My life changed when I got a job at a startup. I was 19 at the time, having just finished my freshman year at the University of Michigan. With some luck, I landed a job as an intern software engineer at a startup called UpTo, which had been backed by venture capital. UpTo is located in downtown Detroit, and I spent most of my college days with them.
It is notoriously difficult to find a job at a startup. Indeed, I applied for that internship 4 times through the VC firm that funded UpTo. The first two times I didn't even get an interview, the third time I was rejected, and the last time I got my wish. To this day, I believe the only reason they accepted me was because I was such a nasty little guy.
I'll never forget my first day on the job, especially the elevator ride from the lobby to the UpTo office on the third floor. There were two interns standing with me in the elevator room, and we talked about the school we went to. The girl on my left went to Harvard, the guy on my right went to Stanford, and I was blown away.
When the door to the third floor opened, I learned the first lesson of the startup dress code. If you've ever worked in a startup, you know what I mean by norms. This norm allows you to know a person's (or her) role in a company simply by how he or she dresses.
I won't list all the details, but it usually goes something like this: Developers wear Zuckerberg-style hoodies of all kinds, designers wear shoes in some bright hue, and business people wear Collared shirts, and venture capitalists have collared shirts with a sweater over them.
On that day, I couldn't fit into any of the above categories, I stood out in the crowd, the typical intern.
When it came time to assign me my first work assignment, I had absolutely no idea what to do. I've been asked to create a view that can draw a rectangle and then add n scissors to the right. I have very little programming experience, let alone iOS development, but I managed to get this working.
That day, I learned the most valuable lesson a programmer can learn—how to use Google, of course. I took a photo of my completed rectangle and sent it to all my friends because I thought it was pretty cool that I could get my iPhone to draw a rectangle.
Although the first days of UpTo were a little scary, after a while I started to realize what an amazing experience I was getting. I can't think of a better situation: my desk is only 2 feet away from a senior iOS developer who I can ask any questions I have at any time. A few feet away was the company's CTO, CEO, and chief designer, all willing to answer any questions I had. What I've learned is multiplying every day.
It wasn't until Friday, the second week of my work week, that I really realized what a startup was for the first time.
That day, the Madison Theater hosted the 2012 Detroit Venture Partners Pitch Day event. If you don’t know what a pitch day is, I’ll explain it here, pitch day is a gathering of startups and investors from all over the world, so that startups can raise money through investors. That day, the Madison Theater was packed, and sparks flickered in the air. My position was the worst in the theater, but that's okay, my startup career completed its "Mitzvah" that day.
Marketing a startup is an art. The promoter has to convince a room full of people to shell out millions to support his (or her) company, which in many cases is losing money. If done right, with a moderate number of buzzwords and slideshows, they can get funding. If the promoters don't do it right, they will be rejected badly.
After watching 5 or 6 presentations, everyone stopped for lunch. The organizers hired Detroit's famous Mudgie's Deli restaurant to serve us on-site, and as I sat there eating a Lockwood sandwich, I remember thinking, 'This scene is so funny, but so weird. There are probably a few hundred people in the theater, but there may be only 15 T-shirts that everyone wears with their company's name or logo on it.
Of course, those CEOs also added a coat over the T-shirt. That's when I learned about the black market for t-shirt exchanges between startups, and a person doesn't simply give you his (or her) company's t-shirt. Enough said, though, I swore I would never reveal how that worked, so let's stop there.
Towards the end of lunch, I noticed a familiar face approaching me, but I don't remember where I saw him. However, I did recognize the company name on his T-shirt. After a few seconds, I finally figured it out, he's the same dude from Shark Tank a while back!
He nodded at me—as you would if you saw your friend on the other side of the room—and walked on. I have had experience with this. Back in my high school prom, I saw the girl I had a crush on waving at me, and the end result was hehe.
So this time, I thought to myself, it's impossible for him to know me. I looked left and right behind me to see if anyone was behind me, but no one was there. He really came towards me.
He said, "UpTo, that sounds cool, what are you doing there?" (I'm wearing an UpTo T-shirt). I murmured awkwardly that I was just an intern, but our conversation went on and we exchanged emails. That was my first network outreach!
For the first time at Pitch Day, I saw people who didn't just love but love what they did, and they were obsessed with it. Think, obsessed, in that theater where everyone keeps doing what they're doing even if they don't have the money.
You might think those people are crazy, but you'd be wrong. They're all fucking lunatics, and everyone in the room thinks they're building something that has the potential to disrupt industries and change the world. Let me tell you, this mindset is contagious.
As my internship continued that summer, so did my infatuation. One of my fondest memories is the first time I ran into a stranger who used UpTo. I was on a flight to Chicago when the female passenger next door opened our app on her iPhone. I've never been on drugs in my life, but the moment I saw her using UpTo must have been the same. Seeing someone press a button I've programmed and then interact with an interface I've designed...the feeling is beyond words.
Sadly, though, the startup experience isn't always so romantic. There will also be frustrating times, like when you get an email at 3am after the new version goes live with the subject line "Everything is crashing" and the text "100% of users experience crashes after app update" ...please fix it..." Then, suddenly, the development team rallied incredibly quickly on the collaboration tool HipChat, cowboy coding, phones on the desk, crash reports on the other side keep coming.
I'll never forget my memories as an intern, even though many of them were quite embarrassing, like the time I deleted all UpTo files from Dropbox (sorry, Dave).
I could spend hours trying to explain to you what it's like to work in a startup, but I don't think that explanation is emotive if you've never been part of a startup. Because, at the end of the day, a startup is a place where you need to fit in, and with a little luck, you'll never leave.
Original link: http://www.codeceo.com/article/software-developer-tips.html#0-tsina-1-50372-397232819ff9a47a7b7e80a40613cfe1