About the Ambassadors of Entrepreneurship Program
How did you find the position?
I found this position through networking and referrals.
What was your motivation for working at a start-up this summer?
My goal for a summer internship is to gain operation experience in China in retail or consumer related industry. My internship satisfied these criteria.
What advice would you give to students interested in working at a start-up this summer?
Keep your confidence up and keep on searching until you find a job. You will definitely land something interesting even though it is really late in the game.
About the Summer Experience
I found my internship at an educational startup fairly early on in second semester because my friend asked me to help him out. The work sounded interesting because there was a high potential to structure a deal with a venture capital firm for 2nd round financing. However, after I got to Beijing in late May, my friend’s startup was going through operational difficulty and talks with the VC firm tanked. My summer internship was no longer available.
I found myself in quite a difficult situation. I started networking like crazy through all sorts of mediums:
* I emailed professors for their support. One actually emailed me back with a potential startup opportunity.
* I cold-emailed VC partners outlining my interests and skill sets. I would say about 70% of them responded back and out of that another 10% gave me offers to work at their portfolio companies.
* I reached out to friends, family, and even Wharton alums.
* I attended the Wharton Global Alumni Forum. It was held in Beijing this summer. I met many people in the startup field and they connected me with job opportunities and informational interviews.
I ended up taking a summer internship at BabyCare, a baby nutritional products startup. It is a fairly mature stage startup with 40 employees at corporate and branch offices all over China. My project was to examine operational performance of its direct sales force.
Looking back on this intense job search – I found it necessary to be specific about your job search and explain your summer goals. People are interested in hearing why you want to work for them and how you can offer value to their organization. This also helps you target your job search a lot more and attracts people to want to help you. For example: when I reached out to VC partners, I looked at their bios and only reached out to those in charge of consumer/retail related portfolio companies. My pitch was that I wanted to gain operational experience at a start up in this field because I eventually wanted to launch a start up in this arena. I even mentioned it during my interview and the founder/CEO of BabyCare offered to discuss with me about my business ideas on a weekly basis. This proved to be invaluable to me.
While on the job, I learned two major lessons. I learned that it is very hard to execute your ideas no matter how good it looks on paper. During one of my brainstorming sessions, I suggested to the VP of Sales to capture the hospital channel and set up contracts with them to run informational sessions on baby and mother nutrition. The realization of this idea was immediately shot down because the hospitals are organized into networks. In order to penetrate this network, you need authorization from government agencies. Although, they have been working with this agency over the past two years, it is impossible to knock down bureaucracies. Furthermore, even though the agency approves of certain initiatives, the individual hospitals will not necessarily carry them out unless they receive ‘personal’ benefits. The bottom line is to have representatives work from top down and bottom up. Realities of carrying out initiatives are based on the people who make decisions and much of this involves creating relationships and this takes time.
Second, working in a different culture and language was more challenging than I thought. Something as simple as creating a questionnaire that should take me no longer than a couple hours took me two days. I was assigned an administrative assistant who helped me translate. The process consisted of her sitting and me in a room as I tried to explain to her with my broken Chinese what I wanted to say. Then, she would try to type it up in formal Chinese. Not only the translation process long, it was also excruciatingly painful. The experience definitely pushed me to improve my Chinese.
This summer proved to be very fruitful for me as I gained more experience in operations in a consumer related industry in China. I am definitely going back for more!