Goodbye Harvey Mudd – Hello Prisma

Earlier this week, I said goodbye to much of my college community, as graduation marked the end of an unforgettable 4 years at Harvey Mudd College. However, less than 24 hours after I received my diploma, I was halfway across the world, embarking on a new journey with Prisma.

I arrived in Europe last week and immediately jumped into my first week of “work” this summer… conveniently aligned with the Prisma company off-site in Barcelona. Not knowing what to expect, the week ended up being a flurry of socialization, workshops, tapas, games, and drinks. And more drinks. Harvey Mudd College is a notorious work-hard play-hard school, with its themed parties and wet campus culture, but I’d never experienced professional work and play like the past week. It was incredibly fun and productive. I left with new friends and exponentially more context on the organization of teams, the complicated technical architecture of Prisma’s current products, and the product strategy for where Prisma is going. Having completed two entirely remote internships at Apple and DocuSign, there’s something different about starting work off in-person with your coworkers.

Motivations for Joining Prisma

For those unfamiliar with Prisma, Prisma is a startup company based out of Berlin, whose signature product to-date is Prisma ORM, their open-source Object Relational Mapping (ORM) for TypeScript and JavaScript applications. Prisma ORM, and ORMs in general, strive to make life easier for developers by allowing them to interact with their databases in programming languages that they are already building their application in. This way, they don't have to write repetitive, complex SQL code in their backend applications to read from or write stuff to their database. This is the core product offering of Prisma today, with over 23K stars on Github, but there are more products launching soon (that I’ll be contributing to!) as Prisma scales the services they can offer as a result of sitting at the layer between the database and the application.

My motivations for joining Prisma this summer are many-fold. For one, I wanted to experience working at a small, high-growth startup. The scale of Apple is obvious, and DocuSign had grown to be over 5,000 employees when I worked there – Prisma’s currently at 70. But beyond the size of the companies, the teams within the companies I worked for had already acquired some serious financial traction. I felt that Prisma, who only a few weeks ago raised their Series B and currently does not monetize their open-source software, would give me an opportunity to see firsthand how a startup strategizes and executes on its product offerings, branding, culture, and organization as it strives to find product-market fit and become a sustainable, revenue-generating business.

My past summer as a Kleiner Perkins Fellow also helped me tremendously in this process. Through the Fellowship, I’d met KP partner Bucky Moore, who participated in multiple funding rounds for Prisma and currently sits on their Board of Directors. I sought Bucky’s advice as I was learning more about Prisma, and his industry knowledge and enthusiasm about Prisma’s trajectory, as well as the learnings I could gain, gave me great conviction to join.

Finally, I had always wanted to study abroad during college, but I was never able to due to the schedule of college basketball seasons. Interning at Prisma gives me the ultimate chance to explore Europe and immerse myself overseas before starting a full-time job. Based on how this summer goes, I will write some resources on my recruiting process to help anyone interested in sourcing oversea companies and internship roles.

In the meantime, Berlin will be home for the next two months, and I’m excited for what’s to come!