On Fred Wilson’s blog post about Raise Cache and HackNY, someone asked a very legitimate question:
Why are we raising money to benefit CS students from top programs around the country? Why are we raising money to help companies like Business Insider and bit.ly hire interns?
The event looks like fun but I’ve been trying to understand hackNY and don’t understand why it’s a charitable cause.
And, I wrote a response — providing some anecdotal information about how Parse.ly benefited from HackNY, and why it matters in a city flush with gold-plated Wall St. internships.
Let me give you a hint why HackNY is somewhat charitable: Wall Street firms pay between $15-$30k/summer for technical interns in NYC. Most startups — especially early-stage ones — simply can’t compete with that.
You may not think startups like bit.ly and Business Insider need any help (and with their $13-15M in capital funding raised, maybe you are right), but in 2010, when Parse.ly sought a summer intern, we had no funding and a < $3K/mo. burn rate. You can read our testimonial about HackNY here: http://hackny.org/a/2011/01/st... That said, it'd probably be good to have more truly early-stage (pre-funding) companies on the roster -- one of the problems with this, though, is that a lot of pre-funding companies are in such a fragile state that the internship might be over a couple weeks into the summer. Also, pre-funding companies aren't typically "buzzworthy". The first two years of HackNY has been partially about creating some buzz about NYC tech among university students, something at which it has succeeded spectacularly. Both of our HackNY interns (2010 + 2011) have commented about how one of the interesting parts of the program is that it simply raises awareness of the different stages of companies. Since the HackNY interns all live together in university housing, they share stories -- and you'll have folks working on >100-person teams at places like Gilt Group and folks working on <10-person teams at places like Parse.ly. Also, the program’s lecture series does a good job of encouraging students to consider entrepreneurship or startup work as a post-graduation option. This is a countervailing force to the professional HR/recruiting teams employed by Wall Street and other Fortune 500s to market their positions to top students.
from Raise Cache at AVC.com.