Jesus RodriguezJournal #1
I recently began working for a small social venture, Connect Us, located in the city of New York. Today was my first day on the job. The office is really small and it is integrated with the rest of the house. There are going to be three of us working here: Marc the CEO, Rakel who is the only employee, and me.
My role in the company will be developing a new Business Plan for the company and helping Marc with the operations. Currently, they are working for a big pharmaceutical company developing a solution to improve living conditions of some patients. I am excited by this opportunity as I will be seeing, from the inside, a real social venture “start up”. I want to learn all that would be possible to start a new one in the future.
My first day was spent reading and understanding the positioning of Connect Us in the market and what kind of services they are providing to patients and pharmaceutical companies.
Let´s see how things go!
Journal #2
I have been working for eight weeks for Connect Us and the experience has been incredible. I have been involved in the negotiations of a $1.5M contract with a pharmaceutical company and I had the opportunity to discuss all the negotiation strategy with the company CEO.
Additionally, I have worked in the development of technical specifications for the programmers, several selling presentations and focus groups for patients. I have reviewed the operations of the company and I had the opportunity to make several changes to improve operations’ performance.
Last week, Howard, another summer intern, has joined our team and we are going to work together in updating the previous business plan and I hope that we will be able to finish it in the next two weeks.
Journal #3
I have recently finished my 10 week internship with Connect Us and it has been a fantastic experience with lot of emotions! In the end, we missed the $1.5M contract with a pharmaceutical company we had been negotiating with for the past month. We received the bad news exactly on my last working day in the office. It was extremely sad and depressing. It taught me that working in a social venture is all emotions and risks.
During my last two weeks on the job, I was devoted to the development of a business plan. I worked with Howard and split the tasks between the two of us. I worked on the numbers of the business plan, while he worked on the written document. The final document was very solid and it was a pity not to have more time to go pitch it to VCs.
In conclusion, during my 10 week summer internship, I was able to live the reality of the day-to-day of a social venture while I worked in three things:
- Negotiate of a new contract with a pharmaceutical company
- Develop a new business plan
- Work on the specifications to programmers
