(Throwaway for what I think will be obvious reasons). I also had my first real internship at a YC company in the Summer of 2012 (think they were either a YCW11 or YCS10 company - they are long since dead). Was the summer after my junior year - had been doing some hackathons and side projects and was really into the startup scene in general. I still remember that my interview consisted mostly of explaining what NodeJS was (the phrase "event loop" was used quite liberally) and then after going back and forth with another company decided to fly out to Mountain View for the summer. Was pretty excited, as I didn't have too many other competing offers and seemed like an interesting, product focused company.
And I must say - what an absolute disaster of a summer. Lived in a large concrete structure where the CEO, my boss (amazing person who I credit with making the summer bearable) and 9 other interns lived. We slept in a room with 5 sets of bunk beds that led to a kitchen on one side and a back room (kind of a garage like space) behind it. Days regularly stretched from 10am to 2am. My pay was room + board and then $400 a week on top of that, which I found out was more than the other interns were making. Too much crazy stuff happened to go into exact detail but a representative listing of events(some of it good, some of it bad):
1. Somehow many of the interns + full time staff (across eng + sales) were either D1 Wrestlers or semi-professional martial artists. I actually credit them with getting me into strength training for the first time. In the back, garage-like room, however, was a wrestling mat. Many, many drunken wrestling matches were had in that room, which while no one was forced to participate in, everyone tended to get in on. I was definitely not on the more athletic side of the group and was put into many, many armbars.
2. One of the interns was very new to the software industry and a bit older. Moved to Mountain View from I think it was Kentucky. Super nice and jovial guy and a super hard worker (we played a lot of basketball that summer and did some condition training. He was not the most in shape person, but one time did sprints until he threw up), but also had a lot of emotional issues. More than once he got incredibly drunk and had to be talked down from hurting himself and others by the other interns plus staff.
3. My 21st birthday coincided with the very start of the internship. To celebrate, I chugged an entire (smaller) bottle of whiskey, and we proceeded to run around our neighborhood incredibly drunk, including a stop to Safeway carrying around a mannequin one of the founders owned. At one point snuck into someone’s backyard and chilled in their pool for a while. It was honestly a very memorable time.
4. One of the founders was going through a divorce at the time and sometimes did not handle it super well. One night he showed up at the work/live space (he had his own apartment nearby) drunk as hell and begged for one of us to go to SF to go clubbing with him. I, being a very dumb intern, acquiesced as he was pretty much refusing to leave unless somebody went with him. How did we get to SF you ask? By driving in his BMW of course! We hit easily over 100 on the 101, him blind drunk, but in the end made it out alive. Sadly, the club he had wanted to go to had closed at that point so we just ate at a Denny’s instead and went home.
5. And the last thing I’ll end with is the CEO. What an absolute scumbag. He was a physically very large human and he knew it. He would throw his weight around to intimidate those around him - thankfully all the other full time employees (who were awesome) were no slouches themselves and so were able to at least somewhat contain him. At one point, halfway through the summer, he ordered all the interns to give a status update on their projects. We all thought it was a fun way to show off what we had been working on and prepared accordingly. After the talks, he yelled at us that we weren’t pushing hard enough and that if this is how seriously we took our jobs, some of us would be fired. For a project that of course we had no way to make go faster or get more direction on (and for a lot of us was our first internship!). I forget why this next part happened, but he tried to organize a MANDATORY company camping trip the week before it was supposed to happen for us all to bond. The entire company revolted, and basically told him to go to hell. He was a lot more calm for the rest of the summer, and then (from what I remember) was basically forced out later that fall for utterly failing to do his job.
So many other things happened (we had the world’s weirdest office manager who at one point made out with an intern against his will and then felt very hurt that he wasn’t into her, despite the fact she was at least 20 years his senior) that I have seriously considered trying to get everyone back together to do an oral history as something, as I’m sure it was a time that no one will ever forget. After that I basically came back to school and did not code on the side for 3 months as I was so burned out, but eventually got an awesome job afterwards and things have been pretty good since!
EDIT: Reposted for better formatting