He’s a bit of a renaissance man, cut from an entrepreneurial cloth of some sort, majestic but resilient. Alex Gold is 26, and he, like I, is a dual Canadian and United States citizen, a somewhat unusual find. The Head of Partnerships at Carrotmob, I flagged him down after he spoke at a “Growthathon”. Naturellement, our mix of politeness and ambition led to an interview
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Born in Toronto, he did his undergrad at the University of Toronto. “I majored in American history in Canada, which was really cool because I got to work with the U.S. State Department, and with the Ambassador. […] So for example we brought former Iranian Hostages and former Iranian disciples together to talk about the Iranian hostage crisis”.
Our Canadian friend didn’t stay in the motherland long, however. “[F]rom there I worked here in The States, for Discovery Channel in Washington D.C. in talent development. I worked for Walden Media which produced the Chronicles of Narnia Film Series, I worked for an Ad Agency in Toronto called Tribal DDB, […] and I worked for Vuguru, which is the digital film studio founded by Michael Eisner.”
Working in Media didn’t quite seem to quell Gold’s appetite, so he went to law school in Ohio, and then subsequently decided he didn’t want to be a lawyer. “I was figuring out what I was going to do with my life, and I didn’t really want to go back to entertainment, it’s hard in entertainment to compete with—you know attempting to change the world in some capacity. So one of my friends […] directed me to Brent Schulkin who’s the founder of Carrotmob, and I just came out here”.
We asked Gold what it’s like at Carrotmob, and instead of the standard rigmarole, he kept it brief. “It’s been a wild ride. It’s been like any startup, it’s had a lot of ups, a lot of downs, a lot of heres and a lot of there, but overall I think we’re making incredible progress”.
As any dual citizen knows, whenever it comes up that you possess two nationalities, the question of your pedigree follows quickly. “My dad […] he’s originally from Boston so his side of the family actually goes back many many centuries to the original Massachusetts Bay Colony—and the State of Maine actually. My Mom’s side of the family is old, old Montréal Jewish, and they met halfway in-between. They met in Boston at a youth event”.
But not so many people ask just what we think about having two citizenships. “It gives you a hell of a lot of freedom to really pursue what you want. […] Like you have the safety net of Canada—which is obviously free healthcare and family—but you have the opportunities here in The States. So you kind of have the best of both worlds, which is what I’ve always found really cool about being a dual citizen”.
As smug as it sounds, being a dual citizen gives you a different insight on the differences between the countries, as the color of bias evaporates…somewhat. Naturally, we had to know his take.
“Canada and the U.S. are not that dissimilar. I think in the major cities you probably realize, not a lot of big difference, and there’s an undercurrent in Canada of anti-Americanism, a little bit of smugness actually. […] I strongly believe that racist xenophobic attitudes have a great home on both sides of the border, and what you do is you have to look for progressive, really cool people in both the U.S. and Canada”.
Onto Carrotmob, what exactly is it? “What we do at Carrotmob is we organize people to come together and spend money at a business, and in exchange that business makes an improvement that the consumers care about. So instead of boycotting business that you don’t like, why not buycott so you can buy their products, and can send a message to make a positive difference”.
As their Head of Partnerships, Alex essentially acts as a liaison between businesses large and small, the Carrotmob community, and the brand of Carrotmob. He makes it all come together, essentially. “[W]e’ve had 250 campaigns in over 20 countries with around $2 million spent over the course of the past few years, and our community is growing, and growing, and growing”.
So what is a Carrotmobber? I’ve never met one, but Gold is definitely our man for explanation on this topic. “[W]e’re mostly millennials, so that’s 18-35—which is pretty much our age. I’m right in the middle of what a Carrotmobber is. We’re predominantly still a US based, San Francisco movement. It was started here in San Francisco by Brent Schulkin who’s my boss, our founder”.
Young people, taking advantage of how our capitalist society functions instead of protesting about it. Cheeky, and it seems to have a bit of a following. “We had a Carrotmob in Thailand that attracted 1500 people. And we’ve had like seven this past week, so it’s a movement that grows”.
What does Gold have in store for the future? “I definitely know I’m going to be an entrepreneur, hopefully in a warmer climate than San Francisco [laughs]”. Vague, but lofty—entrepreneur style.
“I run a blog called gchatfortunecookie, which is basically an ‘it gets better campaign’ for 20-somethings. So what we do is we take snippets of gchat conversations, which when taken out of context sound like fortune cookies. Think of a more mature version of texts from last night. So Texts From Last Night meets TED meets Thought Catalog.” Looks like my gchatfortunecookie is “They should organize a slut march for developing countries”. I like it.
With an ever apparent focus on our generation of 20-somethings that don’t want or don’t know how to grow up, Gold also has come up with the brunch series ’20-somethings doing something’.
“I bring 20-somethings together to talk about really cool things and responsibilities they’ve taken on to battle this whole notion that we’re incapable, we’re not doing anything, and that our generation’s screwed. I’ve mixed bottomless mimosas with that, so I take the best elements of a panel event and a day club brunch, and combine it into two”. Gold plans to host one of these power brunches in San Francisco.
Many 20-somethings feel there is something awry, and that things haven’t panned out as we had imagined. Is there really something lost with our generation, or do we all just feel like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967)?
“[W]e hear every day how one in three of us are unemployed, one in three are moving back in with their parents because they can’t find a job. One in four is delaying marriage because they can’t afford [it]. And somebody like me who graduates from law school with an average of $100,000 in debt and zero prospect of a job! So what do you do? Right?
At 26, Alex isn’t an old dog, but he’s spent four years out of undergrad, considerably more than most of us bright eyed kids in our early 20s, just getting out of college. With considerable candor, Gold goes on—obviously passionate.
“Well, I think to be 20-something and successful today you really have to open your mind to not following the traditional beaten path, and I think this is a great town to do that, because nobody is following a very single path. If anything the people here that follow the defined path are outsiders, it’s the insiders who are people [that] are young startup, and every startup has a different story, a different path, a different model.”
You hear that? Following the beaten path is for dorks. Maybe everything we heard from our parents wasn’t to our ultimate benefit. The world is a different place than our parents experienced at our age.
“I think more 20-somethings need to realize that success is out there, but you have to remove yourself from ‘I’ve been told to do this, this is how I’m going to get a job, I need to interview this way’ and pretty much everything your parents told you, and just go out and start experimenting. You know I came here because I just started experimenting, and followed my instinct every step of the way.”
Everyone is startup crazy in San Francisco, and all over the country, really. It seems after everyone saw The Social Network it really became glamorized, as it really does fit in with the concept of the American dream. People don’t really seem to understand that it’s not all ping pong and zip-lines, perhaps exemplified by a group of business students I met from Booth that came on a “Startup Truck” tour. Guys and girls in suits and high-heels came to stay in the StartupHouse, excited to see the world of startups. They could only hack it for about a day though, and the whole group left the next morning, a little shell-shocked that it wasn’t champagne and caviar, but just a bunch of nerds in a smelly warehouse. Like Japanese tourists who go to Paris, it’s never quite how it looked on TV.
“[D]on’t lose hope and faith. I think everybody says that, but you’ll find that being in a startup really sucks. There’s long hours, hardly any prospect of being successful, you know you’ll see your friends doing a lot better, and you think a startup is so glamorous, right? […] Oh wow, Instagram just sold for a billion dollars, I could be the next Instagram too with my next photosharing app! Well guess what, the next Instagram is not going to be the next Instagram, so the best thing you can do is sit down, and come up with an original idea that tries to solve a problem, and work your butt off—and don’t lose faith.
Glamorization in the valley, is it good or bad anyhow?
“Well I think you’ll separate the wheat from the chaff […], because it all comes down to the mighty dollar. […] But to actually get your product funded, even in a seed stage here, especially now with Series A, you actually need a working substantive product! No VC is going to throw money at a product that doesn’t exist, and that sucks! […] I think at the end of the day if you really wanna focus on this, with this whole glamorization of Silicon Valley, it will fall by the wayside as people realize they just can’t support themselves on glam.
But there’s two sides to the coin. “On the other hand, I think it’s a good thing. You know, truthfully, hopefully we can [close] the gender gap a little bit, you know bring more women into—it’s really a grossly male dominated field. […] I really hope to see that one day. And so the glamorization of Silicon Valley can really contribute to that, and we’re seeing that, we’re seeing great stuff like Goldie Blox, Debbie Sterling who is a Stanford engineer—great female driven startup. And I think she was able to raise money because we’re so startup crazy, and we love it.
SF Fresh 