We Offer an Internship that Actually Matters

Freshman year summer: Camp Counselor

Sophomore year summer: Whistle Sports

Junior year summer: Hashtag Sports

Back in 2016 when I did my first summer internship, a role as social media intern helped your resume stand out.

Now, a summer internship is an expectation amongst the sports industry.

10 years ago were the good old days. Living in NYC and having to think through if I should bring a turkey sandwich (cost: $4) or get a wrap at Chopt (cost: $12 - today, $19).

My summer internship at Whistle was…fine.

And that’s no offense to my friends over there. I even went and worked there post-grad. I learned a little during the internship and had a fun summer.

But the reality of internships is that a lot of the time they’re more an undertaking on the business and the interns are just left doing busy work.

Internships were originally to find talent. It feels like they developed backwards into just filling busy work with cheap labor.

That’s why for the last 5 years, we haven’t offered a summer internship program.

Transparently, I wasn’t too excited about managing a bunch of kids making $20/hr who, after spending 8 weeks teaching them, would go back to college and not think about Snapback for 9 months.

But then the AI boom hit.

And I started messing around with the tools and became intrigued by what could be done by talented people.

The joke on the internet is that you have to be unemployed to keep up with AI.

It’s true. A new tool I wanted to try would launch everyday. A new game I wanted to build required hours of time with the chat bot. Running a company, traveling the country and helping my pregnant wife was quite the opposite of unemployed.

So, how could I become unemployed for the summer?

Thus the Snapback AI Summer Program was born.

Today, 7 uber talented kids will start their 9 weeks in our New York City office building internal and external tools with AI.

They competed amongst 125 candidates in a 72 hour ‘build’ to be selected.

The competition isn’t done yet.

At the end of the summer, one kid will be walking away with a full time job offer.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll be sharing how the program works, what our goals are and why this internship matters.