500 Interns Conclusion: I GOT HIRED

Crazy to think that in just two weeks I went from feeling completely hopeless about my summer internship situation to getting hired by Wednesdays. I must thank InternMatch.com for running such a neat little competition and also Nathan for making the necessary introductions to the startups I was interested in.

Most of all, I would like to thank Wednesdays’ founders Andy and Hugh for conducting such a model interview. It was the most tension free interview I have ever had, though I must admit that getting asked for my GPA outright early on in the interview caught me off guard. The two founders asked me questions that allowed me to demonstrate my knowledge of marketing, while skipping the dreaded “tell me about yourself” question. In addition, they were very clear about what I would be doing as an intern, putting to rest my fears of just being slave labor. Most impressive of all, was how transparent Hugh was about Wednesdays. He answered all of my questions head on during and after the interview, never once resorting to a gate keeping attitude I was expecting.

I walked away from that interview with a strong desire to work with Andy and Hugh. Needless to say I am very excited to be joining the team.

Startups I believe in

This is the third and last post for the 500 Interns Competition and one of the 3 posts for 30 companies(#3for30) explaining why I would be the ideal start up intern. All 3for30 posts can be found on my 500 Interns Competition page.

Previously, I wrote about the importance for me to be able to share in an organization’s vision. For my last post, I am listing out the startups participating in the 500 Interns Competition that do work that I can relate to and believe in.

Punchd

I routinely forget to use and lose my loyalty cards to my favorite stores so I completely understand the problem that Punchd is trying to solve. I whole heartedly believe that if I had all my loyalty cards on my phone I would be getting more free coffees and that’s a worthy cause to work towards!

Motion Math

My childhood was filled with learning games like Reading Rabbit and a host of other games from The Learning Company that I no longer remember. What I do remember is that I never thought of those games as learning, but I certainly learned a lot as Reading Rabbit almost single handedly taught me how to read. I would love to be part of an effort that made games as fun and educational as they were for me for the next generation.

Visual.ly

Mint.com drew me to the power of infographics in displaying information, but it was the Oatmeal that showed me it could be entertaining as well. However, what really drew me to Visual.ly was your Youtube video particularly the ending where the smartphones displaying relevant infographics by recognizing objects through the cameras. Now that is a future that I want to have a hand in creating.

Tello

Having tabled at tradeshows and political events, I understand the type of things that customer service employees go through. Which is why I believe great customer service should be recognized and I like the fact that Tello is making that possible. A project that lets good employees get praised while also empowering consumers and business owners is a project that I want to be part of.

Formative Labs

I am no staunch environmentalist but I do believe we have only one earth and we must take care of it, not to mention cleaner air and water would be nice to have. The idea of using the social web to get people to conserve energy is nothing I have ever heard of and very intriguing. I would very much like to be part of Formative Labs and see how this idea plays out because if it succeeds, the world would definitely be a better place.

Wednesdays

Meals as we learn in anthropology are an important social affair in almost every culture and sadly it seems to be an increasingly less social affair in today’s modern world. This is why I am so thrilled about Wednesdays, it once again draws people back to the table and gets them to connect over food something which everybody can enjoy and relate to. And if the Wednesday concept gets people to solve problems and be more productive then all the better. I think this idea is brilliantly simple and I want to help it unfold.

homeboodle

My memories of accompanying my parents house shopping in the Bay Area are full of boredom, hot cars and yelling. Needless to say, it was not a very enjoyable experience, which is why I am enthusiastic about anything that makes real estate faster, simpler and less painful for the shopper, and if not for the shopper then for their children. In addition, I love San Francisco and hope to one day live in that amazing city, so if there is anything that will make that easier for me, I want to be part of it.

TeachStreet

“A life time of learning” and other related phrases are cliché but something I subscribe to, which is why I think connecting teachers with students is a great idea, especially if those teachers teach niche subjects. Say, when do you think a firearms or jiu jitsu instructor from San Jose is going to sign up on TeachStreet because I would love to help make that happen for my sake.

Nonprofits: The relevant startup experience

This is the second post for the 500 Interns Competition and one of the 3 posts for 30 companies(#3for30) explaining why I would be the ideal start up intern. All 3for30 posts can be found on my 500 Interns Competition page.

A quick look at my work experience will show that I have spent the majority of my employment in nonprofits. Questions of how significant my work experience is to a startup are bound to come up. From what I have read, startups place a great emphasis on whether or not the applicant fits into their culture. Great talent means little if it cannot mesh with the environment, which is why my nonprofit experience makes me the ideal startup intern.

In this post, I will discuss how my work experience in nonprofits has enculturated me to the many aspects of startup culture.

To be clear, by nonprofit, I am referring your local small time nonprofit organization. The small organizations that are putting the boots on the ground and doing the grunt work. I am not referring to the large international and national organizations that have their ongoing existence guaranteed.

Importance of vision

Working in a small nonprofit and in a startup is similar as both cultures are built around a strong vision. Recruiting volunteers and gathering funding is possible only with a clearly articulated vision. In essence, a strong vision that is easily shared is how nonprofits gain traction in a community.

On a similar note, staying onboard and motivated poses a unique challenge in a nonprofit. There is no way to sugarcoat it, the pay at nonprofits is terrible which means that the reason most people go to work is out the window. Much like startups, people who work at nonprofits do so because they believe in the organization. I had given up my job at UCTV which paid me twice my stipend for half the working hours because I believed in what CAUSE was doing and I loved the team that I was working with. My nonprofit experience has shown me that work is not about the money and when times get tough, to dig deep and remember the vision.

While working a few gigs in Shanghai at organizations whose visions I was not very excited about for the sake of my resume, I realized that it is not just about selling the dream to others but also believing it yourself. Working at a nonprofit or startup is not just a job, it is a dream and one that is larger than yourself. My desire to share in such a larger dream is another reason why I would be the ideal startup intern.

Size matters

During my CASIC internship, I worked with a team of ten interns, one executive director, half of a programs coordinator (part-time) and the chairman; that was whole nonprofit and I would not have had it any other way. Small organizations have a unique culture full of people who wear multiple hats, which I love. I would start the day writing a press release, transition into learning InDesign to design a handbook and then ending the day at a networking event as a representative of the nonprofit.

In addition to wearing multiple hats, I worked closely with the chair of the nonprofit, who also is one of the largest if not the largest donor. Accountability was always a major issue and most of the time, the buck stopped with me since I was the team leader. In addition, I was interacting with many of CAUSE’s donors and board members, people who had sway over the future of the nonprofit. In short, I am very comfortable working closely with the people who decide the fate of the organization.

I find comfort in the culture of flexibility and close accountability that only exists in small organizations like startups. My embrace of these cultural aspects of a startup is what will make me the ideal startup intern.

Craving Creativity and Improvisation

Lean startups and small nonprofits work with a similar budget mindset by which I mean a budget full of creative improvisations. Life at a small nonprofit is about thinking quickly on your feet and leveraging the resources and connections you have to achieve your goal. Improvisation took on a whole new level for me during my time at Shanghai Young Bakers, a nonprofit that trains Chinese orphans in French baking. Whether it was something as simple as trying to score a free color printer or figuring out how to run an event where the EU Agricultural Commission will be attending, creativity and improvisation was the key to success when money was tight.

Creativity and improvisation are things that I now crave in my work environments. I am never quite happy unless I am finding a way to think outside the box and the more mischievous the better! This craving of mine forged in my work with nonprofits pairs well with the startup culture, which is why I believe I would make the ideal startup intern.

Conclusion

As an anthropology major, I understand the importance of culture, which is why I was inspired to write this blog post about qualities that fit with my understanding of startup culture. Qualities that I have gained through my work experience in small nonprofits.

Naughtiness: A life and professional skill

This is the first post for the 500 Interns Competition and one of the 3 posts for 30 companies (#3for30) explaining why I would be the ideal start up intern.

Months ago I read Paul Graham’s essay What we look for in Founders and was inspired to write an introspective blog post responding to it. I copied and pasted the excerpt below in a word document saved it and then promptly forgot about it.

“4. Naughtiness
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.”

However, when I saw the 500 Interns Competition I could not think of a better topic to write about that would begin to demonstrate why I would be an ideal startup intern. I dusted the old file off and here is the result!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The “naughtiness” started while I was young, when my parents were the one and only “system.” I must have been one hell of a kid to raise because I was always trying to find ways around my parent’s rules since most of them never made any sense to me.

One of my parent’s rules was that they would never buy me a game console, so while my friends were happily gaming away on their N64s, Playstations and Gameboys, I had to make due with just my computer. However, I saw the light when a family friend built a computer for us and had preinstalled Pokemon Blue for Gameboy color on it. Fueled with a dream, I learned as much about computers as I could and in no time, I was playing away on my Gameboy Advance emulator. From then on, my interest in emulation and computers grew and I was playing all sorts of console and arcade games on my computer.

Fast forward a decade and I can still be found committing mischief, whether it is social engineering my way to the front of the bank line or rerouting the switch for my building to get more bandwidth. Growing up, however, has led me to put my hacking mentality to more constructive uses.

Rules and common practice inevitably create limitations and I have discovered that I find joy in discovering creating methods to overcome these limitations. One example, is the work I am doing for Shanghai Nonprofit Incubator’s One Egg One Dream project. As a nonprofit, funds and expertise are always in short supply so when I was confronted with the problem of translating marketing collateral from Chinese to English, I had to get creative. In the beginning I thought of asking the students in my UC program to help with the translations, but few of them could read Chinese. In addition, due to a lack of incentive or accountability, reliability and timeliness was going to be an issue.

That is when I devised the idea to crowd source the translation, recalling that is how Twitter and Facebook did it. If I broke up the literature into bite size chunks and posted them on an online community with Chinese and English speakers, maybe the community would translate them because it was for a good cause. That is when I remembered, my roommate had handed me card from someone at italki.com, a language learning community. The italki community turned out to be exactly what I was looking for, an active community with many bilingual Chinese and English speakers. After thinking it through a little more, I realized that this plan was scalable. If Shanghai NPI could build a reputation on italki.com, it could reliably use the italki community to translate for their future projects.

The emulation and italki stories are just one of many where I come up with a creative solution by drawing upon my past experience and inability to accept business as usual. I do not want to say I was born ready to join a startup because that would be ridiculous. However, I would like to believe that throughout my life, I have demonstrated a creative and disruptive mindset that pairs well with the startup culture and an ideal startup intern.

Notes and observations on China

I have been studying abroad at Fudan University for almost eight months now and recently quite a few people have been asking me “So what have you learned?” Usually the answers that I give out on the spot are lackluster and it gets me to wondering if I have learned anything at all! Last night, while sitting around alone at Burger King, I began to reflect on what I have learned so far.

Overexpansion

Much has been written about China’s property bubble, but it is hard to fathom when it is mixed in with news about China’s phenomenal growth. However, when you are actually at ground zero, the bubble seems much more obvious. Walking around Shanghai, row after row of vacant apartment blocks, deserted multi-story luxury malls and redevelopment projects are the norm. At night, pitch black apartment blocks sit right across the street from a construction for yet another new apartment complex. On a typical day at the multi-story luxury malls on West Nanjing road, I may see twenty or so shoppers in the entire mall, but despite this all the stores are fully staffed every day and more commercial centers are planned just one street over at Weihai road. The Shanghai city government has redeveloped an area south of the bund called the Cool Docks, billing it as the next expat hot spot. The Cool Docks have been empty since the day it opened and yet more redevelopment projects are planned with the goal of turning area in between the Cool Docks and the Bund into one giant tourist walkway full of luxury shops.

It is hard to see how all of this is sustainable given that China is facing growing unemployment and stagnating wages. I get the feeling that the professors I study under are equally as dumbfounded by how China just works despite the growing laundry list of problems. How long can the country keep defying the law of supply and demand? In my opinion, China is a gilded country with new shiny glass skyscrapers and luxury stores concealing the fact that the large majority of Chinese people are just subsisting and in no condition to support such developments. Shanghai is the richest city in China, but even its population cannot sustain the developments that are taking place in the city and to see this all I had to do was step into a mall.

Shortcomings of Chinese Higher Education

In the states, the media constantly reports on Chinese super students and how Chinese universities are graduating more students than ever. There is a fear that Chinese graduates are going to dominate America in the very near future and for a while I was in that bandwagon. However, after attending Fudan University, my eyes have been opened to the shortcomings of Chinese higher education.

For all intents and purposes, I am on vacation while studying in Shanghai as compared to San Diego. The standards at Fudan are lax and the class curve that is enforced throughout the university is extremely generous. The Chinese professors that I have had have been poor instructors and worse of all; many professors who are teaching in English can barely speak the language at all. Chinese academia has not escaped the gilded nature of the country with Fudan offering many more classes in English than it can effectively staff in order to boost its prestige. In addition, after reading a few articles and papers that a prominent Fudan professor wrote, I cannot help but question the quality of the research that is being done in China. These questions of legitimacy are further compounded by the fact that there have been numerous cases of plagiarism involving high ranking university professors.

Many of the Fudan students I have talked to have a negative view on their classes, describing it as a waste of time. Indeed, that seems to be the case whenever I look into a classroom I see the students either dozing off or reading books not pertaining to class, while the professor drones on. That is not to say that Chinese students are not ambitious, on the contrary to their behavior in class. Outside of class, Fudan students are quite studious and hardworking. Many of the students show up to class because attendance is mandatory and then learn by themselves through reading the textbook. By American standards, Fudan students lead Spartan lives revolving around academics and extracurricular activities that will make them more competitive in the workforce. Sadly, the university does not seem to be keeping up with its students.

Fudan University is generally considered the third best university in China. Chinese academia only gets worse as one goes down the list of universities. Seeing the quality of Chinese higher education for myself, I now understand why there is such a large number of unemployed graduates. Western universities can take comfort in knowing that Chinese higher education is nowhere near them in quality.

Final thoughts

“Seeing is believing” and being on the ground in China has opened my eyes to all the misplaced hype about China. After eight months, the country looks like one giant house of cards, albeit one that unexplainably keeps adding more levels.

Change of Plans

Today, the CMO of Unilever came to Fudan University to give a seminar of sorts. I had this elaborate plan to audio record the whole proceeding put it on my blog along with comments and analysis.

However, when I arrived at the building there was a line of students snaking all the way down from the second floor. Even with the help of my friend who was in the Fudan student union, the group organizing the event, I could not get in.

While roaming the halls of the building wondering what to do, I stumbled upon a Fudan KTV or karaoke competition. So, instead of learning about Unilever's marketing efforts, I spent the night watching Fudan students sing their heart out.

The competition started off pretty seriously with some great voices...

... but then there was this student who performed kungfu while singing

In the end, it was all good fun and I made some decent lemonade out of the whole situation.

Coffee with a PR professional

A couple of weeks ago, I had coffee with a Ms. Lee, a public relations professional currently working in Shanghai. We discussed the state of PR in China and the effect of government censorship in her work. In addition, like in all my discussions, we touched on what it is like to work in this foreign country.

I was looking for an internship in PR in to gain some experience, but Lee told me it was best to start my PR career back in the states simply because China’s PR industry is still undeveloped. She explained that PR in China is still very tactical meaning that it is still event driven. In a more developed industry such as the United States, PR is much more strategic. A strategic PR takes into account the message itself and how to craft the message in order to best fit the target audience.

These observations of the Chinese PR industry really struck me because I could relate it to my work at nonprofit in Shanghai. There was a focus on planning fundraising events without actually thinking about how to create a sustainable program, especially since they were trying to crowd source all of their funding. The message for the project was not very clear, but the nonprofit was not concentrating on solving that problem but rather how to generate publicity.

Lee gave an interesting angle on Chinese protectionism that I had not considered or read about before. The way that Chinese protectionism manifests itself in the PR industry is in the form of censorship of foreign companies. As the government controls all domestic media outlets, foreign companies sometimes miss out on press coverage. In a worst case scenario, they are attacked in the media and not given a way to respond, which is exactly what happened to Paypal, when ChinaDaily ran an interview from the President of UnionPay stating that all China needed was UnionPay and adding in "More interbank networks will raise the cost of commercial banks and lower their profits."

On doing business in China, Lee and I had similar observations. We were both shocked by how slow and inefficient Chinese workers were. In addition, we noted that many places were overstaffed and full of redundancies. Since we met at a nonprofit, we touched on the subject of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Her work experience in the work place gave me a better understand of how CSR is perceived by corporations in China, something that I had only read about. Unsurprisingly, there is an undeveloped idea of corporate social responsibility with companies seeing CSR as just giving money rather than a way of doing business or even a way to sustainably give money.

I walked away from that meeting a much greater understanding of PR than I came in with. It feels good when the time you put into networking produces meaningful results.