A Student's Guide to Startup Internships (2024 Revised)

So let's start by answering what might be the only question that matters: is it even a good idea to intern at a startup?

Not for most people. Here's the thing: If you're going to intern with a startup, you need to be ready to work. Not to cheat. Not to do the bare minimum just to add something to your resume. There's no game to play: there's just success or failure.

And unfortunately, 90% of startups fail. So the one you work at probably will. And the people you'll work with will know that too.

So if they spend 10 hours trying to find the right student, then 20 hours training and managing you, only for you to return little value to the success of the company, then you might've just brought them 30 hours closer to failure.

But on the flip side, if you find an opportunity with a startup that you can pour your heart into, the experience could be unbelievably impactful for both you and the company.

So that's why I'm writing this--to explain everything I've learned along my journey with Catalyst and tell you how you can become a real contributor to the world of entrepreneurship.

If you don't know me, I'm Nathan Bucci and I'm the founder of Catalyst XL. Catalyst helps university students explore paths beyond 9-5 corporate careers. Namely, we help students get started in entrepreneurship. I've helped over 100 students secure meaningful internships with early-stage startups, and have been hands-on in managing a handful of those internships.

This essay is a collection of the most important lessons I've learned through those experiences, and includes many discoveries I made while interviewing startup founders about their approach to hiring interns.

How Working with Startups Changed my Life

Let me start with the absolute most important thing I've learned from my experiences.

Internships aren't about the work you do or even the people you meet: they're about the ideas behind the work that you do, and the ideas that bind the people together. Those are the things that truly stick with you, and even become a part of you.

In the corporate world, the main idea behind the work that you do may just be your desire to get a paycheck. That's not the case for everyone (especially not at first), but it is the case for most.

In startups, entrepreneurs are driven by impact and purpose. They actually want to solve a problem really bad. And they've made solving that problem their life mission; even their identity.

How do I know this? Because I've been one of them for a little over a year now, and I can tell you that words cannot express how all-consuming this life is. Everything is about achieving that mission. For me, that mission is inspiring autonomy in university students. It's why I write this blog. It's why I started Catalyst and work on it nonstop. It's why I just dropped out of college.

But before any of that, I was chasing opportunities to work at big-name, prestigious corporations. And I was surrounded by people doing the same thing.

Put simply, I was abiding by "the system". Get the grades, get an impressive job, and maybe after 5+ years of working, I'd get to experience some sense of autonomy and work on things I genuinely cared about.

It took one experience working with a startup founder to see that I had everything backwards. The culture at my university had caused me to pursue opportunities out of a desire to attain status rather than meaning. This founder was so passionate about solving a real problem for people. I wanted to experience that.

So I started exploring my own ideas, and putting them into action. And what started as a club at my school became a vessel for me to serve people from around the world in the ways I care about most.

Of course with that came more responsibility than I've ever taken on, but that responsibility taught me more in a year than I've learned in my entire life.

So if you're interested in that, you're in the right place. As chaotic as this world of startups is, I'm going to try my best to make sense of it for you. Here's how I've broken this down.

• Why Intern at a Startup?
• How to Get the Internship
  • Finding The Company
  • Showing Them You Care
  • Telling Them How You Can Help
• Negotiating Compensation
• Impressing the Team: 6 Rules
• Methods for Success
• 10 Startup Lessons to Keep in Mind
• Wrap Up

Why intern at a startup?

So that was a pretty philosophical reason for why you might want to do it. But here are 4 logical ones.

1: You'll be handed more responsibility

Startup teams are small. So instead of becoming one of 10,000 employees like you might at a big-name firm, you could become one of 10. That means you actually have the power to influence the company in a big way. You might even have an idea that changes the trajectory of the entire thing. And since this company could be the next Apple, you might have an idea that could change the world.

It's also worth mentioning that more responsibility ALWAYS equates to more personal growth and learning. And at the end of the day, the reason you do internships is to make yourself better.

2: You'll build meaningful relationships with influential people.

The startup world is more connected than you could possibly imagine. Because all of us founders have one thing in common--we're all stupid enough to try and start a company. And most other people aren't. So we group together into communities where we don't feel that stupid for doing that, and support each other along the way. So if you can impress the founder you work with, you've impressed his/her entire network. And that network might be valuable to you in ways you could never have imagined.

3: Everyone is looking for self starters.

If you can learn how to make something out of nothing and get people excited about it (which is exactly what you'll learn at a startup), you will become much more attractive to anyone who might want to hire you. And that's for a reason; the skillset you build when growing a startup is an incredibly rare skillset to have. So build those skills early in your career, and you'll be able to do whatever you want with your work life.

4: You'll make more possible.

Corporate internships have a very rigid structure, and you always go in knowing exactly what the possible outcomes could be. You either get a return offer or you don't. If you do, you get x salary for x number of years.

At a startup, absolutely anything can happen. The downsides aren't great (like the company failing), but the upsides are infinite. In the best case-scenario, you could even be brought on as a Co-Founder or C-suite executive.

How To Get the Internship

Before I dive into this, I'm going to lay out the most important rule you need to follow in getting a startup internship: make sure you care about what the company is doing.

If you don't, the whole thing is going to go horribly for both sides. I've seen this happen too many times to count, and in every case, it would have been better if the internship simply didn't happen at all.

Here's why: if the founder is incentivized by passion and you're incentivized by a resume boost, those misaligned incentives will lead to resentment in both directions.

So if you don't want the founder to resent you, your best bet is to work with a founder whose passion is similar to yours.

And don't worry if you don't know what you care about. You'll know it when you see it. Just keep looking.

So now that you know that, and assuming you're still cool with the idea of a startup internship after reading everything I wrote before this, what do you actually do to get one?

It's as simple as this:

1. Find a company that's doing things that you care about.
2. Show them how much you care.
3. Tell them how you can help.

Yes, I know there are more technicalities to work out. Like how do I reach out? What do I say? How do I know if they're hiring? What about pay? Do I have to work for free?

I'll get to those. But for now, just keep those three steps in mind--everything you do in pursuit of a startup internship should be classified as one of those things.

1: Finding the Company

Notice how I didn't title this "Finding the internship". That's because if you can sell yourself well enough, it won't matter if they were planning on hiring interns or not. Startups make decisions on the fly, and if they really want to, they can hire you tomorrow.

But that might just add to your stress and uncertainty. Because how do you pick from all startups? By knowing where to look.

One simple, easy filter for legitimacy is whether or not a company is venture-backed.

If a company is venture-backed, meaning it has received funding from venture capital investors, that instantly increases the statistical likelihood that the startup is going to succeed.

It also means the company is much more likely to have a bunch of cash that they could pay you with. But don't count on that--they're probably already spending it too fast.

But neither of the above statements are true for all venture-backed companies. So you could add another layer, and only look at startups who are backed by top venture capital firms. These are firms that have stablished track records of success in picking winners, so their selection of a company may indicate an even more elevated likelihood of success.

Firms often post their portfolios on their website, like the one you see here. Pages like that could be an interesting place to start. Personally, I'd probably start with the YC portfolio directory or the Techstars directory.

LinkedIn can also be a phenomenal resource. But you do have to know how to use it, so here's how I would do it if I were you.

But this all begs the question: should you only work at companies that are venture-backed?

No. Venture-backing shows a little extra promise in a company, but you can absolutely find incredible opportunities to work with companies that aren't venture backed. You just have to do your own diligence to determine if the company is a fit for you.

Doing Your Diligence

For any company you're hoping to work with, venture-backed or not, it's important that you have your own boxes to check before moving forward with that pursuit.

So I'll share what I would be looking for if I were to look for a startup internship today.

My goal would be to answer these questions:

• Are they solving a problem that I care about?
• Does the business make sense? (what they do, how they do it, and how they make money)
• Are the founders genuinely committed?
• Do I get along with the founders?

Honestly, that's about it. If the answer to those four questions is a big "Yes", then most of the other things I'd be concerned about will be taken care of. If I can work with people I like on a company that I genuinely believe is solving an important problem well, AND I know they have big ambitions with the company, how could I pass up on that opportunity?

You can get those questions somewhat answered just by stalking the company and founders on Linkedin and other socials. But for the most part, those are questions you can't fully answer until you get on a call with the team.

There's of course some more nitty gritty details to this like pay, job requirements, etc., but I'll explain how to get that information in the next few sections.

2: Showing Them You Care

I can confidently tell you (because every founder I've ever spoken to has told me) that this is the number one thing founders look for in anyone they work with. They need to know you care about solving the problem and carrying out the mission.

And it's a lot easier to show them that if you actually do. So again, make sure you care about the startup before you do anything else.

But assuming you care, the first way to show them is by taking the initiative to reach out authentically and intentionally. So below are some guides to doing that.

Outreach

There are some common themes in the above guides, so I'll lay those out here in case you didn't read through them:

1. Prioritize relationship building over asking for a job. The goal is to get them to reply and to get them on a call. That's it. Show an interest in their expertise and mentorship--not their ability to hire you. You don't want to send a message that would allow them to quickly reply with "we're not looking for interns right now".
2. Demonstrate your insight. One problem many founders face is that nobody understands what they do. If you show that you do, you've instantly made it into their inner circle.
3. Show that you're a self-starter. The founder simply doesn't have time to manage interns. Try to show that you have ideas that you can run with without too much oversight from them. Don't be overbearing and try to change the whole company--just show how you can put attention towards something they're not putting enough attention towards.

So like I said, reaching out authentically and intentionally by following the above guidelines is the first step in showing the founder that you care.

But how do you continue to demonstrate that deep care and interest throughout the rest of your communication with them? Namely, what should you say if you do end up getting a call with them?

The Call

In a phone call or video conference, the three points above still hold true: prioritize relationship building, demonstrate your insight, and show you're a self-starter.

Concretely, the call should be about 90% geeking out about them and their company, and about 10% offering help.

That's the formula I've seen work best. I know 10% doesn't seem like much, but the goal with that 10% is just to schedule a follow-up call about you helping out.

And for that to go well, you need to crush the 90%. So here's how: ask good questions, and listen to the answers.

What do I mean by that? I mean don't just go in with a list of questions and make sure you get answers to all of them. Start with something like "So what made you want to start this company?" Then, listen to their response.

Don't sit there contemplating what you're going to say next. Listen, and respond appropriately like you're having a conversation with a friend. Remember, all you need to do is geek out with them about their story and their work. Which should be easy if you're actually interested in what they do.

It also helps if you can do an extensive amount of research into the company and founder beforehand. If you ask questions that are clearly answered on their website or socials, they'll assume that you're not as interested as you say you are.

So that's showing them you care. It might seem like we haven't actually broached the topic of selling yourself yet, but I can confidently tell you that demonstrating your interest and insight into the company is going to influence their decision to bring you on far more than your actual skills and qualifications.

But even still, we should cover how to nail your pitch and secure the internship.

3: Telling Them How You Can Help

Once you've spent plenty of time asking insightful questions, geeking out like I mentioned, and gaining a deep understanding of their mission and vision, you're free to make a selfless offer to help out.

But what you shouldn't do is only pitch your desire to learn. That desire is important and the founder will love to see your curiosity, but remember that at the end of the day, this is a business transaction. Or in other words, an exchange of value. So it's important to keep in mind that in order for it to be worth doing, both sides need to be better off.

So let's dive into that quick, and look at this purely transactionally.

An Internship as a Business Deal

Founders' most valuable resource is their time. And with the massive amount of responsibility they have, you can bet that they already have an established breakdown of how they spend it. By asking to work with them, you're asking to take some of that valuable resource of theirs.

And that's completely fine; as long as they can feel confident that the time they're going to spend on hiring and mentoring you is going to yield positive value for the business.

So it's as simple as the ratio of time input/value output for them. If they feel that the cost of their time input is greater than the value you create, they won't be motivated to work with you. If they feel the cost of their time input is less, then it would be a bad business decision not to hire you.

Pay, of course, factors into this as well, but we'll touch on that shortly.

So now that you know that, what do you do about it? Put simply, you decrease their perceived time input, and increase your perceived value output.

And the best way to do that is by proposing a role for yourself. Doing so accomplishes all of these things:

• Demonstrates that you have your own ideas for the company that you can work on with minimal oversight
• Gives you added control over your own experience
• Clearly outlines the value of you joining the team

For example, maybe you realize that a company's customer base primarily lives on Instagram. But the founders aren't familiar with Instagram, so you offer to take charge on establishing a presence on that platform. Maybe you can demonstrate success you've had with marketing on Instagram in the past, or you can simply explain that you have a lot of time to put into figuring it out.

But in any case, you're clearly showing that once you join the team, the company is going to be doing more than it was before. You're adding time and resources to the team. Not taking them away. And in this case, you'll be making a direct impact on their most important metric--revenue.

Which brings me to an important point: whatever you propose, try to offer help in areas that directly help the company make more money. This will make the process of measuring your impact on the company's success much simpler for both you and the company, and it will help you prioritize tasks/projects based on what is most impactful. Plus, it drastically increases the likelihood that you'll get paid.

Making an Offer

Offering help should be almost like a sales call. You should go in with an offer in mind, spend the call learning more about what they might need(the geeking out part), then when you find out, make your offer in their terms.

In regard to startup internships, here's what that means: know the value you can deliver to them, learn more about how they operate, then explain the value you can offer in a way that's relevant to them.

What you don't want to do is say something like "Is there any way I could help you guys out?" That would require them to figure out if/how you could fit into their operations, and they'll either stall that decision or just say no.

Before you go saying "But I don't have any skills" or "I don't know what I could help with", I'm going to give you a laundry list of things almost any startup would love help with. And the good news--most of them require little to no skill or previous experience. Just will power and time to figure out how to do them well.

Where to Offer Help

There are four main areas where I've seen interns shine (which I guess are just the four main areas startups have to cover), and those are growth, fundraising, product, and organization.

I'll quickly go through all four of these so you can decide what's most interesting to you. Whichever area you want to be in, make sure you ask about that most in your call so that you can make a grand-slam offer when the time comes.

Growth

Growth covers anything that makes the company's product or offering known to more people.

For interns, that often means things like managing social media pages, putting marketing materials together, or sometimes even outreach.

Companies are never satisfied with their growth efforts. They either want to be doing more in their existing channels, or they want to market in more channels. That dissatisfaction is your opportunity.

Some channels to think about: paid ads, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, direct outreach, email marketing, and podcast apps. Almost all companies use one of those as their main channel, and wish they were on more of them.

Whichever one of those sounds most interesting to you, I guarantee they need help with it. If you spend a lot of time on one of those platforms, I'd of course try to focus on that one.

And even if the channel they need help with isn't in your domain of expertise, pitching that you want to invest time and effort into figuring it out should be more than enough.

And one specific point I'll make: if they do a lot of outreach, most founders would kill for someone to reach out to more people on their behalf and funnel more calls to their calendar. That might not sound like much fun, and it probably isn't, but it's hugely valuable, very likely to get you paid, and could teach you a lot.

But to find out how you can best help out with growth, like I mentioned before, just ask about their approach to growth. You can ask things like "What's the hardest thing to spend enough time on?" Or "have you thought about marketing on xyz platform?" There's always a gap you can fill.

Pro tip: Read 100M Leads by Alex Hormozi to understand every area of growth you can help out in, and how to optimize those areas. You can get it as a free audiobook on Spotify.

Fundraising

When I was heavily involved in organizing startup internships, many of them were focused on fundraising. Fundraising covers any and all tasks that further the company's ability to secure money from sources besides revenue.

Those sources are typically venture capital funds, angel investors, government grants, or other types of non-dilutive grants.

Tasks you might take on in fundraising are growing the investor pipeline and assembling fundraising materials. Which are deliverables like pitch decks, investment memos, financial models, projections, and a data room to house it all.

That might sound intimidating, but the founder might be just as intimidated by those things as you. And that's why they might want your help.

Working in fundraising gives you an amazing glimpse into the startup ecosystem overall. It's highly network-driven, and might lead you to meet some wildly cool people.

You'll also get an all-encompassing view of the company you're working with, which will give you more insight into what it takes to start a successful business.

In my experience, it's typically finance students who take the greatest interest in this. But any student can figure it out.

Lastly, this is another very high-value way to help a company, as success directly ties to more money for the company. Which again means you're more likely to get paid if you can deliver results.

Product

You can think of product work as any task that aligns the company's product with their customer's needs.

For those who love the process of ideation, getting feedback from customers, implementing new features, and/or doing the actual product development work, this is the place to be.

Most students I've met in STEM fields tend to aim for this type of role. Technical skills do of course help here, but extensive technical acumen isn't required.

Many founders don't have tons of programming experience when they start building their product. They figure things out as they go. So if you're interested in development, as long as you know the basics, you should be good to go.

With that said, I know there are plenty of students interested in product who have varying degrees of technical skills, and some with almost none. So I'll give some examples of tasks you can take on at different levels.

Like everything else we've talked about, if you want to be in product, just ask the founder/team about how they approach product. Then find the gap, and offer to fill it.

I'll admit this can be a harder area to be concretely valuable in, and generally most of the tasks we mentioned here should be done by the founders. But some companies do still need help with these things, so I wanted to include them.

Organization

Organization tasks are tasks that are necessary for the business to operate effectively, but not core to the development or delivery of the product.

Often times, there's just a bunch of administrative work to be done in order to make sure the company doesn't break. And a lot of it is stuff the founders would rather not do.

Some of these things include HR, IT, and legal. IT, or information technology, is mostly where I've seen interns take responsibility. That means databases, automations, etc. If you're someone who likes to optimize systems and help things run smoothly, this is a huge way to add value.

And something to keep in mind: the primary value you're adding when you take this on is the time you're adding to the founder's calendar that they'll then be able to spend on the things that matter most to them. So when you make an offer to help with this, try to emphasize that point.

Some good questions to ask that could open up this type of opportunity for you are "What does your day-to-day look like? In a perfect world, what would you spend all your time on? What would you spend none of your time on?"

Now that you know all of that, you can decide which of those categories is most exciting to you. Then, like we mentioned, you can ask a bunch of questions about it in your call with the founder. And once you understand what they need help with, you can offer that help.

The Pitch

This is that last 10% of the call where you make an unsuspecting, selfless, generous, and ideally somewhat specific offer to help the founder.

I won't overcomplicate this; it should be as simple as "Do you guys need help with xyz? Based on what you said, I could definitely spend some time looking into (specific area). I love the mission and vision you have for this, and would be happy to support where I can."

If they say yes, the next thing you want to ask is "How could I learn more about what you've done in that area so far?" They might say a meeting, or they might say they can send you some things to look over.

If they don't suggest a meeting, then you can say something like "Would you want to set up a follow-up call? I'll look over the things you mentioned then there we can talk about some ideas."

Don't force that follow-up call if it doesn't feel like the natural next step. There's nothing wrong with doing some research afterward, then send a message asking them for a call a day or two later.

The follow-up call is where you can start to really show your value and get them excited about you helping out. That's where you guys can agree on exactly what project you should start with, when you should meet every week, etc. More on this topic in "Methods for Success".

And you're not going to want to hear this, but don't bring up compensation in either of these calls. Remember, this has to be a selfless offer to help out. If they're a good founder, they'll bring it up themselves. In a couple sections, we'll get more into the issue of compensation.

All in all, there are a million ways to help startups. So take a truth-seeking approach with the founder to find out what role you could take on that would allow you to add more value than you'd be taking.

And of course, make it clear that your desire to do this work is out of a belief in their company and their mission.

Transparency

As you go through this entire process of communicating with the founder, I cannot stress enough the importance of transparency and truth. Be unbelievably honest about what you can help with/what you might need some time to figure out. Don't just say what you think they want to hear.

Founders at times expect the world from students. But that's most often because students tell them they can give them the world. Don't do that. You don't have as much time as you think you do. I know because I was just student, and I made the mistake of overpromising almost every time I committed to something.

Take careful consideration of your class schedule, extra-curriculars, and everything else that's important to you. Communicate those commitments early on, and you will massively decrease your risk of disappointing the founder.

On the other side, make sure you get the truth out of them. Do your best to understand their expectations so that you can come to an agreement on things like weekly availability, compensation, etc.

Negotiating Compensation

It's time to address the elephant in the room: if you do secure work with a startup, are you going to have to work for no pay?

No. Or at least not forever. But in my opinion, you should start unpaid. And I have some reasons for that.

First, like I mentioned, the offer has to be selfless and genuine. This just starts the relationship off on the right foot and increases the possibilities of what could come out of it long term.

Second, you're raising your status in the founder's mind. Rather than be this pesky little student trying to take their time and money, they'll see you as a bright, inspiring, ambitious student who's helping them out of the goodness of your heart even though you don't need to.

Third, if you ask for money right away, you discredit everything you said before that. They'll think "Ohhhh... so that's what this is about." You need to be all give, no take.

Fourth, they're probably not paying themselves. And if they are, I'm sure there was a time when they weren't. Either way, they don't need money to be motivated to work on the company. They're motivated by passion. By not asking for money, you prove that you are too.

So to sum that up, not asking for money increases their respect for you, makes them feel like they owe you something, and ultimately is a long-term investment in yourself.

Even though you won't get paid right away, that increased respect and appreciation might lead to higher pay down the line, or even a higher percentage ownership in the company.

I know you're thinking "Well fine, but how long do I have to wait?" Probably not long. When you offer to help someone, they generally feel bad if they don't offer something equally valuable in return. If it doesn't happen in the first call, it will likely happen in the second.

But whenever it happens, you should know how to approach the conversation, and that starts with knowledge of the possible ways they might compensate you.

Compensation Structures

The first structure I'll touch on is the one that's probably the most ideal to you, and that's wage-based pay. Meaning the company pays you a fixed amount of cash over an agreed amount of time. This can be hourly, but I've also seen weekly or monthly stipends.

Believe it or not, this structure is often ideal for the startup too. The only problem is that not all startups have the cash to make it happen.

So which ones do? Like I mentioned before, venture-backed startups are a great place to start. And not only venture-backed, but also later-stage, meaning series A or later (though seed stage companies can often qualify as well).

These later-stage companies are also more likely to have a team that's larger than just the founders, and will have more bandwidth to be able to assist and mentor you.

But I'll make this point too: later stage startups tend to be less interesting than early-stage (pre-seed and seed) startups to work with. This is simply because the more mature the company and the larger the team, the more narrow the box you'll be put into as an intern. So if you do pursue later-stage companies, do your best to make sure you'll still get the exciting startup experience you're looking for.

But how do you find out what stage a company is? There are a few ways.

Now let's say they don't have a whole lot of money. Does that mean they can't compensate you? Not at all. Companies at the earliest stages may offer compensation structures other than a wage, such as commission or equity.

Commission is a percentage of the profits you generate for the company through sales, and equity is a percentage of ownership in the company itself.

Equity will likely be worth very little when you get it, and of course has the risk of being worth nothing in the long-term. But if you truly believe in the company's success, equity in it could be life-changing for you. Just understand that if pay is a requirement for your livelihood at the time you take the internship, this compensation structure will not put any cash in your pocket in the short-term.

When companies are just getting off the ground, I believe commission is a fantastic payment structure. Because there's no cap--the amount of money you can make is only limited by the amount of effort you can put in. Just look for signs that people actually want to buy the product before accepting this type of payment (ask the founders about revenue, traction, etc.).

Commission-based pay is of course only applicable to interns working in growth. For example, if I were to help the company start marketing on Linkedin, I could ask of a percentage of every sale that comes through Linkedin.

I wanted to include that section so that you could take all of that information and have an honest, informed discussion with the founder of the startup about your compensation as an intern. So think about what type of pay you would be willing to accept, and communicate it to the team you hope to work with.

Impressing the team: 6 Rules

So you've secured the internship. After you've established a strong foundation of transparency like I mentioned above, it's time to deliver on the commitment you've made to the founder and to the company. And it's time to make sure you get the most possible value out of your experience.

And as far as I can tell, the best way to do that is by following these 6 rules:

1: Take initiative

Your job is to make the founder's life easier, not harder. Try to run your own internship. Be proactive in establishing weekly meeting times with the team. Set ambitious goals and deadlines for yourself that they can get excited about. If you can, have ideas about what to work on and organize your projects yourself.

Your ability to take that approach will depend on the company. Some will want to impose more of a structure on your internship, while others might want to give you a lot of creative room. But at any internship, the more initiative you take and the more trust you build, the more creative room you will earn.

A simple way to take initiative that I've already touched on is finding work that you can make your own. Meaning work that nobody on the team was giving attention to, or has the necessary skills to tackle exceptionally well.

If the role you take on is something the founder or team is already heavily involved in, all of your work will have to meet their standards. If you find work you can make your own, the team probably won't have any standards.

2: Challenge the founder

If there's anyone an entrepreneur respects, it's someone who can get them to think. Ask them deep, insightful questions about the company, their work, and even their lives. Force them to think about things they don't always have to think about in their day-to-day job of managing the company. You can even question things about the company's strategy, and propose different ways to approach things. Your ideas probably won't be great, but you and the founder will both learn something from talking through them.

3: Seek mentorship

Since I'm sort of still a student, I can confidently say one thing that ties all of us students together: we have a lot of blind spots. So you might as well say it out loud and learn as much as you can while you have access to wise, accomplished people who can remove those blind spots for you.

4: Be ready to teach yourself things

Part of growing a startup is overcoming any barriers there are to that growth. At times, those barriers are the knowledge of you and the team, or lack thereof. So you have to remove those barriers by learning. For me, I had to learn how to cobble together the tech and automations that run Catalyst myself as a non-technical person. At first it didn't seem possible, but once I opened my mind to learning whatever I had to learn to make it work, it somehow came together.

I'm sure you've had experiences like this too--learning something because you had to in order to achieve your goal. That is the story of startups, and it will be your story when you start working at one.

5: Build your own relationships

No matter what startup you work at, they're going to have a lot of connections. Customers, partners, investors, other founders, and other communities they're involved in. So of those people, find out who's interesting to you and see if you can find an excuse to have a meeting with them. In those meetings, do what we previously discussed--ask good questions, and listen to the answers.

6: Measure your success

Startups track their success through their KPIs--numbers like revenue, users, etc. In whatever role you take on, make sure you understand what number you're trying to drive up. Quantifying your output this way will help make sure you're not letting yourself become distracted with work that's not a priority. It will also allow you to set concrete, quantifiable goals, and impress the team by achieving or surpassing those goals.

Methods for Success

So the above points are the what. Now we need to talk about the how.

The make-or-break period is the first week of working together. There's usually a lot of excitement and optimism at first, but this week is when you need to figure out how you're going to maintain that optimism and excitement in both you and the team. Because unless you make a plan, those happy feelings can quickly turn into frustration.

You would not believe how many students I've had come to me saying things like "yeah... I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be doing right now" or "I've asked the founder about this but he won't respond."

Here's the thing: startups generally don't know what they're doing when it comes to managing interns/employees. And this becomes painfully obvious in scenarios like the ones I mentioned above. When things like that happen early on in the partnership, it sets a tone of low expectations, low work output, and lack of responsibility overall.

So it's best to take it upon yourself to establish a clear plan for success quickly (by the end of the first week at the latest). A plan includes detailed structure around:

• Correspondence (meetings, ongoing communications)
• Workflows (projects, deadlines, etc.)

That means answering the following questions.

For correspondence:

• How often will you meet with the team and for how long?
• Who will be your main point of contact (POC)?
• What will be the primary medium of communication? (text, email, Slack)
• What hours of the day will you and each team member be responsive?

For workflows:

• Where will projects be organized? (notion, Google drive, etc.)
• How will projects be organized? (more details below)
• What do we hope to accomplish? (double in users, establish a presence on a new platform, implement x new features, etc.)
• What are our KPIs?
• What is your first project?

That last one is crucial--make sure you end the first week knowing exactly what you're going to get done for the company the following week.

If you ask those questions, the team at the startup should be able to answer them. But if that's not true in your case, try to come up with answers yourself. This is that initiative we talked about before. Make their lives easier by proposing ideas and solutions that alleviate the need for them to make decisions.

One major way you can streamline the team's effectiveness is helping them decide how their projects are organized. Figuring this out drastically increased my productivity as a founder, and was a massive help for the teams I was a part of as an intern in the past. So if you're interested, I'll detail how I prefer to organize tasks below.

So that's my two cents there. Be organized and methodical in your efforts to drive the company forward, and your efforts will come back to you in incredible ways.

Duration of the Internship

Something you should definitely know: startups almost always are going to hope that you can stay with their team for the foreseeable future. They rarely bring on interns with the intent that those interns will leave after 8 or 12 weeks.

So with that in mind, communicate early what your intentions are long-term. Would you stay with them full-time if all goes well? Or is this just meant to be a temporary learning experience for you?

No matter your situation, the wisest thing to do is work with a company that you would work with long-term if your situation allowed. I had an amazing internship lined up when I began working on my startup, but ended up dropping it when I saw that my work with Catalyst was a better opportunity.

All this to say, make sure to approach these things with an open mind about the future.

10 Startup Lessons You Should Know

Though I've only been in this game for a couple years, I can confidently say I've learned some life-changing lessons that you should absolutely know if you plan on doing any sort of entrepreneurial work.

The above points were specifically about interning at a startup. Now, I'll go through some general points about making a startup company work. Most of these are things I did poorly, and had to learn from my mistakes.

Though this is most applicable if you are the founder of a startup, these lessons apply to anyone on the team of a young, growing company. Your status as an intern does not take away your ability to massively influence the company with your perspectives and work output. So be sure to keep these principles in mind.

Many of these lessons are derived from the wisdom of Y Combinator. Which brings me to my first lesson.

1: Seek wisdom from authority

The internet is an amazing thing: rather than learn hard lessons yourself through mistakes, you get to learn them simply by listening to the entrepreneurs who already made the mistakes for you. When we started Catalyst, we had no idea how we were going to spend that first summer. But it was the wisdom of mentors and thought leaders that gave us a sense of direction. And they taught us this:

2: "Keep it simple stupid"

Our company's mission to inspire autonomy in university students is deep and complex. But when you boil it all down, our business function is relatively simple: we match students with startups. But at first we didn't realize that was our core business function. So we had no direction. If at any point you're confused about what you should do, think about the simplest thing you need to do for the business to work, and the simplest way you could do it. Then, make everything else you do a way to make that simple thing better.

3: "Do things that don't scale"

This is one of the most prominent ideas in startup culture, coined by YC Founder Paul Graham. Founders often think that before they do anything that involves users or customers, they have to spend months meticulously building their company and product to prepare it for scale, or the massive onslaught of users that will surely want the thing they made.

But the truth is you're much better off doing something that accomplishes the simplest function of your business and teaches you in the process. We started by running 12-week cohorts where we'd work with less than 50 students at a time, teach them about startups, then match them with startup companies to intern with. Now we're launching products and content that are built for more "scale". But we never would've been able to do that without the lessons we learned from running that program.

4: Launch fast and iterate

This is pretty much the same point I just made, but I'll go ahead and double down on it: the sooner you can get something in the hands of users or customers, the better. And by the way, you should absolutely charge for it. By doing those things, you quickly learn: 1. if people are willing to pay you to solve their problem and 2: how people want you to solve their problem. Then you can take those learnings and iterate your product or offering accordingly.

5: Learn from your customers

Your business won't work if your customers don't want what you're selling. So find out what they want. Ask them what they want. Don't assume you know exactly how to market/sell to them, exactly what to build for them, or exactly how to solve their problem. Assume you know nothing, and throughout the lifetime of the company, always do everything to can to understand your customer and how you can best serve them.

6: Give, give, give

In order to build a brand and build community, you have to be willing to give value to your users or customers for free. This way you can earn their trust, and there's no pay wall in the way of you being able to make the impact you want to make. And no matter how valuable your free content is, the fact that it's free will always show potential customers that your paid option is much more valuable.

7: Set KPIs

This is probably the most basic tip I'll give, and I already touched on it when I said to "Measure your success", but this makes all the difference in terms of a startup team's productivity. When you set KPIs, you quickly develop what I like to call your "BS filter". Meaning you can quickly look at a project or task and know if it's BS based on whether or not it impacts your KPI. The most basic KPIs are revenue and users, but there are some (not many) exceptions.

8: Just build product and talk to users

Everything you do at an early-stage startup should be a variation of one of those two things. If it's not, it probably isn't productive. Remember, your entire mission is to reach product-market fit. Which is when you've successfully made something that a significant target market really wants. The only way you get to that point is by making stuff, seeing what your target customer likes/doesn't like about it, then making your stuff better. Then doing that again and again.

9: Under-promise, over-deliver

Startups have a tendency to be overly optimistic about what they can accomplish in any given period of time. Sometimes, that's amazing. But sometimes, that can be a great way to set yourself up for failure. Those who have been following my work know that I'm still learning this lesson. So don't be like me: communicate achievable goals to yourself, your team, and your users, and blow those goals out of the water.

10: Focus.

One of the best definitions of focus I've heard is "The elimination of alternatives". Some of my most important decisions that supercharged Catalyst weren't actually decisions about the company, but decisions to reduce my other commitments. If you strongly believe in something, and working on that thing always teaches you new stuff and makes you better, why wouldn't you put more of your time into it?

The above points barely scratch the surface of what I've learned in the past couple years. For every lesson or nugget of wisdom I learn, I write a blog post on this same page. So if you're interested in this stuff, be sure to subscribe with the purple "subscribe" button and check out some other posts like Outward and Forward, How to Start a Startup on Accident, The Problem of College and Creativity, and Are You "Authentic"?

Wrap Up

I know this was less of a blog post and more of a mini textbook, but I hope it helped you start to make sense of the world of startups and give you some ideas about how to get yourself involved.

I've found an unbelievable amount of meaning and fulfillment in this space, and I wrote this to open up the same opportunities I've had to more students. If this guide left any questions unanswered, my email is nathan@catalystxl.co.

And hey, if this was interesting to you, you may want to check out Catalyst. We're a whole lot more than this essay--our 4-week Fellowship is built to help students find out what it means to build their own ideas, create value, and do work that's most meaningful to them.

So with that I'll close this off, and commend you for making it all the way to the end. I know how stressful it can be to discern your path and to search for interesting opportunities. But I know from experience that if you aggressively pursue meaning over all else, the right opportunity will come at just the right time. Be honest with yourself about what you're passionate about, and actually focus on that. You won't regret it.

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