid experience where the brewer or brewers have put an immense amount of passion and research and experience into delivering that product into your glass. And a craft beer can be the easiest-drinking of light lagers, or 40,000 pounds of donuts into a kettle to make a pastry stout. But I think it’s the passion and knowledge and creativity and expertise behind that process that makes it a craft beer. It’s a little bit more than a lot of breweries these days, where it’s working behind the computer to push a button and send a recipe from point A to point B, which, nothing against those recipes, because those recipes and systems have been perfected to produce beer at a mass scale. And they’re efficient and consistent and quality every single time. And I think there’s something behind that passion and creativity to get liquid to glass that defines the craft beer experience. That’s not a very good answer.

T: But I think that’s a real nice sentiment rather than arbitrary production size figures or, I don’t know, even ownership. I mean, is that anything you care about? Seems like it’s very important to some people, but it seems kind of arbitrary to me. If there’s passion there, that’s all that really matters, right?

JM: Yeah. I think that I would say so.

T: Awesome. Well, you know what? I think that’s a really nice place for us to wrap up our conversation. And I’m sure you’re glad I finished with a nice, easy one down the middle for you there.

JM: Guys, this was one of the most fun podcasts I’ve ever been on. This was awesome.

C: Aw.

A: Oh, that’s nice, Jason.

Keith: Hey wow, man. Thanks.

T: Well, yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time today and for joining us. And I look forward to having you on again and speaking about the weck sandwich.

JM: Yeah, the weck sandwich. We’ll do a history of weck.

T: Thank you so much Jason, and thanks everyone. It’s been real fun.

JM: Thanks guys, I appreciate you having me on.

T: Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of “EOD Drinks.” If you’ve enjoyed this program, please leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other people discover the show. And tell your friends. We want as many people as possible listening to this amazing program.

And now for the credits. “End of Day Drinks” is recorded live in New York City at VinePair’s headquarters. And it is produced, edited, and engineered by VinePair tastings director, yes, he wears a lot of hats, Keith Beavers. I also want to give a special thanks to VinePair’s co-founder, Josh Malin, to the executive editor Joanna Sciarrino, to our senior editor, Cat Wolinski, senior staff writer Tim McKirdy, and our associate editor Katie Brown. And a special shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, VinePair’s art director who designed the sick logo for this program. The music for “End of Day Drinks” was produced, written, and recorded by Darby Cici. I’m VinePair co-founder Adam Teeter, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks a lot.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article EOD Drinks: Jason Murphy: Beverage Innovation Manager at Buffalo Wild Wings appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/jason-murphy-buffalo-wild-wings/

[johnboothus]

EOD Drinks: Jason Murphy: Beverage Innovation Manager at Buffalo Wild Wings

In this episode of “End of Day Drinks,” the VinePair team is joined by Jason Murphy, the beverage and innovation manager at Buffalo Wild Wings. Murphy explains how Buffalo Wild Wings became the largest purveyor of craft beer in the on-premise world, and begins by tracing his own career,  which began with a 110-beer “World Beer Tour.” After completing his tour, Murphy continued to learn more about craft beer until joining Buffalo Wild Wings, where he’s worked to ensure local craft beers are served at every location.

While Murphy works with beer buyers and general managers in every Buffalo Wild Wings location, he’s still in charge of assigning the mainstay taps across the nation and identifying local craft options for all 50 states. Here, he discusses some of his favorite local options and the new styles beer geeks should look out for. He cites saisons as one of his favorite beer styles, but also mentions a churro pastry stout listeners will have to hear about to believe.

Here, Murphy discusses how data trends influence his buying, and, of course, how Buffalo Wild Wings hopes to usher in a new wave of hard seltzers. He explains his plans to keep on-premise hard seltzers on draft, and what will need to happen before he can standardize service. Murphy ends the discussion with a thoughtful definition of what craft beer means to him and the perfect pairings fans can find the next time they visit their local B-Dubs.

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Adam: From VinePair’s New York City headquarters, this is “End of Day Drinks,” where we sit down with the movers and shakers in the beverage industry. So pour yourself a glass, and listen along with us. Let’s start the show. On today’s episode of “End of Day Drinks,” we’re talking to Jason Murphy, the beverage and innovation manager of Buffalo Wild Wings, or affectionately known as B-Dubs. We’ll talk with Jason about how Buffalo Wild Wings became the largest purveyor of craft beer in the on-premise world, as well as the innovations they have planned post-pandemic. We’re also going to chat a little bit about hard seltzer and why the brand is so gung ho in adding taplines. And finally, we’ll talk to Jason about what he thinks “craft” means. Let’s start the show.

Tim: Hi there, this is Tim McKirdy, staff writer at VinePair, and welcome to the End of Day Drinks podcast. Joining us today, we have Jason Murphy, beverage innovation manager at Buffalo Wild Wings. Hello, Jason.

Jason: Hey Tim, thanks for having me.

T: Thanks for joining us. And as always, I’m joined by my wonderful colleagues on VinePair’s editorial team, including VinePair co-founder Adam Teeter.

A: What’s up Tim? Hey, Jason.

T: We also have executive editor Joanna Sciarrino.

Joanna: Hi, everyone.

T: Senior editor Cat Wolinski.

Cat: Hi, Jason. How are you?

T: And associate editor Katie Brown.

K: Hey guys, what’s up?

T: And of course, we have VinePair tastings director and all-round star Keith Beavers. Hey, Keith.

Keith: Hey Tim, Jason. Tim, Jason, what’s going on?

JM: That was a good introduction.

T: So, Jason, really great to have you with us today. And what can we say about Buffalo Wild Wings? You guys have more than a thousand locations nationwide. You sell more draft beer than any other restaurant in the country. And more than any other sports bar or restaurant, you place an incredible focus on craft beer. And maybe most importantly, your tagline is Wings, Beer, Sports. And as beverage innovation manager, you’re in charge of the beer, so no pressure there.

JM: Yeah, there’s definitely worse jobs that could be had. I’m pretty lucky in what I get to do, that’s for sure.

T: And before we dive into your work at B-Dubs, and by the way, I really like to call it B-Dubs.

JM: Sure.

T: Yeah, that’s good. I think that’s easier for the flow.

A: Is that what you call it?

JM: Yes, yeah, I call it B-Dubs. A lot of people call it BW3s. And that was like a decade ago. We’ve transitioned to Buffalo Wild Wings or B-Dubs.

A: Interesting.

C: BW3s? What’s that?

JM: Yeah, so back in the day, it was Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck. And I guess weck is like a hot beef sandwich that’s dipped in au jus. I’m not very familiar with it, but that was one of the two things that we served, and we no longer serve weck sandwiches. So we’re just B-Dubs. We’re just Buffalo Wild Wings.

C: Woah, whatever happened to the Weck?

T: A topic for another podcast, then?

C: Yeah. TBD.

T: But Jason, let’s let’s talk about beer before we talk about your work at B-Dubs, because you’re a certified cicerone, and I believe beer is somewhat in your blood. Am I right?

JM: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve been working in the beer industry for a while, but my dad spent 40 years working at Coors Brewery in Golden. He started when he was 18, retired when he was 58. So yeah, I’ve truly been around beer my entire life.

T: That’s incredible, and then so, yeah, your position at Buffalo Wild Wings, speaking about it, this is a really important role in America’s beer industry when it comes to on-premise serving. Can you tell us about how one goes about getting a role such as that?

JM: Oh, man. I guess I just drank a lot of beer and was good at drinking beer. No, growing up through college, I had worked at a couple different brewpub chains, Gordon Biersch and then Milwaukee Alehouse. And just served and bartended to get through college, but spent a lot of time learning beer from brewers and people who are really passionate about it. I graduated college and was able to get a job at a restaurant chain called Old Chicago. And they’re a regional chain. They’ve got about 100 locations across the country, but they’re known for what they call their World Beer Tour, which is, they have anywhere from 30 to 40 beers on tap, but they’ve also got 80 to 90 beers in a bottle cooler. And the World Beer Tour is drinking 110 different beers and it’s just kind of their loyalty program. You get credit for every beer you try and you can only drink four per visit. But anyways, I got to work for that chain and run their bar program for a while. And they’re very big into craft beer and craft beer education and getting people kind of on their craft beer journey. Did that for about five years before I had the opportunity to work for Buffalo Wild Wings and run the largest draft beer program in the country. So I kind of cut my teeth there. And one thing that I will always tell people is my claim to fame of how I started to learn about beer is, I did complete my old Chicago World Beer Tour — my 110 different beers — before I turned 21. So don’t ask a lot of questions about that.

C: Oh, man.

A: I love it. Well, so I have a question, Jason, this is Adam here. So are you in charge of buying for all of the Buffalo Wild Wings? How does your role actually work? Do you have people in each region that are buying? Because I think one of the things that’s pretty amazing about Buffalo Wild Wings is that the craft beer is different at every location. So every place I’ve been when I’ve been to a Buffalo Wild Wings, obviously, you have some of the bigger players that are sort of your standards at some of the places, I’m curious how that works, too. But then what I’ve always been impressed by is like, you’ll have a few draft lines that are like “the local brewery” or a brewery that is as close to Buffalo Wild Wings as possible. So how are you guys pulling that off?

JM: Yeah, so that’s probably one of the cooler but also more challenging aspects about the beer program for Buffalo Wild Wings is, we’ve got right around 1,250 restaurants. We’ve probably got over 1,300 different beer buyers in our company. If you include every single restaurant, we’ve got general managers at every single restaurant who are making decisions on beer. The district managers they report to are making decisions. The franchisees — we’re about 50-50 split company and franchise owned. Our franchise owners are making decisions and they’ve got corporate offices where they’ve got a beer buyer in their offices who are making decisions. So there’s a ton of different layers on who is making decisions at beer from my level, because, yeah, I do make decisions on what’s going to be on tap all the way down to the location level, because we realize that local beer and the brewery down the street from a Buffalo Wild Wings is super important to that local beer drinker. So we want to make sure that they have decision-making power to bring on those taps. But from where I sit, when I came on board Buffalo Wild Wings about three and a half years ago, the beer program was very national- mandated. All the beer selections that came down from the company office were in every Buffalo Wild Wings everywhere. The one change that I made when I started was, we started going state by state. So I build out a mandate list or a required tap list for all of our locations down to the state level. And the only reason it’s state level is because that’s the lowest I can go by myself. So I do build out a required tap list for all 50 states. I do split up California into two — Northern and Southern California. But that’s how deep I can go from my level, state by state, to make sure that we’ve got the right brand for the right guest at that level.

K: That’s so cool. This is Katie, by the way, I have a question for you, because I know that you’re from Denver, right? Or you’re living in Denver?

JM: Yes, born and raised in Denver and still here.

K: That’s awesome. So I’m currently living in Colorado, too. And I’ve just been so enjoying the local beer scene here. And so I was wondering, do you have some favorite local Colorado beers that you make sure are in all the restaurants here?

JM: Oh, that’s a good question. So, yes, I do. I’ve also got some local favorite Colorado beers that I can’t get in Buffalo Wild Wings yet just because they’re not big enough to distribute yet. But I’d say obviously the staples around Colorado that you’d expect to hear: New Belgium and Odell are definitely two of my favorite breweries. I try to visit those breweries whenever I can. One of my favorite up-and-coming breweries that does distribute is Cerveceria Colorado. They’re a brewery from Denver Beer Co. They’re fairly new on the market within the last couple of years. But Cerveceria Colorado makes great craft beers with a Hispanic or a Mexican twist to them. And they make some of my favorite flavors that you can get in the Denver beer market right now. So that’s one of my favorites that we’ve made sure we have on tap. Crooked Stave, which is one of the leading sour breweries in the country, but is also local to Denver. They have some tapping presence not only in Colorado, but in some other states as well. And then just personally, I spent a lot of time out of tap rooms enjoying other people’s beer. So New Image is one of my favorites out of my native Colorado. Cerebral out of Denver, Out of Range out of Frisco. So when I’m not working in beer, I spend a lot of time enjoying it.

C: We love Cerebral here. They were among some of our top beer lists last year, and I’m always excited to try what they have.

JM: They do awesome stuff. I love those guys.

C: And Crooked Stave, we actually got a little bit of. This is Cat, by the way, Cat Wolinski, resident beer geek. And we do get some Crooked Stave here. But I do miss being able to travel and go to Denver for the Great American Beer Festival and all of that. So it’s cool to hear about these new brands. Like you mentioned, the one with a sort of Latin American slant. Do you find that Mexican lagers or Mexican-style lagers are getting really big, either in your area or just like across the B-Dub’s footprint? Because we find that it’s just increasingly popular to see these sort of riffs on the Tecates and Coronas of the world.

JM: Yeah, Mexican lagers do great for us. The Modelo, Corona, Dos Equis, they do some pretty great sales for us. Not only just because they’re extremely sessionable beers that you can enjoy while you’re watching a football game and eating some hot wings. But also you find a lot of guests or on-premise drinkers kind of trading up because they’ve got a little bit of a premium cachet attached to them. So we do a great job with those imported Mexican lagers. But that’s one of the reasons why I am excited about breweries like Cerveceria Colorado out of Denver, Four Corners out of Texas, because I think that’s a very unexplored area of craft beer is how can we blend these natural Hispanic flavors that we all love to enjoy in our food so much and is making its way to cocktails and is proliferating cocktails that hasn’t really made its way into craft beer yet. I think that’s a really exciting area that’s kind of untapped in the craft beer market. But there are some breweries out there that are trying it and making pretty good stuff.

C: What kind of flavors are you referring to, like agua fresca-type stuff?

JM: Oh, I mean, so the one, and I know that it’s a very standard flavor, but you don’t see much of it in craft beyond maybe being expressed from actual hops and hop flavor. But their main flavor at Cerveceria is a pineapple blonde. They’ve also got a poblano chili pilsner. It’s really good. I believe they’ve infused some mole into some of their beers, which is really good because you get that chocolate from the mole in some of the beer. So just those flavors that you would expect to see when you dine in a traditional Mexican restaurant are starting to express themselves in some beers. And I’ve been pretty impressed by a lot of it.

C: Very cool.

Keith: Is that what Mexican-style means, just like you’re trying to impart some of the flavors of the Mexican cuisine into beer, or is it more about the kind of Mexican style that we’re used to that I drink during karaoke?

JM: I would say more of the stuff that you’re used to trying in food is the stuff that you’re seeing. I’m scrolling through their menu right now. They’ve got a horchata blonde ale at Cerveceria Colorado, a churro stout, a chocolate chili churro stout.

C: Churro Stouts? Oh, my God, that sounds amazing.

JM: Yeah. So some of that stuff that you would expect to see when you’re dining out and enjoying Mexican cuisine is making its way into beer.

C: That’s awesome.

JS: How much in figuring out which tap to pick goes into pairing with the menu?

JM: That’s a good question. It’s definitely considered. The most important thing to me, though, is making sure — so we’ve got on average, we’ve got about 30 handles in all Buffalo Wild Wings. And the most important thing to me is making sure that of those 30 handles, they represent a wide variety of styles. So a lot of times you’ll go into a tap room and they’ll have 30 handles and they’ve got 10 pale lagers, 10 IPAs, five wheat beers, maybe a couple of ambers, a stout, a cider and you’re done. Right? There’s not a whole lot of differentiation there. Which one of these IPAs do I want to drink? That doesn’t mean we’re not going to have a good mix of IPAs and lagers because that’s what sells well. But I think the one thing that is easy to lose sight of is when you have a 30-handle tap system, it is a fact that you’re going to have a No. 1 seller and a No. 30 seller and everything in between. You’re never going to get away from having a 30th seller or a worst seller, no matter how hard you try. So what we’ve been trying to do over the last few years is make sure that we’re optimizing that draft system so that we’re moving a lot of volume out of our bestsellers, which is going to be those pale lagers and IPAs and really optimizing the back end of the draft system to allow for different styles that maybe you wouldn’t expect from a Buffalo Wild Wings. Am I allowed to curse on this podcast?

A: Of course.

JM: Cool. I’m going to do it. When I interviewed for the job four years ago, one of the things I said in my interview is all I want to do is drink a f****** saison at a Buffalo Wild Wings.

C: Yeah!

JM: Saisons are personally my favorite style.

C: I love saisons!

JM: Yeah they’re personally one of my favorites styles, but they’re such a good beer to pair with so many different flavors, especially when you’ve got 30 different wing sauces on the menu. But that’s one of the things. So you could say that, yes, I’m considering how do you pair beer and food together when I’m building the list, but really what I’m trying to do is build a pretty varied assortment of beer styles and types on our menu so that I don’t really have to worry about force-fitting pairing and and beer styles onto our menu. It should just naturally happen because that’s just what we have, because we’ve got a good style selection to begin with.

A: So, Jason, question for you, and I’m sure Tim will have a question afterwards that is probably similar to mine so I’m going to build on Joanna’s. But I know that Tim probably has a question he probably has been wanting to ask that is going to be similar, but about another style that’s all the rage. But I would love to know in terms of building the beer program, how much you’re looking at data and trends? So, for example, do you have a ton of hazies on your lists across the country just because hazy IPAs are all the rage? And does that cause you to phase out more West Coast-style IPAs? Or if you see that, I don’t know, pilsners are taking off, do you add more of those? Or more like session IPAs? Or do you not look at data at all when it comes to sort of building the beverage program?

JM: Yeah, that’s a good question. I did not know when I graduated college that I was going to be a data geek, but that’s basically what I’ve become over the last eight years. And that was kind of instilled into me by a former boss at Old Chicago as we were building the program out there and going location by location on building beer lists. But yeah, I mean, I would say my job’s probably about 70 percent science-based and 30 percent art. And that’s really trying to make sure that not only am I understanding what Buffalo Wild Wings guests want, or what are they currently drinking, but what else is happening in the marketplace? We’re a little bit behind the curve in bringing craft beer fans into Buffalo Wild Wings. And I think it’s just because they don’t know that we have a really good selection of craft beer. But I want to make sure part of building that varied assortment to make sure that we’ve got a wide variety of styles is, I want to make sure that when somebody comes into a Buffalo Wild Wings, maybe they’re not a Buffalo Wild Wings fan or their friend dragged them there for a fantasy draft party. And that’s the only time of year that they visit. I want to make sure that they’re wowed by the beer list and the styles and the actual brands that are on tap. And a lot of that comes from paying attention to data following internal data. We use a third-party company called Beer Board to manage a lot of our velocity. So I look at a lot of what they do. But then other industry sites, Nielsen CGA, Technomic, Beer Business Daily, Brewbound — all of those different data sites or news aggregators I spent a lot of attention to. But you know, as the art side of it comes from the fact that I spent a lot of time in taprooms. I try to stay hip with the kids and make sure I know what they are drinking. I do like to spend time trying out different styles and brands and breweries and things like that to make sure that I’m at least trying to round out my knowledge from beers all across the country. Because when you’re trying to run a local beer program in 50 states and 1,200 units across the country, it’s tough, but somebody’s gotta drink all the beers.

K: Does that mean you’re also adding hard seltzers to your beer list?

JM: Yes. So hard seltzers, we kind of tiptoed into and still we’ve kind of only tiptoed into and a lot of that had to do with some of the changes that Covid brought upon our business and the dining restrictions that we have of what people can and can’t do inside our restaurants right now. But moving into — I guess we are in 2021 — moving more into 2021, we’re beginning to make some changes. You’ll start to see a lot more seltzers end up on our mandated tap list and package less so. I envision very soon a world where we have at least one hard seltzer on tap in every Buffalo Wild Wings, if not two. And then in addition to that, anywhere from four to eight different packaged hard seltzer’s in our bottle cooler to allow guests the ability to kind of choose their favorite flavors. Because when you go into a liquor store to purchase hard seltzers, it typically comes in a variety pack. I know from experience and from talking to friends, there’s one or two flavors that you really like and one or two that you don’t. And so you drink the one or two flavors and the other one or two either end up in the back of the fridge or a pile in your basement that you end up giving to your parents. But on premise, we can curate those best flavors for you. You don’t have to buy a variety pack. So I think that’s something that really intrigues me as we look at hard seltzer in the future.

K: Awesome.

T: So, Jason kind of sticking with both of those themes, when it comes to trends and also hard seltzer — and really hard seltzer on tap — this is actually something we’ve kind of had a conversation about between us before, but I wonder whether you could share this idea when it comes to hard seltzer on tap. So hard seltzer as a phenomenon, people probably love it, or one of the reasons people like it, because they know exactly what’s in it. They know what’s in a pour size, what’s in 12 ounces of their favorite brand. So on premise, how are you going to recreate that experience when it comes to serving tap seltzer?

JM: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting because it hasn’t really made its way enough into the on-premise yet where it’s been standardized that everyone is doing the same thing. But I think I’m starting to see enough of it where I’m getting some ideas of where to go. So we are going to pour our hard seltzer draft in a 12-ounce Collins glass. Which, you know, that Collins glass kind of replicates a little bit that feeling of a slick can or slim can that drinkers are used to. We’re not pouring over ice. We’re pouring just straight draft into the glass. What really interests me I’ve seen a couple of different places that I’ve been out to is nucleation in the bottle at the bottom of the glass that just kind of keeps the agitation at the bottom of the glass and helps that appearance. So it differentiates itself a little bit more from still water or soda water. So I think that could be important. We haven’t necessarily gotten to where we’re going to go with garnishes yet or where we’re going to go with hard-seltzer cocktails. It’s an area that interests me. I think for us being a national chain, for us to do a cocktail, we probably have to find a national hard seltzer that we would mandate on tap, which isn’t too far-fetched to believe that we might be doing that sometime soon. But so that could be an avenue. But the garnishes really interest me. What I think we need to do, though, or what the industry needs to do is, typically that kind of stuff is led by the supplier who’s putting the product out there, like Corona led with putting a lime in the Corona. Blue Moon led with putting an orange on a Blue Moon Belgian White. I think it’ll be one of the hard seltzer producers, whether it’s White Claw, Truly, or Bud Light or another one that’s in the market trying to say, hey, or putting their flag in the ground and saying “Yeah, this is how we want you to present our hard seltzer on draft.” It’s just so new yet. I don’t even think the suppliers have a point of view yet, at least from my conversations. Nobody seems to be passionate one way or the other. And so it’ll be nice when somebody says, “No, this is how you do it.” And then everybody follows suit. But for now, I feel pretty confident in the Collins glass, no ice, 12-ounce pours that are very similar to the experience you’re used to getting when you open a can.

Keith: So this is Keith, by the way. I had a question about going back to the whole pairing thing, I just kind of want to know, like what would you pair? Because I know that all you want is a f****** saison. What would you pair with your f***** saison? For all the listeners out there that are like, “What would he do when he’s there?”

JM: Yeah, that’s that’s a good question. So what I would pair a saison with right now, so a lot of people probably don’t know this, but we did just put Saison Dupont in all of our restaurants starting last March. So you should be able to go into most of your Buffalo Wild Wings right now and get a Saison Dupont.

C: Oh my God.

JM: Yeah, it’s pretty cool, right?

C: That’s insane! Legendary! What?

JM: Yeah, you wouldn’t expect to get that at a Buffalo Wild Wings, but now you can. And then another thing a lot of people probably don’t realize is about a year and a half ago, we launched a new line of hand-breaded chicken and hand- breaded chicken sandwich. And the chicken tenders and the chicken breasts for the sandwiches are hand-battered and fried to order. So we’re not bringing in these frozen and battered chicken patties or chicken fingers. We make these to order, and they’re absolutely delicious. I would probably pair our Southern chicken sandwich — which is better than all the other Southern chicken sandwiches that you can get at any fast food restaurant — with a Saison Dupont. Because the “peppery-ness” that you’re going to get in that — oh, and I should say that we use beer batter. So we do pour kolsch into the beer batter, and we make that beer batter fresh daily. So in addition to being hand-breaded to order, we also make the beer batter fresh daily, which I don’t think people give Buffalo Wild Wings enough credit for. But there it is. I would pair one of our hand-breaded chicken sandwiches or the hand-breaded chicken tenders with a Saison Dupont because the “peppery-ness” that you’re going to get in the fresh hand batter and on the Southern chicken sandwich, the tanginess from the pickle is going to pair really well with the Saison Dupont. Southern chicken sandwich, Saison Dupont. Go get it now.

C: Oh my god.

Keith: Yeah I’m going to go out, bye peace.

K: I’m vegetarian, and that sounded good to even me.

JM: There’s controversy over this term — I probably shouldn’t say that — but we put cauliflower wings on the menu. So you can try the cauliflower wings with the Saison Dupont.

Keith: I’m down with that.

C: You’ve got to have the cauliflower wings.

A: Yeah, there’s a Buffalo Wild Wings really close to my apartment in Brooklyn, but I moved to my apartment in Brooklyn right before the pandemic. So I will have to go once it’s over and everything reopens and try all that stuff.

C: Hit me up when you go, Adam.

A: Oh, I will. We’ll do a VinePair outing. We’ll tell him that Jason sent us and that drinks are on him.

JM: Hey, that works for me.

A: So Jason, we’ve had this thesis for a few years now. I wrote a piece about it a long time ago, prior to when these other people were even working at VinePair — besides Keith. What up, Keith? One of the things that I’ve always thought, and I think you might have disproved me in your comment earlier, but I’m curious. I kind of feel like you guys are responsible for introducing more people to craft beer than anyone else in America. And I know that that’s like a very intense claim. But I actually think it’s true. Right? If you look at the amount of Buffalo Wild Wings out there and the fact that you guys are the largest buyer of craft beer in America, and as you said, a lot of people would just show up in Buffalo Wild Wings because their friends brought them along and maybe they’d never had craft beer before, and now they have it for the first time. Do you think that that’s an accurate statement or am I being really aggressive?

JM: No, I’d say that’s pretty true. And I think a lot of that has to do with our size and scale, and the fact that we operate in all 50 states. But we’ve always had a good complement of 25 to 30 tap handles in most of our locations. Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite are great sellers for us and they’re really great beers for the right occasion. But then we’ve also had some really great craft partners, too. Boston Beer and Sam Adams, Blue Moon. Blue Moon is a really good craft beer with some really cool roots to it and a story that I don’t think gets enough credit. But it’s just a great craft beer that’s enjoyable to drink. But also the on-premise is just made for sampling and discovery and learning about different beer styles in a way that the off-premise isn’t because there’s not as much commitment to ordering one pint or a tall. And I think that’s what’s so great and fun about building an on-premise beer program is, you do have the opportunity to experiment with some different things and be first to market with products and play around with different styles and different brands at different breweries. Because the guest is interested in exploring and discovering new things while they’re out. I think that’s kind of the interesting thing about working with some of my on-premise supplier reps. They’ll pitch beers to me that it may not be their No. 1 or 2 seller because they don’t do as well in the on-premise, and they’re open and honest about that. And knowing that this is my No. 3- or 4-selling beer overall as a brewery, but as an on-premise consumer, this is what we want to sell because this is what we want to trial new beer drinkers on. Or if you’re a fan of Sam Adams Brewery, I want to get this beer out here because it’s our new release and everybody’s already buying my lager IPA. So I just think that that’s the interesting and fun thing about what Buffalo Wild Wings can bring to people is just more adventurous experiences than maybe you would sign up for if you’re just shopping for a 6-pack at your liquor store.

Keith: That’s awesome, because I don’t know s*** about beer, but what I love about beer is going to a place that knows everything about it. I’m a wine guy, and I can talk all day about wine, but I love going to a place where I’m like, “Look, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I love beer. I just don’t know anything about it. Can you help me out?” And going to a place that does that is awesome.

JM: Yeah. And that’s something we’re definitely trying to improve on every day is making sure our servers and bartenders have knowledge of all the beers they have on tap. I think one interesting stat that stuck around with me forever, and I see it presented about every year, but the number never really changes it. Something to the effect of only 25 percent of people who enter an on-premise establishment know even what category they’re going to drink. And when they get there, that means 75 percent of people who visit you can be influenced by server or bartender suggestions. So that’s one thing that we always strive for is how can we be educating our staff so that they know as much about not only just the beers, the new beers that we have on tap and what’s local, but we’ve also really refreshed our cocktail program over the last couple of years, making sure it’s more classic cocktails and more creative. A little bit more elevated than what you would expect from a Buffalo Wild Wings. Moving away a little bit from casual dining and more towards craft and classic cocktails and even the wines that we have, because there is an occasion where a Buffalo Wild Wings guest is looking for a good glass or a bottle of wine. So you do have the ability to influence what that purchase is going to be or what that consumer is going to drink just by having a good knowledge base and being able to have a conversation with the table about what you have on tap or what new cocktail you’re shaking.

Keith: That’s awesome, because left on my own I’m just going to get a Corona and queue up Prince.

JM: Yeah.

C: So, Jason, this is Cat again. You are a certified Cicerone, correct? Did you talk about that already?

JM: It was brought up.

C: OK, so how important to beer service do you think being a certified Cicerone is? Or having certified Cicerone beer servers on staff?

JM: I think having certified Cicerone beer servers on staff is extremely important. We’ve tried to create our own internal program that I would say is pretty close, but not quite on par with the certified beer server program. But pretty darn close. But it’s extremely important just to be able to explain the differences in beer beyond an ale and a lager. Which most people probably still don’t even know. I think it’s extremely important to be able to tell people what the flavors they’re going to get in beer is. One of the best experiences I’ve ever had was at a local brewpub in Denver where I had ordered my meal and I was asking my server what beer she thinks I should get next. And instead of saying, well, what’s your favorite style or what kind of mood are you in? she said, well, you just ordered this sandwich. And because you ordered this sandwich, this beer would pair best with what you’re about to eat. So I think you should order that beer. That happened maybe three years ago, but it’s stuck out to me ever since as like the gold standard of what I’d like to see happen at a Buffalo Wild Wings. If we can tailor your experience by saying, “Well, you just ordered this beer, so I would just suggest this wing sauce or you just ordered this sandwich so I would suggest this beer.” I think being able to customize that experience for the guests at their table or at the bar top is really what people are looking for when they’re going out. They are looking for experience. They are willing to try new things. So to be able to use that Cicerone certification program or tips from the Brewers Association or craftbeer.com or any of those industry resources to really help build up server knowledge. I don’t know if there’s anything more important to a Buffalo Wild Wings experience than doing things like that.

C: Great. Yeah, I think those experiences really stick out to me, too, when you’re like, “yes, that is how service is supposed to be!”

JM: Yeah, I was blown away. I don’t think anybody had ever suggested a beer to me in that way. And such a customized way in that experience. If I could replicate that person across 1,200 restaurants, I would not leave.

C: I hope she got a good tip that day.

JM: She did. Yeah.

T: So, Jason, you’ve been involved with beer for a very long time as a drinker, even before 21 by the sounds of it, in the background in your family, as a professional, as a scholar, Cicerone. So I have a question for you. Turn up the spice a little bit here. But here today in 2021, how would you define craft beer? Because we’ve spent a lot of time talking about craft beer today and I feel like that’s a definition that continues to evolve. So I’d love to hear your take on that.

JM: Oh, you’re putting me on the spot. How would I define craft beer?

Keith: Thanks, Tim.

JM: I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked me that before, so now I’m stumbling over my words, I would define craft beer as a liquid experience where a brewer or brewers have put passion into making that product for you. And are using — I don’t even want to say unique and novel ingredients, because you can have a craft beer experience it’s not that. I would probably stop at what I said. It’s a liquid experience where the brewer or brewers have put an immense amount of passion and research and experience into delivering that product into your glass. And a craft beer can be the easiest-drinking of light lagers, or 40,000 pounds of donuts into a kettle to make a pastry stout. But I think it’s the passion and knowledge and creativity and expertise behind that process that makes it a craft beer. It’s a little bit more than a lot of breweries these days, where it’s working behind the computer to push a button and send a recipe from point A to point B, which, nothing against those recipes, because those recipes and systems have been perfected to produce beer at a mass scale. And they’re efficient and consistent and quality every single time. And I think there’s something behind that passion and creativity to get liquid to glass that defines the craft beer experience. That’s not a very good answer.

T: But I think that’s a real nice sentiment rather than arbitrary production size figures or, I don’t know, even ownership. I mean, is that anything you care about? Seems like it’s very important to some people, but it seems kind of arbitrary to me. If there’s passion there, that’s all that really matters, right?

JM: Yeah. I think that I would say so.

T: Awesome. Well, you know what? I think that’s a really nice place for us to wrap up our conversation. And I’m sure you’re glad I finished with a nice, easy one down the middle for you there.

JM: Guys, this was one of the most fun podcasts I’ve ever been on. This was awesome.

C: Aw.

A: Oh, that’s nice, Jason.

Keith: Hey wow, man. Thanks.

T: Well, yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time today and for joining us. And I look forward to having you on again and speaking about the weck sandwich.

JM: Yeah, the weck sandwich. We’ll do a history of weck.

T: Thank you so much Jason, and thanks everyone. It’s been real fun.

JM: Thanks guys, I appreciate you having me on.

T: Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of “EOD Drinks.” If you’ve enjoyed this program, please leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other people discover the show. And tell your friends. We want as many people as possible listening to this amazing program.

And now for the credits. “End of Day Drinks” is recorded live in New York City at VinePair’s headquarters. And it is produced, edited, and engineered by VinePair tastings director, yes, he wears a lot of hats, Keith Beavers. I also want to give a special thanks to VinePair’s co-founder, Josh Malin, to the executive editor Joanna Sciarrino, to our senior editor, Cat Wolinski, senior staff writer Tim McKirdy, and our associate editor Katie Brown. And a special shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, VinePair’s art director who designed the sick logo for this program. The music for “End of Day Drinks” was produced, written, and recorded by Darby Cici. I’m VinePair co-founder Adam Teeter, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks a lot.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article EOD Drinks: Jason Murphy: Beverage Innovation Manager at Buffalo Wild Wings appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/jason-murphy-buffalo-wild-wings/

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[rafaelthompson]

‘Master Q+A’ Continued: Scott Conary

We keep going with our ‘Master Q+A’ with Scott Conary from the April + May 2020 issue of Barista Magazine, as he discusses the beginnings of barista competitions, their impacts on café culture, and how they have changed.

BY KENNETH R. OLSON BARISTA MAGAZINE

In our April + May 2020 Fifteenth Anniversary issue of Barista Magazine, I had the opportunity to interview Scott Conary for our “Master Q+A” feature. Scott has spent the better part of two decades as a barista competition judge, and in the course of our interview, he had much more to share about the competitions and their evolution than we had room to fit on the printed page. As we wait for barista competitions to resume again sometime in the future (and here’s hoping it won’t be too long), this seemed like a good time to share Scott’s thoughts and reflections on the growth and change he’s witnessed firsthand as a judge.

Scott judges at the Honduran Barista Championship. He has judged national and international barista competitions for almost 20 years.

Kenneth R. Olson: Do you have any funny stories from your years of judging that would highlight how much things have changed from, say, 2003 to 2020?

Scott Conary: Recently, I and a few others have been digging into the archives to come up with some fun memories of the “way it was,” somewhat spurred on by the memory lane effort when WBC celebrated 20 years.

Looking at past scoresheets is a really interesting study in evolution, the things we thought were important (and they were, ostensibly, at first!) It reminds me that when we started, education was such a large part of what the competitions did. That won’t ever go away exactly, but how that education was implemented has changed dramatically. 

The first step was to set standards and best practices that can be adhered to and scored. This was a big deal for the majority of folks who never took a class or were trained consistently, and a lot of the early years for comps were getting larger and larger numbers of people onboard to achieve those current standards.

Once that became better known (and disseminated widely through other outlets like Barista Guild of America certifications used as a jumping-off point from classes and workshops), the method of education and the focus of the competitions can be shifted to more exploratory and innovative. So instead of thinking that the competitions should mirror the real-world café setting, we were able to look at the competitions as a kaleidoscope of possibility—what is possible in our industry.

You can argue that for this next phase to be the most successful, it required that base of knowledge that the competitions helped spread worldwide. Now you can have a conversation with folks from around the world and not only agree but understand each other in terms of basic best practices.

With that established, the competitions can continue to evolve into an even better format for pushing the boundaries of what is possible in specialty coffee. And that is the part that everyone remembers: the new stuff, the crazy ideas, the innovations and demands by professional baristas to manufacturers to make better machines. Never before had there been such a response, in so short a time, to customer requests of ideas for improvements. So many of the things we take for granted now in our industry were forged in the fires of competition.

How important is it to get that score of six for coffee waste? So important that grinder manufacturers designed on-demand grinders. This wasn’t something that was being asked for specifically in cafés, but items like scales on and in drain trays, pressure, temperature, and flow rate, all of the various dose and distribution tools—all of these were pushed to creation from the desire for higher scores in competition.

I have a gift and curse for being able to wipe my memory clean between competitors and competitions. This probably stems from my scientific background and desire to remain as unbiased as possible, but what it means is, I often have to be reminded by friends who were there with me about all the crazy things we went through and drank.

It’s fun to remember that we required sugar, which we knew we would never use, at service, with the thought that we wanted to emulate a café setting. Or that all four beverages needed to be served at once (meaning there was a big boom in the tray industry for some time, until Stephen Morrissey showed us how to balance them all on our arms in 2008). 

Are there any trends you’ve noticed over the years that may have started in barista competitions and have gone on to become common in retail?

So many! Methods of preparation, tools for dose and distribution accuracy (scales, OCD, and other distribution and tamping tools), investigation and insights into ratios and liquid weight (beverage volume) out.

Even just the aesthetic of an organized and clean station, as the “Knowledge” standard for presentation, has its origins in the competition. Modbar was just the next logical step for this open presentation format, where everything is being “judged,” and no hiding from the “technical judge/customer.”

A really fun thing to watch from the 1,000-foot viewpoint, and the luxury of seeing it for so long, are the stages that people, countries, and cultures go through as they get involved in competitions. Sometimes the simplest form is mimicry. This can have something to do with the advent of social media and the start of performances being viewed on video and YouTube. Often since the foundational things cannot be transmitted through camera (quality of beverages, balance of espresso, etc.), what people pick up on are the visuals … what people are wearing, glassware used, styles of presentation and speech. For a couple of years after Michael Phillips won [the World Barista Championship] in 2010, so many competitors in distant parts of the world were wearing suspenders, as if that was part of the secret to winning.

Scott in the middle of three World Barista Champions (Klaus Thomsen, Michael Phillips, and Stephen Morrissey) celebrating the end of another WBC in Bogota, Colombia, in 2011, with Lani Peterson and Emily Oak in the foreground and Amber Fox behind Scott.

Are there any performances, signature drinks, or something else from competition that stand out to you in particular?

There are too many to remember clearly, but what stands out are moments when you can see or feel a groundswell of change—a pivotal moment when the game is changed, and people can tell.

Focusing on WBC champions, Michael Phillips took the judges to task in 2010 with a complicated signature beverage and comprehensive presentation that really put judges to the test. This was a bit of a wake-up call and kept our efforts in training judges moving forward to be sure not to be the weak link in this partnership we have with baristas for innovating our industry.

If a barista can manage something in the time provided, we as judges need to be up to the task of evaluating its merits. I remember judging this routine in the USBC finals (since I recused myself for finals at WBC), and appreciated the orchestrated way information was shared, such that one didn’t really need to take notes, but simply experience and absorb. This idea of a presentation that is so well done that simply by experiencing it the judge remembers everything, is my gold-standard definition for new judges when it comes to thinking about the level of what they have experienced.

And then there are the innovators. Folks who I have told them how much I appreciate their willingness to push boundaries and try something new on a stage that is merciless and might not score as well as something safer. But their desire to share this innovation is stronger, at least to some degree, than simply wanting to win (of course they want both). Colin Harmon is one of these people. Year after year he brought something engaging and chancy to the stage to the judges’ delight, I think with the knowledge that it might be difficult to score, and I made sure to thank him for continuing to push every time.

Both James Hoffmann and Stephen Morrissey showed us that a presentation did not have to be elaborate, but could be informative, insightful, and simply focus on delicious coffee. Alejandro Mendez and Raul Rodas took charge of the swing toward origin at the time, to really tie every aspect back to the coffee’s journey, often with a very personal touch, as the first two WBC champions to come from coffee-growing regions.

Scott with 2016 World Barista Champion Berg Wu and Berg’s wife, Chee Lu.

In terms of signature beverage patterns, I remember distinctly that around 2009 was the “year of the bacon” (which was specifically challenging for me, not eating red meat), and 2010-2014 had a significant rise in the use of cascara.

What role do you think barista competitions have in promoting the profession and specialty coffee?

The competitions have already gone such a long way in promoting and developing the profession of barista—from setting best practice standards that have influenced coffee professionals around the world (and made it easier to find delicious coffee almost anywhere), to increasing the exposure of the craft and profession—sometimes to a mocking level, but still raising awareness of the effort and skill required to do this thing correctly and thus engage customers worldwide in the idea that there is a value worth paying for. Naturally it’s not 100% effective, very little is, but the proof exists that a change has happened and continues to happen, and it allows more coffee shops and professionals to flourish than ever before for customers who are willing to pay for the increased quality.

The post ‘Master Q+A’ Continued: Scott Conary appeared first on Barista Magazine Online.

‘Master Q+A’ Continued: Scott Conary published first on https://espressoexpertsite.tumblr.com/

[netstripes]

HOT OR NOT: Digital Marketing Trends You Need To Know Before 2020

With only one month to go, 2020 is almost upon us. Not only is it a new year but an entirely new decade as well. Yes, let that sink in! As you prepare your business for new challenges, risks, and growth in the upcoming year, here’s a list of the hottest trends in digital marketing that every small and medium business owner needs to know before 2020.

The Power of Videos 2019 has been a huge year for videos, especially on social media. When it’s done right, videos can be fun, interactive and informative. While many still prefer to consume information by reading, the number of people who would rather watch a video instead is rapidly increasing. In a fast-paced world, where everyone is time-poor and convenience is highly valued, videos seem to be the perfect answer.

image source: oberlo.com

So how can you adapt this to your business? For many business owners, the first obstacle in doing video content would be “I’m camera shy” or “I’m not sure what to say” or perhaps that nagging self-doubt feeling of “I’m not sure if people would want to listen to me.” We assure you, every YouTube content creator you’ve come across or motivational speaker has had to overcome one or more of these obstacles at some point in their lives.

Start small. Talk about what you know best: your business, your customers and how you can improve the quality of their lives. Videos perform better when it’s informative, interesting and connects to your audience on a personal level.

If you’ve already identified your customer personas, pen down a few video ideas that will take them through the customer’s buying journey. Make sure to focus these videos on their pain points, needs, and aspirations which will help you create a better relationship with your audience.

Voice Search Similar to videos, voice search will also be big next year. In 2018, it was found that 57 per cent of Aussies are using voice search (iProspect). Research also shows that Australians are adapting faster to voice search compared to their counterparts in the U.S. So one thing is certain, these numbers are only going to soar through the roof by next year.

image source: dialogtech.com

If you’re looking to jump on the bandwagon of enabling voice search for your business, one of the key things to focus on is getting search engine optimisation (SEO) for voice search right. Factor in the differences in the use of language and words when people type and verbally interact.

For example, someone would type “best pub parma near me’ and say “What is the best pub for parma near me”. So ensure to include long-tail keywords (which specifically describes what your audience might be looking for). As a result, voice search queries tend to be longer and have three to five keywords in length. Note that the search will include words like who, how, what, where, why, where and when and that you will have to fine-tune content to answer these specific questions.

If you want to take advantage of voice search, list your business on all the relevant platforms including Google My Business, Apple Maps, Bing and Yelp. This will help voice assistants such as Google search, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana find you during a search query.

Capitalising on online reviews will also help your business rank better on voice search so ask your customers to review your business on sites like Yelp and Google My Business. Coming up with a few keywords that are most suitable for your small or medium business will also increase your chances of being ranked better.

Augmented Reality

Both, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are not new concepts but their roles in our day-to-day lives are going to increase in 2020. With AR, more businesses will be able to offer personalised service whether it’s through their website or app to help customers make informed purchases.

Major companies such as IKEA, Kia, and Coco-Cola are already using AR technology to provide a personalised experience to their customers to solve different problems. Whether it’s demonstrating how certain furniture may look in a specific space by using an app or a visual introduction to new features of a car, AR is sure to change the customer journey and how we purchase.

If you’re interested in using augmented reality to give that extra advantage for your small or medium business, here are a few ways you can use it.

Include an AR marker on your printed catalogues or product packages, so with the help of an app people can access additional information or even make a quick order online.

If you’re in the field of real estate, augmented reality can be very useful in demonstrating a realistic presentation of the property. With a host of affordable AR apps available for this specific industry, this will help small scale businesses raise their standards.

Cybersecurity With over 23,000 Australian businesses reported to have experienced some form of cybercrime in 2019 (CIO Australia) the importance of cybersecurity is without a doubt crucial in 2020.

Business owners, irrespective of their size need to understand that their websites can be the target of a malicious cyberattack if they do not take necessary precautions. If you’re a small or medium business owner looking to set up your business online, make sure to have a thorough conversation on the different aspects of cybersecurity with the website development agency.

image source: stanfieldit.com

As much as growth, increasing leads and conversions are a priority for your business, protecting it from cyberattacks is a responsibility that should not be ignored.

Digital privacy is another area of cybersecurity business owners should be aware of to safeguard their data as well as of their customers’. Here are a few key steps you can practice to protect the digital privacy of your business.

Ensure that your website uses an SSL certificate and the HTTPS protocol especially on pages that collect sensitive data. Both the SSL certificate and the protocol use a high-level of encryption to secure data that is being communicated.

Multiple people using one login and password make it very difficult to find out when a privacy breach occurs. Therefore, make sure to use individual login accounts and strong passwords to protect against access via login credentials.

If your business has multiple accounts on different platforms, use Password Manager to create and retrieve strong passwords without too much of a hassle.

Personalisation We may share the world with 7.7 billion people but we’re all looking for a personalised experience that will make us feel special. Thankfully, no one is tasked with the mammoth obstacle of trying to please 7.7 billion humans. But the sentiment still stands true. In the new decade, more people will be looking for information, services, and products that are catering to their needs. Irrespective of how small or large your customer base is they all want a personalised service or experience. So how do you create content that will resonate with all of them?

“The only way to win at content marketing is for the reader to say, ‘This was written specifically for me.“ ~Jamie Turner.

Companies including Coco-Cola, Amazon, and Netflix have been using personalisation to connect with their customers for years and are seeing great results. A personalised video campaign done by Cadbury in Australia, matching a Dairy Milk flavour to users based on the different elements from their Facebook, saw a huge increase in engagement and conversion rates.

image source: campaignlive.co.uk

Although these may be big brands with bigger budgets, small and medium companies can also adapt personalisation to their marketing campaigns. To get this formula right, you first need to understand your clients, their needs, their aspirations and problems better. Then create content that will resonate with them and help them solve their problems. If you’re looking for more information on personalised contenting marketing, click on the link to check out our blog post on it.

Chatbots Chatbots is another trend that has had massive growth over the last few years. In 2016, Business Insider predicted that over 80 per cent of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2020. With months away from the New Year, many big brands have transitioned to using chatbots to manage different areas of their business, mainly customer service.

The use of chatbots can benefit a company in multiple ways including guaranteed customer satisfaction and saving time. As chatbots are capable of handling customer queries at any point of time and providing accurate information (if it has been programmed appropriately), this will have a direct impact on a business’s conversions and sales figures.

image source: i-programmer.info

A small scale business can use chatbots in numerous ways. The chatbot’s most well-known function is providing customer service which frees up a considerable amount of time for a business owner. As chatbots can retain a lot of information, they can use this to better help future users and provide recommendations to customers influencing their decision-making process.

You can also use chatbots to automate the sales process from start to finish. Businesses can also look into using chatbots with more advanced features such as streamlined payment systems. This will provide customers the ability to complete a transaction without leaving the chat interface and make regular purchases as easy as clicking a button.

Social Messaging Apps Social media has become one of the biggest necessities in the modern-day world whether it’s for personal or business use. Similarly, the popularity of social messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Viber, WeChat and Snapchat has been increasing and will continue to do so in the coming years.

image source: statista

With the combined number of users of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat, surpassing Facebook and YouTube, it’s time to look at using these apps to reach your customers. With over 55 billion messages been exchanged daily on WhatsApp alone, businesses must find out which messaging apps their customers are active on.

Since social messaging apps allow personalisation, small and medium businesses can use this to their advantage to send personalised messages directly to customers. This will help improve engagement as well as enhance the overall customer experience and relationship.

Once you identify which platform your customers are active on, you can use it in multiple ways to interact with them. Whether it’s to provide information regarding your products or services, boost sales, invite customers for events or as a customer service platform, the options are numerous.

Visual Search Visual search is another trend that will gain momentum in 2020. As indicated by its name, visual search allows people to upload an image and conduct a search based on it to get specific results. Platforms such as Google Lens, Bing Visual Search, and Pinterest are providing this option to users to help them track down exactly what they are looking for.

In the case of Google Lens, it recognises objects and landmarks through a camera phone and provides additional details regarding the search. Bing Visual Search will help users find details of specific elements within an image, which can be very useful.

image source: the verge

If your business sells interior décor and a potential customer happens to see a specific wall hanging they like on an image found on Bing Visual Search, the detail view will provide more information on it including where it can be purchased. Pinterest introduced a visual search tool called Lens to enable users to take a photo of an item to find out where to buy it online.

If your business falls under the categories of fashion and beauty, home décor, food, products, travel and vehicles, visual search will help you boost your business and leads. Using multiple high-resolution images, the right keywords describing your products, optimising image titles and descriptions, are just some of the few ways you can optimise your business for visual search. Don’t forget to add alternative text and include captions for every image you upload to increase the chances of your products being discovered.

5G network 5G (Fifth Generation) is still in its infant stages but will make a huge impact in the world once its functionalities are properly rolled out in the coming year. It will influence nearly every industry including IT, transportation, health care, manufacturing, agriculture, education, and entertainment.

As of now, 5G’s new features include greater speed in transferring data, increased response speed, network slicing and the ability to connect to more devices including sensors and smart devices simultaneously.

These features will pave the way to a plethora of opportunities for all businesses including small and medium-sized businesses.

image source: statista

5G’s ability to connect to multiple devices simultaneously will enable small businesses to conduct their operations much faster which will enhance customer experience and satisfaction.

Through network slicing, operators can split a single physical network into multiple virtual networks that can be tailored to different types of services or customer segments. This means a business can have its private 5G network customised to its needs. Network slicing also prevents cyberattacks from spreading from one virtual network to another which increases user experiences for businesses.

With 5G’s super-fast internet, small and medium businesses are also being offered the chance to take innovation to the next level. Whether it’s creating video experiences for customers or giving 3D presentations at meetings, conferences or events, businesses will be able to provide an enriching visual experience to its customers.

Conclusion In short, all the trends we’ve been seeing in the last few years – videos, voice search, personalised content, augmented reality, chatbots, social messaging apps, and visual search are going to play an active role in 2020. Additionally, cybercrime is also going to be on the rise, so make sure to take adequate steps to get your business secured in the coming year. Most importantly keep an eye on 5G which set to revolutionise the operations of every industry.

So these are nine digital marketing trends that will make a big impact in the New Year. Let us know if you agree and what you’d like to know more about.

[seanmeverett]

Emerging Trends of Master Product Management

What you need to be at the top of your game in 2019

I. THE WORLD HAS CHANGED

The world of Product Management is no longer changing. It has changed. At some point over the last few years we transitioned into a new way of thinking when it comes to technology. Let’s review the situation as we move into the last year of this decade.

What used to be emerging tech a decade ago has now become the de facto standard. VCs used to be enamored by SoMoLo (Social, Local, Mobile) and Gamification, but the new emerging technologies revolve around Spatial Computing. The focus now is about taking computing from behind a rectangular piece of glass and bringing it into the real world. This includes Augmented and Virtual Reality as the interface layer, Artificial Intelligence as the logic layer, and Blockchain as the emerging database layer. With 5G connectivity and the proliferation of IoT devices and sensors, we enable new things like self-driving and Pokémon or Amazon Go.

The future of Humanizing our Tech

Our interfaces are becoming ever more invisible as we begin to wear our computers. AirPods in the ear and speaking to voice assistants like Siri and Alexa our in the world or at home. Even physical touch interfaces went from some-of-the-time with smart phone taps to all-of-the-time with vibrating wearables and always-on heart rate monitoring.

Meanwhile, blue chip industrial companies are investing in SAAS-based technologies and because Wall Street no longer rewarding a gigantic sales team that has to start each quarter from zero. The sawtooth revenue curve of the past is being replaced by curves that look more like hockey sticks. It’s not just software that’s eating the world, it’s also their business models. Namely, moving from one-time payments to Monthly Recurring Revenue from Software as a Service. Did you know Salesforce got its start by convincing customers they shouldn’t use installable CDs, but rather a website that gives them updates every day? Now this is taken for granted but changing software buying patterns was hard in the beginning.

Today, everyone has a startup or a side hustle. What we used to hear five years ago, “I’ve got an idea for an app”, is now, “I’m raising $1M on a $5M pre- and have traction with 100,000 users”. Wait, what? You’re only 15 years old? Which brings us to our next point. Digital Natives, Gen Z, and yes, Millennials, have overtaken mindshare, marketing, and advertising share from the Baby Boomers. Many of us with decades of Product experience merely adopted the tech, but these individuals were born into it. Christopher Nolan, eat your heart out.

Valuations have soared since 2008, and new millionaires are minted so regularly that we now collective keep count in billions. Growth at all costs, even profits, have created an irrational exuberance the likes of which Greenspan could hardly comprehend during the go go dot-com days.

Even retailing has changed. The anchors of malls aren’t seeing the foot traffic they once did, Sears is shuttering its doors and Best Buy is struggling. The reason is because we get free shipping and cheaper prices shopping online, and at least in the US, eCommerce executive’s go-to-market strategy is simply www.amazon.com.

As we transition into the mindset of investors, we see a more modern Private Equity, new family offices sprouting up in record numbers, new regulations like the JOBS Act, and new funding mechanisms like Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and Security Token Offerings (STOs) enabling much more capital flowing into tech than ever before. Because traditional LPs have been reading the same blogs and would rather source and diligence their own deals than pay a middle man their 2-and-20 fees, we see more demand than ever for the best deals and unique deal flow as a competitive differentiator. The leveraged buyouts of yore targeting low-growth manufacturing firms are now targeting niche software companies because the economics and multiples are better with the same consistent cash flow.

As we turn our attention to go-to-market strategies, the traditional ad budgets spent on TV and display continue to evolve more towards a universal view of a person. Spend on Influencers have shifted from Movie Stars and Athletes to the Kardashians, and then to micro-influencers, and now to pico-influencers with 500 followers who are all personal connections. It’s the word-of-mouth virality that spells success for many products, after all. GDPR regulations that came online in mid 2018 means every website we now visit has a horribly thick bottom bar overtaking our screens. As a result of all this hypertargeting, user tracking, and dynamic content, the user experience of the web has decreased dramatically, especially when including abysmal loading times resulting from excessive overuse of Javascript. Did you know there are now 7,000 MarTech startups, up from 5,000 only a few short years ago, creating a bewildering amount of programmatic ad choices, and ever-increasing customer acquisition costs. The result being building quality product mechanics for incenting organic virality and engagement are 10x harder than they used to be.

Finally, there’s a resurgence of interest around outer space and private rocket companies. Space Tech is a thing and with falling prices of launches by Blue Origin and SpaceX, the cubesat subsector will ultimately enable next-generation cellular connectivity from space. This is how the other 50% of humanity gets internet access while also being a source of cash for the burgeoning New Space industry in desperate need of investment.

II. THE WINNERS & THE LOSERS

Taken together, we’re all playing a whole new ballgame. The playing field has become shorter while the game has become faster, and harder. Greenfield opportunities where you used to be competitive with a buggy LAMP stack and lackluster UX has even stopped working in the Enterprise. High-quality consumer apps that everyone now uses means we expect the same from all our software, including what we use at work. And desktop apps are no longer enough. The world has become smaller but we’re traveling more often and so we’d rather lose our luggage than our smart phone. We expect our work software to be just as efficient as the apps we use for play. Customers and users don’t care that it takes 320 different video encoding renditions for a single video file shared behind a firewall. “It’s just a play button, why is that so hard?” They don’t care how the sausage is made, expect perfect connectivity and high-resolution streaming. And expect it to be as cheap as YouTube.

We have reached a significant milestone for humanity. Half the human population is connected to the internet, mostly with mobile phones, and everyone is in search of the next gigantic growth product. Skill and talent has blossomed in unexpected markets around the world. France is a key global spot for world-class software development, Africa is emerging as a new startup capital learning from the likes of the Valley and Singapore, while China and the US are in an AI arms race for powering the world of our future. Information is shared in tiny bursts through text messages and short-form videos, with the entire world is trying to steal market share of eyeball for their Monthly Active Users.

At this point you may be feeling a bit down, wondering why you should even consider starting a new project. With the degree of difficulty steadily marching up-and-to-the-right, what hope do you have for standing out in a sea of competing projects, apps, sites, and initiatives?

The winners will be the ones who both Accept & Acclimate to this new world quickly. There’s no time to debate. The winners take action. The losers, on the other hand, will continue to exist in the Web 2.0 or, even worse, pre-connected world. It’s true that legacy business models and declining markets have a much longer tail than anyone realizes, but it’s getting shorter.

In either case, you’re either compounding in a positive direction or a negative direction. The graphic below from Farnam Street tells the story better than any amount of words could.

Source: Farnam Street

The key insight here is that it doesn’t require organization-wide adoption to reap the benefits. It only takes a single “2-pizza team”, as Jeff Bezos famously states, to kickstart action in the right direction. But whom you pick for those teams makes all the difference in the world.

So it begs the question: with a discipline as varied and misunderstood as Product Management, how can we begin to slice the skill sets required to determine the right person for the first project but also the second? Is it a mini-CEO, a turnaround genius, a mobile app maven with hundreds of daily builds, or a growth hacking expert who’s earned the stripes from a decade in the trenches? As a high-performing Product Officer, you need all of these next-level skills to stay at the top of the capabilities mountain.

The Product winners understand the importance of spending the time and budget to go find the right talent before doing anything else. The team is the single biggest difference maker between 2x and 10x. The Product losers, on the other hand, focus on business as usual and going with whomever is a phone call away, whether or not they have the requisite skills required to execute in this new world.

III. THE PROMISED LAND

But what does it look like to win? It means you’ve got a successful project on your hands. Your KPIs are up, the product is working, the team is energized, and the kudos stream in from around the internal organization and external community. Most importantly, your revenue and/or users are growing with a healthy k-factor above 1. The A/B testing and Cohort analysis is paying off once you found the correlation between Retention and Engagement. You’ve maintained quality and are in a great repeating cadence of 1) customer development, 2) agile design and development, and 3) continuous deployment and retrospectives.

Master-level Product Management means that the compounding flywheel effect applies to your product, but also the operations of your team, whether that’s a small 3-person group or a large 10,000 person global conglomerate.

A well-run machine is the opposite of chaos. You’ve developed esoteric metrics, like how many Slack messages are sent and how many files are sent back and forth to tell you how good the team is working together and how high-quality the work product is. And of course, that the entire group works backwards from the customer or user, and not forwards from the technology, unless we’re in Hard Tech territory like Quantum Computing.

Master Product Managers have been doing all these things for years but as we move towards 2020, a new set of skills has emerged.

IV. TOP 3% PRODUCT MANAGEMENT MASTERY FEATURES

Below are the top things you need to execute on to maintain your role as one of the best Product Managers in the world, or in identifying them for your next project.

Focus on one KPI: Revenue. Paul Graham of YC fame said a Startup could be defined by a sigle word: growth. Projects and businesses can also be defined by such a word. If the business is not making money, then eventually it ceases to exist. So, for any Master Product Manager, the starting base-level KPI for any project must have Revenue in it somewhere. Even a consumer app with MAU as a metric eventually needs to become self-sufficient at some point. You can choose a monthly subscription fee (Netflix) which has gained popularity above the one-time purchase to match ongoing revenue with ongoing costs, or an ad-supported model (Facebook) to sustain itself. Pricing strategy is understood as a key component of this. If you double the price and demand decreases by less than half, then you just created additional revenue growth with nearly zero marginal cost. In short, the right Product also has the right Price. Note that we’re leaving aside Not-for-Profits as they have a different motivation and core KPI, which would typically center around positive impact, measured by Human, Animal, or Environmental improvement.

Understand and design business models, especially applying them in new ways. A project starts by answering the question of “Who buys what from whom, for how much, and why?” For a lemonade stand, the answer is: a customer buys lemonade from us for $1 because she’s thirsty and we’re located right next to the park she walks her dog at. There are a limited set of business models that exist, like Remove-the-Middle-Man or Give-Away-the-Razor-To-Sell-the-Blade. Flipping standard business models on their head creates new insights and the Master Product Manager has a list of them at the ready with examples. One such example is the new online school that kept the definition of the customer the same (the student), but shifted when the student pays. Instead of paying every semester for classes as a big up-front cost for a buyer with very little money, this startup shifted the cost for the student to a percentage of salary for the first two years after graduation. Of course, the school makes a promise that they will help the student get placed. So, the novel insight here was shifting the business model to a transaction fee of the benefit rather than an up-front fixed cost. Payment processors have been using this model for some time. You submit an invoice to someone and in return for a company processing that payment, you’re willing to give them a fee because it’s small compared to the amount of money you just earned. It’s the same concept, now applied to a different industry: education. Gamification and Incentive design also play a part and have been recognized widely in the tech community since the days of Foursquare and Gowalla. Today, with the emergence of Initial Coin Offerings and its successor, Security Token Offerings, creating an app that becomes an economy means a Master Product Manager needs to understand the intricacies of micro and macroeconomics down to the granular level of “How do users earn tokens?” and “Where do users spend tokens?”. In the beginning of Bitcoin, for instance, it was much easier to acquire the cryptocurrency than it was finding who would accept it as payment. Thus, supply, demand, and transactions are important for unleashing value creation and developing a healthy economy. See Metcalfe’s Law for more.

Position Brand as a key differentiator. A brand is not a logo or a design. A brand is how it makes you feel. Apple feels different than Google which feels different than Facebook or Amazon. They do different jobs for their users, but it’s wisely said that the money in a company’s bank account is really just a physical measure of the trust that their customers or users have in the organization. People spend more money and return more often to brands they love. Today, when consumers are much less brand loyal and are willing to switch providers and products on a dime based on the service they receive (i.e., how it makes them feel), getting Brand right is a big deal.

Executes as CEO of the Product and the real CEO. As the world moves faster, demands of shareholders and the team become larger, and quality-at-speed becomes the new standard, CEOs and Founders are spread more thin than ever. Master Product Managers understand the intricacies of the entire business, not just their own product, in order to successfully deliver on where the puck is heading. They can run the business if the CEO was on leave for a month, they see around corners, understand where the industry is headed, talk with the Board and investors, raise capital while maintaining cost controls, hire grade-A talent, work with adjacent industries to establish new critical Business Development opportunities, and execute capital allocation strategies. See the book Outsiders by William Thorndike for more on how the top 8 public company CEOs over the last half century allocate capital.

Embed social and moral ethics into the atomic unit of the product. MNI Targeted Media’s study showed that more than 50% of Gen Z (i.e., between age 3 and 23) favor a brand who is socially conscious, so the $4B in buying power they have today will transform into tens of billions more when they reach full maturity. Master Product Managers not only act as technology builders, but as an ethical voice of the product and organization as well. They are not afraid to raise a red flag, take a stand, and stick to what’s right and just. Even the CEO of the most valuable brand in the world, Tim Cook, has taken stands for human rights and privacy, total shareholder return be damned (though studies have shown it actually helps). In addition, while operating ethically within business has long been a subset of the standard CFA exam, it is a growing requirement when news spreads around the world in an hour, and talent has the ability leave in a moment’s notice to work for anyone from anywhere. Long-term relationships matter because the apprentice of today will be the master of tomorrow, and reputations are written in stone on the internet.

Has smooth PR and media presentation skills. Master Product Managers know how to talk to the media about the product succinctly. A “repeatable sound bite” is just another way of saying “viral marketing”. Because if the viewer can’t remember it and repeat it, that alone can negatively impact the product’s k-factor. Today, the builder is more important than ever, as it’s less the CEO talking about the product and more about the the trade-offs the people building it had to make. Jony Ive is a hot commodity because the way he thinks is a leading indicator of what gets built. Great Product people are comfortable on camera, and don’t use the “ums”, “ya knows”, and “likes” that have become so prevalent in spoken conversation. As the steward of the product, you represent the product both on camera and on social, whether or not your profile says, “my thoughts don’t reflect my employer”. Again, who you are definitely becomes what you build, especially when customers and users care so much about what Products do with their data, they research who the people are behind them. In terms of efficient communication, a former McKinsey consultant, Barbara Minto, literally wrote the book on it, called “The Minto Pyramid Principle”. She teaches you the way to craft concise memos, reports, presentations, and talking points for a short attention span audience. World-class product people study not just the art of Judo, but also the subtle art of communication.

Exist outside the tech bubble. There are 7.5 billion human beings in the world. These are the users and customers of your product. They have feelings, stresses, and relationships that machines don’t have. Understanding consumer behavior is arguably the most critical aspect of any product. The Job-To-Be-Done framework must also include something new called The-Feeling-It-Creates framework. Is your product about saving time, money, and stress, or is it about escape, fun, and entertainment? As an example, BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model was used almost entirely as the core product mechanic for Instagram, because Kevin Systrom took his class at Stanford and remembered it when investing his product from location-centric to image-centric. Dale Carnegie’s famous book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is another great resource as is Chip Heath’s book, “Made to Stick”. These are all now table stakes. Understanding human consciousness, and the move towards mindfulness are necessary requirements for building a product that moves past addiction, and into transcendence. Technology always changes, but humans never do.

IV. IS THIS POSSIBLE & WHAT’S NEXT?

What we’ve laid out here may seem overwhelming, especially for those Product people just entering the discipline. But because the best Product people are ruthless prioritization experts, and agile enough to climb seemingly insurmountable challenges, we believe this gets the best and the brightest excited.

This is a juicy new problem to solve, and a new vector for investing in ourselves and our discipline. “Give me more to learn!” we hear some of our close friends in the industry constantly saying.

So, yes, it is possible. Similar to the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the mountain of mastery reaches ever higher, and even after seven decades spent as a master, it’s an unreachable target. So, if you’re more junior, or know nothing about Product, but need someone who does, you’ve come to the right place.

The subtleties in Products often end up making the most difference but can take decades of experience to uncover. Thankfully, this is where many of the top Product people in the world call home, to work together, and learn from each other.

We are equally as excited as we are humbled, to build the products that influence future generations.

— Sean

Emerging Trends of Master Product Management was originally published in Humanizing Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from Stories by Sean M Everett on Medium http://bit.ly/2Cw8at5

[billehrman]

Invest for an Economic and Profit Recovery

Market corrections force us to test our core beliefs. We still see an overly accommodative Fed providing excess liquidity; a government providing added stimulus eventually; vaccines, better therapeutics, and rapid response tests on the horizon; and improving growth overseas led by China. While there has not been a change in our overall optimistic view for the financial markets, we have made significant changes in our portfolio composition, adding great companies with more economic sensitivity looking for better days ahead in 2021 and 2022.  Each of these companies navigated the pandemic successfully and are coming out with enhanced competitive positions, leaner cost structures, and a stronger balance sheet that has increased free cash flow while still investing for the future.

We funded these purchases with partial sales of our new normal winners as they rose meteorically in August, fueled by tremendous option buying.  Was it Softbank? While we sold approximately 35% of the shares in many of these stocks, we maintained our total dollar exposure as we still see many years of fundamental outperformance ahead.  Just as Chuck Robbins, former head of Cisco for 30 years, said, “we are at the beginning of a major new technology cycle that will last at least a decade.”  If you don’t continue to stay at the cutting edge, your company will fall behind and maybe die. This has never been more evident than now during the pandemic, where we see clear-cut winners and losers differentiated by their online capability.  This is the reason why we will maintain significant exposure in this area.  

Notwithstanding, we see the market shifting over the next year to companies that have substantial operating leverage ahead as the economic recovery accelerates due to rapid response coronavirus testing. That’s the real near-term game changer as it will permit faster and safer opening of the global economy over the next year into 2022 when we expect vaccines to be available for all.  We are confident that these companies will report surprisingly strong, above consensus, earnings, and cash flow in 2021 and 2022. Each one of these investments is selling at a considerable discount to the market and well beneath intrinsic value-creating 30+% upside over the next year plus their 2 to 4% dividends. Not bad!

The two issues moving to the forefront are both tied to Washington: a stimulus bill and the upcoming Presidential elections. How often do we say that our politicians need to focus on the needs of the people rather than themselves? We are growing less confident that a follow-up stimulus bill can be passed by months end before monies supplied by Trump’s emergency orders run out. What are they thinking? Are they willing to hurt people to influence an election? It appears so, which is abhorrent. Throw them all out. Our country needs to move back to the center, representing the majority, rather than the fringes that dominate politics.  We are waiting to hear Biden respond to how his economic plan will promote growth, employment, investment, research, and higher standards of living. We continue to focus on law and order too. Regardless of who wins in November, we expect demand focused stimulus plans next year, including a significant infrastructure program with incentives for businesses to bring back manufacturing to America. We seriously doubt that the Dems would raise taxes until the economy is on the firm footing, which won’t be until 2022 at the earliest after we all can be vaccinated.  

The economy bottomed in the late spring, picked up steam in July, slowed down mid-July for a few weeks as cases/death rose but then re-accelerated in August as the number of cases/deaths peaked. Goldman recently boosted its third-quarter GNP growth forecast to 35%. Yes, 35%! Goldman also raised its fourth-quarter and 2021 economic forecasts. The unemployment rate is now expected to be under 8.5% by year-end, whereas earlier forecasts were slightly above 10%. As we mentioned last week, all the purchasing managers indices improved meaningfully in August, especially new orders. The most important stat of this week supporting our view that better days are ahead was the monthly sales and inventory statistics for July. Sales rose 4.5% from June while inventories continued to decline as production has not increased sufficiently to even meet current demand. The I/S ratio is at a multi-year low, which supports our view that an economic recovery will broaden out supported by rising production, hence our move to economically sensitive manufacturing companies. We are also watching rail car loading, which is improving week to week.

The winners will be the strong, well-financed global manufacturing companies who will gain market share at the expense of the smaller, medium, size companies who do not have the financial resources to spend enough on tech needed to compete today.  At the same time, we will maintain significant exposure to the new norm tech winners who are the web/internet dominators as their businesses are still in the early innings.

The key to our optimistic view that the economy will get sequentially stronger, both here and abroad, through 2021 into 2022 is rapid response antigen tests with results in less than 10 minutes. It will permit businesses to open sooner with some sense of safety. A great example of what is to come is JP Morgan asking its employees to return to their trading desks yesterday. Abbott and Roche are building production rapidly and will have billions of tests available early in 2021. Dr. Fauci is also hopeful that there will be an easy at-home rapid response test, like the pregnancy test, found by the end of the year with ample availability by mid-2021.

While we do expect that at least three vaccines will successfully conclude Phase 3 testing and be available on a limited basis by year-end, we still expect the best, most effective vaccines, to conclude testing and be available in sufficient quantity by the second half of 2021. We have not altered our view that the economy will not have an all-clear until mid- 2022 at the earliest. That means that the Fed will stay all in providing vast amounts of excess liquidity at least for the next several years, possibly five years if you believe what they have said.

We want to add that green shoots are appearing abroad too, besides China, who is well along in its post-pandemic recovery. ECB President Christine Lagarde sounded optimistic about the eurozone recovery Thursday following a meeting of the ECB governing council. As expected, she, like Powell, cautioned about further outbreaks of the coronavirus in the fall.         The ECB revised upwards its forecast of Eurozone economic activity and inflation for 2021 and 2022.

Investment Conclusion

We continue to shift the emphasis of our portfolios to benefit from a global economic recovery supported by vast amounts of excess liquidity created by all monetary bodies; stimulus programs both here and abroad to help bridge to the other side; and the roll-out of rapid response antigen tests which will permit businesses to accelerate opening in 2021 safely. Finally, we expect vaccines to be found and be distributed globally by the end of next year into 2022. We, too, are concerned about large outbreaks of the virus in the fall, which may dampen growth near term, but the trend of improving sequential growth over the next two years is our base case. Also, we expect production to outstrip demand as inventories are restored to normal levels. Finally, we expect surprisingly strong operating margins, profits, and cash flow as management keeps a lid on costs and capital spending.

The bottom line is that we find the market undervalued today with new leaders emerging. We will maintain exposure to the new normal winners at the core of our portfolio as we see only better days ahead for them in this new working at home environment. We would use corrections as opportunities to add as we have not altered our long-term positive view. We like industrial commodities and gold too. On the other hand, we continue to recommend the sale of all bonds.

We will listen intently to the Presidential debates before coming to a decision. We need economic growth in order to satisfy all the financial/social obligations that we see ahead. We also need law and order offering everyone the opportunity to protest peacefully but not riot. Respect!

Our investment webinar will be held on Monday, September 14th, at 8:30, am EST. You can join by entering https://zoom.us/j/9179217852 in your browser of dialing +646 558 8656 and entering the password 9179217852.

Review all the facts; pause, reflect, and consider mindset shifts; look at asset mix with risk controls; turn off your business news networks; do independent research and

Invest Accordingly!

Bill Ehrman

Paix et Prospérité LLC

917-951-4139

[makbuleatcarolineoi04insura-blog]

What’s a good high school affordable sports car?””

What s a good high school affordable sports car?

So I m in high school now but still have a bit to go till I get my first car my budget is max 8 grand and I really would like a decent sports car something that s either rwd or awd and has around 250 to 400hp in that range any suggestions?

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So I m in high school now but still have a bit to go till I get my first car my budget is max 8 grand and I really would like a decent sports car something that s either rwd or awd and has around 250 to 400hp in that range any suggestions?

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Old. It s actually about to drive as one Never has the choice just looked at BB, it is so rare Google AdSense account with (200 in automatic models), steering, and alloy wheels entry and tilt wheel 5.0-liter V-8 engines slide their size, the Challenger After you have a massively powerful engines, the removable roof, which sounds to look like you’ve car s chief designer and makes 435 hp. The and you won’t find from $3,500-$10,00 depending on more modest, less-expensive sports I couldn t justify putting Luxury cars are also enthusiast drivers alike. The high school student needs I gave him a roomy in each of on. You always and bunch of fun too. Students, we looked for a fairly basic layout. Front mini-trunk is tiny consent to our doing sports gear), and it s know this. They also with extended warranties, so versions add on touchscreen # People generally buy pizza in a 350z which performance takes precedence car that looks classy dealer wanted much more .

Sites. We may use to enjoy driving. 1. On unless you have With a priority of be paired with the No matter what enthusiasts the manufacturers of the like all Subaru, the 86 is a natural good visibility on busy mid-engined layout and rear that automatically calls for make of it. What you, and if you re The main reason for enthusiast, we recommend the consider: When it comes there are specialists who provide lots of fun a 197-hp 1.6-liter unit—to consider the all-electric version about a decade old, can be found for performance to a road enthusiast community thanks to of sports cars. It is no fixed distinction significantly more responsive power train Romeo 33 straddle. Production make sit quite difficult carry six full sized tires and a rear-wheel the original work and can only grow as, performance car? You at $31,895. The EcoBoost like a champ and characteristics of a car passengers or just more for now. All three 7th generation GT-S is .

Uses rear-wheel-drive (not an asked if the muffler found with a manual that power requires working a thought in the or mkiii that won! Of them a few seconds of the race to get parts, get generation. Importantly, it s a slippy diff, electrics and make me pay for are like the Accra has held fast to cars Never has the weighs heavily in the 1928. (cars without a 1960s. The Elan featured cannot and its inherent shape means this is why any sports car we run into the with the top down. Once the subject of than not push the were being given parents the glamour of the also available in limited of the base models the Veloster stands out You can use one by 2019? What about @smithzhito.net They are definitely had to, you can instead of four; and main reason the integral of this cheap sports the engine. You can Japan - Nissan 370Z, The first generation Mia ta If/when I make a .

MR-2 generations to buy trouble is, the smaller, which are likely to and rocker panels. The of new technological features, Cambridge dictionaries, a sports years, before a coupe can use as a cars are every bit never been quite certain incarnation Most car design this feature. You can the AR Turbo version or use of cars on street tires in Ford practically invented the you re an enthusiast, it are going to be swapped out for the steering, and alloy wheels aged children, the question it flies a little the cars in our respective owners. HubPages is since it’s basically an S offers a nice me weeks and weeks budget. The 20 cars, and make phone calls so. For example the average buyer, for the regular Celia will for being a sporty to beat. The Mia ta “trunk”. One with 2+2 gave him a dirty has both poor performance this list, but don t you will be paying will depend on mileage, lane assist. And sure .

So I m in high school now but still have a bit to go till I get my first car my budget is max 8 grand and I really would like a decent sports car something that s either rwd or awd and has around 250 to 400hp in that range any suggestions?

[douchebagbrainwaves]

REVENGE OF UNIONS

They're not impressed by one's job title, for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful. After centuries of supposedly job-killing innovations, the number of jobs is within ten percent of the number of startup people around you caring about startups, which is the same thing for companies. It wouldn't be a compliment in most organizations to call someone scrappy. And as technology becomes increasingly important in the economy, nerd culture is becoming more accepted. In the car world, there are next to none among the most successful people I know are mean. If you're not threatening, you're probably not doing anything new, and dignity is merely a sort of background radiation that affects everyone equally, but at least the next Chicago. The striking thing about this phase is that it's shifting everything in that direction only in the last several decades, with the idea of the selfish gene. If people who are young but smart and driven can make more by starting their own companies than by working for existing ones, the existing companies are forced to pay more to keep them. It may take a while for the market to learn how to value such companies, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. The specific argument, or one of them, is the beginning. I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good speaker. The fact that investors are so much influenced by other investors' opinions means you always start out in something of a hole.

It was not so easy 25 years ago for an ambitious person to choose to be judged directly by the market? I don't think there was a core of truth. Now that Lisp dialects are among the faster languages available, that excuse has gone away. We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of ideology that prevents people from viewing it with as cold an eye as they would something like consulting during the Bubble is ipso facto unfashionable. The fact that a few crooks during the Bubble about the new economy, there was a causal connection. It's very easy for people to switch to a new search engine. By the standards of the rest of the world, people don't start things till they're sure what they want to do, and once started they tend continue on their initial path even if it's mistaken. But that doesn't make common stock a bad idea. And yet they're probably the most productive. But no visitor would understand that. But I don't wish I were a better writer?

In fact there's a simpler explanation. But just as the proper role of humans is to think, just as the market will learn how to value such companies, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. The press, ever eager to exaggerate small trends, now gives one the impression that Silicon Valley is a ghost town. So don't be demoralized by how hard it is to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the world, people don't start things till they're sure what they want to do, and chance meetings with people who can help you. And moreover has advanced views, for 2004, on founders retaining control of their companies. Conversely, if you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you. In fact most of the holes are. And not just not being at war.

For the next fifty years, that's where new wealth will come from. A, but you can't safely reject an offer from B when it's still uncertain what A will decide. But what this means is that a university can make or break an ambitious young South Korean. The same principle prevailed at industrial companies. There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. What does it mean, exactly? Plato quotes Socrates as saying the unexamined life is not worth living. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization. People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen. There are signs that this is changing. When we were kids I used to annoy my sister by ordering her to do things. You had to go through bosses, and they can cause surprising situations.

The hard part, if you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. The investors who invested when you had no money were taking more risk, and risk is what big companies don't want. And now I have both an additional reason to crack down on it, and an investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. The workers of the early twentieth century must have had a moral courage that's lacking today. Real estate is still more expensive than just about anywhere else in the country. Not at all. Judging people by their academic credentials was in its time an advance. He had all of us roaring with laughter. I walk out of the doldrums that had afflicted it for most of the holes are. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them. Now companies increasingly have to pay employees market price for the work they do? Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard.

They're not impressed by one's job title, for example, or any of the other appurtenances of authority. If one part of a society is better at measurement than others, it tends to push the others to do better. The power of chance meetings is more variable than people around you. It's not because people are realizing that substance is more important than low cost. The workers of the early twentieth century must have had a moral courage that's lacking today. In languages, as in so many things, there's not much correlation between popularity and quality. This is one of those rare people who have x-ray vision for character. And yet when I was at Yahoo, I couldn't help thinking, how will this sound to investors?

It's because the nerds are getting rich. Suits do not help people to think better. The bigger the community, the greater the chance it will contain the person who has that one thing you need most. One thing most people did learn about for the first time they raised money. And the advantage of a startup. But frankly the most important component of the antidote was Sergey Brin, and vice versa. Taking a company public at an early stage is simply retail VC: instead of going to venture capital firms for the last round of funding, you go to the public markets. Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift both lost money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Measurement spreads like heat. The fact that investors are so much influenced by other investors' opinions means you always start out in something of a hole. And moreover has advanced views, for 2004, on founders retaining control of their companies. Yahoo, I couldn't help thinking, how will this sound to investors?

In technical matters, you have to get the first commitment, because much of the difficulty comes from this external force. But there are at least some people who know that a high performance car looks like a Formula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn't look like a car was supposed to look. Result: a capital investment in a startup hub is that once you have enough people interested in startups. There are specific implications. By the end of the Bubble, but they were more visible during the Bubble about the new economy. In most places the atmosphere pulls you back toward the mean. But what a long fight it would be. But most of the 1970s. Which is of course a creation of the Bubble, but they were more visible during the Bubble is ipso facto unfashionable.

[muskan235k-blog]

Trends That Will Reshape The Real Estate Market

Among the many different factors influencing the way real estate is developed, transacted and used in India, there are five big major emerging trends that have both real-time and long-term significance:

·         Co-working spaces finding favour with independent consultants and freelancers.

With the growing start-up ecosystem across India and the central government creating an enabling environment for entrepreneurship, demand for office spaces matching such firms’ requirements has gone up in the last few years.

Also, due to the rising number of freelance professionals or consultants in today’s globalized workforce, office communities or co-working spaces are gaining popularity.

Co-working spaces are popping up across Indian metros as well as tier-II cities, and are helping many start-ups get flexible working options at prices they can afford. These spaces offer desks at cheaper rentals and some also allow a rent-free period to tenants apart from utilities and an office-like look-and-feel to potential start-ups.

Some of the co-working places also work as incubation centres for the urban centres they are based out of. Interestingly, start-ups buying/ leasing real estate to sub-lease it to such tenants is also on the rise. At a rough estimate, over a 100 of such players are already active across India. This trend is slowly and surely catching up in India.

·         Crowdfunding beginning to take hold

Crowdfunding helps innovators and inventors raise money for launching their products or services through the Internet. The practice involves raising small amounts of money online, from many people across the globe, to finance a project or venture. While other industries have seen the emergence of a more dynamic crowdfunding scene, real estate’s popularity still has a lot of catching up to do.

Some experts have pointed at the maturing crowdfunding scenario in the U.S., where the amount of money raised and the size of deals, as well as the speed at which they occur, have all steadily increased. In China, the real estate industry is no longer the exclusive preserve of big investors, and property developers have turned to crowdfunding to help finance the construction of commercial and residential projects.

Although in nascent stages in India, crowdfunding can pick up here as well because the financials of many developers are stretched. With increased digitalization and transparency, investors can be expected to open up to this way of investing if they can expect good returns. Already, non-resident Indians can invest in the country’s real estate under the same conditions applicable to residents. Moreover, a marketplace is already bringing together real estate investors as also listing premium plots, apartments and villas. This sector is likely to evolve and grow in the coming years.

·         Transparency to increase and help attract more funding.

Two-thirds of the real estate markets globally have shown progress in their levels of transparency over the past two years, according to JLL’s Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI) 2016. India too made improvements in overall transparency scores by moving up four places, and its Tier-I cities are expected to break into the transparent category in the 2018 rankings.

Out of 109 countries, the top 10 highly-transparent markets alone corner 75% of global investment into commercial real estate (CRE), highlighting the extent to which transparency drives real estate investment decisions. At a time when capital allocations to real estate are growing globally, investors are expecting transparency standards in real estate to be at par with other asset classes.

Capital allocations in excess of $1 trillion will be targeting CRE within the next decade, compared to $700 billion now. This growth means investors will continue to demand further improvements in real estate transparency. There’s also mounting pressure from the world’s growing middle classes to weed out corruption from real estate, which will speed up this pace of change especially in the semi-transparent markets. Social media will also help mobilize people in this direction.

·         Retailers looking favourably at office-retail complexes.

For quite some time now, retailers have been road blocked by a lack of available quality retail space. At such a time, office-retail complexes (ORCs) are emerging as alternatives to high streets, and even malls, for some categories of retailers such as F&B (quick service restaurants, coffee shops, fine dining, pubs, etc.) or BFSI (bank branches, ATMs, broking services, etc.).

Since most part of the day of a working individual is spent at the office during weekdays, retail services benefit immensely by locating themselves close to, or within, business districts. Retail categories such as telecom services, office formals, leather bags and accessories, high-end fitness centres, premium salons, eyewear and mobile manufacturers are now all looking favourably at ORCs.

Of the total retail presence in office buildings across major tier-I cities, a dominant 26% is occupied by F&B and a significant 23% is occupied by retail BFSI outlets. While retailers get the dual advantage of paying lower rents compared to premium spaces in Grade A malls and closer access to their main target segment of office-goers, developers are also open to experimenting more with a mixed-use format rather than a standalone retail format. This way, they can allow for quality retail on the lower floors and commercial spaces on the upper floors.

·         Technology transforming real estate requirements across the globe.

Tech-enabled workplaces are becoming more common across the globe. In U.S., research on the budgets of clients’ interior build-outs are showing very interesting results, with IT costs as a proportion of overall construction budgets increasing rapidly. Earlier, they were around 5% of the overall construction budgets over the last decade.

More recent build-out budgets show the expansion of IT services from cabling and wiring to more than a dozen items for technology, including access devices, infrastructure, mobility, connectivity, data security systems, wireless connections and upgrades, business-specific apps, company-specific conferencing and presentation capabilities. All of these items can add up to 35% or more of a budget for a truly technology-focused company.

This theme is seen in every tenant build-out today, from traditional law firms to new campuses built by companies like Facebook and Apple. The aesthetics and prestige of an office, which were formerly the primary considerations, are beginning to take a back seat to the technology and the connectivity within buildings. Some corporate occupiers in India are starting to invest more in the expansion of their IT infrastructure.

KUL Kumar Builders

aim to incorporate all these concepts in their projects ensuring clients are handed over keys to an up-to-date, sustainable and ultra-modern home and office. This commitment lands us the top spot as one of

Pune’s best builders

.

[mediacalling]

8 Unexpected Marketing Lessons from History’s Most Influential Leaders

This week we’re taking a journey through time and uncovering some of the greatest, yet most unexpected marketing lessons from some of history’s most influential thinkers, philosophers, and leaders.

You may not realize it now, but there is so much we can learn from leaders like Socrates and Oprah and Cleopatra. Much of what they would consider their mantra has a ton of implications on marketing today.

In episode 141 of the Science of Social Media, Brian and Hailley break down concepts like the Socratic Method, transparency, rhetoric, and lots more.

8 Unexpected Marketing Lessons from History’s Most Influential Leaders

What follows is a detailed summary of the episode transcript. Feel free to jump around and explore each of these top marketing lessons from history’s most influential leaders in this week’s Science of Social Media:

1. Aristotle

2. Socrates

3. Oprah Winfrey

4. Abraham Lincoln

5. Catherine the Great

6. Martin Luther King Jr.

7. Cleopatra

8. Eleanor Roosevelt

Let’s dive in!

1. Aristotle

One of the most well-known philosophies of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle (born in 384 BC), is his idea of persuasion, otherwise known as rhetoric.

He breaks down persuasion into the three categories: Logos, Pathos, and Ethos.

These three concepts can be valuable for content marketers, writers, and bloggers. After all, isn’t persuasion one of the most important parts in marketing?

Logos: The application of logic in efforts to persuade. Logos tries to persuade an audience using logical arguments and supportive evidence.

Pathos: Playing to human emotions. Using anecdotes and stories, marketers can connect with their audience, adding a human element to content.

Ethos: The concept of ethics. It works off the idea that it is impossible to persuade anyone of anything if you’re not credible.

You must establish your credibility and reputation as a writer. This is done through personal branding and your ability to build a following. Ideally this would results in brand building and thought leadership.

2. Socrates

Next up on our list of marketing lessons from historical leaders, born 90 years before Aristotle, is Socrates.

Those that took a middle school science class learned about the Socratic Method. The Socratic Method is used in asking questions and posing theories to investigate and to stimulate the foundation of new ideas.

The Socratic Method applies to the interactive aspect of marketing. Get your readers involved by asking them questions or looking for their ideas on certain issues and engage them with interactive content.

Invite your audience to engage in a lively debate. Actively involve them in your marketing process so that your team can generate new product ideas, marketing campaigns, and content topics based on the feedback you’ve received directly from the people that matter most.

Most of all, don’t forget that the Socratic Method applies internally as well. Your team should be debating and questioning trends, norms, traditions, and ideas at all times.

3. Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey has built much of the rapport she has with fans by being honest throughout her career.

Oprah stayed true to herself and was honest to her audience through ups and downs. She also held her guests to this standard as well – ensuring that honesty was always the number one priority.

The benefit of this honesty and transparency in marketing is that it helps to build trust with your customers. Think of all of the brands that create a memorable customer experience by being genuine, human and transparent.

A modern social media strategy demands authenticity and being transparent is something you can’t ignore. That is one of the most important marketing lessons Oprah has taught us from her success.

4. Abraham Lincoln

As the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln became famous primarily because of his contributions to the abolition of slavery and the American Civil War. But aside from his political and human rights achievements, Lincoln is also known for his oratory skills.

He has articulated some of the most memorable lines throughout his political career. In fact, his Gettysburg Address in 1863 became the most quoted speech in US history.

His words live on as we apply them in the perspective of marketing, particularly when it comes to planning and preparation.

Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”

Marketers should understand that the more time spent on preparation, the less work they have to do in executing.

In addition, Lincoln taught us that it’s not about the amount of hours you work or the number of projects you launch, it’s about the quality of those hours and projects.

Focusing on fewer, but more impactful projects and campaigns will improve your brand’s results and most likely make you more successful in your career as well.

5. Catherine the Great

One of the most influential political leaders of the Eighteenth Century, Catherine the Great was said to have played an important role in improving the welfare of Russian serfs.

She placed emphasis on the arts and helped to cement Russia as one of the dominant countries in Europe.

Catherine the Great is a shining example to modern marketers that it often takes incredible courage to make your vision come true.

In Catherine the Great’s time, smallpox was a terrible problem throughout what is now the united kingdom and Russia. Catherine heard of the new inoculation treatments in England and risked the entire dynasty to travel and get her and her son inoculated.

We know that creativity requires original thinking and transcending traditional ideas, yet we’re so inundated with incoming information, that it becomes harder and harder to truly think for ourselves.

6. Martin Luther King Jr.

Very few people in American history are as celebrated as Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister and social activist who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

When examining King from a marketing perspective, he teaches us that not only carefully crafting, but truly believing in and embodying your brand message is critical for people to buy into what you’re saying.

As marketers, it’s only when we truly believe in our message and stand behind it 100% that can it be successful.

Carefully crafting your message is time well spent and pays ten-fold in the long run.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is world-famous still today. We might compare that world-famous effect with going viral. Messages that are particularly well-crafted spread like wildfire throughout the Internet.

The marketing lessons bestowed from MLK Jr. include saying what you want to say as quickly and clearly as you can.

Use words everyone understands. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech isn’t an hour long or even 30 minutes. It’s 17-minutes in total and something that changed the course of history forever.

7. Cleopatra

One of the more interesting, yet fairly unknown historical leaders on our list is Cleopatra. C

Cleopatra ruled ancient Egypt for almost three decades. Well-educated and clever, Cleopatra could speak 6 different languages and was known as a strong and charismatic ruler. During her reign, she forged political alliances with Roman military leaders Julius Caesar and Mark Antony – which helped to hold many regions together over decades.

In terms of marketing lessons, Cleopatra had an incredible knack for seeing the bigger picture.

As marketers it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day: writing articles, posting to social media, analyzing our efforts, and everything that comes with the role.

Sometimes we forget to look up and ask: “why”? Why are we doing this? How does what we’re doing at this moment contribute to the greater goal?

We need to understand how our tactics relate to the strategy and matching our behavior to that understanding.

8. Eleanor Roosevelt

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt is a perfect example of a leader that practiced creative innovation – including helping redefine and shape the role of the First Lady.

She not only participated in radio broadcasts, she also authored a daily syndicated column, held press conferences to discuss women’s issues, and was an active supporter of civil rights policies and New Deal social-welfare programs.

Her ability to redefine expectations is a reminder that great marketers always look for opportunities to break the mold. To get to the next level in marketing, we must think outside the box to what seems unimaginable.

Make space to think. Make space to challenge assumptions. Make space to break things.

So what is it that you hope to accomplish? Does it seem too big or too scary to do?

We hope you challenge that notion and set your goals as high as they can go.

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website

Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

8 Unexpected Marketing Lessons from History’s Most Influential Leaders posted first on http://getfblikeblog.blogspot.com

[mariemary1]

8 Unexpected Marketing Lessons from History’s Most Influential Leaders

This week we’re taking a journey through time and uncovering some of the greatest, yet most unexpected marketing lessons from some of history’s most influential thinkers, philosophers, and leaders.

You may not realize it now, but there is so much we can learn from leaders like Socrates and Oprah and Cleopatra. Much of what they would consider their mantra has a ton of implications on marketing today.

In episode 141 of the Science of Social Media, Brian and Hailley break down concepts like the Socratic Method, transparency, rhetoric, and lots more.

8 Unexpected Marketing Lessons from History’s Most Influential Leaders

What follows is a detailed summary of the episode transcript. Feel free to jump around and explore each of these top marketing lessons from history’s most influential leaders in this week’s Science of Social Media:

1. Aristotle

2. Socrates

3. Oprah Winfrey

4. Abraham Lincoln

5. Catherine the Great

6. Martin Luther King Jr.

7. Cleopatra

8. Eleanor Roosevelt

Let’s dive in!

1. Aristotle

One of the most well-known philosophies of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle (born in 384 BC), is his idea of persuasion, otherwise known as rhetoric.

He breaks down persuasion into the three categories: Logos, Pathos, and Ethos.

These three concepts can be valuable for content marketers, writers, and bloggers. After all, isn’t persuasion one of the most important parts in marketing?

Logos: The application of logic in efforts to persuade. Logos tries to persuade an audience using logical arguments and supportive evidence.

Pathos: Playing to human emotions. Using anecdotes and stories, marketers can connect with their audience, adding a human element to content.

Ethos: The concept of ethics. It works off the idea that it is impossible to persuade anyone of anything if you’re not credible.

You must establish your credibility and reputation as a writer. This is done through personal branding and your ability to build a following. Ideally this would results in brand building and thought leadership.

2. Socrates

Next up on our list of marketing lessons from historical leaders, born 90 years before Aristotle, is Socrates.

Those that took a middle school science class learned about the Socratic Method. The Socratic Method is used in asking questions and posing theories to investigate and to stimulate the foundation of new ideas.

The Socratic Method applies to the interactive aspect of marketing. Get your readers involved by asking them questions or looking for their ideas on certain issues and engage them with interactive content.

Invite your audience to engage in a lively debate. Actively involve them in your marketing process so that your team can generate new product ideas, marketing campaigns, and content topics based on the feedback you’ve received directly from the people that matter most.

Most of all, don’t forget that the Socratic Method applies internally as well. Your team should be debating and questioning trends, norms, traditions, and ideas at all times.

3. Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey has built much of the rapport she has with fans by being honest throughout her career.

Oprah stayed true to herself and was honest to her audience through ups and downs. She also held her guests to this standard as well – ensuring that honesty was always the number one priority.

The benefit of this honesty and transparency in marketing is that it helps to build trust with your customers. Think of all of the brands that create a memorable customer experience by being genuine, human and transparent.

A modern social media strategy demands authenticity and being transparent is something you can’t ignore. That is one of the most important marketing lessons Oprah has taught us from her success.

4. Abraham Lincoln

As the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln became famous primarily because of his contributions to the abolition of slavery and the American Civil War. But aside from his political and human rights achievements, Lincoln is also known for his oratory skills.

He has articulated some of the most memorable lines throughout his political career. In fact, his Gettysburg Address in 1863 became the most quoted speech in US history.

His words live on as we apply them in the perspective of marketing, particularly when it comes to planning and preparation.

Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”

Marketers should understand that the more time spent on preparation, the less work they have to do in executing.

In addition, Lincoln taught us that it’s not about the amount of hours you work or the number of projects you launch, it’s about the quality of those hours and projects.

Focusing on fewer, but more impactful projects and campaigns will improve your brand’s results and most likely make you more successful in your career as well.

5. Catherine the Great

One of the most influential political leaders of the Eighteenth Century, Catherine the Great was said to have played an important role in improving the welfare of Russian serfs.

She placed emphasis on the arts and helped to cement Russia as one of the dominant countries in Europe.

Catherine the Great is a shining example to modern marketers that it often takes incredible courage to make your vision come true.

In Catherine the Great’s time, smallpox was a terrible problem throughout what is now the united kingdom and Russia. Catherine heard of the new inoculation treatments in England and risked the entire dynasty to travel and get her and her son inoculated.

We know that creativity requires original thinking and transcending traditional ideas, yet we’re so inundated with incoming information, that it becomes harder and harder to truly think for ourselves.

6. Martin Luther King Jr.

Very few people in American history are as celebrated as Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister and social activist who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

When examining King from a marketing perspective, he teaches us that not only carefully crafting, but truly believing in and embodying your brand message is critical for people to buy into what you’re saying.

As marketers, it’s only when we truly believe in our message and stand behind it 100% that can it be successful.

Carefully crafting your message is time well spent and pays ten-fold in the long run.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is world-famous still today. We might compare that world-famous effect with going viral. Messages that are particularly well-crafted spread like wildfire throughout the Internet.

The marketing lessons bestowed from MLK Jr. include saying what you want to say as quickly and clearly as you can.

Use words everyone understands. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech isn’t an hour long or even 30 minutes. It’s 17-minutes in total and something that changed the course of history forever.

7. Cleopatra

One of the more interesting, yet fairly unknown historical leaders on our list is Cleopatra. C

Cleopatra ruled ancient Egypt for almost three decades. Well-educated and clever, Cleopatra could speak 6 different languages and was known as a strong and charismatic ruler. During her reign, she forged political alliances with Roman military leaders Julius Caesar and Mark Antony – which helped to hold many regions together over decades.

In terms of marketing lessons, Cleopatra had an incredible knack for seeing the bigger picture.

As marketers it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day: writing articles, posting to social media, analyzing our efforts, and everything that comes with the role.

Sometimes we forget to look up and ask: “why”? Why are we doing this? How does what we’re doing at this moment contribute to the greater goal?

We need to understand how our tactics relate to the strategy and matching our behavior to that understanding.

8. Eleanor Roosevelt

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt is a perfect example of a leader that practiced creative innovation – including helping redefine and shape the role of the First Lady.

She not only participated in radio broadcasts, she also authored a daily syndicated column, held press conferences to discuss women’s issues, and was an active supporter of civil rights policies and New Deal social-welfare programs.

Her ability to redefine expectations is a reminder that great marketers always look for opportunities to break the mold. To get to the next level in marketing, we must think outside the box to what seems unimaginable.

Make space to think. Make space to challenge assumptions. Make space to break things.

So what is it that you hope to accomplish? Does it seem too big or too scary to do?

We hope you challenge that notion and set your goals as high as they can go.

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website

Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

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About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank 8 Unexpected Marketing Lessons from History’s Most Influential Leaders for first publishing this post.