A commitment to innovation and giving back are core to the company philosophy at LoopUp, and our continuing participation in Silicon Valley Internship Programme (SVIP) is one of the ways we get involved. SVIP offers top software engineering graduates from the UK the opportunity to take up a one-year paid internship with high-growth technology companies in the Bay Area. The idea is to encourage entrepreneurship within this group of British graduates, fostering the next generation of innovators and bringing a little of Silicon Valley’s ‘no fear of failure’ attitude back to Britain.
In the words of Mike Hughes, our co-CEO and founder of SVIP, “From the outside, Silicon Valley looks a little like how Hogwarts must look to the average Muggle – technological wizardry with lots of lights and colors that magically yields gold. In some ways, the dirty little secret is that there is a little more ‘throwing spaghetti against a wall and seeing what sticks’ than deep strategic insight than many of us like to admit. The true wizardry here is the business ecosystem and supporting culture that encourages many, many people to try new ideas, fail, learn and try again and again so companies are born and die quickly yielding a broiling entrepreneurial innovation soup of natural selection that occasionally spits out a spectacular winner. This is the lesson we are trying to get across to the SVIPs – start with something you care about, jump in, move fast, innovate, keep trying – don’t worry too much about failing – it is too easy to sit on the sidelines waiting for the ‘perfect’ idea – come on in, the soup’s lovely!”
SVIP is now in its second year, with a fresh intake of 13 interns joining 9 high-growth technology companies including GuideSpark, Bitnami, and Coffee Meets Bagel. For our part, we’re delighted to welcome Olly Freeman from the University of Cambridge and Josh Peaker from the University of Oxford. All of the interns will, in addition to their new day job, get valuable exposure to training and mentorship focusing on specific aspects of entrepreneurship (such as fund raising), as well as attending monthly hackathons to pursue their own startup ideas. So far so good: as Olly says, “I cannot thank SVIP enough – they have set up an awesome program that has allowed me to work, learn and live in the tech capital of the world. SVIP have taken care of everything, and the atmosphere in the program and at LoopUp is friendly, enthusiastic and extremely infectious – I couldn’t ask for anything more!”
