Posts Tagged ‘internship’

From the Entrepreneurial Society and Entrepreneurship Lab (E-LAB) at SJSU to WePay

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Stephen Guerguy just began his internship at WePay to fulfill a requirement for the Entrepreneurship Lab (E-LAB) at San Jose State University.  The course explores all facets of managing and growing a young, entrepreneurial organization, including building the team, sales, marketing, operations, and finance. It provides the opportunity to learn with practical internship and roundtables with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and others, in the new venture ecosystem.

I just read WePay’s latest blog post about interning for a startup when you’re young, inexperienced, and non-technical. The post said that you should “be persistent, network your way in and demand a job….[and] demonstrate a deep knowledge of and passion for the product.”  I think my experiences may add a little color to this advice.

I’m the president of the Entrepreneurial Society (ES) at San Jose State University. I’m also a junior majoring in finance, and will graduate in Spring 2011, hopefully with high honors. I joined the Entrepreneurial Society at SJSU because it introduces business students to non-traditional career opportunities.

Instead of helping students land stale accounting or finance jobs, ES works with entrepreneurs and angels in the Valley to help students formulate their ideas, build business plans, and compete in events like The Neat Ideas Fair & The Business Plan Competition.

My goal as president has been to build previously non-existent ties between the College of Engineering and the College of Business at SJSU, so students can build relationships and leverage complimentary skill sets. Business students need to understand and appreciate the value of engineers, especially at early-stage startups. WePay has a 5:1 ratio of engineers to non-engineers.  My goal is to establish at least a 1:1 ratio in the Entrepreneurial Society. In addition, I am in the process of planning ES Tech Trek, which will include an in-depth visit to 5 startups and VC firms next fall.  I think it’s important for students to learn about entrepreneurship in the field, in addition to in the classroom.

About a month ago, Rich started reaching out to local student clubs and organizations to better understand how they manage group finances.  Since I was one of the people he contacted, I asked if he wanted to grab lunch; I wanted to better understand how WePay could help ES, but I also wanted to start building relationships with startup founders in the area.

Around the same time, one of my entrepreneurship courses at SJSU had begun bringing in startups to pitch their ideas to students. The class also required students to intern for a funded startup to get the kind of immersive experience that one can’t get from a classroom. I connected Rich with my professor because I wanted WePay to participate in the program.  Now a few weeks later, I’m writing this post from within a sunny office in downtown Palo Alto.  There’s a big WePay sign on the wall across from where I am sitting, and I’m two weeks into one of the most exciting internships I have had. I plan to write a future post about my roles and responsibilities here, and what I hope to accomplish during my time at WePay.

Give WePay a try, it’s free to sign-up!

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So you’re inexperienced, non-technical, and you want to work for a startup. Another post about internships.

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Since news broke about our financing and I started to blog about startup-related things, we have gotten a lot of interest from entrepreneurial students that “love startups” and “really want to work for one.”

We are aggressively hiring engineers, so if an engineer reaches out to us, it’s a pretty straightforward process.  Are you a Cultural fit? Technical fit?  If yes to both, then we probably want to hire you.

Since we are not currently hiring non-engineers, the process is not so straightforward when non-technical candidates reach out to us looking for jobs.

For starters, if you’re non-technical and inexperienced, you’re fighting an uphill battle, since you’re looking to fill a position that doesn’t exist.  One way to get around this is to ask for an internship.   For one, it’s easier to get an internship than it is to get a full time job.  This is probably pretty obvious, but it’s definitely worth noting.

I intentionally let potential interns fall through the cracks all the time. I don’t really want to spend time interviewing and hiring them, and I know that once I do, it’s just going to take up even more of my time. New hires (interns especially) require training and direction.   More often than not, the amount of effort I put in to training and directing an intern is less than the amount of tangible value I get out of the relationship.  The other option is for me to put in no effort, and hope that you can figure it out on your own.  I have rarely been pleasantly surprised by this approach.

So how do you get an internship with a startup that’s not looking to hire interns? Be persistent, network your way in and demand a job. Offer to do a trial period. If you’re super inexperienced, volunteer to work unpaid.  It also helps if you can demonstrate a deep knowledge and passion for our product.

Most importantly, know how to answer the following question: “What do you want to do if I hire you.”  I’m too lazy (or too busy) to answer this question for you. And if you can’t answer it before I hire you, that means that I have to take the time trying to figure it out after I hire you. That’s a pretty big deterrent.

The following answers send red flags: “I’ll do anything you want me to” or “I like everything” or “I’m not sure.”  This tells me that I’m going to spend more time trying to think of tasks to give you, than you’re going to spend actually accomplishing them.

A better answer would be: “I can help you accomplish X because I am good at Y”. The more specific you are, the easier it will be for me to see where you fit in the value chain. Do you have a deep knowledge of our target market? Can you do customer service? Can you make pretty graphics? Edit videos? Everybody can think of something they are good at; all you have to do is figure out how that relates to some aspect of what we do on a daily basis.  Remember that most startups only do two things: they build a product and they get people to use it. If you’re not technical, then you just need to make the case that you’ll somehow contribute to the latter.

If you’re an intern, you better be 80% doer and 20% thinker.  The worst thing you can say is something like this: “I am a management major, so I can help you create a plan and define your goals”. I would much rather hear something as simple as: “I will help you get more users.”

If you can finagle an internship, then you just have to kick ass while you’re there. How do you kick ass while you’re there? Pretty simple: accomplish something tangible.  Get customers. Own a project or role (company blog, customer service, community outreach, etc.). Get press.  It doesn’t really matter: as long as at the end of your internship, I feel like we would suffer a major set back if we let you get away. If that’s the case, then we would be crazy not to offer you a job.

Check out the progress of our start-up. WePay is free to sign-up.

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How to intern for a startup

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

I recently met with the head of business development for a pretty big and wildly successful company. He was their 10th hire, and he started off as an unpaid college intern.  That got me thinking.

I’ll eventually write a post about what startups look for when we interview potential interns, but for now I’m just going to tell the story about how we discovered and hired our first (unpaid) intern, and how we converted him into our second full time (paid) employee.

About six months after Bill and I founded WePay, we were invited to attend Olin College’s Meet the Startups Day.  Olin College is basically a school of 300 or so brilliant hacker-types (Olin actually offered full tuition scholarships to every undergraduate in attendance… until the economy crapped the bed).

Meet the Startups Day is a career fair for Olin students interested in working for startups.  Bill and I were pretty excited to attend because at that point we had not made much progress actually building our product, and although Bill is technically oriented, we needed all the horsepower we could get.  Luckily, we had the arrogance and naiveté to think we had something to offer in return.

So we show up with a laptop and a bunch of business cards. We used the laptop to loop a screen cast of our “prototype” (which, in retrospect, was a piece of crap), and we used our business cards to look, well, business-like.

The business cards didn’t do the trick; every other company had a pretty impressive exhibit, and the people representing those companies looked far less…childlike.

We attracted the fewest number of students, but the students we did attract were particularly enthusiastic.  I think there was a small group of students that genuinely wanted to work for an early-stage startup, and they knew exactly what that entailed.

Olin gave every company that participated in the event a USB stick that contained the resumes of all the students in attendance.  Now that I think about it, that was pretty ingenious…

Three months later, when we were accepted into YCombinator, I looked through the resumes and found Karl Schults, the one name that I remembered from Meet the Startups Day.   Karl was pretty young and earnest, but he was also crazy smart (as far as I could tell).

I gave Karl a call and I said: “Hey Karl, you might not remember me, but I was at Meet the Startups a few months ago. We just got accepted to YC, and we’re about to move out to Silicon Valley. Do you want to intern for us? We can’t pay you, but we’ll buy your plane ticket, give you a place to stay, pay for your food, and provide you with a great experience.”

Karl definitely had the choice to take a paid internship (and if he didn’t, Google and Facebook dropped the ball).  He decided to work unpaid for WePay because he knew he would have the opportunity to write production code and own large parts of the application.

Before the summer, Karl’s only experience with php was a 2 week project in one of his programming classes at school. By the time the summer was over, he was a pro, and had committed as many lines of production code as anybody else. He worked long hours with the rest of us, and his programming skills improved dramatically.

When the summer ended, Karl went back to school… for one semester.  Immediately after we closed our first round, we made Karl an offer. He became our first post-financing hire.  He postponed school, and he now works with us full time in Palo Alto.

Lessons learned:

  1. If Karl hadn’t started networking with startups early, we never would have found him (and he never would have found us).
  2. If Karl hadn’t made a solid impression, and found a way to keep his name in the back of my mind (USB stick….brilliant), I wouldn’t have even thought to reach out to him again.  A monthly “lets-keep-in-touch” email would probably accomplish the same thing.
  3. Karl could have taken a paid internship at a big company. His resume would get a boost, and he would have gotten a ton of “awesome” experience doing QA, writing documentation, and playing Farmville.  Taking an unpaid internship is a bit like early-stage investing: you risk your resources now in the hopes that it pays off in the future. The amount you invest is equivalent to the opportunity cost of working there. Karl bet on us early, and it turned out to be a good choice.
  4. Karl crushed it over the summer. Bill and I never questioned whether we should hire him. It was an obvious decision: once we raise money, we’ll hire him full time.

Give WePay a try today. It’s free to sign up!

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