I joined a startup for an internship, and I stayed.
Why am I writing this?
Three weeks ago I was in a meeting with my managers where I got an offer to become a full-time data scientist at ALPHA10X: A startup building a large-scale Knowledge graph for investments, that connects people, organizations, and technologies.
One of the questions that I skipped answering was my feedback about my journey as an intern at ALPHA10X. Today and after long reflections, I'm ready to answer and maybe help juniors like me explore the startup experience via a set of lessons and conclusions that I learned.
Building big must be backed by a great vision
Before joining ALPHA10X. I have done my homework, I search about what they are building, and talked with some employees about technical details. But when I joined it, I got amazed by the amount of innovation and operations that were established to build the product. At the same time, I was frustrated by the scale of the product, a product that no client have seen or purchased. But still, a tremendous amount of expertise, resources, and soft skills were put in place to build it.
Trust me I have read a lot about startups' first product versions and also seen some of them, especially product-based startups. But this time it was different. We were building at a large scale and using edge technologies.
Our MVP was no simple proof of concept to show potential clients what we can do or to test our ideas. It was like we were tasked to solve a critical and complex problem, and not being able of solving it will have bad consequences on our society in the future, by missing big opportunities.
Let me explain, investors put large amounts of money into solutions that will bring them wealth. As a byproduct, society gets rid of problems solved by those solutions. Not all solutions succeed. But wait, a number of them don't even get the resources (investments) to prove themselves. Imagine the number of solutions that didn't see the light: a treatment for cancer, a car running on water …
But we can not blame the investors, In the end, they are humans, how they can see in a sea full of ideas, where the SNR (signal to noise ratio) is very low. Well, that is our goal at ALPHA10X, is to give investors the chance to discover low signal ideas with great potential, give solution owners a chance to compete, and eventually society gets a chance to enjoy the missed opportunities.
The irony is that I read literally something like this in my onboarding when I joined ALPHA10X. But you know written ideas are just ink. It took me weeks of working on internal projects, a critical situation full of stress, and an inspiring team meeting to get it.
Ego creates stress, embrace delegation instead
I joined ALPHA10X as a data science intern. My first project was straightforward and didn't require much work. Then CritSit happened. A CritSit (short for the critical situation) is an internal word we use at A10x to describe a critical project that needs to be defined and delivered to solve a problem or build a feature that is crucial to our product. And I was assigned to be the owner of this Critsit.
This means I have to plan tasks, prioritize work, build fast and dispatch work to my team members. You can imagine the level of stress that I was in even though I'm known to be a stress-free person and I went through an engineering school, I know the drill, but this one was “again” different.
The first week was hell, I would work for 14 hours per day and even stay awake the weekend. I felt like this Critsit was a war. I would think about the solution alone and only give complementary tasks to my team. I felt that I was already deep into details that the team members will not relate to. But fortunately, I had this inner voice in my head, that stepped up and told me to stop and ask myself: What are you gonna lose if you tried to share?
I felt that I was already deep into details that the team members will not relate.
And that was the first time that I choose by myself to delegate. I instantly did a call with one of my team members to explain what I needed and it worked! then day after day I started doing more and more of this. The stress and the high workload started to fade away. Besides you get the chance to discuss ideas and critique solutions.Things that you can do when you work alone
I could say that I learned the power of delegation the hard way but I'm for life grateful for it.
Do what you love, but don’t overdo it
At A10x, all we talk about is graphs. In the end, it is our core product. Personally, I love graphs, a big proportion of my side projects, papers that I read, or visualization that I make contain a graph. And this was the main reason why I joined A10x to work on what I love.
The first weeks were exploratory, I was curious, going through the data, and learning about the graph that we are building. Even when my real projects started I would keep working for hours after work or on weekends. For me, it was fun but with time I found myself that all I do is work, no more side projects, no more paper reading, nothing. Sometimes even when I'm having a discussion with my friends or outsiders, all I talk about is how awesome what we are doing at ALPHA10X.
With time I found myself like an expert all I do or know to do is one special thing. This created some kind of fear in me. What if get bored? What if I can’t find another that amazes me as graphs? This is when I decided to find some balance. Overwork when it is needed. Explore other things otherwise.
This work bias was easy to overcome. Because I always believed that learning new things with no links to what you do will always help by giving you new ideas, new perspectives, or creating this kind of rare combination that are very valuable.
And that is why I stayed …
I joined ALPHA10X 5 months ago and I feel like I received years' worth of learning perhaps the hard way sometimes, but it was an enjoyable journey.
I learned to believe in a mission
I learned to delegate
I learned to create a work balance
I learned responsibility
And much more, without speaking about the amount of technical expertise that I got. And that is why I decided to stay and help get our product to life.
