Gotham Gal

Teaching to bake and giving to a cause

Last night I went to a woman's apartment who taught us how to bake baguettes.  She bakes them every other day for her family.  She decided to start teaching others how to bake baguettes and requests that each person who comes needs to give a donation to Hot Bread Kitchen.  Great idea. 

The process is simple but I guarantee you it is all about a sixth sense.  You begin with live yeast, very warm water and sugar. 

You mix that with some flour, continuing to stir until there are no bubbles. The consistency is like soup.  That sits covered for about an hour.

Then you add more flour and sea salt and just stir until everything is really incorporated.  Slowly adding in the flour.  This rises for about 2 more hours. 

Then it is ready and you have to move quickly.

Take some flour and put it on the kitchen counter.  Pour some dough out which is about the size of an orange. 

You flip is once to cover with flour and then put it on the bread trays.  Bake for about 25 minutes. 

I won't share the recipe until I try it at home.  Looks simple but my gut tells me she just made is look that way.  I took my baguette home, hot out of the oven and shared it with the family.  Pretty damn good.

By the Way Meet Vera Stark

This is not the first play I have seen from the playwright Lynn Nottage and hopefully it will not be the last.  By the Way Meet Vera Stark is well written, funny, clever, layered and smart. 

The play is about racism.  We meet Vera Stark, in the 1930's, who lives in Los Angeles working as a maid of a major Hollywood starlet while trying to break into acting herself.  The roles for black women at that time were minimal and the ones available had no lines or they played the hired helped.  This takes place during the Depression. 

Eventually Vera lands a role in a major Hollywood play, a break out role for black women.  The second act shows her actual movie role on film.  Very clever how Nottage uses different mediums in this play.  We learn that Vera, after her last TV appearance on a talk show in 1973, basically vanishes.  This scene is particularly clever.  Nottage has two themes going at the same time.  Vera on stage at the talk show in 1973 and then 3 people at a talk show in the present day analyzing Vera, this show and her life. 

The acting is fantastic.  Every single actor gives an incredible performance and plays multiple characters.  The last scene gives you an insight into the insanity of talking heads attempting to analyze Vera and then the audience sees Vera for the choices she had to make based on her race.  What was available to her as a black woman in the 30's was minimal.  She took the role which ended up being a pivotal career move because she so wanted to act but the reprecussions of being a black woman at that time were huge. 

Super smart, well written and a really thought provoking play with a lot of laughter as an added bonus.  The fact that this is a comedy makes the viewer think even more.  The content isn't so funny, it is a part of our history that certainly wasn't easy for the African Americans who struggled through those times and made the most of the few opportunities they were given all because of the color of their skin.

 

 

the next generation of jewelers or even shoe repair people

My mother was into jewelry making.  She took some classes and most of the time found herself disappointed in the outcome of her projects.  I remember her making bead necklaces when I was much younger and at one point she painted too.  She might not have been great at the execution but she had a great eye.  She loved taking her jewelry to a jeweler and making changes with it by pulling out a stone and putting it in a pin or creating something else. 

I inherited a handful of gems from her.  I took them up to our jeweler and worked with her to create a ring I could wear every day with all the gems so I could have a little piece of my Mom with me daily.  I went up there this week to see the setting before everything was set in stone.  While I was there, I went down to the "hole" of the guy who actually made the ring and had him clean some jewelry for me.

What I was interested in when I got there was about the next generation of jewelers.  When I asked the jeweler if his family was going into the business he just laughed.  NO way, they want to be in finance or something like that.  So where is the next generation of jewelers?  Interesting enough the jeweler did say there are a few younger people getting into the business.  In many ways, I wasn't surprised based on what seems to be happening with the next generation. 

I think about the same thing when I get my shoes repaired as there are only a few left in the city.  To me, they are artists.  Someone told me that at the turn of the 20th Century there were thousands of tailors in Brooklyn who made handmade suits, now there are less than a handful but it is changing.

The good news is that there appears to be a resurgence of people who are interested in being tailors, fixing shoes, making jewelry, crafting furniture, etc.  Perhaps it is the 24/7 world that we all seem to live in has spurred the beauty of returning to the simple way to life because it is gratifying in a completely different way.  It isn't simple using your hands every day to create products but it is a completely different work life.  Making a home cooked dinner, canning peaches or whatever it is.  The next DIY generation includes farmers too.  Perhaps this generation will find the beauty in the old traditions that need to be embraced before they fall into an abyss. 

the new Bon Apetit

Magazines are not dead yet.  Many still have a huge circulation.  New ones have even launched over the past years and have found an audience to grow with while creating revenues too.  The success of magazines, like retail stores, will be finding the balance between a paper magazine that hits your mailbox once a month to building a community online. 

Bon Apetit stepped out of 20 year comfort zone and hired Adam Rapoport as the new Editor-in-Chief of the magazine.  May, which just came out, is his first issue.  The issue hit the stands with a launch of a new look on the website.  Just as I was done with Bon Apetit, they reeled me right back in. 

His first issue as Editor-In-Chief is focused on how people are cooking now.  Great simple recipes that look good and are exactly what we are seeing now in our local restaurants, good editorial about travel, children and family including a magazine that just looked like it was printed in 2011.  Bravo!

I am excited about Bon Apetit and am hoping that their lead in hiring Adam Rapoport as the new voice who was the editor at GQ for the past 10 years was a bold and smart choice.  I hope it will make other magazines take a look at the future of their readers who will transform this industry into where it must go.  Eventually the magazine will be released monthly on your friendly iPad but you still need a smart editor who gets the world we are living in today.  Go pick it up and let me know what you think. 

Lamb Dinner

I saw that Dickinsons Farmstand Meats in the Chelsea market was selling whole and half lambs for Easter.  Couldn't pass up the chance so I bought one.  Beyond easy to make and so good. 

I rubbed the lamb down with chopped thyme, oregano, kosher salt, paprika and olive oil.  Roasted it in the oven at 400 for 45 minutes.  Then I added small potatoes that had been seasoned with olive oil and kosher salt and put them in the roasting pan.  Baked for another 45 minutes and it was done.  If this looks a little too rare for you then add another 10 minutes, tops. I am missing the other photo of the leg which was in another pan. 

One side dish was a Greek Salad.  A variety of tomatoes cut in 1/4's, sliced red onions, chunks of French feta cheese, English cucumbers peeled and sliced into 1/4's, chopped fresh thyme.  A little olive oil and red wine vinegar over the top and mix.

Grilled asparagus with fava beans.  The dressing came out a little chunky but it was red wine vinegar and a basil infused oil.  Fava beans are definitely a bit of a production to make.  Take them out of the pods, boil for about five minutes and then immediately douse in cold water and then peel off the casings and serve.  Only once a year so well worth it.

My sister made an excellent lemon pound cake for dessert.  That with a few bottles of red wine, we had a nice Jewish easter.

 

 

Emily Hickey, Hashable, Woman Entrepreneur

If you hang out in the tech industry long enough names continue to pop-up and of course after awhile I become curious and want to meet them.  Emily Hickey is one of those people.  What I didn't know is that she was around during the 1.0 phase of the Internet explosion in NYC and worked for someone who I knew and had become friends with but our paths never crossed.  We finally met just recently and made plans to get together this past Friday night. We probably could have spent the whole day together just gabbing.  We parted afer having a glass or two of wine knowing that our conversation will definitely be continued. 

Before I start on Emily's interesting career, I just want to say that Emily is a very cool girl.  She is smart, insightful, artistic and if she wasn't in the tech industry, she'd definitely be a rock and roll chic.  Her brain got the better of her.  Sorry all you rockers out there. 

Emily grew up in St. Louis and left to go to school at UNC Chapel Hill.  After graduating from college, like many young graduates, made her way to NYC.  She got a job at Anderson Consulting, it was 1996 and it was a crazy time to be in NYC if you were doing anything in the tech industry.  Emily worked with People Soft while at Anderson Consulting and happened to learn how to write code while she was there.  Certainly an added bonus.  She hated the job and after a year left to go to Hot Jobs. 

Emily was the 14th person hired at Hot Jobs.  The company consisted of sales people and engineers.  Emily worked with Lucent to create a recruiting piece to the job board at Hot Jobs.  Working at Hot Jobs was like riding a rocketship.  I remember when Hot Jobs, that was growing like wildflower, spent over a million bucks to run an add on the Superbowl.  Any person in the tech industry with some experience under their hat definitely took pause when that happened.  How the hell did these companies grow so damn fast in less than a few years to put an ad on the Super Bowl? 

Three years after Hot Jobs was launched there was an IPO.  The company was doing over $100 million dollars in revenue and there were 800 employees.  It was 1999.  She was VP of Products and stayed for a few years after that IPO even going out to San Francisco to help turn around an acquistion the company had made but the atmosphere in the company had changed and people were jumping ship.  It was time to leave. 

Emily bought a small house and her brother moved out there and together they started a band.  She needed time to regroup.  Her father had died when she was at Anderson Consulting which had left a big hole and after the last 6 years it was time to chill out.  She took 18 months to relax. 

Emily took a job after 18 months working with WildAid, as the assistant ED, a non-profit that worked on stopping the trade of illegal wildlife by helping to enforce protection in forests around the world.  The USA has laws as well as a forest service that does this but in many foreign countries they do not.  She stayed a few years and found herself going back and forth from SF to LA doing her music too.  Deciding she needed a change, she took the GRE's and applied to Stanford to get her MBA and got in. 

The next two years were spent at Stanford where she met a guy who had a bunch of patents that wanted to commercialize them.   At the same time, she met her husband.  Her boyfriend (husband to be) got into the Tisch program for the arts and her business partner wanted to be back in NYC so off they went.  She was beyond thrilled to leave SF. 

She worked on an app that could detect if you were lying through emotions.  Think of a mood ring for an app.  Way before its time.  Nobody was even using apps then.  Emily got together with some tech people who she worked with at Hot Jobs and they launched Photoshelter.  She took the role of COO. They raised 6 million for the business.  This was 2007.  They ramped up the business to 30 people and realized after spending 4 million that the model wasn't working.  What is truly impressive is that they took the last 2 million, pivoted some of the ideas, barely took salaries and rebooted Photoshelter into a new company and marketed it like crazy. They got the business profitable within 12 months, with revenues in the millions and growing almost 100% annually with roughly 20% net margins.   The business continues to build the revenue stream annually.

Ideas kept flowing through her head and she joined Tracked.com and with the group of guys who were there they began to focus on the idea of Hashable which they launched as a separate business.  Hashable is a networking app.  Emily was critical in making that pivot and single handedly launched Hashable.  It was launched this past Labor Day and they were off to the races.  The group refers to themselves as co-Creators which is absolutely perfect.  The other co-creators are Teddy Jawde and David Sebag and Mike Yavonditte.  

Emily has had a really interesting career.  Although she might not have been the one singular person with the one idea that she built a company around, she has been part of entrepreneurial teams and has grown businesses from Hot Jobs (being the group of 5 that literally built the business ) to Photoshelter to Hashable.  Married with a 2 year old ( she was pregnant during her time at Photoshelter ).  There are so many incredible women out there who are product developers.  They are integral parts of growing a start-up and without them the company would never get to where it needs to go.  These people, like Emily, make sure the business vision gets executed.  They are critical.  Emily is one of those people and she is a leader in the tech community and as far as I am concerned, a very cool woman. 

the power of women and conversation

Two weeks ago in NYC, there was an event put on by Bloomberg called the Bloomberg Empowered Entrepreneur Conference.  The lack of women on the panels was overwhelming.  I wrote a post about it. 

The listserv that I am on not only discussed the panels at length we also did something about it.  Each of us reached out to the right people to discuss our frustration (and anger) at only one woman on a large panel of men ( I believe there were 14 as a total for the day of panels ).  I happened to be on vacation when these conversations were taking place so I wrote a post.  Someone reached out to me immediately from Bloomberg and asked me to be on the panel.  Unfortunately I was going to be in Los Angeles.  Many conversations were taking place on how this panel could be changed to represent the tech industry with a balance of men and women and that is what I truly cared about.  

In the end, 10 women spoke at the event.  They went from one to 10 quickly.  There were many panels that were all men yet were moderated by women.  There was one panel that was all women which was about fashion and retail businesses.  Perhaps not surprising but women seem to be ruling this particular category.  I would like to see more balance in the other areas that are using tech as a platform to create new businesses instead of the pure fashion play but I am hopeful that over time more women will spread into other areas.  We are just begining to break the iceberg as more and more women are graduating from colleges and starting to work in start-ups or are creating their own business models but that is another post. 

The group at Bloomberg rose to the noise and added more panels and more women.  Perhaps the next time we will see better balance at every level from the very onset.  The good news is that through conversation and the power of a group of women we are opening the road to a healthier and equal balance in the tech community as we move forward. 

The Sayder (Sedar)

I always loved Passover.  To me, it is like a Jewish Thanksgiving.  The food is the same every year, we are thankful and reflective and you know no matter how religious you are or not that every Jew is sitting down around the world celebrating Passover. 

Passover has been constant over the year and what I mean by that is it is always the same.  We read from the Haggadah, we go through the prayers, we do the four questions, we sing Dayenu, we eat matzoh ball soup.  This year was different.  We were on a plane the first night.  Total screw up on my part but the second night we went to a friends house who is trying as an adult to discover as well as figure out how Judaism will play a role in his life.  Keep in mind he grew up in an orthodox household.

Together with a small group of friends who are also looking to figure out Judaism in their lives, they created a site call The Sayder.  A group of about 18 of us sat around the table for a sedar which was lead by a rabbi (although he is going to rabbinical school coming this fall) and we followed The Sayder.  It was one of the best sedars I have ever been too.  I can't get it out of my head.  I only wished we had this type of service around my table growing up.  This sedar was a conversational, interactive and a learning opportunity.  It also made me feel part of the Jewish community which is significant. 

We began the Sayder with every person telling their name and say one significant thing that changed in their life since last Passover.  Since I didn't know everyone at the table, that was a great way to start.  It was insightful and gave us each a slight glimpse into where each of us were in our lives.  The afikoman was hidden at this point.  We did follow some classic parts like four glasses of wine, etc.

Then we were to name organizations that we thought we making significant changes in the world today to make the world a better and freer place.  I named Hot Bread Kitchen.  At that point we broke up into pairs and discussed what is enslaving you today and holding you back from being freer.  The conversations were really interesting as we then returned to the table.  At this point we had some food.  

Next question was what solutions can we identify to make life better and freer.  Conversations flowed from the changes taking place in the Middle East, to giving back, to Governments being dysfunctional, etc.  Then we had dinner.

Our last question was each of our visions for a freer world.  How did we hope to see the world next year at this time.  Also we searched for the afikomen and who ever found it decided which non-profit organization we would donate money to.  Hot Bread Kitchen was chosen and so I was thrilled. 

Then came dessert.  It was a long night but incredibly insightful, thoughtful and engaging.  I keep thinking about the night.  Next year, not in Jerusalem but at my house with my kids and friends that can't get home from the girls college and we will follow The Sayder. 

e-commerce

I have been not only thinking a lot abut the e-commerce space these days, I am seeing a lot of new businesses in this area crop-up.  I like to look at this space in terms of history.  Lets go back to the 70's.  In the 70's the big department stores were built and it was definitely the shopping location of choice.  The chains of singular stores had not really exploded yet and the Gap took that to another level.  Although the first Gap store opened up in 1969 it was sometime around the mid-70s that they began to grow.  The rest is history with other verticals such as Banana Republic, Old Navy, etc. 

The 80's come and the market share for department stores starts to drop.  More companies are starting up stores devoted to one type of look from jewelry to clothing to shoe stores.  These companies start grabbing some market share in the retail space.  Many of these stores, including department stores, begin to produce their products overseas where they can buy items for less, sell at a lower price point with the thoughts of turning through more merchandise or making better margins.  The amount of merchandise on the shelves of stores is staggering. 

With the Internet, say mid-90's, people began to explore a variety of ways to create e-commerce from terrible ideas such as Ties.com to brilliant ideas like Amazon or Zappos (launching 1999).  Now the market share is split among even more companies in the retail space.  There is also the explosion of Borders and Barnes and Noble that is not only a bookstore but had figured out how to create communities with their local coffee shop and in-house events.  Local book stores are dying.  We also began to watch department stores consolidate such as Federated starting in the late 80's through the 90's trying to become leaner smarter organizations.

Perhaps it is the advent of the Internet, the world of social media, whatever it is the world has changed at lightening speed.  We consume information differently, we shop differently, we live our lives differently.  Not only that but the Internet has allowed us to find sites and communities across the globe that appeal to our only personal senses.  People have also begun to have a desire to return to their roots.  They want to support local businesses and buy their basics online.  Do you really need to go and see certain items?  It is becoming apparent through e-commerce that you don't. 

There are now businesses that are crowd sourcing cool lists of items that you can link through and buy such as Svpply.  Gilt group has captured people shopping for top bargains but has grown the company with other options for their customers such as Jet Setter.  I think of Gilt as the Loehmanns of the 21st Century although they have become much more than that. 

People don't necessarily want to spend their time shopping and wandering through department stores these days.  Live are frenetic and more complicated than the past.  People are looking for ways to go back to their roots and simplify their lives.  Buying on the net to make life easier and spending time doing something else on the weekend seems to be the direction that we are taking.  If department stores don't completely retool their business model they will find themselves way behind the times as Borders did by recently going into bankruptcy. 

There will be a slew of new e-commerce sites in the next year that will change the way we shop and communicate about our purchases as the communities we navigate towards become an extension of our own personal brands. 

Netflix is one of the genius moves over the past few years.  Launching to provide an easier approach to watching movies at home by getting your dvd sent to you in the mail as they saw the demise of local video shops.  They saw the writing on the wall when they began to see opportunities with companies such as Boxee and realized that people were going to watch their movies with a click of a mouse and they needed to have access to the Netflix data base on line.  They moved into that pretty quickly as a company and now they own that space.  More companies in the large brick and mortar models of old should spend a little time getting out in the world and thinking out of the box about the future of e-commerce or they too will find themselves out of a job.

How do people want to consume, how do people want to live their lives, how can data provide better information so we can become leaner higher margin businesses and what value can my retail operation provide for the community I want to reach.   The next couple of years in the e-commerce space will be very interesting. 

 

EDITD

What is EDITD?  Besides the fact that it is a company that I just invested in, EDITD is a pioneer in taking real time data and using technological analysis for the apparel market to predict trends. 

My first career out of college was at Macys where I went through the training program to end up on the other end in a series of jobs that eventually got you be a buyer.  Being a buyer is not only analytical it is also trying to figure out what the next trends will be.  You certainly get help from your vendors as they are showing you the lines that they believe will be what the customer is going to want but they aren't always right. 

When I was at Macys we manufactured a lot of private label overseas.  That merchandise was planned out in advance and sometimes when it hit the stores it didn't move off the shelves.  Othertimes, the merchandise flew of the shelves and we had to figure out how to get back into it as quickly as possible. 

With the beauty of ecommerce as well as companies like Moda Operandi where customers are literally buying things when models of major fashion houses walk down the runway for a fashion show, there is data to be captured.  If the data is telling you that blue is the next color of the season and there is an overwhelming response to tailored jackets then wouldn't you want that information?  If I was in retail or wholesale, I certainly would.

If you had access to information that would allow you to optimize sales, develop better products and think more intelligently about your marketing strategy with actual data...wouldn't you buy it?

The couple behind EDITD are fantastic.  I highly recommend reading the blog. Julia is an amazing fashion forecaster and Geoff is a brilliant programmer.  I loved what they are doing immediately.  I admit, I still have a big place in my heart for the world of retail and wholesale.  Maybe one day I will return.  We will see.  For now, I am going to work with EDITD.  Oh and there are a few others that might be coming my way.