It is fitting that it was now that I read that Raj Dey, founder of Enternships.com, has won the O2 X Young Entrepreneur of the year Award. It is the evening before my final day of a journey that started two years ago when having logged on to a slightly buggy website a friend from Oxford had mentioned to me, I decided to dive headfirst into the world of Enternships.
An Enternship is literally an Entrepreneurial internship - a placement in a small, rapidly growing business, where daily tasks go far beyond the traditional realms of filing documents or just listening in on meetings. These placements offer authentic responsibility in environments that let entrepreneurial individuals flourish. For the companies hosting the Entern, they get access to a pool of hungry, ambitious (and cheap!) young achievers looking to make an impact. It's the perfect match.
My experience as an Entern has been nothing less than extraordinary. I dropped out of an Undergraduate course at the LSE in 2007 (Accounting and Finance, it turned out, just wasn't my thing), and whilst working on a plan to get from Dropout to Dot-com millionaire I decided to find an Enternship. A friend had recommended the site to me, and straight away I found a placement working none other than for Peter Jones of Dragon's Den fame. In 3 of the most amazing weeks I was exposed to the very sharp end of the business world in a way that no other experience could get close to.
I immediately followed this up with an Enternship at BBC Worldwide, working closely with an experienced Entrepreneur on planning and developing a web-based video application. Again, the experience of working in an entrepreneurial environment gave me exposure and responsibilities that I knew would stand me in good stead when I started my own business.
My final Enternship was the most remarkable of all. Having only intended to join a fledgling startup called Amuso.com for only a few weeks to gain some marketing experience, my placement rapidly expanded into a full time paid role, working with the founding team on every aspect of building a company from nothing more than a business plan and some Venture Capital funding. For a budding Entrepreneur, there is nothing in the world that can prepare you better for the stress, the highs, the lows, the long hours, the frustrations, the jubilation and overall
ordeal of founding an ambitious startup. Best of all, I have spent the last 10 months of my 21 month stint with
Amuso working with a team of developers in sunny Barcelona, where I have made some amazing friends and found a wonderful country to build a life in.
Tomorrow is my final day at Amuso, and it marks my final day as an Entern. Finally I am going off to found my own Web 2.0 venture. I now, however, have a wealth of experience, knowledge and contacts to help me give my own company the best start possible and who knows, perhaps I will be hiring my own Enterns soon. I've had the best possible leg-up and have Raj and his team to thank... so congratulations Raj, thanks for the hard work and enjoy the award!
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