How to Get Scrappy to Get Your Business Off the Ground

I’m a big believer in paying people for the work that they do. In fact, one of my students at Barnard College is the student who went to Congress with the piece of legislation that tried to make it an actual piece of law that requires anybody who hires interns to pay them. So I would never say skirt the system by not paying people for their work, but I would say there are a few different ways to slice that. So for example, there is a program at Barnard College, specifically at the Athena Center that they have sponsored. And so what they do is they subsidize, they even provide housing and they even provide emotional support for the young interns to come together once a week and essentially talk about their internship experiences. And so they’ve provided a context in which interns are more likely to be successful. And the entire thing is funded by the university, which means that the interns that you might get through that program are being paid, just not by you.

And it’s those sorts of programs that may or may not exist in your community, but they could. And if they don’t, maybe a phone call and a conversation with your local university about how to support this sort of interns that couldn’t get free internships, that are talented and that are brilliant, but don’t come from family wealth and so, therefore can’t take an internship that doesn’t pay. These are the sorts of hacks, these are the sort of ways of circumventing having to pay for things. It doesn’t mean that they don’t get paid, they just don’t get paid by you. Ultimately getting other people to pay for internships is really just one of a long list of scrappy things that you have to do as an entrepreneur that doesn’t necessarily have a trust fund. And I talk about a whole series of things like not paying for websites, like not paying for office space that are all critical ways to find creative solutions to the fact that you are scrappy and you don’t actually have to pay for the things that people believe to be critical to the success of any business.