I will intern at a Big-Tech company this summer. Yes, I sold out to Big-Tech; yes, I am a hypocrite; and no, I never meant anything I said about dreaming to work at a startup and doing impactful work.
Jokes aside, I want to reason that working at a Big-Tech company is not mutually exclusive with an end goal of starting a company or building the future. In contrast, I argue that it is beneficial towards that goal for significant reasons beyond the obvious ones like good pay and stability.
One of the most important things to get right in a startup is the co-founder(s). Some co-founders have known each other since they were kids, but most meet naturally through serendipity they intentionally created. Moving to the Bay Area or going to a college with a strong Engineering program, for example, are ways by which one increases that serendipity.
A Big-Tech company is one of the places where the likelihood to meet a good co-founder is high: assuming that the interns recruited by these companies are the top college talents within their schools (why they might not be), it is one of the best places to meet talented people who care about doing great work.
In addition, when we meet people, what’s the best way to know them? Sure, we can talk to them and grab coffee and go to baseball games (I will do this a lot; thanks Buster Posey! Adames and Chapman extension are great deals), but the best way to really know them is to work with them. By working with them we understand how they see a project through, what they’re like in a conflict, and so on. So, by being at a Big-Tech company, one sets themself up for meeting really high-quality people really well.
In a survey, subjects were told that either 2,000, or 20,000, or 200,000 migrating birds were endangered annually and were asked how much they would pay to prevent that – to which they responded $80, $78, and $88 respectively – bearing no relationship at all with the actual number of birds affected. This cognitive bias is called scope neglect: once a number surpasses our familiar orders of magnitude, we start to become insensitive to scale.
If you want to create impact, you’ll likely have to deal with a large scale of something – birds, people, data, robots, … But in a startup setting, you inevitably start off small. Where can you get the practice in dealing with large scale? Big-Tech seems like a good place. As an intern, you interact with services that impact hundreds of millions around the globe, be it their social media, mobile device, or Thursday Night Football. This can be really good preparation for creating large-scale impact: when you make a change affecting as little as 0.01% of users, that may very well be as big as millions.
Starting a company is solving a problem, and most of these problems are not low-hanging fruits: they're at the boundary of a certain industry. A good founder, therefore, should have a high surface area of boundary problems. One way to increase this surface area is by exposing oneself to different hard problems - and Big-Tech could be a great way to do this. These companies are facing big problems that no one else in the world needs to face just yet: Amazon made AWS because it needed AWS.
Admittedly, getting all three of these things is difficult: would a short three-month stint really expose me to the hardest problems faced by some of the world's biggest companies? Would I, an intern, really get to do things that impact even just 0.01% of users?
I don't have the answers – and I will, hopefully, once the internship is over – but, simply knowing that these upsides exist is beneficial for navigating the internship. I will try to make the most out of it by meeting talented people, doing things at scale, and seeing hard problems - all of which more important than a mere return offer.
January 9, 2025