High-Impact Entrepreneurship

Dhiraj Sehgal is an MBA candidate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is interning with Endeavor Entrepreneur Vinny Lingham’s new venture, Gyft, through Endeavor’s eMBA Program.

It is a third of the way through my internship at Gyft now and it has been an incredible experience. Working with an entrepreneurial team on their new gig has provided me with insights into how companies are started and what unique financial, organizational, strategic and execution challenges they face. I was hired into a marketing role to help the team launch Gyft’s mobile app but it has morphed into an all-encompassing marketing role, which has required me to use my previous marketing experience extensively, apply my academic Wharton learnings and discover new marketing frontiers. The internship is a mix of product management and marketing. I have been working with legal, engineering, and sales and business development personnel to define the product, create value proposition collateral, conduct usability testing and simulate customer experience.

The team is exceptionally talented from the founders to the engineers who are working in the background. I am learning a lot about how to manage design and engineering teams’ expectation in regards to providing defined marketing feature requirements and how to do periodic evaluations about which features to include. The best part is that we don’t have to set up meetings and send agendas. The engineers are sitting next to me and we have impromptu discussions and real-time feedback loops. This is amazingly brilliant. There’s a lot more to come as I continue my internship journey at Gyft!