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The onboarding opportunity
Bethany Crystal – Jan 8, 2019
We’re in the midst on onboarding two folks to the Network Team at USV — one new full-time hire and one temp who’s stepping in to cover for a colleague on maternity leave. This has never happened before. As you [...] Read more
10 easy ways to make sure people don’t want to read your email
Bethany Crystal – Jan 7, 2019
I spent a good part of this afternoon and evening getting through an email backlog from over the holidays. It seems like many people thought this was a great time of year to send cold emails. So I thought I’d [...] Read more
Becoming a New Yorker
Bethany Crystal – Jan 6, 2019
They say you’re not a New Yorker until you’ve cried your eyes out in public. If that’s all it takes, then I’ve been a New Yorker since 2008, the year of my very first internship here. Back in college, I [...] Read more
Diversity in congress: Learn the system (to learn how to break the system)
Bethany Crystal – Jan 4, 2019
Yesterday, the 116th Congress took their oaths as the most diverse congressional class in the history of our nation, with women comprising nearly 1/4 of all seats. I woke up this morning to an exciting flurry of Tweets about this [...] Read more
How can you measure the importance of “soft skills”?
Bethany Crystal – Jan 3, 2019
Digital Divisions Earlier this fall, my husband and I took ourselves out for a “date night” in New York City and wound up at a Japanese steakhouse restaurant, one where you’re seating at a table of 8–10 other people and [...] Read more
The dumb question danger zone
Bethany Crystal – Jan 2, 2019
They tell us this when we’re young: There’s no such thing as a dumb question. But the older I get, for some reason, the harder it is to remember this. Maybe there’s something about ego that gets in the way [...] Read more
New Year, new mantra
Bethany Crystal – Dec 31, 2018
For the past few years, I’ve set annual mantras for myself — a kind of reminder that helps guide me through a year’s worth of events and activities. My mantras aren’t resolutions. They also aren’t intentions. They are more like [...] Read more
Dining with a dash of drama
Bethany Crystal – Dec 28, 2018
The menu of the day, with Grouper as the late addition After 90 minutes of waiting, our family finally sat down to dinner. “We’re so sorry. Our fisherman…well, he never came today. We don’t have fish. Ready for appetizers?” We [...] Read more
“Hola” vs. “Bonjour” — What’s hidden in hello
Bethany Crystal – Dec 26, 2018
You have to love the Spanish greeting, “Hola!” Perhaps the most welcoming of all salutations, the uplift in tone when spoken invites an immediate smile. Friendly to a fault, it works at any time of day or night in near-endless [...] Read more