After sifting through various online job postings, I found startuply, an online job board that features startup jobs at startup companies. Maybe it was the whole story of how Google started out as a startup company themselves or the fact that there are several, very interesting startup companies with very interesting ideas currently out there now but there was a part of me that was intrigued by the idea of startup companies and what it would be like to be a part of one.
After I thought I had broken through the Catch-22 of technical opportunities (ie. you must have previous technical experience to get a technical job in the first place), it turned out that (in my experience) you need startup experience before you can get a startup job. I have always found that a bit strange but I suppose it makes sense -- how does one get the startup experience that they need then?
I suppose there are two main ways I can think of:
1. Start your own startup company
2. Intern for a startup company to gain experience
Actually, now that I've given it some more thought, there's probably a few more (like some where you're connected in some way to a startup company through your personal contacts or friends) but as I just graduated out of university and did not have many friends who were as passionate as I am about startups, that was not a strategy I could pursue.
I subscribed to the job feed for startuply and every day, I would look at the job postings thinking about how much more experience I would need until I could actually apply to the job (much less have the knowledge to do it). It's funny because the job postings were extremely motivational to me but at the same time, I knew that when I actually reached that point in my life, that particular job would probably be taken by someone else already.
That was when I saw a posting by Redux Inc. Here was a company looking for interns to post interesting articles, videos, images and all sorts of other links to streams on their site so that people would have access to the best links and comment and have discussions with others around that content. I applied and didn't really think much about it until I got an e-mail from an executive asking if a few more questions about my interest in Redux and why I would be a good candidate.
Well, it's been a month into my internship and I can say that it has been quite fun posting all sorts of good content on redux and having conversations around that content on the site. I subscribe to a lot of feeds on Reader and normally I just star the ones I like, maybe tag them with a key word and then move on to other things -- but that's all changed because now depending on the link, I may post it to FriendFeed, Twitter, Redux, Facebook, Tumblr, or all five! Suffice to say, it takes up some time when I have to post to that many sites (I am aware of ping.fm but I guess I'm not used to it yet)
What I'm really trying to say is that I was really lucky to find something I really like doing in my spare time and then finding a job whose tasks are almost exactly the same (and for a startup company too! That's got to be great experience for the future, even if I never work for a startup) and sometimes, you have to work your way from the bottom up. My Redux internship is providing me with valuable experience about sharing content, generating discussions and marketing Redux to other users and you never know when that experience will give you that edge in your next job application. I guess that's why they call it 'start up' experience because when you start, the only way to go is up.
