Scoring the Perfect Startup Internship

A Princeton student’s guide. It’s that time of the year again…

So, you want to work at a tech startup this summer? Not sure where to start? Intimidated by all your friends who already have scheduled superdays at Facebook/Google/McKinsey/Goldman? Have no fear! There are at least a billion startups out there that would kill to have you. You just have to find one and convince them you’re their guy or gal.

To help get you started, I’ve compiled a little roadmap. It is by no means comprehensive but I think it’s a good place to start and it summarizes the main things to consider. Some credentials: I’ve interned at Facebook and MemSQL. Keep in mind I’ve written this from a point of view of a programmer, so apologies in advance if you don’t code.

I like to think of getting an internship as a three-step process:

1. Find a company
2. Get an interview
3. Get the job

In this article I’ll focus on Step 1: Finding a Company, and I’ll post about the other two in the near future.

Part 1: Finding a Company

This is arguably the most difficult part of the process since there really isn’t any formula for it. While choosing among big companies is kind of a no-brainer, with startups you are faced with way too many choices, and often you don’t know about any of them. It gets even worse once you start reading up startups on TechCrunch or on their own websites. It seems that 99% of startups these days have “only A players”, are working on “revolutionary technologies” and are about to “change the world”.

Here are a few ways to focus your search.

Talk to friends

There is no better way to get a feel of where the wind is blowing in today’s overcrowded startup landscape than to simply consult your fellow startup-obsessed buddies. Where have they interned before? Where have their friends interned? Which startups do they think are cool these days?

Grab coffee or lunch with a startup nerd and have all your questions answered! We are always more than happy to ramble about our great insights on those beloved topics. And we might also give you some useful tips.

Reach out to classmates and student groups

Surely your school has student groups that are interested in entrepreneurship, programming, hackathons, etc. At Princeton, those are The Princeton Entrepreneurship Club and the ACM Club. If you’re not from Princeton, find out who those groups are on your campus and contact them! Reach out directly to their presidents. They love to help out confused souls like yourself because it makes them feel important and authoritative.

Also, make sure to sign up for their newsletters. These groups often send out lots of opportunities to meet or interview with cool tech startups.

Attend events

A great way to find startups en masse are big tech events. Some examples:

1. University Career Fairs

At Princeton, those would be

• The General Interest Career Fair (early October),
• The Science and Technology Career Fair (early October),
• The Startup Career Fair (February), and
• The Internship Fair (February)

Even though these are not all startup-specific, there are always a few cool startups roaming around the floor, often with awesome alumni reps. Also don’t be afraid to go to full-time career fairs even though you’re looking for an internship. Representatives would still love to meet you.

2. Public Career Fairs

Some that I know of are NYC UNCUBED and the NYC Startup Job Fair.

3. Hackathons

There are a lot of cool startups sponsoring hackathons these days. They also often send representatives, so you can use this opportunity to meet engineers who work there, get a first-hand feel of the culture, and even make an impression. Some hackathons that are popular these days:

• HackPrinceton (duh)
• PennApps
• HackNY
• Whatever you can find on HackerLeague

Going to hackathons is also a great way to make friends with people who are also interested in startups and building cool things. It also helps you build a portfolio and a legit github profile that immediately puts you way ahead of other job applicants.

And in case you’re not from Princeton and you don’t have hackathons at your school, you should organize the first one! It’s a fantastic way to build a solid network in the tech community, and also a ton of fun.

4. Conferences

Startup conferences are a magnificent way to meet founders and CEO’s of hot new startups that are hungry for talent. Some startup conferences that I like:

• Business Today’s Startup @ a Startup Conference
• The East Coast Startup Summit
• InteractATX and the huge SXSW

5. TigerTreks and other ad-hoc events

There are numerous other random events that can give you first-hand exposure to startup wonderland. At Princeton, you should check out the Silicon Valley TigerTrek, a trip that takes 20 undergraduates to Silicon Valley over fall break to meet with hot startups, tech giants, celebrity entrepreneurs and investors. Then there are also the NYC TigerTreks, single-day trips to NYC startups and VC’s that take place about once every couple of months.

They are both organized by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club, so you should sign up for their newsletter to get the latest updates.

Read tech blogs

Up and rising tech startups get covered all the time on TechCrunch, Business Insider, Hacker News, Forbes, and some of the more promising ones even get features in the WSJ and the NYT. Scan the recent headlines too see what’s hot these days.

Check out VC Portfolios

If you’re looking to skim over huge quantities of random startups, go over the portfolios of established successful venture capital firms. Some of the biggest names in the industry include Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures (USV is mostly NYC startups).

For more early-stage startups, check out First Round Capital, Y Combinator, and AngelList.

Now that you’re loaded with thousands and thousands of potential employers, you have to somehow narrow down your choices.

What to Look For in a Startup

Once you’re interested in a particular startup (or perhaps they’re interested in you?), it is crucial to determine whether they are the right fit for you. But how do you know that? The first thing you need to do is determine what you want to get out of your summer. In my experience, the single most important thing you should do during your summer internship is to

optimize for learning.

In order to know what to look for in a startup (or any company for that matter), it is helpful to start thinking of your internship as an extension of your college education into the summer. No matter how much they pay you, the most important thing you’ll get out of your summer is coding experience. Expect to upgrade your arsenal of programming tricks by a level or two. During your summer you should learn new paradigms, new technologies, new programming languages, new editors and environments, new ways of thinking about systems design and architecture.

If you maximize learning, no matter what the “official” outcome of your internship is, you will always have gained something invaluable that is transferrable to anything you do after that.

Of course, other things are important too, like the prospects of getting a full-time job after graduation, getting a good recommendation for other jobs, getting a feel of how a tech startup lives and breathes, and maybe even earning some cash. However, all those things come secondary, and they are almost certainly guaranteed if you make it your top goal to optimize for learning.

Now that you know what your goal is, how do you know if a startup will help you achieve it? What I personally like to do is

evaluate the startup like a VC.

Besides trivial things like location, I mainly consider the startup’s

1. Team
2. Investors
3. Product

1. Team

First and foremost, look at the team behind the startup. Are they all ex-Google veterans with insane credentials? Or are they a couple of MBA’s looking for a code monkey to build their website? While I have nothing against business school graduates, if you want to learn from the best in the industry, your safest bet is to look for the startup with the brightest most experienced technical virtuosos, and they often come from the trenches of tech giants like Google and Facebook.

The best way to get to know a startup team is to simply stop by their office and meet the founders. So far I’ve found this to be the most useful tactic for filtering startups. It goes both ways — one one hand, the founders get to meet you, which immensely increases your chances of getting an interview. And on the other hand, you get to “interview” the founders and the engineers yourself, on their own turf. You can see their code, hear their vision, see what their work culture is like, how they like to chill. If you know someone who works there, definitely ask them to show you around the office and introduce you to the founders. Or if you can, go on one of those Princeton TigerTreks.

2. Investors

While team credentials are a good indicator of how likely the startup will succeed, an even better indicator is who has put money in it. Are they backed by some of the top-tier VC firms (see above)? If they’re still early-stage, did they graduate from YC? You can usually find all this information on CrunchBase or AngelList. If you don’t see any names on the list of investors that ring a bell or that show up a lot on TechCrunch, chances are you’ll be shooting in the dark.

3. Product

Finally, it’s always great if you’re passionate about the product that the startup is working on. Nothing else will keep you coding until midnight and thinking about it on the weekends. As a bonus, startups — especially early-stage ones — love it when people use their product, and you’ll get lots of extra points during the interview if you know their product inside-out and can suggest potential areas for improvement.

I deliberately put product last because I’ve personally found that it is really not that much of a deal-breaker. Our brains are exceptionally flexible, and even if you aren’t particularly crazy about the product, you can still enjoy your job, learn a lot, and maybe eventually even fall in love with what you’re working on. For me personally, it is not that important what the product is, but how difficult are the technical challenges that the team has to solve in order to make it great. And in the end, it is always a pleasure to work with amazing people, even on a not-so-exciting product. Conversely, working on the most incredible startup idea can be a nightmare if you’re dealing with mediocre people.

I hope that this guide helps you find the startup of your dreams! Stay tuned for Step 2: Getting an Interview.