The Internship That Changed How I Build

The week before I started at Method, my friend and I got rejected from Y-Combinator. 

We had been talking about starting a company for a while. You know, the kind of talking that happens late at night when you're supposed to be studying but all you can think about is something else. We had an idea we believed in so we built a demo and applied to YC. We got an interview. We did the interview. And then we got rejected.

The day following the rejection, I had an interview with Jose, Method's CEO. He asked if I ever wanted to start a company. I chuckled, “well… um… so yesterday I….” 

Our scheduled 30 minutes together turned into 1h 15m, and before I knew it I was sharing maybe a little more than I thought I would. Jose has this way of really getting to know people. We talked about my options of going back to Jane Street or Snowflake — both good companies with great people. We talked about how despite my past internships at good companies with great people, I still felt like I couldn’t just sit down and build.

Ten weeks at Method changed that.

Week One

Day 1 of most internships start the same way: onboarding docs, Slack permissions, 1:1s. Maybe you touch prod by week two if you're lucky.

I walked in Day 1 and joined the rest of the Austin office for its daily morning coffee run (side note: this company has a coffee addiction, as do I now). As we were walking, Marco casually gave me my first task: optimize report generation using hashing. “Uhh what report generation? Hashing? I had never implemented hashing in prod before.” I sped-walked with coffee in hand, and before I could even get Slack set up I was Googling and using Chat to figure out how the heck I was going to do this. By the end of the day, I had a PR up — and Slack, too.

The tasks kept coming — each one a bit bigger, each one teaching me something new about Method's systems and how the business actually worked. Within two weeks, I was learning concepts I'd never encountered at any of my previous internships. Fundamental things about how software operates at scale, how design decisions cascade through a system.

I was having fun. Then Jose asked me to design Message Level Encryption (MLE) for Method's biggest customer ever. The deal hinged on delivery. And I knew almost nothing about security.

MLE in a Nutshell

Message Level Encryption is like bidirectional 2FA for web servers. Every request and response gets encrypted. Which means extra overhead for everyone who uses it.

Your design needs to:

• Not affect customers who don't use MLE

• Handle requests at scale for customers who do

• Not touch any existing services

• Be completely secure (that's the whole point)

I drafted a spec and then Jose, Marco, and Mustafa (founding engineer) and I walked through the design choices. Which physical servers would this run on? How do you add something this essential without modifying existing services? How do you keep requests from becoming 4x slower?

In one week, I designed it. By week four, I tested and implemented it. We ended up launching it without affecting a single request. It processed 40 million Americans' personal information. Didn't break once.

MLE isn't something many financial institutions support unless their name rhymes with Visa or Mastercard. Watching it go from customer ask to production feature felt incredible. At most internships, you get one project. Maybe 1.5 if things go really well. This was week 4… of 10.

What Makes Method Great

The people at Method believe in what they are building. I know everyone says this and there is the whole “mission driven” thing that every startup preaches, but I really mean this. The people at Method believe in what they are building. You see it in the way they talk about problems and make decisions. Everyone from engineering to legal genuinely cares about the product and understands the forest from the trees, but also how important each tree is.

I think there’s a certain baseline you need to join a team like this. As an engineer, you have to already understand the fundamentals. You have to be comfortable with ambiguity because the solution is not going to be handed to you. Sometimes you won’t even be told what to work on, you have to reason that out yourself. Marco, Mustafa, Jose and others — they are all there to mentor and teach, but it only works if you are willing to learn and figure things out.

Parting Thoughts

After Method, I feel differently about what I can build. Not in some abstract way, but practically. If you can generalize, black-box when needed, and be scrappy when you hit a wall, you can build most things. That's what I learned.

If this kind of experience sounds valuable to you, it's worth considering interning at Method. At least for me, it was easily the best decision I made in college. Maybe it will be your’s too.

Feel free to reach out to me if I can be helpful.