Joe and the Juice is the natural habitat for fashionable urbanites, who pay $13+ tax to stylishly sip their signature coconut water, lemon, spinach, ginger, apple and olive oil, with ginger or lemon… juice… or on a Palo Alto scorcher, a functional smoothie.
My friend came here with a banging hangover and it sorted him right out!
The freshness and the flavor of the organic ingredients are indescribable!!!
Yummy food but too expensive, idm paying tho
…say the reviews.
Three are within a mile of downtown.
Inside, Joe and the Juice is post-industrial chic, even though nothing about it is post-industrial: Uncovered cement floors, 15-foot ceilings with exposed pipes, and floor-to ceiling windows; a few high-tops that look like they could use reclaimed wood, and a couple hip-height rounds.
A dropped nickel would echo when Joe and the Juice is empty. But when one isn’t nearly empty, it’s LOUD. And at 5pm on a Thursday afternoon, two groups started to trickle in. One for scheduled networking. The other maybe for something else. By 5:30, the juice blender competed to be heard.
Before the clock struck five, a meeting organizer, a guy with a “hello, my name is…” type sticker on his shirt, sat down at a hip-height table, opened a laptop, and pulled out a black Sharpie and an entire roll of name tag stickers. One for everybody; an extra each for investors and pitchers.
The networkers clumped together as more arrived; the organizer held up a brown, crumpled piece of recycled paper and said, I want you to be Lionel Messi, who got his first contract on a napkin. Gather in groups of five, get out your LinkedIn QR codes. You should all leave here with ten more connections.
Four groups of five-ish gathered around the high-tops. The icebreaker question:
What was a problem you solved, and what is a problem you are solving?
The problem everyone was solving without saying, whatever the reason they gave for being there, was looking for my next gig or starting something new; a steady job was disallowed.
Ray was THE guy who stood out. His slicked back whitish hair said I’ve been through this before.
He’d been early at a few startups, he’d signed an NDA with one that wanted to hire him as their CTO. And he was there looking for his next gig. He natively spoke Silicon Valley watercooler talk; spoken only by people who knew the game.
He talked fundraising and comp, and opaquely about which companies were doing what; within earshot of two unglamorous VCs, he said they used to care about building something. Now they’re just money managers basing their decisions on making a return.
With 9,000 followers on LinkedIn, he was going to be okay.
When the organizer set up a speaker and mic, like a karaoke machine without the lights, Ray was OUT. It was time for the pitch. The pitchers had paid to pitch; the networkers paid to network; the blonde proptech entrepreneur sipped a $13+ pink drink while she got ready to watch.
Joe and the Juice didn’t come with a 20-foot projector screen; the networkers squinted at pitchers’ laptop screens while they politely listened to this:
“I’m a solo founder, I have a masters degree from fill-in-the-blank prestigious university and I’m asking for a $3M seed round for 26-30 months of runway, to hire an engineer and GTM, and plan to raise a Series A in 18 months…
On the startup pitch bingo card, AI agent was checked off within the second breath.
These strivers were striving, but God help you with following the rest. The two pitches took 15 minutes, but it felt like an hour…
Then the organizer said: You have another hour and a half to network!
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