It’s Intern Season — Interning in a Startup 🚀
A collaboration between Me, Sina Meraji and Sim Jing Kiat on what its like working in a Malaysian Startup.
I believe that working in a great Startup would be a great way to learn, build yourself and change your life forever
Featuring: Me from Kaodim, Sina Meraji from Supahands and Sim Jing Kiat from Fave. Three of these startups has something in common tho, we’re backed by 500 Startups. Sina Meraji wrote few interesting pieces on Medium too, check him out!
We wrote this in our voice and we hope that you could read this in our voice too. Let’s just cut to the chase!
1. Who are You?
Sina: My name is Sina. I’m from Iran, and have been living in Malaysia since 2010. I’m one of the 18 nerds in University of Malaya artificial intelligence class of 2019, graduating this October :) I play football every weekend and love talking/reading/writing about technology and liberal arts. In July 2018 I joined Supahands.com as a Product Management intern (marking my 3rd tech internship) and after 3 months the company and I decided that I’d continue my work here as a full-time AI Product Manager. Now I’m just happy :)
Disclaimer: Throughout this piece, I actively raise your expectations about a startup internship experience, by sharing how great my experience has been. It’s an honest piece and I mean every word of it, however, some of my friends and myself have also had less pleasant experiences in the past with some other startups (most of those startups don’t exist anymore), and for that reason it is important for every student to get a good understanding of startups and tech careers in general, even for an internship. As a responsible writer and student, I’ve also included an extra section at the very bottom of my writings here and shared the context of my thoughts, for your reference. Ultimately, I guess the question I wanna form in your mind is how to find companies that are built to go from good to great and companies that’ll last. When we find such companies, we can go all in and trust them with our growth and career satisfaction. As a student, I tried learning to identify these companies by trying to learn how to build them, and while I’m not starting up my own company now, I’ve learned enough about ‘starting a startup’ to know a great tech company when I see one.
George: George here! As you can see I am just gonna use my profile picture. Always been passionate about working with passionate people to build anything! Startups always has a special place in my heart ever since I heard about them, it has brought me to a lot of places from multiple Startup Weekends to interning in a startup. A lot has happened in between, let’s not get into it hahaha! As the saying goes,
“I’ll handle the business side”
I am still learning and trying to figure out how to start my own startup especially through reading and observing while in a startup. I was a data analyst intern (still not worthy enough to use the title data scientist) in Kaodim for 5 months, it was my second internship experience, the first one was in (I guess you could call it a corporate) iCar Asia Limited or also known as carlist.my. I love dwelling and using data to make discovery and meaningful decision. Currently, a final year software engineering student.
Jing Kiat: Heyyyy! My name is Sim and I’m from Sarawak. Currently a final year finance and marketing student. Kudos to George, I get to know about startups which leads me to apply internship in startup companies in order to get new exposure during the semester break. Fortunately, I got accepted by one of the largest and fastest growing startup in Malaysia which is Fave! I joined Fave as a performance marketing intern for about 3 months starting December 2018.
2. Tell us about the startup
George: I hope I get it right! Essentially, Kaodim is your trusted place to hire local service providers (plumbers, air-con servicing, local moving etc). They’re available in both on web and mobile platforms! How it works is that you make a request, they will match you with a service provider, and you get what you need. Currently, its Kaodim’s fourth year (still counting, still expanding) and their latest funding round was series B.
Sina: Supahands has a web-based product that connects large tech companies to thousands of remote online agents to perform data preprocessing tasks.
For example if a driverless car company needs to annotate 10 million images of roads to train its AI models, instead of hiring and training new staff to perform that task, they can just upload it on our platform, so that our SupaAgents can work on the images and get paid for it, we make sure the quality of the output is great.
Jing Kiat: So, what’s Fave? Fave is like a lifestyle brand, where you can buy discounted offers ranging from things to eat, do, see, and experience — all in one App! Different from other mobile payment apps, Fave provides customers with cashback up to 30% which means you get cashback whenever you pay using Fave’s app. It’s all about more and more savings nowadays. As the world is moving towards cashless society, Fave is a must have app inside your phone. Fave provide values to merchants such a way that it brings online customers to offline (brick and mortar store). Currently, Fave operates in 3 countries which are Malaysia (HQ), Singapore, Indonesia and more to come!
3. What was your role and what did you do?
Jing Kiat: What kind of marketing is performance marketing? As far as I am concern, performance marketing is one of the online marketing tools which mainly focuses on paid online advertising. An example would be the sponsored ads you see on Facebook and Instagram while scrolling through the news feed. As a performance marketing intern, my task was to monitor the performance of the ads. From day to day basis, I pulled the data from an analytics software and put it into a spreadsheet. Essentially, what I look into were revenues generated by the ads, cost of the ads, impressions, click, and last but not least ROI (return on investment). Besides, you’ll get to learn about ways to create ads such as Google search ads and Facebook ads. You get to know how these ads work and how to improve it by decreasing cost while increasing number of clicks or revenues. I also had chance to work with other teams such as Growth Planning (GP) team and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) team. GP plan for upcoming campaigns while CRM sends emails and mobile app pushes. They’re the ones that connect with current users while Performance Marketing mostly connects with new user by driving them to the website.
George: I drink green tea. With minimum technical explanation, I was a data analyst in the Data and Strategy department and I get to work on interesting projects throughout the internship from experimenting with deep neural network, and NLP to doing product recommendation and conducting a SQL workshop, all with the aim to produce meaningful business strategy or to bring the business forward with data. More over, I was task to handle all data request from Singapore or Kaodim SG, this would range from doing writing reports/dashboard to deep dive on various hypothesis to assisting in business strategy. I was very close to every business processes or business models, learning and understanding them was crucial to decision making. On a side note, I get to join the HR during one of the campus visits! Here’s a short video for……I have no idea.
Sina: I joined as a Product Management intern and after a long and well-planned onboarding process, I focused on products that had to do with work quality at scale, via automation and optimization. With thousands of SupaAgents working from home on our clients’ data, it is crucial to ensure high output quality. Very generally, my job would start by identifying the stakeholders, and then working with them to understand the problems, bottlenecks and places where we could do better, and propose solutions to optimize the process given our time and resources. These solutions could include AI and data science techniques for automation or optimization, or they could involve UX and behaviour design and strategic thinking about what these changes meant to our business. I’d then work with engineering team to implement the solution in the form of product/features.
4. Why did you choose to work in a startup, or particularly the startup you worked at?
Sina: Paul Graham says it best:
“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four….There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of pain. For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years.”
That’s why I joined a startup rather than a corporate.
Why did I join Supahands? They meet the criteria to become a good-to-great company, and that aside, my life goal is to build world’s next education system sometime in the next 30 years. I’m dedicating the next 10 years of my life to acquiring the financial and social capital that it takes to achieve my goal.
Jing Kiat: Why startups instead of giant corporate? One thing I love personally is that you can wear casually instead of wearing formal to work every day.
There’s a study showing that Malaysian workers prefer better office cultures over high salaries which leads to me choosing Fave.
The company culture at Fave is cool, where you get a friendly working environment with learning and development opportunities which is crucial to everyone’s career growth. I always wonder how companies like Facebook or Amazon works because they don’t own any physical stores and yet still makes money. Therefore, I think Fave is a right fit for me as they’re a digital company with little amount of workers but has high revenues. Last but not least, I loved Fave’s visions on helping small and medium sized business to grow which eventually helps the economy of the countries.
George: The culture. From my experience, even working with small team to organize an event or working on a project, if the right team culture was written from bottom up, we could brave through every storm. So I am always in search for the right fit or the right culture. I wrote extensively on company’s culture and why it is so important to get it right. As Brian Chesky of Airbnb defines culture in a simple and concise way:
“A shared way of doing things.”
From the book Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman(Co-founder of Linkedin and a member of PayPal mafia) and Chris Yeh, clearly defining how things are done in a organization matters a lot, because blitzscaling requires aggressive, focused action, and unclear, hazy culture get in the way of a actually implementing strategy. I am always interested in how startup scales so quickly and I believe the company culture is one of the key component.
Netflix cofounder and CEO Reed Hastings:
“Weak cultures are diffuse; people act differently, and don’t understand each other, and it becomes political”
Some corporate has great culture but the thing with startup is that because it is so young, their branches are still fresh and could be shaped easily thus making changes/decisions much easier as compare to a giant corporate. It would take quite sometime in my opinion. Take a look at how Dara Khosrowshahi changes Uber’s company culture here.
Why I join Kaodim? Joining Kaodim did not disappoint me in search for great company culture and without shame, I am a big fan of Khailee Ng, I hope you can put the links between him and Kaodim, yourself.
5. What its like working in a startup?
Sina: Great, when you’re at a great startup. A great startup doesn’t have to be in Silicon Valley, and you can spot one by looking deep into their business model, company culture, organizational structure and how the current employees feel about work.
Jing Kiat: One word to describe: LIT🔥! In a startup, there are no borders within the workplace. Unlike corporate office with many rooms with directors inside, the only rooms we have at Fave are meeting rooms. Therefore, you get to know everyone in the company and talk to them whenever they’re free. This kind of workplace stimulates socializing and teamwork. Whenever you need help, you can just walk around and ask for help and anyone from other departments will be willing to help you out too. You can learn more because everything is new and you need to figure it out yourself. Every day, you can try something new and test it out whether its working or not. One of the principles of Fave:
“Think big, Start small, Fail fast, Scale faster”
Definitely you’ll learn a lot if you work in a startup as long as you’re willing to learn!
George: I am not sure if it might apply to every startup but all of it depends on the organization culture. Based on my experience, its like jazz music, you are required to improvise and there’s a steep learning curve but if you love learning, there shouldn’t be any problem. You can also use the phrase “fast paced”, yes, it’s fast paced only when you/culture allows it to be! Working in a startup allows you to explore new opportunities as you get to try on different types of hats! Another great thing about working in a startup is the people. Everyone in my department strives to improve oneself and each other, I definitely learn a lot especially from my boss!!
6. How do you choose a great startup to work at?
George: It requires understanding yourself quite a lot then you’ll know what you really wanted. For me particularly, my methods might be controversial or there might be points that you don’t agree with. It comes down to two key points, the culture and funding history. Pool tables or ping-pong table isn’t company culture, company cultures comes from the mission, vision and its core values, try to do research on the particular startup and understand what they stood for. There should be a specific reason why they exist. My previous article explains why culture is important:
These core values eventually ends up meaning everything, from the people we hire, who gets promoted and what we discussed in meetings. In the book Hard Things About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz talks about how culture distinguishes us from our competitors, ensure that critical operating values persist such as making beautiful products and help us identify employees who fit with our mission. As a startup, we are just a team of people on a mission, as a good culture is just what looks like on the inside.
Knowing the culture would help you filters out which startup you don’t want to work at or avoid shitty/dodgy startups. Why funding history? Well, to me, knowing which VC firms or who funds the startup is very important as it actually shows what the VC stood for. I prefer going for startup that are series B and above as it portray what stage they’re in (the number of years they’re in the industry), their ability to rise above most startups and their stability. I agree with what Sina said :
“I’ve learned enough about ‘starting a startup’ to know a great tech company when I see one”.
For a data analyst, I would prefer to go for startups that are in the industry for a long time because of the amount of data they might have, so I get to work with those data more meaningfully. I think great VC funds great company, that’s just how I think, thus I would want to know who their investors were. *Great VC gives great advice as well. I could list out a few firms that I am interested in, this is just my personal preference: Sequioa Capital, 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures and many more.
Jing Kiat: Wise words from Fave’s GM during Growth Summit:
“Team with the best players win”
For me, the definition of a great startup would be a team with some good leaders, good company cultures and strong work ethics. However, it all depends on your personal goals, passions and which industry you prefer. If you love about something like sharing economy and e-commerce platforms, you can look into startups like Lazada, Airbnb, Shopee, Tokopedia and etc.
A standard guideline for me would be choose the job you like, join team with dozens of elites, learn from them and help each other grow.
Sina: As a 23 year old (soon turning 24), I didn’t spend too much time thinking/caring about how big the brand was; but rather I cared about how smart the people at the company were. Someone once told me “Don’t look for companies, look for a good boss”. Then my friend and mentor Asyrique gave me an even better benchmark, quoting his friend and mentor:
“Ask yourself 3 questions: 1. are you working on something great that you love? 2. are you working with great and smart people? 3. are you getting compensated fairly? if the answer to 3 of these is yes, you’re at the perfect place. If only 2 of them are met, your company is fine, but you should keep looking, and if only one of them is yes, you should quit; because you can always find a place that gives you at least two!”
There’s also a Japanese concept called Ikigai that Mark, our CEO, told me about when I was telling him about my career goals. Ikigai is more inclusive IMO.
Tell us anything
Sina: I’d like to share some context about myself and my career preference, to help you filter out any possible bias in my words earlier: I always wanted to explore a non-engineering role that still involved a lot of technical problem solving. I’ve been a fairly well-performing CS student and a passionate hackathon hacker, and at the same time I’ve enjoyed leadership, marketing, strategy and thinking about organizations and human behaviour, too (some students in the faculty called me a marketing guy, while some other students called me to give a talk about creating serverless web apps). It was a major identity crisis and I spend about 2 years of my university life trying to figure out what to do after graduation. Eventually in Spring 2018 (3rd year, 2nd semester), I learned about Product Management role. I’ve noticed product management isn’t very well known among students, and it seemed like most CS students in Malaysia thought of CS careers as a binary situation in which you either become a programmer after graduation or you quit tech and become a businessperson or do something else. I did, too, until I learned about the PM role and went on Linkedin and asked my connections if any of their companies was offering a product management internship role. 2 weeks no news and one day Susian, one of the 2 super cool co-founders at Supahands hit me up and told me that they had an opening. I happily did an interview with them and was accepted to join the internship program.
Supahands has a well-defined onboarding plan for interns, like they (we) do for full-timers, and I spent the first month following that onboarding plan. An onboarding program is the process that helps a new joiner fit the company culture and learn about the company’s tools, processes, people and problem statements. It’s like the orientation week at uni, except you get paid, and it’s not a week. It’s so important that I strictly advise my juniors at UM to avoid companies that don’t have a pre-planned onboarding program. At some point in my university life I worked part-time at myBurgerLab and I can’t imagine working there without being trained for it. It was extremely fast-paced, but nobody there would be mad enough to say “You should learn everything on your own because we’re a fast-paced business”. In fact, there was a board in the kitchen that said “You don’t need to be crazy, we will train you :)” and I’ve learned that’s something to look for when searching for a good company. Being smart and able to solve problems on your own after the onboarding is a totally different conversation, as independence is a skill you should have, if you’re joining a startup. (the original fast-food onboarding analogy is from the book ‘The Hard Thing About The Hard Things’ and goes like: “People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald’s? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly.”)
In my first week at Supahands, our product lead Isaac gave me the choice to pick between a 1-month vs 3-month onboarding. The difference was quite simple to me. Simple and well-planned:
- “If you’re planning to do this 3-month internship but not continue working full-time afterwards, you’ll go through a smaller-scope 1-month onboarding, so you can spend the other 2 months working with a full-time PM on a product or feature, to get the overall experience of product management without going in full depth of the role.”
- “But if you’re planning to continue working with us as a full-timer afterwards, we’ll treat these 3-month as your onboarding. In the first month, you’ll be doing a lot of reading, observing, asking, shadowing (following people to their meetings and observe), and from the 2nd month on, we’ll gradually onboard you to our products so you and we can learn your strengths as a PM; as there are several different types of PMs in the world, depending on your background”.
I’m a long-term planner usually and look for teams that I can stay with for long periods of time so I picked my adventure here and went with the 2nd option, investing my time and trust in the probability that this company might be the one I’d spend the next couple of years of my life working at.
Prior to this investment of my time and trust and attention, I’d spent 2 years building a product-development tech community of students at UM, that my friends and I co-founded in 2016. By the time I was interning at Supahands, I’d had hundreds of hours of conversations about education, career, startup and life with friends and mentors and people who were significantly better and wiser than me, I had watched many hours of startup related videos like this playlist, had listened to podcasts frequently (including these 1, 2, 3 and more. feel free to ask me), had read a lot of interesting books (an un-updated list of which is available here) and wrote blog posts usually once a month. I say this not to assert dominance haha or to look special or to say that you need to invest that much time before joining a startup, but to responsibly remind you that while you can land an internship at a great startup, you may also end up in a terrible shady startup, if you don’t do your research about the company and about startups in general. After all, career choices are all about our intellectual and financial growth and I hope my experience, combined with the experience of other friends included in this article will add value to you and help you decide better what’s right for you.
Big thanks to George for asking me to contribute to this article, and thank you for reading.
George: Thank God for everything, good or bad. I love reading, recently I’ve been obsessed with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, his lectures and his books. Here’s a quote from the book 12 Rules For Life on the “proper aim of mankind”:
Concentrate on the day, so that you can live in the present, and attend completely and properly to what is right in front of you. But do that only after you have decided to let what is within shin forth, so that it can justify Being and illuminate the world. Do that only after you have determined to sacrifice whatever it is that must be sacrificed so that you can pursue the highest good
I always took the present very seriously, as we could never be truly sure about the future. Don’t treat your college life with the same mentality as going to a high school, you should articulate yourself to level you cant dream of while you still have the time. One more thing:
Competition is for losers — Peter Thiel
Jing Kiat:
Getting Serious on Having Fun
Going for internship during the semester break was one of the best decision i ever made! I came to Fave with a mindset: learn as much as I could, meanwhile have fun and enjoy my life. I’ve made a lot of new friends throughout my internship, had a chance to join company’s annual dinner, and marketing team outing too. I get lots of motivations from the elites too including Fave’s founder, Joel. They thought me on how to see things differently and how to encounter challenges in life. All of them had come a long way to success and therefore showed that success does not happen overnight. Warren Buffet once said that:
“Ultimately, there’s one investment that supersedes all others: Invest in yourself”
Success always come from doing the things you like, knowing what you want from life. Don’t be too serious, learn to have fun, appreciate things around you, and living best moment of your life every single day! :)
Happy Birthday Sina Meraji ✨ and Thank you to Kiat and Sina as well! Thanks to UM Hack as well. Thank you for reading :) Happy Chinese New Year :D
