Leapset’s ‘Six Month Startup’ puts interns through Silicon Valley paces

Friday, 24 January 2014 06:47 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Silicon Valley based Technology CompanyLeapset, launched a unique internship program at its Sri Lankan engineering centre that aims to give interns a taste of the startup experience. The aptly named ‘Six Month Startup’ drives interns to develop an entirely new complementary product that can be integrated into the Leapset product suite. This idea to execution model is a first for a tech internship programme in Sri Lanka and aims to replicate the processes followed by techstartups in the Silicon Valley. The program is designed to mirror the beginnings of Leapset whose end to end restaurant operating system (ROS) is disrupting the restaurant industry by using technology to revolutionise the merchant customer relationship.

Commenting on the motivation behind the internship Leapset’s MD Sri Lanka and SVP Engineering, Shanil Fernando, said, “Engineers who come straight out of university face a steep learning curve fitting into a software product company like ours. What our internship and other internal training programs do is help instil a shift in the mind-set of our teams, instilling in them the necessary drive and creativity to become ‘Smart Engineers’ that can change the world.” Shanil went on to describe what sets ‘Smart Engineers’ apart from rest, stating that smart engineers are those who can go beyond building what they are told to. Smart engineers can wield technology with a will to challenge the status quo and change the world. This requires them to be domain experts; have an in-depth knowledge about the trends and latest technological innovations in their business area and also multidisciplinary having the ability to work with different technologies while being creative. The ‘Six Month Start-up’ begins with a rotational training program. The interns spend time in each of Leapset’s nine different divisions, learning everything from software development to Deployment, QA and Technical Operations. The next stage is a series of workshops on different technical practices and processes, which empowers the interns with some of the skills they will need to successfully complete the ‘Six Month Startup’ program. The interns next move onto the ideation phase, and come up with concepts for new product enhancements to Leapset’s comprehensive product suite. This process includes a pitch contest: an internal event where the interns pitch their ideas to the Leapset leadership team with the best pitch chosen as the Interns’ project. The chosen product or service will be developed, integrated to the product suite and will be released to the market. The pitch contest is conducted in the style of the ‘TechCrunch Disrupt’ program, where potential entrepreneurs are given time on the stage to pitch their ideas to a wide audience of venture capital funders. Leapset’s Director Engineering and Architecture, Anjana Somathilake, is the mentor to the 2013 batch of interns from the University Of Colombo School Of Computing and the University of Moratuwa Computer Science and Engineering faculty. Commenting on the ‘Six Month Start-up’ he said, “We want to take the interns all the way from idea to implementation and give them an end to end experience. This is the only way they can truly understand the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture, and understand where Leapset is coming from. We want our interns to gain maximum exposure through our Internship program.” Anjana elaborated on why this is important to Leapset, “Even our core engineering teams undergo cross training in different technical disciplines, and we have different internal initiatives to ensure our team is always on the cutting edge of new technology including weekly workshops, tech talks and innovation sessions.” The Six month Startup is currently two months completed. The six member team is expected to complete the Leapset complimentary product in May 2014.