Reflections on Working at an Early Stage Startup
I’m a 4th-year student at UC Berkeley currently working as a software engineering intern at Gatsby Labs. I’ve previously interned at Facebook, Microsoft, and Blackbaud, on teams focused on ML ranking & relevance, low-level distributed systems, and full-stack development. I previously co-founded @Flipout, a mobile sports gaming company (1000+ users, just under 100k in pre-seed funding), and I’m interested in early-stage companies.
In Fall 2020, my university announced that it was going to be remote for the semester because of COVID-19. I had recently shut down Flipout, a company I co-founded, and after interning at several large companies, I wanted an experience closer to the one I’d had as a founder building out an early-stage product.
Through a friend who was an 8VC Fellow, I heard about Gatsby, an up-and-coming seed-backed startup of 6 people, funded by several notable investors, including Pear VC and 8VC.
WHY AN EARLY-STAGE STARTUP
I was looking for an experience where I could gain greater insight into how operational & engineering processes are efficiently managed, information & learnings are organized, and product decisions are made in an environment where the company itself is rapidly changing. I was eager to take on a more flexible role between software and product — at this intersection, I felt I could have a greater impact in my work by shaping foundational product design, while also contributing to new engineering infrastructure being built from the ground up.
ABOUT GATSBY
Gatsby is focused on building a suite of professional tools for executives to seamlessly manage personal workflows — everything from event planning & curation, contextualized contacts management, and efficient, admin-initiated reminders. The company is striving to build the “Operating System” for admin and executive software.
Gatsby was interesting to me because I was surprised there weren’t already great tools for executives to manage their complex workflows and encompass details that are critical to maintaining business and personal relationships. Some of the largest executives and their admins, who manage billions of dollars in spend, use old-school processes and spreadsheets to manage their contacts, track corresponding relationship details, organize critical events, etc.
CEOs of companies or VC fund managers can’t exactly use Eventbrite to send personal invitations or collaborate on a guest list, and they don’t have intimate CRM’s to manage small details such as which of their dinner guests are vegetarians. These nuances may seem small at face value, but they can help make or break deals, contracts, and financing rounds.
In an ideal world, software tools should perform at a level proportional to the impact of the tasks they’re carrying out, and I do think Gatsby is helping close the gap.
WHAT I WORKED ON
Within my first two days at Gatsby, I proactively identified a handful of potential security vulnerabilities (input validation and cross-site scripting) in the relatively young product. I worked to mitigate and correct these issues from both security and functionality perspectives — from the start of my time at Gatsby, I was pushed to define areas of improvement and author corresponding end-to-end fixes.
Throughout my internship, I worked on a variety of additional features: parsing and inserting in-platform Gatsby contacts and guest list members through file uploads, redesigning event creation flows, building baseline in-app ranking & recommendation functionality, creating internal infrastructure & scripts for onboarding & access control for new organizations and users, and developing some image upload infrastructure around the Gatsby core API.
Working at a startup like Gatsby allows for close collaboration with a variety of people across engineering, product, and design — my previous internships at larger tech companies felt much more siloed. On some days, I worked with Gatsby’s CEO or lead designer, and on other days I participated in user interviews. Within a few weeks, I had worked closely with every person on the Gatsby team.
THE CULTURE AND TEAM
Like many other startups at a similar stage, the pace at Gatsby moves quickly. From one week to the next, major decisions and views on the product can completely evolve. Interns who joined Gatsby the previous summer may not recognize the codebase or even part of the engineering stack, much less most of the product itself.
Yet in spite of the daily evolution, longer-term planning, product vision, and hiring counts need to be ironed out months in advance, in anticipation of what the company will need at a completely different stage.
The most consistent trend I witnessed was the flurry of competing priorities that all needed immediate attention. Any early-stage company wrestles with product bugs, and we were also trying to meet the high standards for UI/UX that initial users and true adopters always have for new applications.
Beyond the wave of design and functionality improvements, there were also significant product decisions that needed to be made at every juncture. We debated potential feature offerings and continually evaluated whether they would expand our product in the ways we wanted. We had to assess what to offer, why, and how to serve it to users. To answer these questions, it was critical to effectively piece together user interviews, competitive product comparisons, and company vision into a cohesive flow of ideas and mockups.
TAKEAWAYS
My work at Gatsby echoed a greater trend I’ve noted throughout my experience interviewing for more than 50 software companies. Companies of all sizes and stages are increasingly seeking out software engineers with a combination of sound technical abilities and fundamentals, in addition to developed product sense and an ability to drive end-to-end product improvement.
In my mind, working at a startup like Gatsby or another early-stage company is an ideal place to hone these skills, especially as a young engineer, because of the visibility into leadership decision making and the opportunity to take part in surmounting key challenges.
Most young companies will face similar hurdles — organizing huge influxes of information without established processes, navigating rapid product changes, continuously trading off the needs of early adopters with those of more general users, and trying to do it all with a dynamically growing team.
The critical success factors needed to tackle these obstacles are the team’s leadership, experience, vision, and organization. At Gatsby, specifically, I’ve been able to sharpen these skills within a few short months, and that has been an invaluable experience as I look to build my own toolkit as a future founder.
Thanks to Zach, Chris, MZ, MC, Binoy & Austin for your help and guidance, and for making my internship one to remember!