Yogi Land

Scott Gerber is the founder of Sizzle It!, a New York-based sizzle reel production company and the Young Entrepreneur Council. He is a serial entrepreneur, internationally syndicated columnist, angel investor, public speaker and author of the best-selling book Never Get a “Real” Job: How To Dump Your Boss, Build a Business and Not Go Broke.

The hardest part of growing a blossoming startup beyond infancy is recruiting talent. The right team can take your venture to new heights whereas the wrong one can push it off a cliff.

Even though we are in a “employer’s” market, traditional recruitment channels, such as recruitment firms, may prove too expensive for fledging businesses. Startups should consider using social media as a recruitment tool.

When executed properly, social media offers recruiting managers a larger applicant pool, more access to information that will enable them to better pre-screen and filter candidates and, most importantly, a more direct line of communication to the potential hires themselves.

It is important to avoid missteps. Spamming people will get your business nowhere fast. It’s a tricky balancing act but by being respectful, honest and human, your next big hire might just come from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

I asked a group of successful young entrepreneurs about the best ways to use social media to recruit top notch startup talent. Here’s what they had to say:

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1. Achieve Expert Status

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Use social media to help build a strong brand and then let the top talent come to you. The ideal situation is to have others wanting to work with you, whatever the conditions, so by simply being great at what you do and building your brand around that, you shouldn’t have any trouble drawing in top talent (then make them happy they contacted you!).

—Colin Wright, Exile Lifestyle

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2. Tweet with Hashtags

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When promoting any new openings at your startup, tweet out with special hashtags for #hiring, #startupjobs and whatever industry or trade you’re hiring from to get the attention of the right candidates.

—Danny Wong, Blank Label Group, Inc.

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3. Twitter Is Your Best Friend

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Scout for startup talent using Twitter search with hashtags and terms relevant to your industry. Compile a list of potential candidates and evaluate their Twitter activity by looking at their number of followers as well as the quality of their tweets. Use Follower Wonk‘s “Compare whom they follow” to compare candidates with industry leaders and look at shared connections and “Wonk Score”.

—Andrew Saladino, RTA Kitchen Cabinets

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4. Pick the Folks You Want

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When you’re still early in the startup process, you have to make sure that you’ve got the right team. That means knowing as much as possible before even suggesting that you’re looking … social media makes it easy to find out all sorts of [information].

—Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting

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5. Have a Contest

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Choose an important trait you’re looking for and host a contest via social media. Get creative with submissions and guidelines. Share the contest with influencers and hubs and invite them to send talent your way.

—Lisa Nicole Bell, Inspired Life Media Group

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6. Get a Referral

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Referrals are the lifeblood of many a business. It works the same when it comes to recruitment via social media. Ask your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn contacts for solid leads for the new position in your company. By having someone come pre-qualified, you end up with (usually) a better candidate and someone whom you can trust.

—Erin Blaskie, BSETC

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7. Listen, Converse and Engage

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Besides LinkedIn being amazing for recruiting startup talent, I’d say monitoring job trends on Twitter and keeping your job board updated is also a great pull strategy. If you have a current job board and are sending your opportunities through your social media channels, then your message will be heard and re-posted in all the right areas.

Ryan Holmes, HootSuite

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8. YouTube Your Vision

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You have to get people to believe in your story. Especially when you’re in startup mode. So record a short video where you describe your vision, progress and motivations. Help prospective talent connect with your deeper story. What’s the next chapter they can help to create? Share that video across social media.

—Michael Margolis, Get Storied

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Image courtesy of Flickr, oooh.oooh

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Still-in-beta interactive music startup Turntable.fm has taken another step toward going mainstream Tuesday. It has just become licensed by ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), a performing rights organization which licenses and collects royalties for performances.

Turntable.fm has been taking the web by storm of late, amassing around 300,000 users and more than its share of buzz. However, many have wondered if the site is wholly legal. Basically, it’s a series of musical chatrooms in which five DJs can spin tracks on demand via Medianet or by uploading their own music. The site even shut down international usage recently in an effort to stay Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)-compliant (the DMCA is U.S.-only).

Still, myriad musicians (and music industry types) have flocked to the site, and we have yet to see any significant backlash against it. However, Turntable.fm is still in beta and is invite-only (if you have a Facebook friend on there, though, you can get access), so it’s still a bit under the radar in the mainstream sphere.

The fact that the site is still in its infancy makes the ASCAP license an interesting milestone (Spotify secured its license when it launched in the U.S. last week). “It’s great to see a tech start-up securing an ASCAP license from the outset, ensuring that songwriters, composers and publishers will be paid fairly if the site succeeds,” said Jon Bahr, director of marketing for ASCAP, in a statement.

Perhaps we could be seeing Turntable.fm coming out of beta soon.

We’ve contacted the team for comment.

More About: ASCAP, music, startup, turntable.fm

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Online document hosting service Scribd launched an iPhone app Tuesday that aims to make reading on small smartphone screens bearable.

“For the most part, browsers were built for computers and sort of retrofitted for cellphones,” says Scribd Director of Product Matt Riley, “and they really haven’t provided a great reading experience so far.”

To — for lack of better words — “smartphonize” reading, Riley and his team built Float, an app that strips the external links, ads and any clutter from an article to make it easier to read on a small screen. When reading an article on Float, users have a choice between scrolling up and down or swiping right to left in order to see the next page of content. If they pinch the screen to zoom in, the text rewraps.

The app’s easy reading format is useful and improves the reading experience. But it makes less than a bold headline. What is really nifty about Scribd’s new app are the four ways that content gets loaded onto it.

The app links to your Scribd account and downloads any documents in it for offline mobile reading. But it also links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts and searches for links that friends have posted on those platforms and loads such articles into a “social feed” for offline reading. Readers can also browse for articles from more than 150 publications directly from the app. (Disclosure: Mashable is one of them.) Scribd had the foresight to partner with these publications instead of merely scraping their content in order to avoid a Zite-style legal fiasco.

Scribd also joined Apple in borrowing a trick from online reading tool Instapaper. With a browser bookmarklet, you can easily send articles you find online to your account for reading later.

For now Float is completely free, but Riley says eventually Scribd might charge for premium content or show ads on certain pages. Paid or not, it’s not a particular surprise that Scribd is aggressively pursuing a mobile audience. The company launched a send-to-device feature last year and CEO Trip Adler mentioned mobile strategy when he announced a $13 million round of funding in January.

“As the world rapidly changes the way it reads,” he said in a statement at the time, “we are rapidly preparing to change the way we deliver what they read.”

More About: Instapaper, iphone, scribd, smartphone reader, startups

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Elliott Spelman is an intern at WePay which allows you to collect payments online without the hassle. You can contact him at elliott.spelman@wepay.com.

Four years and three internships later, I’m a graduate of USC. Like a lot of people my age, I’ve become pretty comfortable with the fact that I don’t really know what I want to do in life. Every graduation speaker I’ve ever listened to, from Steve Ballmer to Mr. Gowen, my elementary school gym teacher, has urged the same advice: Do what you’re passionate about.

For people in my position, though, there seems to be a choice between doing a job you love and doing a job that’s available to you. We’re left with the question: If doing something rewarding is the ultimate goal, what if it takes some time to figure it out?

Just because I’m not on a prescribed career path doesn’t mean I’m not interested in anything. On the contrary, actually. My college resume is a veritable potpourri of potential professions. All three of my college internships were tied to personal interests (non-profits, travel, music). I majored in economics and creative writing. I pledged a fraternity and worked for the geography department one summer. And now I’m feeding my interests again, picking a summer internship at a tech startup in Silicon Valley over other full-time job offers.

People ask me all the time, with genuine concern in their faces: “Aren’t you worried about what happens at the end of the summer?” The honest answer is no. If I have to sacrifice my interests for the sake of long-term financial security at the age of 21, then in the words of professor Hubert J. Farnsworth: “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.” Plus, if for some reason the job isn’t right, or if something else pops up, it’s only a three-month commitment.

Along the winding path toward a more permanent career, I’ve picked up a few pieces of wisdom for my fellow interns out there.

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1. Understand How People See Your Generation

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There’s a Youtube clip out there of a few anchors on Fox News talking about how Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood has ruined a generation of young people who now feel special. Entitlement, I’m afraid, is the knock on our generation.

How do you objectively measure something like that? I’ve been fired for it (“Your generation needs to learn that you do not give ultimatums to a superior”), and I’ve heard it muttered (“F*****g kids these days”), but basically, your job is to prove these people wrong. It doesn’t take much. Show that you are genuinely interested and engaged by the people around you. Learn how to be competent. Make your coworkers trust you, and make them look good.

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2. Take Advantage of Your Generation’s Gifts

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We are the first wave of people raised on the Internet. We stay connected. We rely on other people. We understand our constant access to infinite information and we adjust ourselves accordingly. Compared to those for whom the Internet is a struggle, we have the opportunity to be exponentially more productive in a fraction of the time.

My advice is to use the applications that best organize your mind — the ones that help you develop methods and routines that feel comfortable. When it comes to documents, I’m a Google Apps kind of guy. Some people prefer Dropbox or MobileMe.

Everyone our age should be able to find the answer to any basic question within a minute. Google and Wikipedia should be second nature. After all, part of the reason we’re seen as entitled is because we have access to a whole array of shortcuts that have never existed before. Use them to your advantage.

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3. There’s a Reason for Professionalism

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I’ve worked at an internship where everybody in the office ironed their pants every morning, and I’ve worked with people in flip-flops. Neither one is intrinsically better than the other. You have to understand that each place you work has its own corporate culture and in order to do well you have to adjust yourself to fit it.

If people are going to spend nine hours each day cramped together, they have to find ways to stay sane. Some bosses hand out beers at five, and some require their employees to wear a certain color tie. If you want peoples’ respect, you have to give in to it.

That’s basically what professionalism is: A code of behavior that greases the wheels and keeps everyone out of each other’s way. You shouldn’t feel like the code is a burden. If it starts to feel like you’re wearing a mask to work every day, don’t be afraid to question if the job is a good fit for you.

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4. Enjoy the People You Work With

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This is the single most underrated aspect of career decisions. Granted, it’s very difficult to know what the person hiring you will turn out to be like, but that’s where internships come in. Internships give you a taste of what kind of people get drawn to what kind of careers.

The fact is, even with the mask of professionalism, your coworkers rub off on you. You can’t avoid them. If you hate who you work with, it can be tough to convince yourself that what you are doing is worthwhile, even if you would normally enjoy it.

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5. Use Your Education Wisely

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Unless you studied accounting or architecture as an undergrad (and even if you did), there is a very small chance that your college education will come in particularly handy for your first job. There are, however, unexpected elements of your education that will be tremendously useful.

At my PR gig, I gave my boss an essay by Georg Simmel that I thought he might find interesting. Working at the tutoring center, I helped format databases of small donors with Excel formulas I’d learned in ECON317. And now, working for a tech company, I find myself blogging, pulling from all kinds of things I learned in creative writing workshops.

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I guess my general piece of advice here would be to never assume it’s okay to stop learning. There is no direct correlation between your formal education and what you do after, so remember to always stay curious and flexible.

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Image courtesy of Flickr, Tricia Wang 王圣捷, Simon King, and iStockphoto, H-Gall

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Instagram, the seven-month-old mobile photo-sharing app for iPhone, surpassed more than 4.25 million users this week. A new version of the application now shows its fast-growing user base the love, literally.

Instagram has slightly reworked comments and “likes” in version 1.8, which was released on Thursday. Now users can double tap photos to “like” them, and should they do so, a white heart icon will briefly appear over the photo in question.

The application now includes an interactive comment screen that co-founder Kevin Systrom believes will make in-app comments on photos more akin to the iPhone’s native SMS experience. The enhanced comment screen also lets users swipe left or right to delete comments on their photos.

“[The interactive comment screen] makes it easier to see the whole conversation at once,” Systrom says. “You can more easily reply to specific people and remove comments you’ve made or comments on your pictures.”

As Systrom indicates, user replies have been improved in the release. Now, when a user wishes to reply to another user in the comments, he or she can type the “@” symbol and the first few letters of the username, and the application will autocomplete the name.

While Thursday’s app updates are relatively minor, they are characteristically Instagram in nature — simple and elegant — and it’s the startup’s attention to detail that has helped it continue to attract new users.

Image courtesy of Instagram, Ryan Kuder

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Four-year-old file storage startup Dropbox has experienced explosive growth in the past year, jumping from 5 million users to more than 25 million users.

And together, these users are now saving more than 300 million files each day and 1 million files every five minutes. In total, Dropbox users have saved more than 100 billion files, CEO and co-founder Drew Houston said.

Houston, speaking at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco on Monday afternoon, shared the massive figures in a presentation detailing how his startup has managed to scale under such enormous demand.

In the past year, Dropbox has added 35 employees to meet demand, growing from a 20-person team to a 55-person company. Roughly 50% of the startup’s team is comprised of engineers, Houston said.

Part of Dropbox’s ability to scale successfully, said Houston, is the startup’s focus on hiring fewer, better engineers and creating an office environment that its employees want to work in. The startup does not force mandatory office hours, nor does it instruct team members on how or where to work, Houston shared.

Another key, stated the CEO, is to set and reset company goals on a quarterly and annual basis in order to minimize overhead and reduce waste.

But when boiling it down to just the basics, Houston’s advice to founders is to, “Build the right thing, and build things right.” If forced to choose just one, founders should build the right thing, he says.

More About: Dropbox, file storage, startup

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