Refresh, a product that aims to keep you as prepared as possible for your next encounter, wants to be the app equivalent of that character. I’ve been using Refresh in the wild for about two months now.
Something did come of it, however, as I ended up receiving its notifications often enough that I would actually click on them. I found that the more I looked at Refresh’s detailed “dossiers,” which pulled information from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, CrunchBase, AngelList and various other sources beforehand, the more prepared I was for my meetings.
The more prepared I was for my meetings, the better those meetings went, and I ended up saving myself a lot of frantic pre-meeting Googling and stress, because Refresh had already pulled the data for me.
The best thing about Refresh was you could forget it existed, and it would remind you that you needed it 15 minutes before you needed it. I also ended up learning things I didn’t know about my co-workers and friends.
Refresh has a very refreshing backstory. Its founder, Bhavin Shah, was originally working at LeapFrog Enterprises, a startup that built tablets for kids. LeapFrog somehow happened to catch the attention of Howard Zucker, the then Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health, who wanted to use the technology to teach women in Afghanistan about prenatal safety.
