You should not hire an intern for your startup

As the non CEO cofounder you are probably handling a lot of the operations for your startup. Hiring a college intern for the summer or during the term time can seem like a win-win situation. That’s especially true if you have access to university, state, or trade association programs that will pay part or all of an intern's salary while they work at your startup.

It seems so obvious: you get free cheap labor, they get a great experience, and you move your startup at a faster pace.

Not. So. Fast.

Here’s the secret of internships: Big companies hire interns to create a recruitment pipeline for full-time hires.

They don't bring interns in because they think they are going to be productive during their summer or term-time internship. For a big corporation, it makes sense to dedicate staff time to ensuring that those interns have a great experience and that they show up as new employees with some form of training. In most of the corporate internship programs I saw before I became an entrepreneur, offer rate and hire rate into full-time jobs were key metrics on which the success of the internship program were judged.

If interns were productive as workers, offer rate and hire rate wouldn’t be the measures of success for an internship program.

And full time, partially trained, entry level hires aren’t the goal of a startup. Most of the time interns cost more than they are worth to startups. Here’s why:

1. Interns add to coordination costs

Have you seen those diagrams that sketch out the communication paths among people on a team? When you have two people there's one conversation. When you have three people there are three conversations. But when you have 4, you have six conversations and by the time you have 5 people, there are 10 conversations. The complexity of communication scales geometrically with team members. Interns are particularly unskilled teammates. They add to this communication complexity, without paying much back into the system, simply because they can't at their current skill level.

2. Interns need to be kept busy with appropriately simple tasks

if you have a college intern, you owe it to them to make sure that they are busy and learning most of the time. And while you certainly can assign them some filler tasks, like learning a new skill or practicing with ChatGPT, you need to keep them continually busy.

The issue is that what an intern can accomplish is usually fairly simple. Maybe you give them a list of companies to research and they go off on LinkedIn and figure out who the CTO of each company is and a blurb about what the company does. Or you give them a couple of spreadsheets and you have them make some charts and graphs. Or you have them proofread and clean up your presentation.

Coming up with a string of tasks like like these that will keep an intern busy 40 hours a week all summer long is, quite frankly, exhausting. You could probably do these tasks faster yourself versus assigning them to an intern, checking the intern's work, giving them feedback, and reviewing another round. Your intern is slowing you down, not speeding you up.

3. Interns need frequent touchpoints

When you work with experienced people, you might catch up with them a few times a week, or even less. If they need something they'll know to come to you.

Interns are different. They don't know when they need help and they don’t know when they should come to you. You will find yourself checking in with them multiple times a day if you want them to get anything done, and that's exhausting. Suddenly instead of having big blocks of time to focus in your day, or to work on things that will move your business forward, you’re meeting three times a day on what a spreadsheet of basic business research should look like. This is not efficient.

4. Interns often need coaching on professionalism

Nearly every problem I have ever had with professionalism has come from people who are inexperienced in the workplace. And we owe coaching to our less experienced colleagues. Like, don't go visit regulators dressed in shorts. Clean up after yourself in the office kitchen. Take feedback gracefully. If you're dating a colleague, keep it out of the office.

It's hard to know which interns will struggle with this and which won't but you'll end up doing a lot of coaching that just feels like something people should already know. But they just don't, so you'll need to tell them.

The entrepreneurs who are most likely to make mistakes hiring interns

I have found that entrepreneurs who have little work experience themselves are much more likely to make the mistake of hiring interns for a summer or for lengthy term-time internships. Most of the time these folks don’t understand how unproductive they themselves are, nor how much work managing somebody else effectively is.

And that's one of the reasons why older entrepreneurs are much more likely to succeed than younger entrepreneurs. I know I probably just offended lots of younger entrepreneurs. But do yourself a favor - think really hard before you bring in another intern. This is a trade off. Would you be better off with an intern for 40 hours at minimum wage all summer? Or would you be better off hiring a fractional person who can do work that you don’t know how to do for 5 hours a week?

Pay your freaking interns

I hate this conversation. We shouldn’t have to have it.

First, if you're in the United States, there are only a few narrowly designed cases in which it's OK to not pay your interns. Otherwise, it's usually a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act and possibly state laws. And, importantly, no worker can waive their right to minimum wage. So, you’re breaking the law, doing something that's frankly wrong (taking somebody else's labor for free to build yourself something of value), and also putting your startup at risk of a lawsuit, particularly if you are successful.

Second, a world of unpaid internships is a world where rich people’s children gain work experience that will help them find a job after graduation while poor people’s children can’t take professional internships. If you offer an unpaid internship, you’re contributing to this dynamic.

When hiring interns can work for a startup

I’m not totally anti intern for early-stage startups. There are specific situations where it may make sense. For example, some interns have significant relevant experience, particularly people who worked before getting an undergraduate or graduate degree. If you’re hiring someone who has prior experience temporarily, that may make sense.

Another great use case is when you have a large amount of repetitive work that you’ve been able to scope out well. This could include researching VCs and collecting information into spreadsheet columns you’ve already laid out or stepping through competitors’ websites following a step-by-step process you’ve designed. In those kinds of cases, hiring an intern for the project can make sense.

In general, though, you’re better off letting college students have great learning experiences at larger companies.

I'm not your lawyer, your therapist, your advisor, or your accountant. We're just internet friends, and these are just my experiences and personal opinions. Consult professionals for advice before you make any sudden moves in your startup.

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