The first summer internship I did at Waterloo was at Google. Interning there was an eye-opening experience. I got to work on Google Search<\/a>, a product that billions of people, including myself, use every single day.<\/p>\n When I took up the internship, like any freshman, I just thought it would be cool to work at a big company and ship big products. I ended up interning at Google twice, first in the summer of 2019, and then during the following summer in 2020.<\/p>\n During my internships at Google, I learned a lot, particularly about operating as a software engineer on large-scale products. That included learning how to write unit tests and good technical design documents. Big companies are great at that.<\/p>\n Related stories<\/p>\n Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know<\/p>\n Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know<\/p>\n That said, I didn’t enjoy the bureaucracy that came with working in a Big Tech<\/a> company. If you are shipping something on Google Search, you cannot break Google Search. That is just one of the underlying rules.<\/p>\n I understand why things have to be slow at that scale. It’s just that for someone who wants to learn fast and try out different things, it can feel limiting.<\/p>\n Even for my internship projects, it took a few months just for the code to get shipped. Although the projects were technically done, we still had to conduct A\/B testing experiments and get sign-offs before the code could be deployed.<\/p>\n Going from Big Tech to startups<\/p>\n That experience eventually set me on the path toward working at startups. I chose to focus on AI because I wanted to be at the edge of what technology can do.<\/p>\n I was initially an AI skeptic<\/a>. I didn’t buy into the hype of how it could change everything. It was only when I started using AI on a day-to-day basis that I began to appreciate how it could usher in a fundamental shift in the way we work.<\/p>\n It also helps that working on AI is fun and exciting. There are new advancements in space every week, and the frontier of what we can do just keeps going further.<\/p>\n I ended up doing two internships at two AI startups before I graduated. The first one was at Warp, an AI agent platform for developers, and the second one was at Ramp, a fintech startup<\/a> that uses AI to automate financial operations.<\/p>\n I received full-time offers from both Warp and Ramp and chose to work at Warp. Both were great companies, but I wanted to work at Warp because I wanted to be part of a startup that was in a relatively early stage of development.<\/p>\n Ramp was at a much more mature stage than Warp at the time, and was focused on scaling up. Warp, on the other hand, was still trying to figure things out. On a personal level, I wanted to see how a startup goes through that process. I wanted to grapple with questions like, “How does pricing work? How does the business model work?”<\/p>\n That is harder to see at a mature startup, where all of these things have already been figured out and growth is the priority.<\/p>\n So far, working at Warp for the past two years has lived up to my expectations. We ship code every week. I could be working on something on Tuesday, and it gets shipped out on Thursday. I work maybe 60 to 70 hours a week. It’s a very different kind of velocity and cadence than at Big Tech.<\/p>\n In the near term, I want to continue to work on AI because it’s one of the most rapidly expanding areas in tech. Companies like Warp and its competitors, Cursor and Cognition<\/a>, are all expanding very rapidly.<\/p>\n I am somewhat tempted to launch my own startup, but I think it’s difficult to gain market share in this hyper-competitive space. That’s something I will give serious thought about in the future.<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1754989098_269_placeholder.png\")
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