5 reasons business students shouldn’t intern at a start-up.

Update: It’s great to see that over 10'000 people have read and enjoyed this post in 2 days, even making it to the front page of HN. If you’d like to read more of my blog posts and keep in touch, I’d love it if you signed up here

Update 2: 15k reads, 100's of shares, likes & upvotes… And a lot of angry abuse. Most of it generic name-calling and anonymous personal attacks or just people who didn’t properly read the article. More worrying (yet in a sense also gratifying as it validated my argument) were the arguments of those founders and ‘experts’ who contacted me to tell me why they think I’m wrong. Here you can find my response to one commenter whose arguments were pretty indicative of the general negative feedback I received.

SPOILER: They’re still wrong.

As a start-up founder (Gymhopper, Mondable, FLAWR) and a team member of the entrepreneurs club at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland (YEC), I come into contact with lots of business students who are considering an internship at a start-up and ask for my advice. I also see what seem like endless internship adverts from start-ups, both here in Switzerland and abroad, which are aimed at business students.

Before I give you my 5 best reasons not to do an internship at a start-up (especially if you live in Switzerland), let me preface by admitting that there are great start-ups to intern at — they just happen to be few and far between for business students. If you aren’t sure, the 5 points below should make it a bit easier to tell the difference.

You shouldn’t take the internship if:

1. You want to start a start-up yourself. See Peter Thiel and Sam Altman’s lectures in the ‘How to start a start-up’ lecture series for a better explanation from people who really know what they’re talking about. If you want to start up yourself, just do it. If you need the money, you can make roughly the same amount as you would working as an intern by working 2 days/week in the service industry (eg waiter), giving you great sales skills AND 5 days/week to concentrate on your own project.
2. You won’t be learning specific skills from an expert. I estimate that over 80% of business internships I see at start-ups are general ‘business development’ positions. If the role is advertised as ‘be responsible for X’, where X is SEO/social media marketing/blog/sales etc, say no and say it fast. If you’re not going to learn specific skills from an expert (e.g. ‘work on A/B testing our social media marketing as part of our growth team’) then it’s not an internship, you’re just a paid donkey they don’t have to pay well or give equity to. It also means that they are undervaluing both your skills and some part of the business — not great hallmarks of a successful founding team.
3. The wage and/or stock-options aren’t right. Don’t get taken for granted — if you are one of the very first people working on the project along with the cofounding team, it makes sense that they might not be able to pay you very much in compensation during your internship. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean you should be working for less than you’re worth, especially if you have experience or aren’t working in an area which allows you to learn vital skills from experts. Also, an unwillingness to even discuss stock-options can often mean…
4. You’re not in the picture long-term. Interning as a business student usually means repetitive tasks, long working hours and low pay — so unless you’re learning a skill in depth which you couldn’t learn anywhere else, a full time position after university/directly after the internship should at least be on the table. Otherwise, it probably means that…
5. You’re doing a job which less qualified people would be paid more to do. Too many start-ups see business students as a source of cheap labour. For some reason, business students are willing to undertake tasks at start-ups which they would never accept otherwise. If you’re interning as a glorified call center worker, delivery boy or butler, you aren’t really interning. Instead, you’re just doing a menial job for an hourly wage which real call center workers/delivery boys/butlers would refuse. Congratulations!

So here is my plea:

Start-ups, stop ripping off business students — they don’t deserve to be manipulated just because of their gullible herd mentality.

Business students — either go and learn a useful skill at university/online, intern at a company where you either have a bright future or can learn skills you couldn’t learn anywhere else, or just start your own company and learn by doing. You can find great cofounders (and some of the better start-up internships) at cofoundme.org.

In the meantime, feel free to name and shame terrible start-up internships here, or send their founders this post.