Happy 7-11 day! Hope you got a free slushie today.
I’m back, and this time I’m coming to you from a startup in the SOMA district of SF. I’m a newly appointed CS intern at Heroes Jobs. I work in growth hacking and I primarily write scripts for user acquisition/retention.
A long journey
I’ve been dreaming of working at a startup in SF for a long time now. I’ve heard a lot about the entrepreneurial energy going on here for a while, and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of it. As a child of two entrpreneurs, I’ve always been looked up to those who are willing to swim against the tide, to work outside of the system to pave their own way to success. I’ve been looking to join a startup for some time, and this summer I finally have the opportunity to intern with a great startup and join a great team.
Workflow
Working at a startup is unlike any other job at any other company, and each startup has their own specific flavor of doing things. For example, at Heroes we each took turns cooking for a team lunch on Wednesdays and our CEO would always bring us beers on Fridays. But by and far what marked the startup was how agile and fast development was on projects, and how much attention you received from executives.
CFO or professional chef?
Even as an intern what I did had very direct results for the company. As such, the CEO although he was not technical (economics and finance major) was very interested in my ideas and my work. Working with such a small team, we all shared the same table and it was easy to see what everyone brought to the company, I could look over and see what my coworkers were working on, and “meetings” were usually just discussion between employees from different sides of the table.
A difference between startups and my friends who worked in other companies were that my hours were more flexible. I could come and go as I pleased as long as I stayed active on the Slack channel and I completed project benchmarks. However this usually meant that I worked longer days than some of my friends. For example, to me a regular day looked like:
| 8:15 | arrive |
| 8:20 | make a latté |
| 8:30 | check scraper status |
| 9:00 | check to see if accounts blocked/other errors |
| 9:30 | research ways to get more users |
| 11:30 | optimize processes, look for user patterns |
| 1:15 | lunch |
| 2:00 | check messages/comments from users |
| 3:00 | look for platforms to expand to |
| 7:00 | go home |
my latté