Gist.

The tech community is split down the middle on this one; in a tech startup, does college education matter or does a college dropout with a big idea have just as good a shot at finding success as an entrepreneur?

Last month Intelligence Squared held its first public debate in Chicago titled Too Many Kids Go to College. Peter Thiel, a long time advocate of young entrepreneurs ditching the books in favor of launching new companies, argued vehemently For the Motion. At the end of the 90 minutes, the audience poll was tied at 47% For, 46% Against, and 7% Undecided.

We all know the college dropout/tech-hero legends of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs. But what does the data really show us about this ‘we don’t need no education’ techie urban legend? Sure that recent history would reveal the cold hard facts and that data would support them — we got to work on this infographic comparing education and success rates among Y Combinator and TechStars founders with varying education levels. The data will surprise you.

Raising money is a crucial step to startup success.  People who do it well, know it’s a sales process where identifying the right prospects, building a relationship, timing your pitch and following up are critical.  In many ways, we built Gist to optimize this experience and increase your chances of success.  Here are a few tips to make the most of Gist in this process.

1.  Connect all your personal accounts to Gist (email, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) – this will bring all your contacts into one place.

2.  Start using “tags” to create key subgroups.  I use “investor_VC”, “investor_angel” “influencer”,  ”competition”… You can do this from the web or from inside Gmail or Outlook.  More details on how to do this here.

3.  If you are thin on investor contacts, you can start looking at places like Crunchbase to find similar companies, check their investors and “add them to Gist” (with the right tags).  Here is an example from our friends at Zaarly, who just raised a major round and are power Gist users.



4. You can also “add contacts” to Gist from news articles and conference agendas…so it is pretty easy to get a strong list.  Also, as people make intros for you (email or LinkedIn) new investors will automatically be added to your Gist database.

5.  As you add investors to the list, you might want to add further tags including location (I use airport tags like “SFO”), focus  (“CRM”) or even persona interests (like “wine” or “running”).  These tags come in handy when you are looking for all the people in your list who are investors, who like wine (which is most of them) or are located around SFO.

6.  Now you have your list of 10-50 potential investors. Make sure you have their fullest profiles including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook using the “edit contact details” in Gist. I also tend to cut and paste bios and other tidbits into the “notes” field (see Brad’s profile below).  Key quotes, articles, relevant investments… Anything that will help you get a fuller picture of this investor.

7. Each morning you can start your day looking over the Gist dashboard (investors, competitors, influencers…) to see what people are
saying and where/when to make your pitch and how to fit it into their words.  As you find tweets/articles that are relevant, you can share them;
sometimes back to the investors themselves “hey Brad, I really liked your post about Zynga…” or to your team “did you see what Brad said about the social gaming space…”  This will help you build stronger relationships all around, show you are paying attention and are “in the know.”

8.  As you interact (send emails, schedule meetings, etc.) Gist keeps tabs of this and ranks these contacts so you can stay focused on your most valuable prospects.  You also get all this data inside your email client (Outlook or Gmail) so when you are interacting with Brad, you always know what is up with him, what he is thinking and in this case that he is traveling to Portland, which allows you to respond accordingly.

9.  Keeping up with the right people at the right frequency is important. Use the Gist contact list (web) to see when you connected last and then reach out to keep your contacts fresh.  I tend to review this weekly.

10. As you make progress on your startup, send your updates to potential investors.  Get a good press mention or ship a significant update? Send it along.  The easiest way to do this is inside Outlook or Gmail; select a tag (e.g. “investors_vc”), hit return (all the contacts in the tag will be shown with updates), click “actions” and now you can email them all with an update. Super fast and efficient.

11.  Finally, as you are making the rounds, you always have access to your Gist contacts (updates, notes, shared contacts…) as Gist is available on iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.   Make a big impression with your understanding of the space, the firm, the individual… 10 seconds before the meeting starts.

Getting to know your potential investors, customizing your message, and showing ongoing and relevant progress is key to building getting and staying funded.

Have other things you want Gist to do? Let us know. Found your own way to make it work even better, let the community know by making a comment here.

This post was written by T.A. McCann, founder of Gist. T.A. is now a Vice President at Research In Motion, which acquired Gist in February 2011. Previously T.A. was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at both Vulcan Capital and Polaris Venture Partners. Find out more about T.A. at http://gist.com/tamccann

Just be cool. Just be yourself. Just be who you are. Just be honest. These reassuring little nuggets are often the best advice we get about being authentic, but the truth is, they don’t always apply at work.

In Gist’s 10 Characteristics of the New Workstyle, we talk about authenticity as a shared passion for work. We propose dynamic, multidimensional products represent the environment and people who created them. But do passionate, authentic people, mean authentic, dynamic products? Not necessarily.

Putting authenticity into action at work starts with people working on what they’re passionate about, using tools, techniques and processes that work best for them, with the common goal of helping the end user, customer or consumer.

Finding your workstyle
A workman is only as good as his tools and if those are out of step with the creative process, then the product, project or team suffers. What is really important in cultivating authenticity in the workplace is encouraging authentic work practices, rather than authentic personalities. It’s more about giving workers the freedom to choose their tools than the freedom to practice scream therapy in a conference room. In life, the authentic self may take precedence but at work it’s more about finding and doing what works for you to deliver results.

Here’s a personal example. In another life, I worked at a public relations firm in San Francisco. My clients were exciting technology companies and startups and I envied the way they were allowed to work: from home, on Macs, on Google Apps, in their pajamas, over IM, from Puerto Rico, in the middle of the night, from a coffee shop, on an iPad, using every cloud application imaginable, sans meetings, sans titles, sans IT policies. It was a mashup of awesomeness. Paradoxically, I was provided an outdated machine to work on, which lacked mobility, battery life or even a hint of coolness. I was chained to my landline phone and imprisoned by three paper thin partitions and the humiliating glass wall of my cubicle and met with daily battles to access the dreaded VPN. Cloud applications were publicly touted as the way of the future in technology, but privately dismissed as a security risk remedied only by licenced software deployed behind a firewall. Working from home was frowned upon and Instant Messaging, video conferencing and collaborative tools were used by few and almost in secret by the most junior staffers. And then there were the meetings…oh the meetings. To give credit, this agency was full of nurturing managers, who encouraged me to be myself, embraced my quirks and listened to my suggestions about new ways of working.

Even so, the disconnect between the way I worked, the way I wished I could work and the way the clients who I represented worked, made me feel grossly inauthentic, effected my morale and likely prevented me from performing to my greatest potential.

For me, it was more important to be given the opportunity to work authentically, in my own style, than it was to reveal my “authentic self” at work.

Fortunately, in the context of the New Workstyle, is seems almost as unlikely for a company to tell its staffers what they can and can’t eat for lunch as it is to tell them what tools they have to use to get their work done.

Choosing what to work on
In addition to choosing our workstyles, choosing what we want to work on is equally important in moving towards the authentic New Workstyle. At a macro-level, we see:

• people moving in between jobs at a more rapid rate, delivering results quickly and then moving on
• more ad hoc collaborations between people who simply like working together
• more interest-based business relationships, generated through common online connections
• people becoming increasingly specialized in areas of business they find more enjoyment in, rather than being a jack of all trades (and a master of none) and being able to more easily market those specializations

Within the enterprise, this is emerging as a trend inspired by Google’s 20% Time, which places value on people’s individual pursuits and recognizes their passions as a great source of ideas and insights for the business. Google’s mechanism for doing this is simple: all engineers are free to spend 20% of their time (around one day a week) on pet projects and personal pursuits rather than on company priorities.

(Gmail Labs show the value of encouraging authentic work practices to drive product development and value for the user)

The logic: the company is relentlessly rigorous and inventive when it comes to hiring the best people for their culture (which includes people with wildly diverse backgrounds and experiences) and its leaders are interested in bringing all of their ideas and insights and energies into play. They figure that those individuals will come up with all sorts of new product ideas and directions for the company that the management team couldn’t possibly figure out alone. And that’s turned out to be the case: 20% time has yielded important new products like Google News and Google Suggest.

While it may not be achievable to have everyone in a business working on what they like all the time, a definitive shift towards this aspirational goal is in progress, a la The New Workstyle.

Authenticity as a service
Chris Brogan recently blogged about the question of workplace authenticity, calling special attention to a key action step in authenticity – being helpful:

“There’s a lot that goes with true authenticity that isn’t helpful. Instead, the people we connect with would be much better served if we chose to be helpful instead. “Helpful” is a far more useful frame of reference than authentic… be honest with yourself and filter that into whatever it takes to be helpful to others. Present your most helpful side to the people who need it, and do so with as much genuine interest in other people’s success as you can possibly muster. ”

Steve Jobs resignation is a perfect example of this idea in action. From his resignation announcement:

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

Because authenticity can easily be mistaken for “being who you are”, being honest, or taking a warts and all approach, it can often seem incongruent with business strategy, where it is prudent to put your best foot forward. The principle of helpfulness can be used as a guide towards the authentic path. Where we might question the best way to proceed authentically in a situation, a focus on how we can best serve those we’re working with keeps things simple.

Have you ever seen “trust” appear on a list of your company’s core values? Have you ever rolled your eyes with the crushing knowledge that if “trust” were really present in your office culture, you’d be working at home right now, setting your own hours, using your favorite software, apps, mobile device and choosing your work computer, PC or Mac?

The New Workstyle places value on results. This means impact > output. The question of how you get there, is left to the individual, opening up a world of choice and customization as the primary means to this end. So, if we’re leaving everyone to their own devices (pardon the pun) doesn’t this mean we have to trust everyone to figure out the best way to deliver results? Yes.

Let’s take working from home as an example. By 2016 around 43% of the US workforce is expected to be working from home, representing a massive shift away from the traditional cube farm and a vote of confidence in the results delivered by those working outside the office. What this also tells us, however, is that there’s still a large chunk of industry undecided about what the future of workplaces looks like and whether employees can really but trusted to manage themselves.

Case in point: Mindflash last month released an infographic asking the question “should you let your employees work from home?” which set off a heated comments debate on the FastCompany post.

What seemed to concern people most about Mindlflash’s visualisation was the supposition that you can’t trust everyone to work remotely.

Below are some comments, calling special attention to the role of trust in this conversation:

Trust is a key element of Gist’s 10 Characteristics of the New Workstyle. In our company, it means allowing the individual to work in the way that is most productive and efficient, whether it’s the tools they use, the information they share or where they work, day to day. Working from home has been a mainstay of trust in our company. Gist’s ‘Work From Home Thursdays’, has helped mitigate the scheduling hiccups for employees often created by the cable guy or the dentist. Thursday is the day when we can attend to our lives, while we’re working. The best way to describe our philosophy is giving each other freedom, with responsibility.

The challenge for many employers, of course, is in relinquishing control over productivity — or the perceived control they might have. In the Old Workstyle, employers fear employees are “wasting time” being “unproductive”, for which the old remedy was a cubicle farm of workers, seen to be working. Today, almost 70% of employers believe mobile workers are as productive as those working in the office, and those employers cite technology and communication as the biggest reason why.

No matter how you slice it, working from home all boils down to trust, which can be fostered or hindered by the tools available to the individual worker and the communication guidelines set by a team.

Here are some tips for building a culture of trust for your remote workforce:

1. Use Communication Tools:
If you manage or work remotely, communication must be consistent, purposeful, and predictable, but without the right tools this is nearly impossible. Keeping in mind that a worker is only as good as their tools, make sure your mobile workers are equipped with communication must-haves like:

• Skype: offers inexpensive or free calls, IM, video chat, and group chat
• Tungle: elegantly simple scheduling app for meetings
• Dropbox: user-friendly online service to store files (music, videos, documents)
• Google Docs: a free and easy way to share documents and make real-time collaboration quick and painless
• Yammer: enterprise social networking, collaboration and information sharing – like a virtual office, accessible on any device
• Evernote: note taking for everything, sharing and delegating

2. Demonstrate Mobile Reliability
By doing what you say you’ll do, whether it’s leading a call with a new client, sending a presentation by the agreed deadline, being online during set hours, or just making time for team check-in call, your mobile reliability shows respect for what your coworkers are doing both outside and in the office. Without it, they’ll stop asking for help, view you as unavailable and you’ll fall out of the loop. Trust is critically important in distance relationships of all kinds, and you build trust through actions that demonstrate reliability, integrity, and familiarity. Sending an email to tell your coworkers you’re going offline for the next hour and updating your IM status, can make a huge difference to the way people experience your reliability as a remote worker. If you can’t pass each other in the hall to offer a quick project update, you have to foster an environment of quick, casual and regular communication online, which demonstrates reliability and builds trust.

At Gist we use status updates religiously every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Sent to the team via email before 10am, our reports follow the form:

- Status: Red, Yellow, Green – so we all know if someone needs help or is going to impact anyone else’s work
- Important info: urgent items
- Kudos: nice to recognize good work from someone
- Did: what I did
- Doing: what I’m doing
- Need help: where I need help

3. Create Mobile Worker Communications Guidelines
Managers should take the lead in this area. Mobile workers can suffer from what is known as a “trust gap” and feel the need to over-communicate, if the burden is on them to initiate communication.  Some mobile workers will end up making a lot of noise about what they’re working on or what they’ve accomplished if clear communications objectives and expectations are not set. At the same time, managers don’t want to convey that they are constantly “checking up” on an employee. Regular, informal communication sessions that are “neutral” in content ensure that no one feels pressured or forgotten, while remote communications guidelines can help mobile workers adjust to being trusted, while meeting expectations.

Many people who read the Gist blog are small business owners so we’re excited to bring you a guest post from our friends over at Outright.com. In their own words,

Outright is a simple, free online service that automates your income, expenses and taxes so you can get back to doing what you love – running your business. This post was written by Thursday Bram. Enjoy…

Every year, we swear that we’re going to be so much better about how we handle our paperwork and keep our books, but the fact of the matter is that it’s rare that most of us keep up-to-date records throughout the year. There’s just other work that is a higher priority, leading most of us to say that we’ll catch up over the weekend or at the end of the month or some general day that never seems to come — at least until we feel tax season breathing down our necks. At some point, we have to play catch up so that we can present the CPA with everything she needs to prepare our taxes or at least put together everything we need to get through doing our taxes ourselves.

Traditionally, that’s supposed to look like some arduous process where we spread out shoeboxes and receipts all over the table, forcing our way through the pile and hopefully coming out with some usable numbers on the far end. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Even if you aren’t perfectly caught up on keeping your books, the process of getting to where you need to be doesn’t have to hurt.

Don’t Organize Your Receipts

It may sound like some sort of heresy to suggest that you don’t need to take the time to organize all of your business receipts, but it’s true. You do need to sort your receipts — of course, your business receipts and your personal receipts are hopefully already separated out, but you’ll want to sort out any receipts that show you paid with cash.

You should certainly keep your receipts, but those that show payment by credit card, debit card, check or even direct deposit can all go in some sort of container together. Don’t worry about organizing them by date and matching them up with your bank statements, at least for the purposes of tax preparation. It’s a good idea to double check your bank statements against your receipts — but it’s not necessary for your taxes. It should be a priority for a different day.

Even those receipts that you’ve set aside because they were for cash purchases don’t need to be organized according to date or type of expense or anything like that. Just get them in a pile.

Pull Your Statements into Your Bookkeeping Software

The reason you don’t need to muck around with any receipts except those for cash purchases is because as long as you paid with a card or a check, you can get that information automatically imported into your accounting software. Outright.com will pull in your bank statements, your credit card statements and even your PayPal records (and if you want to get ahead of the game for next year, Outright can do so automatically, every month). Don’t waste your time on data entry. You don’t need to pay someone for it either — whether you were thinking about bringing in some college kid and paying minimum wage or you were going to pay your CPA’s hourly rate to get your paperwork in order, using an automatic process is not only free, but significantly faster.

You will want to at least read over everything you pull in from your various accounts, just make sure the information came through correctly. You may also need to take some time to categorize expenses, but that’s something you can break up into whatever bits and pieces of time you want to spend on it. You don’t need to sit down and spend hours at the computer.

Deal With Those Cash Receipts

All that leaves on the table are your receipts from purchases made with cash. You can simply enter those by hand — but you don’t absolutely have to. This is a good time to take a look at what your time is worth. If you could be spending your time doing something that will bring in income for your business, rather than typing out the details of just where you met a client for lunch six weeks ago, that may be worth handing off to someone else. The costs of doing so vary significantly. One option may be to use either a dedicated receipts scanner or a service like Shoeboxed to put all of your receipts in a format that can be directly added to your bookkeeping software without any need to hand type all that information. The scanner will have a fixed price, while Shoeboxed’s price will be based on the number of receipts you need to scan. There’s no upfront cost, though, and Shoeboxed doesn’t require you to sit at your computer feeding papers into your scanner.

There are other options, of course. Those include paying a person to handle the task or — assuming that there’s a manageable number of receipts — entering them by yourself. Either way, though, the suggestion to forget about organizing your receipts stands. No matter what order you enter them into your bookkeeping tool, the entries will be organized by date, expense and any other categorization you might need. Let the software do the heavy lifting.

Talk to Your Tax Preparer

Once you’ve got all of your expenses and income in your bookkeeping tool, it’s worth having a talk with your tax preparer. Not only do you get to surprise her with how organized you are, but by having a short chat before you start sending over your reports and files, you can make sure you didn’t miss something. It’s easier to go in and add more information or correct a problem before you get into the rush of tax season.

From there, you can just hand the information over to your CPA or tax professional. There’s no more carting around of receipts or even a last minute push to get everything ready to. Instead, you can get caught up quickly and efficiently.

Ready to simplify running your business at tax time? Signup for a free Outright.com account today.

This post is a guest post by Conrad Hall from http://socialmediacheapandeasy.com talking about using Gist to save time and keep track of all of his clients. If you want more details and info on Gist, Conrad also interviewed Gist CEO T.A. McCann which can be listened to here. I’ll turn it over to Conrad now.

At first Gist seemed like an interesting bit of software. I honestly thought it was just some kind of contact manager.

As you can imagine, my opinion of Gist has changed. It’s now one of the tools I recommend to clients – especially B2B (Business to Business) clients – for listening and tracking what their contacts are doing.

Most folks know about Google Alerts, and how to use it. Well Gist gives me the same tool with the News icon. I click on that and see where a specific person is being mentioned. That’s a huge time saver when I’m doing research for my radio show, research on/for my clients, and even tracking my own mentions.

Another feature that has saved my bacon over and over again is Gist’s attachment feature.

The icon is a paperclip. You click on it, and up pops a list of every attachment someone has ever sent you.

Have you ever had someone say they sent you an attachment and you can’t find it? Me too. With Gist, I just go to the last e-mail they sent me and click on the paperclip. Then every attachment they ever sent gets listed. This is definitely my favourite feature.

And these are just things I do with the Outlook Plugin, by the way.

When you go to Gist.com, there’s a whole extended world of functionality. I could easily write a few thousand words about the site itself. But here’s one super cool feature about the site and Gist…

You can delete a contact without losing it.

What I mean is, when you “delete” a contact, Gist archives it. It lets you take the contact off the page so you don’t see it, while keeping all the information in storage. (I’ve used that little feature once or twice, let me tell you.)

Like I said, I could go on writing about Gist for pages. But that paperclip is definitely my favourite feature.

The one thing I’d like to see added is a birthday reminder function that links to a site for greeting cards. (A little birdy told me they’re working on this.)

Start sharing. Stay connected! Sign up for Gist here.

Nowadays it seems more important than ever to do blogger outreach for your company. Whether you are trying to get bloggers to write about your company or just build relationships with people in your industry, blogger outreach is becoming more important than ever and should probably be in every marketing and pr teams program.

David talks about his experience connecting with bloggers and a new product he is building that will help people connect with bloggers in their industry making for a better targeted pitch and hopefully will help both sides of the table when companies are trying to effectively get exposure.

Enjoy the interview.

This is a guest post from a user who wanted to share how he was using Gist. If you would like to do a guest post on the Gist blog then please send an email to marketing@gist.com.

Jeff Grosse is the founder of http://salesforcechannel.com and you can find him on twitter at @crmfyi. Enjoy his insight.

For me, Gist is one of those tools that gives me a competitive advantage unlike I’ve experienced before. It gives me one place to unearth information on everyone I know from all electronic and social media venues. It crosses business and personal lives to help me know my coworkers, business partners, and my friends even better.

Instead of taking 10-30 minutes researching the people I plan on reaching out to, I spend just a couple of minutes glancing through my Gist dashboard to prepare myself for meetings each day. What I find, helps me engage better with people, and I even use it to know who to reach out to when we’ve been out of contact too long.

One feature I enjoy is when Gist picks up on people who get CCd on emails I receive so I can effortlessly build a deeper network and track relationships. And since the integration of Gist to Gmail for Google Apps came along, I’ve been able to drill to updates on people almost effortlessly. The data is just there for me to read and deeper details are just a click away in the Gist website.

In time, I’ve come to trust Gist as my “master contact list” since it integrates to all the sites and tools I work with regularly. It aggregates information painlessly, and keeps me from scrambling around the Internet to extend relationships.

We were excited to be featured on the BBC show yesterday and mentioned “as a great way to manage contacts from all across the web!” Thanks to the BBC team and feel free to check out the video spot on the BBC website by clicking the video or link below. We look forward to working with people all around the globe!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9049488.stm

We would love you to try out Gist here.

You can follow Gist on twitter here or join us on our facebook fan page here.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed here or have the latest post delivered to youremail inbox here.

This post was written by Shane Mac, Marketing Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at shanem@gist.com.

Last week, I had the pleasure to talk with Richard Zeidel, VP of Business Development, from Tungle.me.

Tungle.me is a scheduling application that syncs with your existing calendar. Here is what it can do for you:

1. Eliminate double-bookings, time zone mishaps and the back-and-forth of finding a time to meet

2. Easily schedule meetings, inside or outside your organization

3. Invite others to schedule with you, without having to sign up

For any business person out there, Tungle is a great way to save time, manage your calendar, and connect easily to people you’d like to meet. If you would like to set up a meeting and chat, you can check out my Tungle page at http://tungle.me/shanemac.

In this interview we discuss how Tungle got started and where the future of Scheduling may be headed. Enjoy.

We would love you to try out Gist here.

You can follow Gist on twitter here or join us on our facebook fan page here.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed here or have the latest post delivered to youremail inbox here.

This post was written by Shane Mac, Marketing Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello atshanem@gist.com.