Don’t wait for permission
I’ve been at foursquare for just over a month, and I think I’ve cracked the code on how this place works:
If you see something that needs to be done, you do it.
If you have an idea, you start building it.
If you wait for someone to tell you what to do, you’ll be left behind.
Before this internship, I didn’t have any clue what “startup culture” would be like. I had read a couple articles about how fast-paced it was, but actually living it has been eye opening.
If something isn’t working, no one puts together a long-term strategy doc to address it. Someone just fixes it. If you have an idea, you don’t wait to present it in a meeting next month, instead you just throw it in the group chat, and by the time you check back, people are already building upon it.
That’s a big change of pace for someone from Missouri. But I love it.
Figuring it out as I go
When I first got here, I had guessed that, like most jobs, there might be some more guidance or a ramp up into what I should or shouldn’t be doing. That isn’t the case at all, because it simply cannot be the case. In a team this small and mighty, you absolutely must figure it out.
My whiteboard tracker of universities I’ve been reaching out to. Let’s not erase this.
My main project, foursquare for Universities, is all about getting colleges to integrate foursquare into campus life. Helping them create official pages, design custom badges, get students excited to check in. But there’s no handbook for how to do that, so I’ve had to build the strategy while I was executing it. This means sometimes it won’t work, but that’s part of taking the risks necessary to grow.
Some schools “got it” immediately. Others had no idea why this would matter to them. Some cared about student engagement, others were focused on alumni. There wasn’t a single perfect pitch I could use for everyone—I had to adjust on the fly. This was tough for me to get used to because, at first, I wanted to scope it all out and get things right before I reached out to schools. But then I realized: there was no “right.”
Startups life doesn’t wait—just build
My first week at foursquare, I suggested a way for universities to highlight their top check-in spots in a more dynamic way. I thought maybe I’d need to put together some project proposal to show my boss or team. Instead, the answer I got back was, “Cool, how do we do it?” By the end of the day, we had a rough concept that we could use, and try testing it by the end of the week.
These kinds of ideas don’t happen in meetings; they happen in conversations, group chats, standups, and while out for drinks. And some of the best ideas come when people don’t overthink. I’ve heard my team call it the “Yes, and…” mindset, like in improv (which I did in high school, by the way—it’s harder than it looks). The point being that, instead of shutting down ideas, people build on them.
One of the biggest shifts for me has been adapting to that mentality. You don’t have to be 100% sure an idea is perfect before you put it out there. The point isn’t to be right—it’s to create momentum.
A month ago, I thought I wanted to work at a startup. Now, I know I need to.