I think there's nothing better when your young (or old for that matter!) to muck in with a startup. Although it isn't Silicon Valley, I interned with two businesses this summer a loved it.
With one, we were brainstorming ideas for the product and mapping out the development schedule. You guys know what it's like - your sitting in a noisy cafe with a pen, a piece of paper, all grinning at each other as you see ideas coming together. It's even more awesome now as the products get developed (we've got one developer. He's a real trooper!). You learn how to work with other people. You learn to expand on other people's ideas. You learn to ship.
The other business I worked with is a bit more established, (an SEO consultancy) where I was working on my own within the team to produce a one-off guide to creating linkbait. It took two weeks of research, interviewing the team on video, editing video, working with the design team and writing it all up... then about a weeks editing which included learning bits of CSS mighty-fast to fix formatting errors! Hehe...
We launched this afternoon - Seth Godin picked it up! WOW! That and a few hundred other tweets and some really quite humbling comments from the rest of the SEO community.
Why in the world that we live in would you not try and connect with people and do awesome, challenging, fun stuff like this. And why would you work in a corporation?!? You'd never get anything like that kind of flexibility you get with SME's and startups.
I'd love to do what this guy did in the valley someday. Better still, I hope to get more people interning in the valley and across the world with startups. Maybe there's some money in that?
I am one of the owners of one of the companies that Ed interned at. He is amazing - proving that opportunity is there if you just go and grab it. Here's what he produced: http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/
With one, we were brainstorming ideas for the product and mapping out the development schedule. You guys know what it's like - your sitting in a noisy cafe with a pen, a piece of paper, all grinning at each other as you see ideas coming together. It's even more awesome now as the products get developed (we've got one developer. He's a real trooper!). You learn how to work with other people. You learn to expand on other people's ideas. You learn to ship.
The other business I worked with is a bit more established, (an SEO consultancy) where I was working on my own within the team to produce a one-off guide to creating linkbait. It took two weeks of research, interviewing the team on video, editing video, working with the design team and writing it all up... then about a weeks editing which included learning bits of CSS mighty-fast to fix formatting errors! Hehe...
We launched this afternoon - Seth Godin picked it up! WOW! That and a few hundred other tweets and some really quite humbling comments from the rest of the SEO community.
Why in the world that we live in would you not try and connect with people and do awesome, challenging, fun stuff like this. And why would you work in a corporation?!? You'd never get anything like that kind of flexibility you get with SME's and startups.
I'd love to do what this guy did in the valley someday. Better still, I hope to get more people interning in the valley and across the world with startups. Maybe there's some money in that?