Lesson 4 - Legal
How To Hire Interns For Your AI Startup📅 2025-02-05
Transcript
[00:00] welcome back to the series where I show you based off my experience of running a software company how we are going to hire unpaid interns if you made it to this lesson that means you're part of my school community so hello we're going to go ahead and just X off the offer letters here as we did that in our previous lesson so bye-bye offer letters now let's jump into everything we need to understand when it comes to Legal contracts and this process first major disclaimer for this video I am not a lawyer don't take anything I'm about to say right now as legal advice I'm speaking anecdotally from my EXP
[00:30] experience on what we did as a software company so knowing that knowing that I am not a lawyer I never practiced the bar let's go ahead and see how we did it for our software company to best showcase this I went ahead and broke this down into multiple steps let's start with step one here of probably the major question you're just thinking right off the bat which is what is the cost for this and what is the timeline here's the situation when you go down this journey of hiring unpaid interns this is real this isn't like hiring a Contractor on upwork you are employing someone in your company in an unpaid position
[01:00] unpaid internship and for the way you approach is take this seriously where is your company located so for example bump UPS it's located in Texas more specifically we are in the city of Dallas so whatever that means for you wherever your company's located find lawyers in your area how do I find lawyers Corbin simply just go to Google type in business lawyers need contract this kind of situation jump in a bunch of free consultations find your fit for context of how much this costed us for this Standalone contract that is a
[01:32] one-size fitall that we'll be able to use for every single internship program the underlying duration it took to create said contract was 3 to 4 weeks and the underlying cost was 1,500 USD when it comes to cost your lawyers and how you approach it this could vary I was getting quotes back that wereth 3,000 USD 5,000 USD so keep this in mind find the one that fits best for you so then following this now that you understand timeline and cost associated with this and when you hear the words 1,500 USD or 2,000 USD and you're like
[02:04] you know what I'm just going to have Chad gbt create this don't do that artificial intelligence is amazing and we can use that in a lot of different areas in real life but when it comes to Legal contracts this is no joke this stuff can bite your butt if you don't do it correctly pay for it find a cheaper rate whatever it may be pay for a legal contract don't have Chad gbt output your contract this is not good so understanding that what do we put in our legal contract or at least what did we put in our legal contract cuz this is
[02:35] all anecdotal first things first what are we even asking for like what do we need this is going to be an at will employment agreement that's confidential information invention assignment and arbitration agreement the reason I put this here which is kind of like a jumbled of words is for you to screenshot this video or just use that exact phrasing so when you talk to your lawyers you're like hey unpaid internship and I want this to be like an at will agreement etc etc when you use verbiage like that with a lawyer they'll be like okay I know what you're talking about first major thing in order to make this a standalone contract though is
[03:05] that you need to identify the underlying dates that is going to be for your internship program so for us this is going to be you know January to April we want to have this so it's very open ended very easy for us to Plug and Play so you can put like January or maybe the next one's like in May all the way to September whatever it may be this is where we're going to put our dates and then we're going to have the initials of the employer you and the employee in turn you need to set boundaries you need to set dates this is important so what's the next important thing that we personally did was essentially confidentiality I mean this is going to be standardized anyways with an outw
[03:37] employment agreement so this should already be part of it confidentiality the work you do for this company you keep within the company like don't leak information don't give out information just very standard type of confidentiality agreement within the contract itself next is agreement not to compete this is important especially in the context of software maybe not as relevant for other Industries the idea behind this is very much just set of duration I mean this isn't going to be like a agreement not to compete well first off agreement not to compete means that someone works for bump ups and then
[04:09] a day later they're like creating their own version of an AI software that analyzes videos that's just not allowed when you do an agreement and not to compete the way these are typically structured isn't like they sign and they'll never be able to create a software in that industry more along the lines of when they're working in the internship they can't create a competing product which makes sense and then after the internship there's usually a duration period of maybe 6 Months 8 months they can't enter that exact same Market doesn't mean they can't create software it just means they can't create
[04:39] a competing product to the company they're working for which then leads to another fundamental part of this contract which is going to be a conflict of interest guide we add this in our contract because the fact that we don't want an intern who's working at bump ups but is also working for another AI software company that's in the same niche in the same field because that is quite literally a ICT of Interest the tech and knowledge that we own as a company at bump UPS could be utilized in the competitor software and vice versa therefore we have no incentive here if
[05:10] you find yourself in a situation where an intern is bringing this up and they're like hey I want to do your opportunity but I also want to do this other software company that is very similar to yours pick or choose no double dipping essentially just give them a binary situation where choose whatever you think is best for your career path if you want to go a fuss let's do it if you don't I can completely understand it's either us or them no combin So within this agreement though there's going to be a bunch of other sections that are just very much just legal jargon and stuff that is mandatory to be seen in an out will agreement your lawyer will understand
[05:42] this and your lawyer will be able to explain this better to you I just wanted to go over these ones because these are very fundamental that you probably want in your contract I'm not saying you have to I'm not a legal I'm not a lawyer I'm not a lawyer but we use these so the next thing here to understand is employee handbook what is an employee handbook I'm going to leave a link in the description down below that's going to give you templates that you can utilize within your company the idea behind an employee handbook is very much how to conduct yourself in a work environment this is something you're going to create in that little Google drive folder we created earlier it's going to be Evergreen you can use it for
[06:14] every single internship program this is standard conduct check out the link for the templates this is how to operate within a Workforce environment EG two interns they're having issues with each other you need to make yourself a viable area where they can communicate this to you and then and basically give you their grievances of what's incurring in the company essentially that you're handling the HR side of a company an employee handbook is fundamental as this is the backbone to policies that if an individual were to infringe on you can
[06:44] reference the employee handbook if you didn't have an employee handbook and you didn't give this in the onboarding process you have nothing to base the grounds of your rulings when dealing with these kind of decisions therefore think of your employee handbook as the Baseline of character conduct within your company assuming you have 5 10 15 interns these individuals will probably be working with each other in different projects if an issue ever arised and you didn't have an employee handbook well guess what now it's kind of a your word situation where there was no clear
[07:14] guidelines to follow but now with this there's clear guidelines clear understanding and clear like check out page 10 it clearly says this this and this not to do this this and this you infringe that lastly when it comes to this legal side here so you're going to have one Standalone cont contract that you're going to be able to use for every inter program so that cost of 1,500,000 2,000 is very nice cuz very much an evergreen contract so once you pay a once you'll be able to put it within this little sop you're creating for your unpaid interns but the last thing I want to leave this video with is this idea
[07:45] this is unpaid remember this end of the day the purpose of an unpaid internship is these interns are working for your company because they want to learn something they want to do something cool they want to further their career choice so understanding this they are using this as a learning opportunity this isn't like you hire an unpaid intern and you're like okay I want you to go ahead and code out this this and this bye-bye no you need to be there to give them guidance and understanding how to do projects and give them perspective from
[08:16] your industry on the best ways to do the projects this is very much a coaching situation here or Mentor situation here When approaching having unpaid interns this isn't like uh I hired an unpaid intern go go go so this is very much like I hired an unpaid intern I'm here to train you and get you better suited for the workforce bring this up because yeah maybe in theory If you hired a software engineer for 200k a year that's more of a relationship where it's like I need this this and this done for the company proceed here's how to operate
[08:48] and go unpaid part of the deal is mentorship that's part of the program last little not here before we end off this video as this goes over everything you fundamentally need to understand when it comes to the whole legal situation I want need to take this very seriously this is not a joke this is not a game if you genuinely plan on hiring unpaid interns this part you can't gloss over it can't be like it's 1:00 a.m. at night I'm just going to generate a contract with gbt and call out a day this is like no joke take this part seriously so two things I'll leave you with first thing what I'm about to say sucks but is what it is part of the
[09:19] government sadly you can't give your insurance free swag can't give them like a branded bump UPS shirt or a branded bump UPS hat sadly you can't do this I wish you could and due to the law and how it looks at this they see it as a form of compensation which then becomes you are liable to things that you wouldn't otherwise be liable to if it was purely just an unpaid internship as I said this is not legal advice anecdotal second thing when it comes to this contract and you went through this entire process of hiring a legal team to build out this contract this is very much a non-negotiable contract if the intern's not willing to sign it is what
[09:51] it is on to the next intern the reason I say this is because this contract was created by a legal team that knows how to protect you in the context of hiring an unpaid intern when you start making unique versions of this contract depending on the intern you can get messy really quick so keep it as a standalone oneand done proceed that covers the legal video thank you for joining my school Community there is other exclusive videos you can check out here on my back end play this or front end play but without further Ado I'll see you in the next video