Pinterest is not just a place to collect and organize inspiring images. The powerhouse social site has improved its enviable good looks and upped the IQ of its pins so that everyone, including businesses, can get more out of pinning and Pinterest, in turn, can get money from businesses.

The company that made it possible to organize and collect (aka “pin”) things from around the web has worked hard to make pins useful by adding relevant information to certain types of pins and making it possible to pin from mobile apps.

If you’ve ever clicked on a pretty bootie or a mouth-watering boozy popsicle, only to land on a dead-end Flickr album or broken link, you will especially appreciate the backend improvements that Pinterest has just rolled out.

Product pins now have more information so you can see where that boot is from (Nordstrom) and whether it’s in stock before you even leave the site (it is). Similarly, recipe pins from your favorite food bloggers now include cook time, ingredients, and servings. Movie pins now include content ratings and cast members. It will automatically update all your old pins that have contextual data.

So far only product, recipe, and movie pins contain more information. But as software engineer Anna Majkowska says in a blog post announcing these changes, “This is just the beginning and we hope to make all pins more useful in the coming months.”

To start off, Pinterest worked with some popular websites like Anthropologie, Etsy, Bon Apetit, Real Simple, and Netflix to add more information to pins. Companies that want to make their pins “richer” can join Pinterest as a business or convert their account.  They will have to prep their website with meta tags and apply to get on Pinterset. Is it a coincidence that Pinterest has coined these useful, business-oriented pins “rich pins?”

And because everyone is getting more mobile these days, Pinterest is making the Pin It button available on apps such as Modcloth, The North Face, and Jetsetter so you can really pin wherever you are.

It’s too early to tell how much effect these changes will have on people’s pinning habits, but it does seem like a way to both monetize and help users get more out of perusing pins.

Photo via Pinterest

[Editor’s note: Julia Plevin recently started a job at a startup that’s still in stealth mode. She’ll be posting occasional columns on VentureBeat about her experiences.]

It’s hard to believe I’ve been working at this startup for one year now. I joined a company of four people, and now I see about 25 of us. I never know how many coworkers I have because there seems to be someone new every Monday.

A new intern actually asked me if I was in the marketing department. I found that funny because a year ago that would have been an absurd question. It was just five of us in the corner of one floor in an old bank office, and we all had our own remote control helicopter.

We’re still in so-called stealth mode, but only for a few more weeks. I can’t wait to talk openly about the awesome stuff we are working on (even though the company may remain unnamed in this column). It’s amazing. For a year we dreamed and brainstormed. We had so many ideas of things we could do someday. But we had separate pieces that didn’t seem to really relate.

And then it happened. Things are coming together. Ideas are turning into features. The startup is actually starting up!

I’ve learned a lot this past year just from observing. I feel as if I embody the company’s history because I’ve witnessed it all. Week after week, it seemed as if nothing was happening with the startup. But now it’s been 12 months, and we’ve accomplished quite a bit. I’ve been on the roller-coaster ride of my life.

And I’m starting to realize that the real ride hasn’t even started yet.

A friend of mine is applying for a job at a startup and recently asked me some questions about my startup experience. Lots of friends have asked me for advice on how to get a job at a startup, but I love that her questions focused on what I’ve learned, because learning is really what it’s all about.

I’m sharing my answers here. I hope you learn something, too!

What are the most important skills you’ve learned on the job?

• Be the person who gets things done. A lot of people have ideas but don’t actually like to do the work. The person who can take an idea and actually make it happen is very valuable. My CEO says the person with the most stuff on their desks is the one who actually get things done.

• Just start. Making things pretty and professional and creating processes will come, but you’ve just got to start somewhere. It’s a real skill to be able to start small and humbly with whatever you’re working on and see a bigger vision for the future.

• User research and user testing is key. Talk to customers/users/people to see what they want. This works for usability testing on the website and also for testing out marketing copy. I like to go to Union Square and talk to people from all over the country so that we don’t get stuck in the San Francisco bubble.

• Own your calendar. Prioritize things that need to get done and don’t let people schedule all your time for meetings. If you need “maker time” (for coding or for writing or whatever), be sure to carve out your most productive hours for that. I know I focus best at a café outside the office.

• Stick to deadlines. It’s amazing to me how many people miss deadlines. Your coworkers will take you seriously if you take deadlines seriously.

What are some skills that you didn’t expect to be important?

• Know how to communicate with your coworkers. It’s really important to be able to talk about what you’re working on and learn what other people are doing.

• Be happy! If you’re fun to work with and are generally pleasant, people will pull you into cool projects. Never underestimate the value of a positive outlook and a big smile.

• Organize fun events. Startups are all about culture, but oftentimes people are too busy to think about creating a culture. Your coworkers will appreciate it if you go out of your way to organize fun offsite events or even just remember birthdays.

• Be patient. It always takes longer than you’d think to get things going.

What are some of the best things you did to prepare for your interview?

• Tell your story effectively. Walk people through your resume. Explain why you made the choices you did. It doesn’t really matter what you’ve done as long as you have a compelling story.

• Ask questions! It’s amazing how many interviewees never ask a thing about the person interviewing them. People love to talk about themselves and their company, and they will think you’re more interesting if you ask them questions.

• Play it cool. Sweaty palms and a shaky voice are warning signals. People at startups want to hire someone they want to hang out with. But don’t be too cool that you seem blasé.

Of course, some jobs have specific requirements. I do believe, however, that these skills are universal for all “departments” in a startup. After all, the best thing about working at a startup is there is no such thing as a department.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Yes, the name of this column is a horrible pun on Sex and the City. And yes, I always had to be the Carrie whenever three friends and I played the “Which SATC character are you?” game.

But no, this isn’t meant to be a dating column. It’s just that the similarities between dating and working at a startup are undeniable.

When I first moved to San Francisco about a year ago, I was on the prowl and looking to land a gig at a startup. I did the whole network-your-brains-out thing and went to funding parties and after parties. I knew the scene.

Now that I’m going steady with a startup, I’m not the social butterfly I once was.  Occasionally I’ll meet up with some girlfriends and gossip about other startups, but more in the ladies-night-out-after-the-baby-is-asleep-for-the-night way.

During one of these “ladies nights” a few of my friends started talking about their startup relationships.

One friend was pretty happy in her current position but was still keeping an eye out for a hot new gig that might come around.  It seems like there are some people who have a startup of the week and are always jumping to new jobs. This sounds exhausting, but who am I to judge?

Another friend was recently out of a long-term relationship with a startup. She’d been there for a few years and ended up getting burned in the end.  Apparently, they’re working things out, but she’s not willing to commit to another startup right now. Instead, she’s dating around as a consultant to a bunch of companies and trying to work on her personal brand. Maybe she’ll find something that strikes her fancy, or maybe she’ll do something on her own for a while.

My third friend has been in the industry for the longest and is the most connected. She knows everyone from venture capitalists to hotshot entrepreneurs. She’s a total matchmaker and connector and is always helping her ladies find new gigs around town.

In fact, on that night, she had just been asked by a recently-funded startup if she knew of anyone who might be interested in a new job.  The offer sounded almost illicitly tantalizing.

I could probably create an analogy between this group and the four women from Sex and the City but that game jumped the shark along with 2008 movie. And anyway, Girls is the Sex and the City of my generation….

Now which startup character are you?

Photo credit: Kramchang via photo pin

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Working at a startup is not a typical 9-5 — it’s a lifestyle. If the following resonates with you, then there’s a high probability that you work at a startup … or wish you did.

1. You can’t do anything without wondering if it was user-tested. When ordering from an unnecessarily complicated menu, you make a snide comment about it not being tested on users. The consoles for keeping score when bowling and playing songs at karaoke leaves your heart throbbing for the user testing that could have been. You want to stop and do guerrilla improvements on all machines. Don’t even get you started on the vending machine!
2. You calendar everything and everyone. When your mom wants to talk to you on the phone, you ask her to schedule some time on your Google calendar. When you want to make sure your roommates are all around to help clean the house on a Sunday afternoon, you block the time on their calendar. If something doesn’t make it to your calendar, it just won’t get done.
3. You have an app for that. Your friends are still talking about Uber Cab, but you know about Uber’s newer, cheaper younger sibling.  You downloaded the app for the Curry Up Now food truck so that you didn’t have to wait in the long line for your dosa. Oh, did I mention that you downloaded the app while waiting in line and got a lot of satisfaction from cutting the queue when your order was called?
4. You have a weekly board game night. Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, Dominion, Resistance, oh my! Going out is cool and all, but really all you want to do is drink beer and play board games. (Bananagrams is probably too literary for you and World of Warcraft was so five years ago.)
5. You climb at Mission Cliffs at least once a week. You’ve been known to pitch your best startup ideas while dangling from a crimpy hold. You only climb in t-shirts from Google, Evernote or Twilio.
6. You visit TechCrunch, Mashable, and VentureBeat’s websites multiple times a day. You’re the first to know when a new startup has launched, raised funding, or been acquired. But you know embarrassingly little about the primary election or current affairs in Myanmar. You heard about the State of the Union address on Twitter and you found out who Jeremy Lin was via your friends’ Facebook posts.
7. You use tech words in normal conversation and non-techies look at you like you’re from cyberspace. When you are missing a kitchen utensil, you come up with a clever “hack” or “workaround.” If you’re giving a friend from out of town a tour of your neighborhood (probably the Mission), you’re “onboarding” them.
8. There are tons of great happy hours near your office, but you’ve never been to one. You love to tell recruits about all the happening bars nearby, but the reality is that everyone works well past the outer limit of happy hour.
9. Granola bars are a food group. Clif bars, Nutrigrain bars, and Quaker Oats granola bars are all discrete foods within the group. These bars all come from the “fully stocked pantry” that is advertised on your startup’s job page.
10.  Your friends at Google have it so easy! They don’t have to buy Subway sandwiches for lunch and their micro-kitchens are stocked with Tcho chocolate.  They can attend yoga classes and go on runs anytime during the day. But you wouldn’t trade places with them for anything. They’re just a cog in a 30,000-person machine and you’re changing the world.

Julia Plevin is a writer and blogger who recently returned to the United States after managing a magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam. She now works at a stealth startup in San Francisco. She’s posting occasional columns on VentureBeat about her experiences.

Photo credit: Twilio

Previous Startup and the City columns:

• A great moment in history
• A startup vocabulary lesson
• Lessons from landing my first startup job
• View from the other side of the hiring process
• Fake it until you make it

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Editor’s note: Julia Plevin recently started a job at a startup that’s still in stealth mode. She’ll be posting occasional columns on VentureBeat about her experiences.

Like most great ideas, the inspiration for this article came to me while at a bar at approximately 11:37pm on a Thursday night.

It must have been 11:37pm because I had been working on a report to present the next morning until eleven o’clock.

My roommate convinced me to go grab a drink at our local bar and I agreed because I needed to take my mind off work for a few minutes before going to bed.

So when a guy at the bar asked me what I did and wanted to hear about my startup I snapped at him. “I’ve been working all night. Work is the last thing I want to talk about.”

But it turned out he also worked at startup. And was also a History major in college. This guy’s startup deals with finance so almost everyone else he works with studied finance or engineering in college. He gets asked all the time why he studied history and his response was so good that I made a mental note to remember it for the next time someone asks me why I studied history.

“Being a history major taught me how to be an analyst. I learned how to distill incredible amounts of information into a thesis statement. It’s easier to write a ten-page paper than a two-page paper. History teaches you perspective,” he said, “I don’t know how anyone who studied history isn’t in Silicon Valley right now.”

And that’s just it. Silicon Valley is the boomtown of our age. This startup scene will someday be romanticized the same way Mad Men depicts advertising in the 1950s, Pan Am shows air travel in the 1960s, and some movies present Wall Street of the 1980s.

Those of us who are working long hours in the hope that our company will be the next Facebook, Twitter, or AirBnB are living in a historic moment. The hotbed of excitement in our era is right here in Silicon Valley.

Almost.

It took all my strength not to book a one-way ticket to Burma when I found out that the United States restored relations with the country. As a journalist, I have an itch to be where the news is. That, and I have a personal connection to the country from doing some NGO work there. Burma is also having a historic moment. I’d try to liken it to this same moment in the tech industry, but that’s not just fair.

At least if I can’t be part of one historic moment, I can be part of another.

Being a history major in the tech industry has other perks.

For example, I understood the analogy when our CEO said a venture capitalist once compared the old conflict between Facebook and Zynga to the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the potential for mutually assured destruction if Facebook didn’t let Zynga use its platform.

Also, I could sympathize with the CEO when he was explaining the challenge of distilling all the ideas our company has into a two-minute pitch to a venture capitalist who hears thousands of pitches. It’s just like trying to answer whether Peter the Great was a hero or a villain in a thesis statement or explaining the causes of World War I in a paragraph.

A late-night chat in a bar reminded me that it’s not necessary to study engineering, marketing, or business if you want to work at a startup. There are benefits to studying other disciplines as long as you know how to argue that what you studied gives you a unique and valuable perspective.

Previous Startup and the City columns:

A startup vocabulary lesson

Lessons from landing my first startup job

View from the other side of the hiring process

Fake it until you make it

Tiensin Treaty image via ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Editor’s note: Julia Plevin recently started a job at a startup that’s still in stealth mode. She’ll be posting occasional columns on VentureBeat about her experiences.

I come from a right-brained family of lawyers, English teachers and journalists. We dabble in word puns and bananagrams but not math or logic puzzles. That is to say, I don’t come from a culture of engineering.

Each day I work at my startup, I learn to understand the engineers a little better, but I’m still light years away from considering them a known quantity.  

I’m learning that a lot of tech startup culture comes from computer engineering culture. The vocabulary and turns of phrase that pepper the everyday goings on at my company have elucidated the way that engineers think and approach everyday matters.

For example, after a few weeks in our stylish new office, we decided that the desk setup wasn’t quite right. Or rather, it didn’t maximize efficiency. We discussed how we might improve this situation. And then we cleared everything off the desks and started to move them around.

But engineers don’t just move furniture until it looks right. They prototype and then iterate until they come up with the perfect setup. It’s a science. We pretended to sit in our desks and worked out all the issues with the different formations until we came up with the best solution.

It’s not just the lexicon, but the insight into the way engineers think that I find so fascinating. It’s just so systematic.

I wasn’t handed a vocabulary list before my first day at work, but I’ve been doing a good job of picking up these words on the fly.

One morning before my coffee had fully kicked in, my coworkers asked for my feedback on a candidate I’d met briefly.

“She seemed really smart and we had a good conversation,” I said.

“A quick bit rate, right?” a coworker asked.

“A what?” I responded.

“A bit rate…quick at processing,” he said, perhaps noting that my bit rate wasn’t speedy that morning.

It was just that I’d never heard the word bit rate used, let alone to describe a person. Not only am I learning a new industry, I’m learning a new language to go along with it.

A few weeks ago we had one day of calendar malfunction. Maybe it’s the startup world (or just modern life), but at my work, Google calendar is like an oxygen tank. We all rely on it to survive and thrive during busy days.

To meet with a coworker, you calendar them in. It’s okay to grab lunch with a friend or go to the dentist, but it better be on the calendar. But on this particular day of calendar chaos, uncalendared and miscalendared people kept appearing. One job candidate had not been on our schedule at all and one came in a few hours early.

And on this star-crossed day, one of the users I found on Craigslist showed up even though she wasn’t calendared. It’s easy to imagine how stressful this day was for everyone. I daresay we pulled it off, but no one was happy about the organization failure.

Afterwards, the team gathered around to do a root cause analysis of the situation to figure out why it happened and to ensure it would never happen again. I’ve always been more of the put a bandaid on it/throw your problems under your bed type, so it’s refreshing and enlightening to be surrounded by people who get to the bottom of every issue.

I’m sure there are countless other words and phrases that I’ve been too busy thrashing about to pick up on. I’m just thankful we are creating a culture of limited tolerance for acronyms. Because we all know, TNSTAAFL (there’s no such thing as a free lunch).

What are other quintessential startup vocabulary words? Should I run a query to find more?

Keyboard image via Shutterstock

Previous Startup and the City columns:

Lessons from landing my first startup job

View from the other side of the hiring process

Fake it until you make it

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Editor’s note: Julia Plevin recently started a job at a startup that’s still in stealth mode. She’ll be posting occasional columns on VentureBeat about her experiences.

Here’s a secret: I don’t really know how to do my job.

I might be more embarrassed to admit this except for the fact that I think it’s completely normal, especially in the startup world.

Did Mark Zuckerburg know how to be a CEO when he first created Facebook? No, he learned on the job.

When I first became the managing editor of a city magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam, I had no idea what I was doing. I was a writer, yes, but my only experience as an editor had been at my high school yearbook. A friend, who had just taken a fancy job at an art gallery in Hanoi, assured me that I should pretend I knew what I was doing and soon enough I would actually understand my job.

And that’s exactly what I did. In the beginning I would fumble deadlines, and I felt more Dora the Explorer than Anna Wintour when I showed up to cocktail parties and sponsored events. But by the time I left the job a year later, I had grown into my Editrix stilettos and could juggle photographers, writers, print deadlines, and story ideas while standing on one high-heeled foot.

When I took my job at this startup, the founders knew that I had minimal high tech experience. But they also knew I had that that “learn how to learn” Ivy League undergraduate experience. (That’s another secret: All I learned in college was how to learn.) And they assured me that they would invest in me. Getting to be part of the startup ride, especially from so early on, would be more valuable than any amount of pay.

A startup veteran later told me I was a fool for believing the promise of being invested in. That’s apparently the line all startups use to justify paying smart people small amounts of money. But it’s been almost three months since I first started working at the startup, and I can confidently say that I’ve been invested in.

I’m not sure how I became the user researcher for the company, but that’s the bulk of what I do now. A few months ago I could not have defined usability or user experience and now it’s all I think about.

During my first weeks of work, the startup hired a graduate from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Institute of Design to give me a two-week crash course on usability and design thinking.  We joke that I got my design school education but didn’t have to spend the time or money to go back to school. Those two weeks showed me that this company was serious about investing in me.

Now, as the resident user researcher, I’m basically my own manager. No one babysits me or looks over my shoulder to make sure I’m doing my job correctly. I’ve taken it upon myself to learn how to be a user research guru. I’ve scoured the Internet for blogs on the subject, ordered a bunch of UX books, sought out Skillshare classes, and tried to find a user researcher group to join.

At times I felt that I haven’t been managed enough — I would love for someone to show me how to use Excel more efficiently, to help me brainstorm usability test ideas, and just to give me some general feedback about the quality of my work.

Then I learned the secret to job success, as told to me by a friend at Google: Don’t wait around for someone to tell you what to do. Or, in this instance: Don’t wait around for someone to manage you.

All of my coworkers are incredibly busy with their own work, and making sure that I’m on task and feeling content isn’t quite their number one priority. But if I reach out to them and ask for feedback or help in certain areas, they are more than willing to take the time to work with me.

Now I’m in the process of hiring an intern to help me schedule user interviews, accompany me out in the field and transcribe notes. I realize that once I have an intern, I’ll have to manage him or her. Which means that I have to be organized and confident in my own work.

I’m told it’s this process of managing up that often forces us to really know what we’re doing and not just pretend anymore.

But it makes me wonder, if I’m learning on the job, who else is? Are we all just faking it until we make it?

Kid in suit image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Editor’s note: Julia Plevin recently started a job at a startup that’s still in stealth mode. She’ll be posting occasional columns on VentureBeat about her experiences.

“Would you be able to spend twelve hours in an airport with this person?” our CEO asks each of us as we consider engineering candidates we’ve interviewed for open positions.

I started to interview people during my first week at the startup. It’s been a pretty awesome experience.

When every member of the team, no matter how new or how junior, gets a say in important company decisions, it fosters a sense ownership. I know I’m inspired to do my best work when I feel my opinion matters. Involving everyone and avoiding secret closed-door meetings as much as possible makes for a healthy work environment at a small company.

So far, there are seven of us on the team. Most of our engineers have been contractors who rarely, if ever, come to the office. But now we have a minimum viable product that we are testing with friends and family, and we need more full-time engineers to implement all the improvements we want to make. Hiring the right engineers is key at this point.

I’ve been doing user research with each candidate, so while I can’t test them on their Javascript or Ruby on Rails prowess, I am able to talk with them and make sure they can communicate like normal human beings. That was my bar for engineers. As long as they were on the human side of the human-to-robot spectrum, I’d give them a pass.

One candidate showed up to the interview wearing a wrinkled t-shirt. He was straight out of the engineer stereotype many programmers resent. But I enjoyed his quirky sense of humor, so if the other engineers on the team thought he was smart and could add value, sure, I’d give a thumbs up.

As you can tell, I’m still new at this whole hiring people thing. Soon I’ll feel empowered to give a straight yes or no to a candidate, but so far I’ve been wishy-washy and relatively easy on each candidate. But I am constantly reminded that there’s an endless supply of talented people around, and we only want those who are a perfect fit.

Right now, everyone on the team can communicate easily with one another. We have a nice rapport and are all on the same page. Bringing on someone who has a different mindset could poison the whole vibe of the company, especially at this early stage.

“I’m just not sure what standards I should have for engineers,” I responded when the CEO asked me if I thought a candidate was a good cultural fit for the team. Everyone on the team now is sporty and enjoys the occasional round of drinks at the bar, but I thought surely our nerd quotient would increase as we hired more engineers.

“What about Dan and Josh?” the CEO said, “They’re not nerds.” The engineers on our team are super sociable, athletic, and shower daily — a seemingly rare breed.

“Yeah, I know, they’re awesome,” I said, “but how many engineers like them are out there?” I asked, recalling the “nerd herd” at my previous startup that would roll out to pick up lunch at precisely 12pm and then return to their desks to eat while typing away on their keyboards.

“There are plenty,” said the CEO, “and they will want to come work with us for that reason.”

We’re working in the social sphere so it makes sense that we have high standards for sociability. We don’t need to be a team of social butterflies, but we should all be able to work together, or spend 12 hours at an airport together.

This question of spending time at the airport with someone is just a way to gauge whether a candidate is a good match culturally.

It reminds me a bit of my sorority days back in college where, after rush, we’d sit around and discuss the girls we’d just met in order to decide who we wanted to back. “How far would you drive her?” the rush chair would ask.

If you liked the rushee you might say, “I’d drive her home for winter break,” or maybe, “I’d drive her around the moon a thousand times!” If you were not a fan you could say, “I’d drive her to the grocery store,” or “I wouldn’t even let her in my car!”

But unlike women during rush, engineers ultimately have a leg up in the startup hiring process. They have a highly valued skill and are compensated accordingly. If things don’t work out with one startup, there’s always another one with a different office culture seeking engineers.

I’m grateful to be on the other side of the hiring process now and to never have to go through sorority rush again.

Julia Plevin is a writer and blogger who recently returned to the United States after managing a magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam. She now works at a startup in San Francisco.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Editor’s note: Julia Plevin recently started a job at a startup that’s still in stealth mode. She’ll be posting occasional columns on VentureBeat about her experiences.

I’ve been asked many times why and how I got into working at a startup. I normally shrug it off and say something like, “Oh, just the right time and right place,” but of course that’s not the whole truth.

Like many a young person with big dreams, I arrived bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked to San Francisco with plans to be part of something big and exciting. I even had an idea for a start-up of my own that I just knew would be the next Twitter (actually I’m still kind of convinced it will be).

And so I set out to get a job at a start-up. Easy, right? Not so much.

The first crush of reality came when a seasoned San Francisco tech industry veteran told me that with my interest in editorial content, I’d be better off looking for a job at a start-up in New York City. I was told that techie engineering companies and sales firms mostly dominate the San Francisco/Silicon Valley start-up scene. And I was clearly not an engineer or a salesperson.

A second blow came from my childhood friend who is now a co-founder of InternMatch. He explained that being around the start-up scene – attending demo day events, launch parties, and exciting, groundbreaking conferences – was a lot more romantic than actually working at a start-up. The day-to-day of a start-up is a total grind.

But still I persevered, writing cover letters out my ears and sometimes even meeting people for an interview. About two months passed before I finally found a start-up that wanted to hire me. And that’s the thing: If a company has job postings online, it’s almost too late.

When a start-up is looking to hire, they need people fast. They don’t want to spend a lot of time recruiting. They trust people already in the industry and value referrals highly. So I was lucky enough to find a friend who had a friend who had a start-up that was about to launch and needed more hands on deck, (really, fingers on keyboards).

I promptly took the job. And then I learned another lesson: Not all start-ups are created equal. Some are more serious while others more chill. Some are more engineering heavy and others less so. Some are on ambitious growth trajectories and others just chugging along. And so on.

The one I landed at, let’s call it Bleu Project, was filled with great people, but it was not a perfect culture fit for me. Ask anyone in the start-up world and they’ll tell you that finding a culture fit is totally key. At Bleu Project, people talked about math equations during happy hour, and eating lunch anywhere other than in front of your computer screen was considered sacrilegious. Moreover, the product was something I found interesting, but not all that relevant to me.

I stuck it out for a good seven weeks before I went to meet the team at another start-up in downtown San Francisco. This other start-up was in a super early stage, pre-private beta. From the moment I flew my first remote control helicopter, an almost prerequisite for getting a job at the young-hearted company, I knew I had found my start-up home in San Francisco. The product was something that I could relate to and believe in. Everyone on the team was smart and accomplished but also fun and social.

I eagerly accepted an offer at this early stage company and bid Bleu Project adieu. I was nervous that the people at Bleu Project might be upset with me for jumping ship to go work at a different start-up, but they were quite gracious. And therein lies another lesson about start-ups: it’s a small world where it’s taken for granted that people move around a lot, so everyone wants to remain on good terms.

So here I am now, working at a start-up I love and occasionally “moonlighting” as a columnist here. I’m a start-up newbie, having spent most of my post-collegiate life as a writer and a journalist, and I have a bit of an outsider’s perspective since I spent the past two years living in Vietnam. I’ll be writing regularly about what it’s actually like to work at a start-up and I will even disclose the name of said start-up as soon as we are no longer in stealth mode.

Julia Plevin is a writer and blogger who recently returned to the United States after managing a magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam. She now works at a startup in San Francisco.