The Mission Coffee Perk

One of the startups we really admire here in the Mission is a tiny coffee shop called Grand Coffee. If you look at the destination coffee houses in the Mission, just about all of them are within the hipster friendly confines of Valencia Street.

Tiny little Grand opened up under the shadow of the old Grand Theater sign on Mission Street between 22nd and 23rd, amongst the bodegas, fish markets, pawn shops, and torta houses.

It was tough going for them at first. I remember chatting with Nabeel, the owner, in the early days about how disappointed he was that he wasn’t getting more BART foot traffic.

But they stuck with it, tried some different viral campaigns like allowing people to buy coffees for friends, distributed pastries from other Mission shops, and above all, provided superior coffee (Four Barrel) and service. Impressively, Nabeel was the only employee initially, working 70-80 hours a week. He was almost certainly surviving on Ramen during these early days.

Today, business is booming. Go in between 8-10 in the morning and tiny Grand is shoulder to shoulder, and the Grand Coffee staff has ballooned to five employees.

So it is with great pleasure that we today announce that DoubleDutch has signed a definitive, exclusive agreement with Grand Coffee to consume all of our caffeine there.

Effective today, all DoubleDutch employees are now equipped with a DoubleDutch powered Grand Coffee app that allows them to log their caffeine consumption, and the tab is picked up by us.

Of course, there is a leaderboard, with the gentle buyer beware that too much caffeine will in fact kill you.

So if world class coffee is a prerequisite for your next employer, you may want to consider a career at DoubleDutch. We are hiring.