The Definitive Guide to Landing an Internship at a Startup
As a startup founder who is quite active on social media, I get a lot of internship requests from students (especially to-be engineers.) Enough applications for me to see patterns. This post is my attempt to simplify it for you if you are a student. If one of my readers sent you this link, please treat it is a learning opportunity and then ditch their startup and apply for a position at mine ;)
Always do your homework
If you’re applying for an internship at my company, the least you can do is put in the time and effort to learn what we do and who we are. Most startup founders are active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, AngelList, or some social network. Find out and stalk us. Watch YouTube videos of our pitches or explainer videos if possible. If there are press mentions, please read them. This does not take more than a couple of hours. A worthy investment irrespective of whether you get the gig or not. It’ll make you come across someone who cares. Also, here’s a dirty secret: startup founders hate to admit it, but we love ego massages.
Find someone who can vouch for you
During the course of your homework, you will usually come across some sort of a connection to one of the founders or team members at the company you’re hoping to join. It’s a very small world. Take advantage of that fact. Applying via a warm referral makes it more likely that you will get a (positive) response. In fact, a referral is a great first test that several recruiters and investors like to use. The art of asking for help is a skill you’ll have to learn in order to succeed. Your internship hunt is as good a time as any to start. If you can get one of my friends or family members to vouch for you, half your job is done. Invest time and effort into this.
Know what kind of role you want
I realize that you’re probably in your early 20s and that you’re yet to properly decide on a career path. However, there’s very little any founder can work with if you email them with phrases like “anything non tech.” Please put in the necessary effort to find out from seniors, peers, or family members what roles usually exist and what terms you ought to be using. Unless you make it easy for me to say “Hell yeah” my reaction will tend towards a “Fuck no.” As the great Dr Perry Cox once said, “Help me to help you. Help me to help you.”
Keep the CV crisp
Your CV/resume shouldn’t be over a page long. Nobody cares about the lemon-and-spoon race you won while you were in 5th grade. Nobody cares about a singing competition victory at a tech company that isn’t into music. It sounds brutal, but that’s the truth. Stick to key and relevant accomplishments, projects, open source submissions if any, and skills. You should really read this post to know more on this topic.
Personalize your email
Founders are people and not machines. Please don’t flick some template off the Internet and use it. Firstly, it makes it come across as impersonal because I sure as fuck know that you wouldn’t use the word ‘perusal’ in your email on your own. Secondly, there’s a very high chance that your friend with whom you discussed your application or shared the template also emailed me with the same template. I once had 10 applications from the same IIT which were all worded the exact same way. None of them got a response because if you’re sending me template-based emails, it shows that you’re carpet-bombing founders’ inboxes with applications. I have nothing against it. All the best to you and all that. However, it doesn’t make me feel special when I know that 30 other people got the same email. It’s a job application and not a newsletter. Put in the necessary work. One more request: please try not to let typos or bad grammar sneak into your first email to me. I try not to be judgemental about these things, but it does matter. A quick spell-check and edit never hurt anyone.
Speaking of newsletters, you should consider signing up for mine. I send out one email per week, usually on Saturdays. The email contains my favourite learnings and these can be from books/articles I read, podcasts I listened to, or mentors I spoke to. You can sign up here.
Be realistic and reasonable
If you follow all of the above suggestions and end up getting an offer, please do not mess it up by being unrealistic with your ask. Large companies may be willing to pay you huge amounts of money to train you in the art of fetching hot beverages from the cafeteria. However, at a startup you will learn so much more in a short amount of time.
Startups hire interns for very few reasons. They either want some inexpensive work done and/or want to spot talent early on so that they can hire you full-time once you graduate/drop out. Occasionally, startups are known to bring in interns as a way of paying it forward. Trust me when I say this, I would have done anything to get the kind of chances some of you get while you are in college. I had to actually put skin in the game and learn this stuff myself by starting up.
Once you understand that above paragraph, you’ll realize that you very rarely have the talent, mindset, and skills that will allow any founder to give you a task on day one. It doesn’t work that way. The biggest investment we make in an intern isn’t the money at all. It is the time.
It takes time to do the necessary hand-holding. It takes time to teach you how the real world works. It takes time to help you hone your skills and make you useful to the company. By the time that happens, your vacations come to an end and you bid us goodbye.
If done right, an internship at a startup can teach you more than your college can teach during a whole semester if not more. It is also a great way to become more employable. Most importantly, an internship at a startup is an enjoyable way to become part of an amazing family.
You can read about the lovely interns I’ve had the pleasure of learning from on my startup’s blog.
If you found this post useful, consider sharing it with a student or two to help them out. An easy way to do that would be by clicking the heart-shaped ‘recommend’ button under the post. If you find my writing style to be enjoyable, like my mother does, consider checking out my personal site.
