I arrived in the quaint town of Roslyn, New York on Tues­day after­noon. Angel­beat is a small com­pany based out of CEO Ron Ger­ber ‘82’s house. He told me the story of Jet­blue, the air­line com­pany known for its gen­er­ous leg room, and how it has no cen­tral head­quar­ters. While Jet­blue is based in New York, it hires peo­ple (mainly house­wives) from all over the US for cus­tomer ser­vice. There is no need to invest in a cen­tral­ized build­ing; instead, they invest in tech­nol­ogy that effi­ciently directs calls to the gen­eral cus­tomer ser­vice line to these employ­ees all over the coun­try. Not only is it cheaper in the long run, but it’s also more con­ve­nient for the employ­ees because they can work at home, and Jet­blue can hire a larger range of peo­ple with­out being con­stricted to the local vicinity.

Angel­beat is run in a sim­i­lar way with Ron and 5 other employ­ees from all over the US. As he put it, Ron is a “high-tech party plan­ner.” In fact, if you’re inter­ested, here’s a link to the itin­er­ary of an upcom­ing event in Fort Laud­erdale, Florida.http://www.angelbeat.com/events/418/

So what does a day in the life of CEO Ron Ger­ber ’82 look like?
As the main employee of an entire com­pany, he spends a lot of his time deal­ing with the nitty gritty details to make sure his events go smoothly. A lot of his day is ded­i­cated to per­son­ally call­ing peo­ple from the enor­mous data­base he has com­piled of rel­e­vant pro­fes­sion­als from all over the coun­try. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is essen­tial in this job; being able to sell his events to these peo­ple and con­vince them to come is the premise of his job. Because his job relies so much on these phone calls, my days mainly con­sisted of lis­ten­ing in on Ron’s phone calls and see­ing how he dealt with cus­tomers on a daily basis, pick­ing up inter­est­ing tips and tidbits.

Ron Ger­ber and Catherine

That is what Ron does on a daily basis. As for me, the intern, I actu­ally got to help Ron start plan­ning his cyber­bul­ly­ing work­shop. With the recent tragedies regard­ing cyber bul­ly­ing pri­mar­ily over social net­works like Face­book, par­ents are with­out a doubt wor­ried about their child’s safety. Thus, he plans to hold these events and bring rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Face­book and the local Attor­ney Gen­eral to come talk about what they are doing to address this dan­ger. He plans to hold one in NYC and if all goes well, another one in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area near Facebook’s head­quar­ters (also known as my hometown)

The first step is to reach the right peo­ple. One of Ron’s strate­gies is to con­tact schools in the area and have them adver­tise the work­shop. Not only would par­ents be more recep­tive to a work­shop rec­om­mended by the school rather than a ran­dom startup, but the school would know the best way to pass along the infor­ma­tion to par­ents. Thus, my task was to start com­pil­ing a data­base of con­tact infor­ma­tion for school author­i­ties, the “cyber­bul­ly­ing work­shop equiv­a­lent” of his reg­u­lar data­base for IT events. I would visit school web­sites and sleuth around, look­ing for the con­tact infor­ma­tion for the PTA (ide­ally), the prin­ci­pal, the Direc­tor of Tech­nol­ogy, the Direc­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the local school board, or any­one who seemed per­ti­nent. The more con­tacts, the more likely you’ll find the right per­son to talk to about this event. By the end of my time at Angel­beat, I became quite adept at find­ing rel­e­vant con­tact infor­ma­tion; in fact, I fin­ished enter­ing all the pri­vate schools in NYC and most of the schools in the Bay Area!

Over­all, I learned a lot and had a fun time. Ron was really nice and help­ful, mak­ing sure all my (many) ques­tions were answered and giv­ing me good future career advice. I lis­tened in on all his con­ver­sa­tions as I com­piled the data­base of school con­tacts, and he made sure to explain what he was doing and why he was doing it. I wit­nessed first­hand what Ron does every day and how small star­tups like Angel­beat worked. It was really inter­est­ing and I loved the expe­ri­enc­ing the real work world!

On a side note, after each work day was over, I got to play with Ron’s chil­dren and watch their kid­die shows (Poke­mon is my guilty pleasure).