Week 5: Sick and Sad

Time: 02/17-02/23, 10.5 hours

Topics: Tech Startups and Entrepreneurship.

Tools: Prismic, Gatsby.

Summary:

I remember this was one of the worst weeks I had in Woodlawn. I got sick and spent the entire week in bed with a fever, headaches, and sore throat. I was miserable. I would wake up each morning and cook a giant pot of rice congee. After cooking I would get back in bed and only leave to refill my congee bowl, get water, or use the bathroom. My entry for Feb 18th is:

"Miserable. Sick. I need to recover quickly. I can’t do this anymore."

Interning remotely meant I could still keep up with that week’s internship hours. It was difficult to find the motivation to get anything done during this week. Besides the daily scrum calls, I spent some time learning CSS tricks and styling the blog. By this point, I felt comfortable fetching content from Prismic and building pages and components with Gatsby. 

Tech Startups and Entrepreneurship: I want to compare the work experience of my last internship with Bureau Gravity to working with Wunderite. These are incredibly different companies with different organization, goals, and audiences. What I want to spend some time discussing is what I found different in terms of the way leadership was defined and why I think startups have an efficiency advantage. By this week I understood everyone’s roles and responsibilities. Peter and Joe are co-founders and they worked on developing the first versions of Wunderite with two developers in the Philippines, Chris, and Cyril, as well as Peter’s brother Phil. They outsourced a lot of Wunderite’s design work to a design team at North Eastern University and have weekly Technical calls with Rick, who specializes in backend development. This structure is incredibly efficient because it allows for Wunderite to pull in additional talent as necessary for more demanding projects and is agile enough for the team to make significant progress on goals and deadlines every week. Bureau Gravity, in contrast, had full-time designers, content editors, and a software developer. These workers were constantly overwhelmed with tasks because the company was understaffed which led to a lot of complaints towards management. Because Peter and Joe have the connections and resources to quickly pull in mentorship, advice, or part-time help for specific blockers, Wunderite is not limited to its team members and the work can easily be redistributed.