The Endless Summer: How Working at a Tech Startup Changed My Career Path
By Lauren Brose
This past summer, it really dawned on me just how old I am getting. Deterministically not pursuing a Master’s, the next chapter for me is my career. I call this “Adulting.” As far as I can tell, adulting is the bane of my existence and the cause of death to this huge part of my soul: my social butterfly. I think to myself more often than not why I never took naps when I had the time. Now, naps are a luxury reserved for the weekends and the “occasional” I-have-so-much-to-do-I’m-gonna-nap-instead moments.
After working 50 hour weeks in the industry of my choosing, I proudly return to USC for my final semester. To be honest, I never fully understood the deeper meaning of YOLO until the first week of classes rolled around. Oh how I’ve missed you USC! <3
Dialing it back 3 months, let’s talk about the bad ass things I’ve learned from my temporary stint in the real world.
The Coming of Age (to pay your own rent)
“Adulting” isn’t easy. As a USC student, I never held a job that required me to clock in and clock out at specific times. I write remotely for Trojans 360 and come into the office a handful of times a semester to sync up with the project managers. Last summer I averaged 50-hour work weeks with my Fridays being relatively short, 5 hours long, because sometimes I would be on sales calls as early as 7AM and leaving the office at 7PM! My hectic work week was detrimental to my social life (thank goodness 9-0 Wednesday’s don’t exist over summer) and I hardly saw my friends over the summer.
The biggest change for me was having to go to bed earlier so I have energy to work through the week. Additionally, not being able to partake in the amazing 3+ day excursions to Lake Tahoe, Big Sur, San Francisco that my friends and family went on was hard to say no to. But I had to… I had 2 days off and one of them—if not both— was spent sleeping in. Is there an upside? YES. NO HOMEWORK AND FREE LUNCH.
That Startup Life Tho
I currently work as a Sales intern at a technology startup. We sell fraud technology in the programmatic buying space in the advertising industry. More on that later. Among some major upsides include the camaraderie between your small office of -/+ 25 employees. When we reached our sales goal for the month, which was extremely valuable for investors, the entire office boosted each other up and our CEO took us out for drinks and outlined how each and every one of us were instrumental to our success. It felt great to be recognized for the hard work you’ve put in as well as being praised alongside your colleagues for being such a great team.
In a startup, don’t expect to do only the tasks your job entails; That’s corporate life. In a startup, you do whatever needs to be done for the sake of the company. Although I did a lot of sales stuff, I also worked in marketing and account management. While this may seem exhausting (it is!!), it’s a great opportunity to learn more about the way a business is run. You witness all of the pieces coming together and the end product was made possible, in some form, by your efforts! The only major downside I saw in a startup is the high level of stress due to a smaller staff size as well as a budget that isn’t expendable to all resources. I still to this day get extremely stressed out about my job (I currently work part-time until January, when I start my full-time position) because deadlines need to be met, it’s embarrassing to make an error on data input and organizing client meetings. Sometimes I lie in bed wondering if I forgot to send out an emails for meetings or follow ups on sales leads and hope I don’t wake up to an influx of emails from my boss in the morning.
Technology + Advertising = THE FUTURE
Allow me to let you in on a little secret. While tech isn’t sexy and doesn’t involve going to WME parties or VIP access to Coachella, technology is ridiculously interesting. It’s evidently taking over the world in all aspects including education, consumer products, entertainment (think VR), and even in medicine. Now, technology is taking over advertising.
It’s very own stock exchange, online advertising is sold by impressions (a single click on an ad that you see on websites such as Facebook). There are price ranges depending on time of day and other factors that buyers bid on. This entire thing is called purchasing programmatic through real-time bidding (RTB). Thousands of impressions are sold at once and the people who are buying and selling are networks, publishers, agencies, direct and supply side platforms and exchanges.
Because all of this is digital, there are opportunities for fraud. Try $6.8 BILLION dollars being stolen per year by online fraudsters who make fraudulent websites and pass them off for high selling websites such as Forbes.com or CNN.com and then pocketing all of the money!
Because this hasn’t been occurring very long, the FCC doesn’t recognize this crime yet. In other words, these thieves who are hiding behind their computer screens cannot get prosecuted for these committed crimes. Everyday I get the opportunity to assist and speak to companies that buy or sell advertising space programmatically and assist them with their pain points. There is such a long road ahead of me in terms of becoming an expert of this facet of technology, but I am so fascinated with it I want to learn more.
“SELL ME THIS PEN”
In my classes, my professors emphasized the selling aspect of marketing, advertising and public relations and how we need to master selling an idea or brand. I thought to myself: if I can sell a brand surely I can sell a product. Tis true. It’s all about taking the initiative, becoming an expert at the product you’re selling and organization. Organization was my biggest enemy this summer. By the end, I did not have a single opened email sitting in my inbox. Instead, I had over a dozen tiny folders in which the corresponding email would be archived. I have 2 notebooks that I utilize everyday. One contains meeting notes and tasks for the week. The other, which was much smaller, contained a to do list of stuff I have to work on for the day. While many sales jobs require cold calling, mine did not. If you work for a company where customers are coming to you with interest, cold calling isn’t necessary. Throw all of those negative feelings about sales away because it just became a whole lot less tedious.
I also was the sole administrator for CRM database (Customer Relations Management), an aspect of businesses which focus on building stronger, more personal relationships with customers. Not only did I have to structure the database so that we are able to filter out contacts by deal status, city/state/country, source, company type, but I also had to input all of the data! I spent weeks working on this project and I was eventually given my own dual screen monitor because I had to work on tons of different spreadsheets for importing data (and I’m talking about thousands of contacts at once). LIFE ADVICE: Just get a dual screen monitor. It’s honestly the coolest.
I’m gonna end my spiel with this: take advantage of your connections at USC and try something you might like or be good at. You never know, it could repave your entire career path just like working at this tech startup has for me! If I didn’t seize this moment after my classmate told me about this opening, I wouldn’t have learned so much about sales and technology nor would I have a job after graduation. : )
