Emi Gal

One of the best ways to get work done cheaply when you’re a startup is get interns on board. Most of the times they’re smart, driven, willing to learn, and can be very affordable. However, you have to be careful as both hiring and getting them up-to-speed can be quite time consuming.

I’ve hired a few interns in the past few years since I’ve been building companies, and I’d like to share some of my learnings with you.

Look for potential, not experience. The reason why people do internships is to get experience. If someone with 2+ yrs of experience in a specific industry is still doing internships, it means there’s something wrong there.

Hire fast and fire faster. When you find someone you really like, hire her or him, don’t wait. Momentum is very important when getting interns on board. Get them excited about the company, get them on board, assign responsibilities and get it rolling. But please, you will thank me later for this: if it doesn’t work in the first week, stop!

Don’t pay an intern too much. If you’re hiring an intern in London, anything from £10 to £30 per day is enough. If you pay more than that it means they’re doing it for the money, and that’s not the type of intern you need. You need someone willing to work 24/7 even for £10 / day, just because they love the team, the business and whatever you’re doing.

Be very careful if hiring MBA interns. I recently got burned with one. MBAs can be super-smart and can bring tons of value to the company, however most of the times they: a) think they’re smarter than you, b) think they have more experience than you, c) think they deserve better than an internship so they start calling themselves consultants and d) are expensive. I know people who’ve gotten brilliant MBA interns on board, I know people who’ve experienced exactly what I have. So be careful with this one, and only hire if they have some key skill that you can’t find in an undergraduate / student intern.

The best ways to get interns I think are through your network of friends & business contacts, on gumtree.com (surprisingly good applicants, if you have someone to go through all the crap applications you’ll get) or enternships.com. I hope the tips in this post will help you in the quest for the best intern for your startup!

I haven’t had time to blog at all in the past couple of months, as I’ve been too busy sleeping, partying and sipping Pina Coladas in Santorini, of course.

However, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. From classic novels to philosophy to business books. And to soften some of this guilt I have for almost abandoning this blog, I decided to share some of the best ones with you. You’ve probably read most of them, but if you haven’t I strongly recommend that you do.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde – I think it’s the second or third time I read it, but Lord Henry remains one of my favorite characters of all times

How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie – a book that has taught me how to smile. Smile properly.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera –  it made me miss Prague, a city that reminds me a lot of Bucharest, my home town.

Crush it, Gary Vaynerchuk – the books brings nothing new to the party, but I completely loved the chapter about customer service: CARE

The One Minute Manager series by Ken Blanchard – a must read by any manager or CEO out there interested to improve his / her leadership skills.

A couple of weeks ago I met one of the smartest guy you probably never heard of. Or, you have, if you’ve ever watched the Startup.com movie or if you know anything about the dot com bubble.

Kaleil Isaza Tuzman founded one of the hottest startups of the dot com bubble, govworks.com. He raised $50 million, grew the company to 300 employees and then scaled it down and sold it cheap ’cause of the bubble.

Ten years have passed and he’s done quite a lot. Most importantly, he founded KIT Digital, a publicly traded (NASDAQ: KITD) IP video enablement company. And the biggest one in this space, for that matter.

So, as I was saying, I had the priviledge to have a very fun & entertaining dinner with Reshma Sohoni, Kaleil and a few other people, a couple of weeks ago. And the the highlight of the evening was when I asked Kaleil what he would’ve done differently in the past 10 years. His answers stuck into my head so I decided to share them with you:

1. Keep your very good friends very close. You’ll find your best friends in your early 20s.

2. Have more fun. Much more fun. Don’t let work be your life. Get out and play. Try almost everything at least once.

3. Make more babies. Start a family. Early on, ’cause there really is no perfect time to do that.

That’s it. Thank you, Kaleil.

By the way, feel free to checkout my other posts from the “Words of Wisdom” series, here and here.

Is when you pitch to a potential customer and two minutes later he shows you an internal presentation from “6 weeks ago” showcasing a similar product to yours. This means that:

a) They see the problem
b) It’s a big enough problem that they were thinking to solve it themselves
c) If your value proposition & business model are strong enough, it will make sense for them to use your product instead of building it themselves

Needless to say how my meeting went, no?

As a lot of you have probably seen, Hulu announced a few new exciting features on their online video platform last week. And I’m extremely exciting about some of them, because it seems the online video world is heading where I expected it to go .

Here are some of the things they launched and my thoughts on why I think they launched them:

Bigger screen – they’ve increased their player size by 25%. Now, you could already click full-screen anyway, so why bigger screen? Well, to be able to plug in various advertising / interactive elements, don’t you think? *wink wink*

Ad tailor – a small little tool that asks people if they like a specific ad. Oh, yeah, and a polling system that asks people various things related to the platform. Hm, I know a company that’s been doing that for quite some time now . On a more serious note – the smart people of Hulu have understood that in order to be better at advertising, they need to interact with people to find out what they want.

Heat map & seek bar - the heat map is a cool way to find out which part of a video is more popular. The seek bar allows you to view thumbs in the video at any specific point in the video. These are two features  that I’m very excited about, because both of them point towards where Hulu’s heading: engaging the viewer with the video content and making more use of the data they have.

One thing I don’t really agree on with Hulu is their lack of HTML5 support. HTML5 is extremely important in the video on demand ecosystem I think, because it makes it so easy to stream content across multiple platforms.

All in all, I think hulu’s definitely one of the innovators in the online video space, and the fact that they’re making steps towards interactive video & advertising reinforces what I’ve been saying for quite some time now: the future of video is interactive.

Those of you who know me more than just as the guy behind Brainient probaby know that the most important thing I want to achieve in life is reinventing education. And it makes me so happy when I discover that I’m not the only guy who sees that education today has some big, big issues.

For example, Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher and part time Googler who lives in Santa Cruz, US, has found a way to redefine how high school students understand math, by using multimedia, interaction and by redefining how math problems are created.

I encourage you to watch the video below. If more people would try to decompose problems & find solutions the way Dan does, education so much more interesting for students.

Whenever a company starts completely changing (or creating) an industry and massively capitalizes on that, people start talking. Press & media starts following its every step to see if they could get some drama (and traffic, therefore revenue) out of that.

Facebook is right in the midst of all this drama with its share-everything privacy policy and Zuckerberg’s recent “newly discovered” IM messages.

But here’s my take on it: Facebook will make $1 billion this year, and they’ll probably IPO in 2012. Right now, investors trust Zuck and his team and users need Facebook enough to be willing to go through the roller coaster together with the company. And Zuck knows that.

Think about the following scenario: Mark Zuckerberg’s IM message is discovered after their IPO. What happens to the stock? It goes down. Or, Facebook changes their privacy policies and makes tons of changes that users hate. What happens to the stock? It goes down. Or… well, you get the point.

Facebook has two more years to bang its head on the wall and try everything possible without that affecting their ‘market cap’. Once they float, they will have to be 100 times more careful. So it makes sense for them to try it and then ask for forgiveness. And Zuck’s doing just that.

Because I have this big interest in monetising video, I always keep an eye open to see how people react to video advertising. I’ve therefore developed a little bit of an obsession to quiz all my friends on what they like / don’t when watching video online. And quite a lot of my friends aren’t that much into technology, so I find their feedback very valuable. Here’s what I’ve discovered in the past few months:

1. They don’t want to watch pre-rolls unless they’re directly related to the content of the video they’re about to watch. Therefore, targeting pays a very big role in video advertising I think.

2. If they have no choice, they would like a pre-roll they can interact / play with or that would be interesting / captivating. Did I hear interactive video, anyone?

3. They’d be much happier watching more, but shorter, video ads distributed across the video instead of having all of them at the beginning of the video. Why are advertisers still surprised that nobody clicks on pre-rolls? I’m pretty sure nobody pays attention to them, so they’re throwing their money out the window if you ask me.

4. Instead of a pre-roll, they’d like something to play with (a game, a poll, an animation). That would make them pay attention and actually remember what the pre-roll is about. Again, this is another sign that the world’s heading to words interactive video.

These are my conclusions after talking to quite a few people in the past few months. And please don’t get me wrong – by no means do I think that pre-rolls are going to die. They’re not. But they need to become smarter. More targeted. More interesting. Interactive .

It’s been so hectic in the past couple of weeks that I completely forgot to tell you that Brainient got the runner-up prize at The Next Web 2010, that we launched the first AppStore for Video in the world and that I started taking Ashtanga Yoga classes.

London’s treating me well .

There’s a great passage in the Bible talking about patience. I don’t remember what it says exactly, but the bottom line is that the more patient we are, the wiser we grow. It makes sense, I think. However, I find it very strange that even though I know that being patient will ultimately make me wiser, I still can’t do it. I try to, but whenever I’m in an argument, for example, I just lose it.

Today though, while having a very long run around Battersea Park, I think I realized why people that have plenty of patience are wiser: because they take the time to listen. Now I know.