On Monday, grocery store shelves across the Northeast were cleared of all sustenance by desperate citizens in preparation for the great blizzard of 2015. As I sit hunkered down in Brooklyn, with a full refrigerator of treasures I fought the bearded and scarved hoards for yesterday, my thoughts turned to the future of how we shop. Truth be told, shopping across all categories is broken. There is a growing gap between the shopping public and the retailers who aim to serve them. And caught in the middle, brands are trying to find new ways to wrestle some control back. On the edge is an army of entrepreneurs claiming they’ll show us how to do it all better. With that stage set, I believe 2015 will be a big year for shopping. I’m not predicting record sales or the greatest black Friday on record. This is about what happens behind the shelves. What we’ll see this year is the surfacing of multiple disjointed issues deep inside the infrastructure of shopping itself.

Read my conclusions to this opportunity on Forbes

There is a decent chance that you've seen friends and connections sharing "the exciting news" that because of "how fast things are moving" they and their team "are proud to announce, We're Hiring!" (Yes, StockUp is hiring also) In the past two months, I have seen more "We're Hiring" posts than ever before and I spent some time digging into it last night on the train. There are three possible motivations behind these posts:

1) You're signaling that you're now in a position to make a hiring decision for your company.  Mommy wow, we're all big kids now.

2) You're reminding anyone reading that your company is in fact growing and moving forward. Any company that isn't currently hiring likely won't be in business a year from now.

3) You've joined the ranks of people baffled by the seeming contradiction in headlines of "Over 40% of Millennials and unemployed or underemployed" and "Companies of All Sizes Struggle to Retain Top Talent." (In a survey of top CEOs by INC Magazine last month, over 50% said that their biggest challenge right now is attracting and retaining a skilled employees.)

And that last one is the one that keeps sticking out to me.  When I look at the current head count of our team at StockUp, and where I expect us to be, both with our developer/design team and our sales/marketing team, in the next six months, I am a little bit overwhelmed. Sure, there is a lot of work that goes into finding, hiring, and onboarding any new hires, but it is much more than that.  Each one of the people that, for whatever reason, say "yes, I want to be a part of what you are building" are also saying "I trust you enough and believe in this company enough to say 'no' to everything else and chase down this big idea together." And when you're a part of a young growing company, that takes a lot more trust than when you're a well established company.

Simon Sinek, in the now most over quoted TED Talk in the history of TED Talks, says that you're not "looking for people who need a job, you're looking for people that believe what you believe."  That is our challenge, as those looking to attract and retain amazing people, drill down to the core of what we believe and be able to make a case for why saying 'yes' to our opportunity is worth the cost of saying 'no' to all other options that are out there.

So maybe, instead of "We're Hiring" the announcement should be "Open seat on a rocket ship, You're invited."

The speed of technology and innovation has never been faster. Everywhere we look, everything is different and being disrupted. Across industries, corporations, and countries, those that can't keep up and simply left behind as a warning to everyone else of what happens if you don't adapt to what is right now.  We are bombarded with more information than we can handle and all of it is apparently urgent. Our smartphones make sure that we are never more than three swipes away from a flood of content about anything and everything that happened, might have happened, and could happen everywhere in the world. And we're completely burnt out.

And the pendulum is swinging back the other direction.

And fast.

Right now, the hottest trends are being inspired by cavemen.

Not the Jetsons, the Flinestones.

• After years of using state of the art equipment in perfectly lit and scented gyms, millions are flocking to previously abandoned warehouses to get their caveman work out on and push a tractor tire around for a hour.
• Instead of rushing out to sample the latest in molecular gastronomy and high art cuisine, the current diet trend is based on the bench mark of what the paleolithic beings from 15,000 years ago might have consumed.
• Apparently as it became easier and easier to communicate instantly, the thought and meaning of long form communication has gone the way of the dinosaurs and short form emoji-laden bursts of text have brought cave drawings back as the preferred standard of communication for the next generation.

So with our workouts, diet, and communication already reverting back to caveman inspired standards, what is next?

This week alone, three different people have told me "the industry we're trying to disrupt is the last frontier for innovation." And then, after hearing more about their company, idea, and solution, I end up feeling bad for the reputation that it appears the word "innovation" has developed. Just because you replicated an offline process online doesn't mean you innovated, it just means we're evolving. "Technology eating the world" is turning out to be really boring. There are incredibly smart and savvy entrepreneurs working on incredibly boring and, when considered in the context of the world as a whole, meaningless ideas.

They're working on vitamins instead of pain killers.

They're working on nice-to-haves that make things a little bit better.

They're not working on the must-haves that changes the entire trajectory of a situation.

People will forget to take their vitamins. But, when suffering, people will always look for a way to kill that pain.

Maybe it was the scotch, maybe it was that I had the chip lead, or maybe there's just something in the air, but, last week during poker night, I realized something about the way I approach each hand that is dealt. And then next morning over coffee realized it is the same way I approach life. I'm always looking to go All-In.

Now, I don't mean on every hand, but I do mean, that my "tell" (sign that I've got something exciting) is that I bet. I have no problem sluffing cards that aren't quite good enough. There is definitely an opportunity cost to not staying in hands longer, like knowing you'd have had the winning hand after all the cards are dealt, but there is something to be said for knowing how you play and what you're willing to risk.

The same is true when evaluating options and making choices in life. I'm constantly finding that once I go "in" on a hand, I am quickly confident enough to go All-In. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing All-In.

Or said another way: