Having interned in SF last summer, I would definitely recommend that you take as much time as you can to meet other people, especially those outside your company. The best way to do that is to join the "201X Bay Area Summer Interns" facebook group. I was in the 2013 one and there were almost 5000 members. Every day people were posting with what they were up to and looking for people to join them. Its a great way to meet other interns and experience all of the things that can be done in the bay area.
As a younger person that these types of articles are so fond of talking about (I'm 21), I don't agree that members of my generation are leaving and that we don't perceive Facebook as cool. I think what's changed with the new social media companies is the timeliness of when we do things.
Perfect example- I was out for a Secret Santa dinner with a bunch of my friends. While we were at the dinner, we took tons of pictures, some of which ended up as Snapchat stories or on Instagram. But later that night, every single one of those pictures went up on Facebook. Cover photos were updated aplently. Why? Because all of us are on Facebook and Facebook is still the best way to permanently store and share the experiences you've had with your friends (while also tagging them in the photos).
I'd definitely say a t-shirt if you can afford them. I have t-shirts from multiple hackathons and wear them all the time. They get far more mileage than any sticker or pen I've received.
ESPN Fantasy Focus Baseball, Behind the Dish with Keith Law, This Week in Startups, Nerd Poker: Dungeons and Dragons with Brian Posehn and Friends (A bunch of hilarious comedians playing D&D together. It is very entertaining)
I use Evernote every day at school. It fills just about all of my needs. The only place where it struggles is when I need to write out math. In those cases I'll usually just use pen and paper. Everything else goes in Evernote though.
I just bought a MBP 15-inch retina display with a 2.3GHz i7, 8 gigs of 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM, 256GB Flash Storage, and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. What about that is outdated?
You could also buy a refurbished mac. They tend to be about $300 cheaper than the retail version and tend not to have any problems. I just bought one and so far its been perfect.
I think this absolutely makes a lot of sense. Particularly the idea of getting outside the tech echo chamber. For me, I maintain a group of stringently non-technically inclined friends. They use facebook and that is about it. So I use my time with them to recalibrate my senses and understand where normal people are in terms of adoption. I always gain new perspective from those conversations.
I think the thing about this that is most remarkable is how much better this is going to make Danielle as a founder. Being able to really focus on different and new aspects of the business (and gaining experience in those aspects), when combined with the skills she already developed at Twilio, will surely help her tremendously.
I'm curious as to why they wouldn't include lessons on the Facebook and Twitter APIs. I would think that would be a primary example of APIs to be familiar with.
For my entire life, I've always loved science. It was never a doubt for me that I wanted to study science in school. But when I got to school, I was accepted into an accelerated honors program for science students. So I was taking a lot of hard science really quickly. At first it was great, but soon I started to get really burnt out. I realized that I wasn't enjoying my classes anymore and that I was starting to loathe the concept of studying the material. I refused to allow school to ruin my love for science, so I changed my major.
I was dead set on becoming a neuroseurgeon. Spent all of high school taking science classes. Majored in Neuroscience for my first year and a half of college, decided I hated everything about it, and decided to change my major. Attended a hackathon or two (including one sponsored by Twilio) and haven't looked back. I'm still in school, but I work for Freshplum as well. Hopefully I'll be spending this summer out in the valley.
The big thing with poke/snapchat is that they send pictures that aren't stored anywhere and can only be viewed for a few seconds, after which they are inaccessible. This makes it easier and less worrisome for people to do things like sext or send pictures of themselves making silly faces.
As a Marketing student who has worked in a few different marketing jobs I think there are a couple things you should be looking for.
First, as previously mentioned, please do not make your decision based on the individual's social media followers. Instead, you might want to look at some of the growth they've helped to engineer in their previous jobs. For example if they tell you that they helped a company grow from 500 to 50,000 twitter followers, that is pretty impressive. However, even then it is important to take those numbers with a grain of salt. Ask how many were purchased vs earned. Ask what specific techniques they used to gain those followers and how they would apply those techniques to your company. Try to determine how much impact that specific person had on the growth.
Second, just like many people suggest assigning a coding project to a candidate to determine if they fit with the company's engineering style, you can assign a project to a marketing candidate to see if the work they do fits with what you're looking for. Ask them to write a sample blog post for you. Ask them to write a sample email they would send to potential customers. Ask them to outline some ideas they have for how to market your company and how they would implement them.
Third, if you want to attract good marketers, please don't treat them like second class citizens. There is a large resentment among many in the tech community towards "Business" people and "Marketers". If you and your company show similar resentments, the person you are interviewing will be turned off.
If your site is only open to Stanford students, why don't you find a marketing student at Stanford who would be interesting in working for you? Go hang out by the marketing department and introduce yourself to students. Or contact the career center and see if you can post an intern opening.
I'm a college student, so I use it to take notes in all of my classes. Since it all syncs between devices and I can access it from the web, I have access to my notes wherever I am and with any device I have. It makes my life easier because if I'm going to the library to work or meeting with a group to work on a project, I don't need to lug binders or even my computer around. The photos feature makes life easier as I can just take pictures of whatever is on the board.