Having interned in SF last summer, I would definitely recommend that you take as much time as you can to meet other people, especially those outside your company. The best way to do that is to join the "201X Bay Area Summer Interns" facebook group. I was in the 2013 one and there were almost 5000 members. Every day people were posting with what they were up to and looking for people to join them. Its a great way to meet other interns and experience all of the things that can be done in the bay area.
As a younger person that these types of articles are so fond of talking about (I'm 21), I don't agree that members of my generation are leaving and that we don't perceive Facebook as cool. I think what's changed with the new social media companies is the timeliness of when we do things.
Perfect example- I was out for a Secret Santa dinner with a bunch of my friends. While we were at the dinner, we took tons of pictures, some of which ended up as Snapchat stories or on Instagram. But later that night, every single one of those pictures went up on Facebook. Cover photos were updated aplently. Why? Because all of us are on Facebook and Facebook is still the best way to permanently store and share the experiences you've had with your friends (while also tagging them in the photos).
I'd definitely say a t-shirt if you can afford them. I have t-shirts from multiple hackathons and wear them all the time. They get far more mileage than any sticker or pen I've received.
They need to be good t-shirts though, which means a decent design, good fabric, light-on-dark, well fitting (hint: female attendees have different body shapes to male attendees).
ESPN Fantasy Focus Baseball, Behind the Dish with Keith Law, This Week in Startups, Nerd Poker: Dungeons and Dragons with Brian Posehn and Friends (A bunch of hilarious comedians playing D&D together. It is very entertaining)
I use Evernote every day at school. It fills just about all of my needs. The only place where it struggles is when I need to write out math. In those cases I'll usually just use pen and paper. Everything else goes in Evernote though.
You could also buy a refurbished mac. They tend to be about $300 cheaper than the retail version and tend not to have any problems. I just bought one and so far its been perfect.
I just bought a MBP 15-inch retina display with a 2.3GHz i7, 8 gigs of 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM, 256GB Flash Storage, and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. What about that is outdated?
I think this absolutely makes a lot of sense. Particularly the idea of getting outside the tech echo chamber. For me, I maintain a group of stringently non-technically inclined friends. They use facebook and that is about it. So I use my time with them to recalibrate my senses and understand where normal people are in terms of adoption. I always gain new perspective from those conversations.
I think the thing about this that is most remarkable is how much better this is going to make Danielle as a founder. Being able to really focus on different and new aspects of the business (and gaining experience in those aspects), when combined with the skills she already developed at Twilio, will surely help her tremendously.
