hustler
More coming soon
Hacker
Tesla
Tesla was amazing. I worked part-time at the Houston Galleria, Houston's central mall. I talked to fanboys, skeptics of the local oil industry, and rich people. I evangelized the vision, Elon, and administered test drives (0-60 in 2.8 secs baby!).
I got this job in a hilariously naive, freshman way.
About a month into my undergrad degree, I went to the fall career fair. Wearing a preppy pastel outfit I brought from high school, I energetically went around shaking hands and asking what these companies did.
After the career fair, several upperclassmen gave me shit for going around "networking" because these companies were obviously only looking for juniors and seniors.
What they didn't realize was that Tesla was there, looking to staff part-time Product Specialists, and that this job really only had one responbility: enthusiastically talk to people about Tesla.
What I didn't realize was that when I saw Tesla there, went up and nearly cried from fanboying so hard, was that that was the job. That's it. Done. Fin. That was the interview.
For the rest of my freshman year, I went into our showroom 30 hours a week, rubbing shoulders with some of Houston's top brass (for context, Tesla at this time was still strictly high-end, pre Model 3 and Model X, and electric cars were especially edgy given Houston's identity as an oil town).
But beyond these titans of industry, I also met so many interesting travelers. Being a starry-eyed freshman, I asked them for life advice, and they were more than happy to give it to me. One day I plan to write an anthology the wisdom they imparted to me.
LiftIgniter
More coming soon
Microsoft
I write about my Microsft internship experience here so I won't go into too much detail, but overall I did not love it.
I think a big part of that has to do with the fact that internships at big companies are scoped narrowly and somewhat contrived (which makes sense). The project I would've returned to was actually interesting, but ultimately, the pace was too slow for me, the people too content.
The salary and resume experience would've been nice, but our time on earth is finite.
Strata Labs
Strata is a micropayments started based in San Francisco and founded by two Harvard '18 CS grads.
I joined Strata as the first engineer, building out cloud infrastructure processes and ensuring reliability (DevOps and SRE).
- I mastered the art of bash, setting up our CircleCI build/deploy/test pipeline.
- I migrated our fragmented npm modules into a single monorepo with lerna and yarn.
- I contributed to open source packages for the Interledger Network Protocol.
- I messed up a deploy once, nearly costing the company thousands of dollars. I scraped through petabytes of logs and luckily recovered the data.
I learned a lot about Kubernetes and system design, and my resourcefulness/autodidacticism had to level up, but being the first hire was ultimately a far greater lesson in leadership than engineering. Working with my founders was a helluva time, and I loved every second of it.
GroupRaise
GroupRaise is a marketplace startup based in both Houston and Santiago, Chile. I was fortunate enough to work in both offices, part-time in Houston my sophomore spring and then Santiago for a summer internship.
At GroupRaise I dipped my toe in Ruby on Rails, generating dynamic SEO-optimized HTML for the 5,000+ businesses on our platform.
On the SEM side, I used Google Adwords to create and optimize targeted ad campaigns.
For both SEO and SEM, I researched keywords and demographic data, and used Google Analytics to track and evaluate these campaigns. Ultimately, I improved our core digital metrics across the board (CTR, CPM, CPC, CPA).
GroupRaise is an alum of Startup Chile and TechStars, and has raised venture funding from Kapor Capital. GroupRaise is an impact venture that helps non-profits raise money, and has a majority minority team.
For anyone interested in growth (which includes not just digital marketing, but also product and engineering), I recommend Brian Balfour's essays, particularly How To Become A Customer Acquisition Expert and 7 Principles To Mastering Growth.
V A P O R D O C S
Vapor Docs is the first React project I ever made. I'm still impressed by the aesthetic.
Check it out ~ h e r e ~
Ken's Shine
When I was first learning about digital marketing over my sophomore winter break, I decided the best way to prove my understanding was not with the dumb Google Adwords test, but with a real world project! I eventually deployed an ad campaign for my good friend Ken, a shoe shiner in Houston.
I originally met Ken when I needed to get a shoe shined while working at Tesla. I was immediately drawn to this kind, humble man.
I found Ken through Yelp, but I told him he would probably get a lot more business if he was on Google Maps as well.
So I put him on the map!
A year later, I later setup some Google Ads for Ken to test out my skills (he got a lot more business).
And a year after that, after learning how to make web apps, I made Ken a website!. If you're ever in Houston and need a shine, you know who to call :)