In the summer after my high school sophomore year, I met Celestine Schnugg at a venture mixer and we hit it off talking about networks. She invited me to mini-conference of hers, and I ended up working for her as an primarily remote, unpaid intern doing special projects for Boom, a small, early-stage venture capital firm with a knack for finding successful biotech, aerospace, and AI startups.
I won’t go into details about that first summer here to respect Celestine’s circle of integrity, but it was primarily a research-heavy project related to modern networks in the search of better understanding how communities form and grow.
The next summer, Cee Cee asked me back to continue working unpaid for her, and I gladly accepted. This time I was in-person and much more active on the business side of things, attending pitches, surveying (and running!) hackathons, sitting in on feedback sessions for portfolio founders, and going on a business trip with Celestine to Seattle to run a biotech conference, as well as continuing my research.
There are so many interesting stories from this experience - whether I was running un-conferences in the woods or meeting Adam and Tim Draper over lunch in a local bistro, there was always something interesting to learn. Working in venture capital opened my eyes to how early-stage business functions, network math and vouching systems, the actual technology behind all sorts of interesting industries, and the exciting places we might go in the future. There’s nothing quite like working with visionaries, and I aim to do a lot more of it.