What to Do When You’re Asked to Go Get the Coffee

When I was a graduate student at Brown University, I started my first company with a few of my professors. As with most startups, we eventually decided to raise money to grow, and so we started inviting venture capitalists in to give them our pitch. It was a heady and exciting time (remember 1998 and 1999), and somehow we scored meetings with a few venerable VCs.

We invited the VCs to our office, a tiny and damp basement on Water Street in Providence, Rhode Island. It was me, a few post-doctoral students, and my professors pitching a nascent technology to investors. Before one such meeting, as we were headed to the conference room with a well-known VC, he started introducing himself to the group but when he came to me, instead of an intro, he looked straight at me and said “Would you mind getting me a cup of coffee?”

To be fair, I look 18 now, so fifteen years ago I probably looked like an underage intern. But I wasn’t going to argue or take it as an insult, so I said “Sure!”

Now, keep in mind, we were a true startup working out of a little basement office. We didn’t have a pot to piss in (literally… we had to use restrooms at the Rhode Island School of Design), let alone a coffee maker. So I ran as fast as I could to Starbucks. Meanwhile, my team sat down at the conference table and made small talk until the VC asked “Shall we get started?”

Members of my team looked at each other, unsure of what to do, until one of the professors finally spoke up: “Well, we could, except that you sent our CEO out to get coffee.”

As you can imagine, I received effusive apologies when I returned from Starbucks. The VC made an embarrassing error in judgment, focusing on the cover rather than cracking the book. He should have been embarrassed and he was, but it happens to all of us. For me though, it was a great way to show some humility and demonstrate to my team that we are all in it together as equals.

That point of equality is often lost on people, as if it is a nothing more than an abstract idea. As someone who has studied the brain, I value variations in intelligence. But there is an important twist. Our brains are mostly alike. Even our closest kin, chimpanzees, share 98.8% of our DNA. Across the human spectrum, the dumbest of us are even more similar than that to the most intelligent. For all intents and purposes, our brains are virtually identical. That means we can learn a tremendous amount from just about anyone, if we are willing to be respectful and listen. For this reason alone, it’s downright stupid to treat anyone else as anything but our equal (a distinction we should probably also extend to the animal kingdom, but I digress). Maybe the VC should have gotten his own coffee, but if he had to choose someone, I was as good a choice as anyone else.

You’re missing out if you’re not giving yourself the same opportunity to learn something each day from the janitor as well as the CEO. That doesn’t mean you should be “nice,” it means you must take genuine interest. I see people coddling up to my assistants all the time - buying flowers, making small talk. These actions are usually aimed at gaining some sort of advantage; they reflect arrogance, not kindness. It is the same perverse philosophy that causes people to add friends on Facebook who are anything but, and use associations on LinkedIn to connect up the chain. Often these gestures are vain and self-serving rather than a genuine attempt to connect.

The VC who asked me to get coffee quickly course corrected and our meeting went well. I didn’t hold it against him and he turned out to be a genuinely great guy. Truth be told, I had no problem grabbing the coffee; heck, I thought it was pretty funny. It was actually a humbling experience and one I am proud of. I can’t imagine how miserable my life would be if I tried to ensure that everyone I meet treats me in a way that’s commensurate with my title. But there are so many people who DO live and work that way, and those people are missing out.

It’s just more fun and less stressful to avoid taking yourself too seriously, and to go about your day with humility and a sense of humor. In the same way that you won’t learn from people who you don’t treat genuinely, you can’t learn from those who you allow to ruffle your feathers.

My coffee run told that venture capitalist a lot about who I am and how I operate. Perhaps he thought my actions weren’t very CEO-like; perhaps he thought I should have issued an executive order or assigned an (actual) intern to the task. But in the end, worrying about those things just isn’t worth it. I don’t have time for that: I’m too busy getting coffee for the interns.

Photo credit:Alisdair / Flickr