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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

And in good 2009 spirit, I twitted about the top 3 things I learned, of course. Without further ado:

Firstly: most important thing I’ve learned this year: if you’re crap at something, delegate it as soon as you can

For example, I’m a complete mess at administrative / finance stuff. It took me a few years to finally understand accept that and find someone to delegate it to. Now it’s done, and it’s sooo much better.

Secondly: second thing I learned this year: communication is key. And boy, I learned this the hard way! #fb

For a long, long time I hoped that avoiding a problem will eventually make it vanish. And it happens. Sometimes. But in 90% of the cases, it doesn’t. Avoiding to communicate regarding a problem will only make it worse. But hey, better to learn later than never, no?

Last but not least: 3d thing I learned this year: always try to do the right thing, even tho it might be damn difficult. #fb

Doing the right thing is always more difficult. It takes guts and character to do it. But doing the right thing always makes you stronger.

That’s it for this year. Happy New Year and all that .

From here.

It’s probably hard to see when you have bills piling up, clients that keep pushing their payments and everybody seems to be focusing on making it to the next trimester, but if you look closely at it, recession wakes up the creative side of you. And creativity brings lots of opportunities with it, I don’t have to tell you that.

The other thing I like about recession is that it can help you get more market share. But that’s a whole different topic so I’ll leave it for later. Meanwhile, no matter how you look at it, we’re in the middle of a recession. You can either react with fear or make smart bets.

What will you choose?