Owen Thomas, court scribe for Business Insider, has published a cafe crawl guide for young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. All things being equal, his map doesn’t give two hoots about quality service, drinks, or even roasters – it’s based solely on the cafe’s ability to help you sell your precious startup to a cabal of Internet Titans!

The closer you are to Caltrain, basically, the more eager the venture capitalist is.

Coupa Café? Ask for a higher valuation.

University Cafe? You might be able to lower the rate on the cumulative dividends.

Ooh, lower the rate on the cumulative dividends, burn! Read Business Insider for the full list, or simply check out our handy map below! You can thank us with stock.

View Silicon Valley Startup Deal Cafes in a larger map

The post Silly-Con Valley: Your Choice In Cafe Is Worth Beaucoup Bucks appeared first on Sprudge.com.

Aimee Groth is a New York-based journalist working for the Business Insider. Before that she was an assistant editor for a legal magazine published by Thomson Reuters in Minneapolis. But in between those gigs, she worked for three grueling weeks at the busiest Starbucks in Brooklyn – and she’s written a fascinating account of her time there for the Business Insider.

My initial idea of working a leisurely part-time job was completely false. This was going to be hard work. And a lot of it.

In this way, she shares a background similar to a number of specialty coffee denizens (including the editor of this website), men and women who got their start at Starbucks prior to moving onwards and upwards in the industry. Groth’s account is harrowing, real, and at times hilarious:

We got two 10-minute breaks and one unpaid 30-minute break for every 8 hours on the floor, where we’d have to decide between running next door to use the restroom (because ours was always had a line of customers in front of it), quickly eating a bag lunch (there was never time to stand in line and buy something from the store), or making a cell phone call. If you’re lucky, you got to sit down on the one chair in the break room, or on the ladder, because there were never any open seats in the store.

Some of my coworkers were more demanding than others. Most were nice and welcoming. And there were office politics. On more than one occasion I walked into the break room to see someone crying, or talking about other coworkers. I mostly avoided this, until what would be my last week on the job.

If there’s something nice to be said about the new employee experience at Starbucks, it is that their streamlined training manual and procedures handbook are both top notch. The brains at SBUXHQ have spent years studying and developing efficient flight patterns and customer service training, effective enough to break down and reform sixteen-year-old shitheads and working journalists alike. “In and out the door in 3 minutes, even at periods of high volume,” is something of a mantra. And it works, with an efficiency that is downright scary. This is how you build an empire.

Read Aimee Groth’s account of her time at Starbucks here, via Business Insider.

The post Business Insider Goes Behind The Green Apron appeared first on Sprudge.com.