Growth Intern at Riva

Riva

During the summer of 2019, I got the chance to experience being a part of a mission-driven tech startup in Silicon Valley. The company’s mission is to provide the tools and encouragement for everyone, especially women and minorities, to negotiate their compensation packages. Riva used machine learning to generate the most likely response to secure a successful compensation negotiation. As a startup in the pre-seed stage of funding, the company only had a handful of people on the team and needed more people to complete all of the many things they hoped to accomplish.

The Growth Intern

As the organization was focused on helping women and minorities, they needed someone to search for organizations that were focused on these groups to find people who would use the service. This is where I came in. I spent weeks digging through local organizations, university organizations, and national chapters’ websites, Facebook groups, and directories to look for a point of contact that would result in the highest rate of response. I was also involved with reworking the emails, using my business writing background, to increase the rate of success.

My Growth

While these tasks did not require a highly skilled person to execute them, I gained a lot just by physically being in the workspace and experiencing the culture. Working on the mainland, and particularly in San Francisco, is very different from the slow-pace and laid-back atmosphere here in Hawaii. I was fortunate to be able to talk to my co-workers, who were mainly software engineers, and network with other professionals working in the tech industry. I met some data scientists and gained insight on their life working at Uber and Google. The best part? I got to meet great friends from another part of the world.

You can learn about the company here.