As authors like Doug Coupland and Po Bronson attempt to capture in fiction an insider's view of life at high-tech start-ups, a group at Stanford University students are capturing the same thing in real life. As part of Stanford's Technology Venture Co-Op program which train engineers to also be entrepreneurs, a series of diaries written by interns at Silicon Valley start-ups are being examined to understand the experiences of entry-level engineers.
"Most of what's written about entrepreneurship is what happens at the top - not bottom-level engineers, designing and building things that take companies to IPOs," explains Keith Rollag, who's spearheading the Stanford Diary project. "As start-up entrepreneur culture emerges, you have to look beyond the characters and mystique - it's people's jobs, it's work."
Stanford University is situated between Venture Capital Row and Silicon Valley, and draws many of its professors and advisers from the Valley; as start-up companies boom, those professors have expressed concern with the business skills of the engineering graduates. In response, they founded the Stanford Technology Ventures Program to bring high-tech execs to talk about the skills necessary to start a new company.
Explains program director Tom Byers: "Our idea was: Why is it that only MBA programs are teaching entrepreneurship when entrepreneurs come from every program? If you combine that with an engineering degree, that's what it's all about."
As part of the program, 21 students in the past two years have participated in glorified summer internships at local start-ups, such as Speck Design or Granite Systems. (For the program, "start-up" means an emerging company, with annual revenue below US$50 million and fewer than 200 employees). Those students were fully integrated into the companies, mentored, and given access to boardrooms and business plans. They kept detailed journals about their experience.
After two years of the program, all 2,800 pages of those journals are being analyzed by a graduate team headed by Rollag, to be turned into academic research and a wide-publication book. Results are already being published in trade journals like that of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The intention is to pick out the differences between entry-level work at a start-up versus a big company.
"A lot of students are going to start-ups these days. It's an area we don't know as much about as established companies," says Rollag. "We started this project to understand what new engineers' experience: what are their thoughts, as they go to their first job outside college?"
The diaries are strict blow-by-blow details of their days written during the workday itself. In between strict technical explanations of their work and the mundane details of their days are glimpses of the students' emotions about their work environments.
The common sentiments expressed in the 21 diaries are in many ways painfully obvious: for example, that engineers are happier when they have projects that are both challenging and important to the company - something that's more likely to happen at a small start-up where bodies are scarce. Other epiphanies include the emotional benefits of "pizza and stock options," mentoring relationships and frequent feedback, and allowing them to have full access to the office and including them in lunch-time activities.
Although the 21 students had unique internships, in that they were given more company access than your average interns, Rollag believes that as a whole the diaries provide a great snapshot of life on the bottom level. He also hopes the research will be a tool for start-up executives who want to figure out how to make their freshest employees more productive and happy.
Says Rollag: "They've heard stories about options and IPOs, sleeping under desks, and drinking Jolt cola - maybe people would be interested in what it's like day to day."
