There was a little Mexican market down the street and around the corner from the apartment where I used to live. I used to walk down there every now and then to pick up a few things - a gallon of milk, a few onions, some beer. They also served hot food, but the grill kept odd hours so I almost never ate there (more on that in a bit).

The market had a handful of employees that I might recognize on sight, but there’s one that I remember in particular. We’ll call him Ambitious Guy. He noticed some bit of LinkedIn gear I had on one time and he asked me about it. Did I work for LinkedIn? What was it like? …and how could he use LinkedIn to help his market, to help grow his business? At the time I didn’t really know how to answer and I was almost certainly in a rush to get home with my beer and onions, so I gave a noncommittal answer and moved on along.

Later on I thought a lot about what Ambitious Guy had asked me. I came up with zero answers for how he could leverage LinkedIn to grow a small Mexican market in an off-the-beaten-path residential neighborhood in Mountain View. LinkedIn isn’t exactly geared for that. Yelp? Maybe.

…but…

The French have a term that I’m fond of - l’esprit d’escalier, “staircase wit”. Generally it is applied to sarcastic comebacks, but something about its “flavor” - about the idea of only developing the Perfect Response after-the-fact - comes to mind when I think back to Ambitious Guy.

In that vein, I did think of some things AG could do to grow his business. For starters: the prep food I had there - when it was available - was super- good. …but the food was almost never available when I was. I think they mostly catered to a lunch crowd and they closed around 8, so by the time I got there after work (read: dinner time) the grill would already be shut down in preparation to close up shop.

…which brings me to an important detail: this particular market-cum-taqueria shares a parking lot with a bar. A bar that doesn’t open its doors until 9PM. Man, the missed potential here. There are precisely 3 things that drunk people leaving a bar want, and AG’s Place is uniquely positioned to (legally) provide two of those three - specifically:

  1. More booze

  2. Inexpensive, tasty food.

…and they close their doors an hour before the bar even opens.

I never told AG any of this.

So it goes.