The Digital Skeptic: Wake Up and Smell the Profits

Listen up, my digital data-weary brothers and sisters: What makes Everyman Espresso unique is that it seeks to confirm every data point that filters in from the coffee production and procurement process. Not only does Penix and company collect information from Web vendors and industry contacts; he invests real time and money in having actual humans use their actual senses to make a deep and complex emotional assessment of the beans they sell.

What that boils down to is every one at Everyman Espresso literally lines up the beans and smells for money. Employees here are like mini coffee sommeliers -- they brew, sniff and slurp their way through their latest inventory to debate, quantify and then finally pull the trigger on the beans they sell. The process is called cupping.

"We have to know what we are talking about and investing in," says Sam Lewontin, who manages the Soho location, "so we brew up each batch we get, confirm what the roasters have done and get in touch with the product."

Or in business speak, what Penix and his team are doing here is bringing a repeatable process for bringing complex human experience into play to draw out the essence of what works and what doesn't in a given business deal.

"As soon as I rely on other people's opinions and numbers," Lewontin says, "a bell goes off in my head that I better get in here and really get with the product."

Since Wall Street was just down the street, and honestly I was walking back from a trip to the office, I asked Lewontin what he thought would happen if banks and investors conducted the same sort of creative due diligence when they worked a loan or took an investment bet. Clearly, the topic had come up many times here in fashionable Soho, where the world's financial elite work and live.

"We would not be in the mess we are in," Lewontin says without hesitation. "If you are not cupping the beans, it's just garbage in and garbage out."

It might just be time for Wall Street to give up on the fetish of cold, data-centric investing and instead wake up, be a real human and start putting their money where their nose is.