There are very few places in the world where fashion designers with racks of clothes occupy the same building as fast paced startup coders. One of those places is Betaworks in New York City.
Nestled on West 13th street between Theory Design, Palantir and ChallengePost, Betaworks is unique among companies in New York and in the tech world. It’s not a startup, it’s not an incubator, it’s not an investment firm.
Betaworks is a company of companies that invests in other companies.
Betaworks has around a dozen companies in its office and has spun off Bit.ly, ChartBeat and SocialFlow.
They have also invested in Tumblr, Twitter and AirBnb at the early stage.
Cool place, yea?
This summer, I was an intern at a Betaworks’ company Instapaper which is a team of 6 people. Instapaper started when the first iPhone came out. Since then, Betaworks acquired it and the company is now operating as a Betaworks startup.
As an iOS developer, I got hands on with the code base every single day. I even got to ship the project I worked on over the summer with the update that went on with iOS 8.
As with most startups, there is a fridge that gets restocked with drinks. The cabinets also contain a bunch of snacks like fruit rollups, Cliff bars and pretzels. Need coffee? There’s a fridge thing-y where you pull a lever and coffee comes out. Great, huh?
Every Thursday (one of my favorite days of the week) people demo the hacks they work on. But let’s be real, every day was pretty cool.
As a betaworks intern, you will also probably here weekly talks from the employees like Nick Barr, Josh Auerbach and Janet Balis. This is a chance for you to eat lunch with all of the other betaworks interns and then ask questions about every aspect of growing and running a company.
Betaworks is an awesome place to spend your summer. Thanks to Jhishan for inspiring me to write this post. Thanks also to Jhishan, Andrew, Ani, Hannah, Nick, Seth, Alon and Jan for being awesome people. And of course, Maya.
Jhishan’s post about his Betaworks internship is here.
