I'm in agreement with you on that - we pay all of our interns at The Muse. The posting referred to above is a way of recruiting people who are interested in contributing 1-4 mentoring posts per month, so very low commitment nights-and-weekends type thing.
Thanks so much Jessica- we're so glad we did. YC was an unbelievably valuable experience. To the commenter below who asked how YC changed us & our company, there's not much that's more useful to an early, growing company than getting to spend time with people like Jessica & PG, and having their regular/honest feedback on what's working (and what's not). I'll try to write more about that here later.
Hi Asparagirl, there are 4-5x the number of people who ask to write for us compared to the number who ultimately get to, so clearly there's some value there :)
The reality is that most of our writers are also mentors to other people, and they really enjoy it. Writing for The Muse is their way of scaling that mentorship to a broader audience.
Thanks - I actually, embarrassingly, have not read the book (I should not admit this in public) but it sounds very much up our alley. That said, you can do so much more digitally than you can in print, especially for people who might be exploring careers in so many different ways and from so many different starting points. Shoot me over ideas any time :)
Fair - It's helpful to ask around, if you can, re: what to expect ahead of time. I've seen Techcrunch posts cause a bigger spike than a Fox national TV appearance (3000-4000 visits, 1-2000 simultaneous) depending on the time of day, and how much the segment is about your company vs about a trend or a topic that your company is commenting on
Then don't take any equity and ask for a higher salary instead (or, accept that it's not a time you want to be taking a risk on a startup, and look at a bigger company role). The founders should believe that equity has a lot of value, which means it's an important negotiating chip either way. If they don't, you might have a bigger problem
I'm always surprised by how many people I speak to at other companies who value their equity at 0 when negotiating a startup offer. Whether or not those shares have value to you, they have a huge amount of value to the company/founders/existing employees, and they're a bargaining chip like everything else.
I would say this advice primarily applies when your competitors are solid companies working hard on the same space. Maybe less so if you have reason to believe they're deceptive and/or trouble
The guidelines are also different for nonprofit and for-profit companies (and if your interns are getting college credit vs. not), so it definitely pays to check. FWIW we pay our fulltime interns, but there are circumstances when it's ok not to.
You may want to revisit your history then - a woman wrote what is widely considered, by both men and women, to be the first computer program, an extremely complicated algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace). During WWII, women were "recruited to do ballistics calculations and program computers. Around 1943-1945, these women "computers" used a Differential Analyzer in the basement of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering to speed up their calculations." In 1949, Grace Hopper was the first programmer of the Harvard Mark I, known as the "Mother of COBOL", and developed the first ever compiler for an electronic computer, known as A-0. In the late 1950s, orbital calculations for the United States' Explorer 1 satellite were solved by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's all-female "computers", many of whom were recruited out of high school.
While attitudes may not have done a 180, your inference that early women computer scientists were "not programming" and only transcribing is factually incorrect.
"The new campus is filled with beloved and familiar-looking restaurants, shops, banks, barber shops, and bike shares" --> anyone know how they decided which businesses got to open up shop inside?
I don't know if that's fair. Livefyre just announced something like 1 billion page views/month, so clearly someone must think they have a compelling value prop!