Entrepreneurship is a career path: notes from our first Internship Program
It is our goal to empower the next generation of builders to create great companies of enduring meaning and value. This past summer we launched our Atomic Internship Program for graduate and undergraduate students.
Our Internship has three main pillars:
- Value Creation: Fellows are empowered to immediately contribute and create value on 0-to-1 initiatives.
- Community: Company building is a team sport, we host events and activities to foster community in the cohort. Interns will invariably be the leaders of tomorrow.
- Diversity of Thought: Diversity of backgrounds and skills creates better opportunities to learn and expand thinking.
2020 was our Internship’s inaugural year. We had 567 applicants in two weeks. With only ten spots available, candidate selection became a challenging task. Our acceptance rate was on course to be lower than even the most prestigious colleges (1.76%). Ultimately we made some tough decisions and chose an absolutely amazing cohort.
When the pandemic hit and San Francisco went into lockdown, companies began canceling internship programs left and right. Not us. We believe it has never been a better time to start a company. Our incredible team quickly pivoted from the original plan and enabled us to host a fully-remote internship program. But this change raised some important questions:
- Can a remote internship offer a comparable amount of value to an in-person internship?
- Will the interns feel connected to Atomic and to each other?
- Would the cohort be able to learn and deliver on projects effectively?
After 12 weeks, we can report the answer was a resounding YES to each of those questions. Every week was full of CEO fireside chats from around Atomic, courses from external experts, peer to peer lessons, socials, and self-organized jam sessions to work through intractable problems.
Each intern provided demonstrable value in ways that exceeded expectations. From tackling huge problems, building custom web applications, re-designing parts of conversion funnels, intensely researching and pitching customers, building out multivariate tests and MVPs, to synthesizing huge data sets — Interns quickly became important members of the Atomic Family.
We plan to continue the program next summer and cannot wait to see what the next round of interns bring to the table. We will begin hiring for the summer cohort in February. Although we are not actively looking for interns during the rest of the year, we do encourage anyone who wants to build together to submit an application.
