

Hackers: Intern for the Summer, Get Paid for a Year - LukeG
http://jobalchemist.com/Intern.html

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carterschonwald
I'm missing the part where an unpaid intern can support living in SF and
working up to 7 days a week, esp in software where pretty much every
internship in industry pays quite nicely

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LukeG
You're right that it's not the right opportunity for everyone. For people with
a little more flexibility (or who are already in the Bay Area) and want a more
entrepreneurial summer experience that coding for a big software company, we
think this could be pretty sweet.

You'll put SW into people's hands almost immediately, get to work through the
business implications of what you're building, and more. We also hope that
this becomes seriously lucrative for the intern(s) over the course of the next
year.

Also keep in mind that this is an experiment, in many ways. We haven't tried
this before, and we don't know anyone else who has, either. It's a relatively
risky internship in that sense, but one with pretty significant upside
potential, too.

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breck
I think it's a very cool experiment. I could see it working very well.
However, no pay and only 10% of the profits doesn't seem like such a great
deal.

To me, getting a full time job and doing affiliate marketing at night--keeping
100% of the profits, seems like it would be a better deal.

There are many very profitable affiliate companies in San Francisco that both
pay well and offer revenue sharing deals to their workers. These companies
really know what they are doing in the lead gen/affiliate space and offering a
decent base salary is small peanuts to them.

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LukeG
You could be right, but I suspect the groups of people that enjoy building
software and doing affiliate marketing have a relatively small area of
overlap.

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breck
Yes, I think you're right about that.

I read the post a little too quickly and it seemed like more of an affiliate
role than a software dev role.

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byrneseyeview
This is the worst YC clone yet. $0 in funding, for a 90% equity stake.

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LukeG
Ha _it's an internship_. It's also the only internship I've ever heard of that
will give the interns an actual revenue share. We've spent eighteen months
building the software, domain knowledge and business processes that they'll
get to leverage while learning, having fun, and making money. You're right,
crappy deal.

~~~
byrneseyeview
I know, I know. There's just a very tiny slice of talent for which this is a
good deal: if you can't make a business that generates, say, $40K in a year,
this internship pays worse than most others. If you're able to do much better
than that, though, the 10% revenue share seems pretty minor, when you could
pay some of the upfront costs and get 100% instead.

It's the only software internship I've heard of with those terms, but in New
York lots of startups looking for biz-dev interns will compensate like that.

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LukeG
Right. We would all be extremely disappointed if their work brought in just
$40K in the next year. We have more _paying_ work than we can get to at this
point, and we're confident that we can do well for everyone with this
arrangement.

~~~
byrneseyeview
If you have existing paying work that you're adding people to, it sounds more
like you're in the staffing industry -- where paying someone 70% of what
you're billing them out for is about the limit. I suppose you could argue that
there's more uncertainty, but not enough to justify that big a difference.

I do like your company (when I was unemployed, Startuply was the only job
board I _liked_ checking), but I think this internship needs to be tweaked
pretty seriously before it's a good deal for everyone involved.

~~~
LukeG
We're definitely open to suggestions.

Our thought with this was "come work with us for the summer, let's build cool
stuff and make some money, and we'll pay you a piece of what you earn _for 12
months rather than 3_. We get help when that we can't pay for off the bat, and
they get (1) cool work experience and (2) paid for a year.

We thought then and continue to feel that this is a fun, unorthodox, kinda
risky and potentially very lucrative way for some college kids to spend the
summer. There's nothing malign about our intentions, but we're resource-
constrained enough that we have to be creative in our approach.

Just because it's a rev share rather than a flat fee, though, doesn't mean
it's like the staffing industry. The staffing industry pays people below-
market wages in return for letting them be entirely reactive about finding
work. Our approach is to have interns share some risk in return for an upside
that isn't capped.

~~~
byrneseyeview
If you're open to suggestions, here's how I would have done it:

1) offer a stipend. It's going to be modest, but you're a startup, so "We'll
pay for your lunch, and give you enough money to rent a place with roommates,"
is enough.

2) Instead of ownership of revenue, give people ownership in the properties
they create. Getting 10% of something questionable is okay, but being in
charge of whatever new, successful lines of business you create is great.

3) Drop the '12 months' line. Tell people that you're looking for folks who
can create good sites, and that if they can do it in a few months, you'll
bring them on board full-time. A cut of revenue might be the right way to do
things, but it makes you sound like an affiliate marketer masquerading as an
internship, rather than an internship with a novel compensation scheme.

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LukeG
Interesting. We're trying to put together the cash for a reasonable stipend,
and will if we can. We won't give equity for intern/contract type work; almost
no one goes, for good reason. That being said, we'd love to be able to bring
someone on full time after the summer, assuming things go well. The summer/12
months was designed to appeal to college students who compose the traditional
intern market...

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cmos
I like your approach! It would be nice to at least offer them a bed in your
broom closet. When we were starting out we paid our summer interns a little
above minimum wage (one of their mom's was a tough negotiator) and let them
sleep on our couches.

They still talk about it as one of the best summers of their lives, and for
the ones that didn't stay with us, it definitely helped them get better jobs
later in life.

Part of your pitch should be (and might be) an involvement in more than just
low level coding so that you attract people who understand that working for a
startup at such a raw stage will be a unique experience that both you and they
hope will be priceless.

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nikron
I can't tell if this comment is serious or not.

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cmos
100% serious. One of them still works for us, 10 years later.

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mannicken
Ok. But what stops me from paying myself $0, working a profitable project over
summer and having all the 100% to myself during the year?

I apologize in advance if I'm impolite but it sounds like a ripoff and is even
worse than Rentacoder's slave wages.

In fact, here is my counter-proposal: come to Seattle where I live, work on my
ideas and if you're successful I will give you 50% of the profits. It's like:
work for a summer get paid for five years! I may or may not give you office
space but I guarantee that I will micromanage you and give you advice even
though I don't actually know your area of development.

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LukeG
Forget "ideas." We have working, proven software and a platform for extending
it. We have hard won domain knowledge and battle-tested business processes
that deliver. We have a pipeline of revenue-producing products that we can't
get to because we're short handed. As PG has suggested, ideas on their own are
worth nothing. We have the product and the adoption.

It sucks that this sounds like a ripoff to you. Can you elaborate on why? It
also seems like you're trivializing the challenges of "working a profitable
project over summer." This is not an either/or situation, either - most people
probably aren't trying to figure out whether to (a) intern or (b) start their
own company. The two are generally pretty distinct.

So the only thing that stops you is everything else.

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mannicken
Well, this is what it sounds like to me.

1\. We have some projects that bring us money. 2\. We have some ideas. 3\. You
develop those ideas without any pay. 4\. If they succeed, we'll give you
measly 10%. 5\. Our platform is worth 90% of your revenue-generating product.

Microsoft also has products and platforms for extending them. Adsense is a
battle-tested business process.

And as much evil as MS is, they don't practically own your company just
because you happened to built on their platform, whatever that means.

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jpcx01
Please... Leave this ad for late night infomercials.

Use jobberbase.com, build your own, and get 100%

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LukeG
[In what way is this worse than offering an unpaid summer internship, which
seem to proliferate everywhere (especially in an economy like this)?]

There are a number of white label job board solutions out there. I think ours
delivers a far superior user experience, but that's open for debate. I can say
_for sure_ that there's more to building successful sites than sticking an
implementation of someone else's software on a page somewhere.

We think we're working on some pretty fun stuff, and would love to have some
smart help for the summer. Because we don't have the cash on hand to pay
interns $20-$30/hour, we're trying a deferred compensation arrangement - which
we want to pay more, in the end.

I do have some extra sham wows I could sell you, though.

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andylei
This is better than an unpaid summer internship, but unpaid summer internships
suck. I'm sure you can find some desperate students to take this, but I still
don't think it's a good deal. Even if you're not offering that much now, I
think it'd be better if you'd pay some fixed amount for the work they're
doing.

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DavidSJ
The programming is the hard part. 10% is ridiculous.

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tptacek
It's an internship position. Plenty of CS people take internships that pay
minimum wage, or nothing at all. So far as I can tell, even Spolsky's interns
get a flat stipend. Royalties are uncommon even for fulltimers and
contractors.

I wouldn't do it, but it's not a BS offer.

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jacoblyles
I don't know of any CS students at my university that are taking minimum wage
this summer. All the places I interviewed at had a floor of about $20/hr.

Since the ad stated that they want students from very good universities, I
can't imagine their prospects would be worse.

That said, if someone takes this position, they will get far more experience
than working most other gigs.

It's not necessarily a bad offer, though the ability to obtain food and
shelter are usually factors I consider in my job search. However, I think the
comparison to minimum wage or unpaid internships is invalid. We ain't Poli Sci
students.

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chris11
I'd agree with you. I don't know much about cs students, but engineering
internships usually always pay. While looking for engineering internships the
range seemed to be between 12 and 20 an hour.

I have offered to work for free, but whenever I have done that, I have been
informed that the internship paid. Also, I have only volunteered that when the
internship was close to home. I understand that the startup might not be able
to afford to pay, but I don't really know how affordable it would be for me to
volunteer and have to pay for food, housing, and transportation.

The offer would be a whole lot more attractive if you offered housing, even if
housing was just sharing a room with another employee.

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tptacek
Ok, just for the record: $12-$20/hr is about the range I'm arguing internships
seem to land. The original claim was that interns should be making $5k/mo.

I agree with you that the big thing missing here is housing. On the other
hand, if you mostly plan on picking up locals, housing doesn't matter. We pay
interns, but we still end up with Chicago and NYC people for the same reason.

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chris11
I just reread my post. I was referring to the startup not paying, not anyone
else.

I agree with you. Royalty is a very surprising offer. But their most
competitive applicants will probably be local. I don't really know how to
judge the expected worth of the royalty, and the cost seems like it would be
expensive for anyone not local.

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rms
This would go over better if it was rev share + housing stipend.

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LukeG
I'm with you, and we're definitely looking for a way to make this happen.

