True Ventures’ Entrepreneur Force Pays It Forward To Budding Tech Leaders
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Do I just misunderstand the article? Do the companies themselves make up the rest? Or is this "competing for talent" claim mostly posturing?
The goal is to try to make this cost-neutral for the students participating in TEC.
When we talked to students who were considering taking an internship at a startup versus a big company, the big issue in many cases was that most startups weren't offering cash compensation. The problem being that even if students really want to try working at a startup, it is really expensive to live in the Bay Area - even for 8 weeks.
So the goal was not to compete with big companies directly on cash compensation (which most startups would never do even for a full-time hire), but rather enable anyone who wants to have experience working with a small team - the opportunity to be able to afford to do so.
Unpaid internships at American startups almost certainly violate federal labor laws, since one of the criteria for exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act is that the company get 'no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees'. Aside from the 'compliance with bureaucratic legalese' issue, unpaid internships are exploitation, plain and simple.
Minimum wage isn't that much. Pay your interns.
Addendum: I'm really not trying to needlessly antagonize you, but I think your point about cash compensation isn't very sound, because it neglects the equity a full-time employee would receive to offset the below-market salary.
It's a different sales pitch than big companies though - our pitch is we'll cover your living expense and give you the chance to work with a small team and see if a startup is the right fit for you.
Instead of equity - many of the TEC participants get to own an entire product or initiative. Ali Shah out of NYU came on board and over the summer designed and built the entire VodPod iPad App. Andrew Boni at BC was a core part of the team that helped design and push code to the GigaOM site redesign.
At an internship for a major tech company, you're pushing some live code, but its for a small part of a major property. Much like joining a startup early, you get to own major parts of product and get to understand how your work fits into the broader company building process.
P.S. Doesn't feel antagonistic at all - I'm just trying to shine a light on how we think about the situation internally. We know we don't pay participants as much as Google, Apple, etc - but we think it actually helps attract the right type applicants to the program.
We settled this over tacos and beer. True Ventures is not trying to compete with the likes of Facebook for top technical talent. That seems to be a misleading spin added by the authors of the article at TechCrunch.
True Ventures is instead trying to find people for whom the value of a summer spent working and learning at a start-up and building relationships within the firm is greater than the $12k+ pay delta. I agree that this can hold true for certain individuals, especially people looking to found their own companies in the very near future. I imagine there are many struggling start-up founders who would be willing (not that anyone would offer this deal) to pay $12k for the sort of access a TEC participant has.
Unlike what the TechCrunch article implies, this does not do much to solve the recruitment problems faced by many start-ups, nor is it intended to do so.
Thanks for the tacos, Adam!
How can we educate these team members and give them access to all the cool/smart people we meet? Essentially how can being a part of our team, also help get you ready to start your own company in a couple of years?
The greatest companies ala paypal, fb, goog, fairchild,etc. end up spawning a subsequent generation of entrepreneurs. We want that to be built into OnSwipe from day 1 and not a haphazard bi-product.
Really open to some suggestions on the above concept as it's still rough and we're working on it.
If this interests you, email me: j@onswipe.com . We're hiring (front end+back end) and I know we're doing something like this, just figuring out right approach. You can help us shape it.
I'm all for more programs like this, but I don't think VCs should be running them. HackNY.org is a similar program in NYC. The key difference is that it's a non-profit run by educators and hackers with no commercial interests. HackNY is truly paying it forward.
I now work at True and was a part of the first TEC class in 2009.
Was curious if you could go into more detail about why VCs shouldn't run these types of programs.
Our main goal is to help college students connect with startups so they can discover alternatives to the traditional big company career paths they hear about all the time at school. In the end, more people graduating and looking to join startups is good thing for the ecosystem, no matter who is running the program.
I'd propose the opposite, that all venture funds should be running these types of programs. Both to help their portfolio companies recruit and to help educate students about opportunities at high-tech startups.
P.S. If you're looking for the West Coast equivalent to HackNY - you should check out Startup Roots.