Update: I've received over a dozen emails and phone calls from companies who want me as an intern this summer. I'm inching towards the final phases of my search, and plan on making a final decision by the evening of May 1st. Thanks for all of your support and encouragement!

The past few days have been intense! In a nutshell, I've been looking at an internship -- yes, a JOB with a real COMPANY. It's come to my stark realization that I never thought about working for a company not so much because I thought corporations were dumb, but because there are few places that would allow me to explore my own projects. In other words, I would only work for a company that allowed me to be an entrepreneur within the company. While there aren't many companies with such a culture, I've started to look at a few companies that prosper on having creative and fast moving "intra-preneurs." My partial list includes Ning, Six Apart, PBWiki, and Ustream.

Of course, being that I'm bratty Jessica Mah, I'm super picky with the companies I would want to deal with. Here are my thoughts and reasoning behind the companies I've talked with so far:

1) I'm picky with the companies I interview with, and I immediately look for a culture fit. If anything, culture fit is the FIRST thing I look for in a company. If I'm not going to be happy there, it's not even worth a legit interview. What does culture mean? That deserves a blog post on its own, but it's so crucial for a startup to be fast-moving, communicative, open-minded, friendly, and enthusiastic. If the company has high-walled cubicles and segregated "departments," I have no interest in spending my summer there.

2) I don't accept offers from companies who don't thoroughly interview me. Sure, I think I'm a moderately smart person. However, I want to work for a company where people are brilliant. If the company doesn't bother to test my knowledge and skills, it shows that they don't take hiring seriously. With that said, if I get a job or internship offer from a company that doesn't spend the time needed to test me for culture and knowledge fit, I don't see the company as being good enough for me. Lesson: I only work for startups that make it difficult for me to get in. The next time you interview a "rockstar" prospective employee, keep this in mind.

3) Companies and employees need to give and take equally from each other. In my search for a summer internship, I'm not looking for a big name brand. I want to work for a company that lets me play around with my product management, business, and coding skills. I want to work for a company that wants me as much as I want them. One of the companies on my list offered to fly me out for a visit -- that shows a lot of dedication. It proves to me that the company wants me as bad as I want it.

4) Do programming ninjas talk to the business people? In other words, do the complaints and desires of the users get seen by the people working on the product? Sounds like a silly question, but so many companies (United Airlines among them,) don't have any connect between the customer support people and the executives who implement the changes. With that said, I like seeing companies where coders and business people are in everyday dialogue with each other. I love how Ning's customer advocate team also works in product management -- since they talk to customers everyday, they are more likely to know what changes should be made.

5) Money!!! As you've probably read before, compensation is not my #1 priority. However, it's not something that can be ignored. Living in the Bay Area this summer costs a LOT of money. I'll be paying $2000+ / month in various living costs that include food, apartment, transportation. Then I somehow need to pay off the $5,000 summer tuition bill that Stanford University is soon to send me. The startup scene is competitive -- In most cases, I want these companies just as much as they want me. If they want me to join on board, a competitive offer is definitely in order.

6) Networking, colleagues, and mentors. Last, but not least, I look for any potential to grow my network. I'm looking for executives who are well connected in Silicon Valley and beyond. I'm looking for colleagues who are open and willing to help me just as much as I'm willing to help them. With all of the companies I've applied to so far, I've either personally met an executive there or had one of my friends refer me. Never underestimate the power of a personal network!

With that said, I'll keep you updated with my internship hunt. Now you know the supposedly secret thoughts on what a self proclaimed teen entrepreneur looks for in an internship! Having this summer internship won't slow me down from being an entrepreneur. It's simply a way for me to further my learning -- a way for me to figure out how fast-moving companies survive and grow.

By the time I graduate with my Bachelor's degree in two years, I'll be fully prepared to take on the world with a company of my own.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

Isn't it frustrating when you do something "wrong" and a random person tells you that you can't do it because it's against the company/school/organization's rules? This can be in reference to virtually anything -- a hotel employee or restaurant waitress tells you that you're not allowed to do something because it's against company policy. The issue being that this so called employee has no clue why the rules exist in the first place! If your company has rules in place, make sure that employees know why they exist. Make sure your employees can offer good explanations for why they exist and reasonable alternatives around them. Real life example:

1) As I write this blog post, I'm in Boston. As I was checking into my hotel, I noticed a hotel customer and hotel employee arguing over something. The hotel customer was clearly a tourist and had brought in a cooler box, when the employee stopped him. Apparently, cooler boxes weren't allowed into the hotel. What? Why? Of course, the hotel employee didn't know why. He responded by saying, "it's just against hotel policy." Now why isn't this explanation good enough? Because the customer gets even MORE aggravated. He's thinking what to do with this cooler box he just bought. What does he do with the many drinks inside? The proper response would be for the hotel employee to say something among the lines of, "You can’t bring the cooler box inside because it's against state law, but I'd be happy to hold onto your cooler box until the end of your stay." Except how many employees are trained to do this?

2) Or another example I've dealt with throughout my childhood: Teachers asserting authority by punishing kids for rules that haven't a reason to exist: I was sitting on my friend's lap when a random school aid told me not to. I got off her lap and asked the school aid why I wasn't allowed to sit on her lap. Of course, being that I'm Jessica Mah, I get accused of being an arrogant teenage brat because I'm curious enough to ask about the reasons for rules existing. Next thing I knew, I was being threatened detention and a trip to the principals office. Had it ever occurred to the school aid that it was a stupid rule that should be changed? Probably not -- it makes them feel good about themselves to assert their authority over me. In an ideal world, the school aid would tell me why I can't sit on the persons lap. If the school aid doesn't have an answer, she would tell the school principal that the rule was meaningless, and that it be removed.

The bottom line: If your customer does something that's "against the rules," be prepared to give them a good reason as to why the rules exist, and promptly propose a suitable alternative. If no alternative exists, make one, even if it isn't your fault. If my flight from New York to San Francisco is delayed, I don't care that your plane broke down and I don't care what your reimbursement policies are. I want a suitable alternative or reimbursement. Make sure your employees know precisely how to react in these "unique" situations, and what they are authorized to offer as alternatives. Better yet, tell your employees that they can do whatever they would like in order to please the customer. If customer service is your number one priority and you give employees full authorization to do whatever they want to meet that mantra, your customers will be satisfied even when they can't do something or if you're not allowed to let them do something. I promise!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

So many books talk about how entrepreneurs did this or did that, but it's all about the team. I didn't do jack compared to my counterparts. I found a few super motivated kids my age who wanted to join in on the business venture, and we split the work out depending on where our skill sets were. I did business, sales, marketing, and intermediate level tech support. Alan was a hardcore techy. Tyler filled in for both me and Alan. This brings me to my next lesson from when I supposedly ran a business back when I was 13: Your team matters more than you do. Make them happy, and they'll save you when you need them most.

Mishap #1: (4 months in business, 300 customers) I was driving down the freeway with my family on a rainy day in July. We were driving up the Jersey Coast, going to our next vacation destination. All of my responsibilities were temporarily designated to one of my co-founders, Tyler, and I received a terrible phone call:

"Hey umm... our servers are down! All of our customers are bitching at us!"

Oh. Bloody. Hell. We had downtime for the next 48 hours and eventually found out that one of our customers, once again, was phishing. In other words, somebody with an account on our primary machine was pretending to be PayPal and sent out fake emails. All of this from OUR server. This cost the company a few hundred dollars in revenue and thousands more in potential business, but it was a good lesson that I learned young. a) invest in security, b) figure out ways to get your customers online if such a problem ever happened, c) compensate them for having suffered through your stupidity, and d) be transparent and honest as to what happened. We failed to do all of the above when we needed to. Fortunately, we learned from these mistakes. We ended up giving out heavily discounted services and emailing updates to customers when they suffered through our careless mistakes.

Mishap #2: (9 months in business, 700 customers) I was in a hotel room on December 31st a few years ago. It was 11:59 and 15 seconds (+/- 10 seconds) and suddenly I get a phone call. Of course, another problem while I'm trying to enjoy my vacation. Co-founder Tyler tells me that some f**khead hacked into all of our servers and wiped off our clients' accounts. Not. Funny. Except this time, we learned from our mistakes. My other co-founder, Alan, was also a nerdy Asian. He was brilliant. An absolute genius. He found out what happened and he patched the problems up within 15 minutes by reverting to our backup machines. Since this was new years, nobody was looking. We were so fast with getting things back online that not a single customer sent us a support ticket. This brings me to my next super important lesson: Always critique yourself and learn from your mistakes. If something terrible happens, (such as if some dickhead deletes all of your customers' accounts,) then learn. Figure out what happened, patch it up, and promise that it'll never ever happen again in the future. And if somehow it does, you're going to lose business.

More to come on my stories from when I was a stupid, arrogant, teenage entrepreneur!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

It's a pity that Rackspace, a company with a stellar reputation for uptime and "Fanatical Support" experienced hours of downtime for clients in the Fort Worth data center. After putting in millions of dollars into infrastructure, how could something like this happen?

First, disclosures: I used to be happy Rackspace customer. I studied the way they did business and implemented it in my own dedicated server solutions business back in 2004. I'm friendly with the founders/former management of Rackspace and Serverbeach, and I've learned so much from their advice.

Just a few weeks ago, Serverbeach experienced a power outage. They took the necessary steps to get people back online within a few hours, but it was sure to cost clients thousands of hours of man power and money to fix. The damage is still there - downtime puts full time businesses out of order.

When a hosting company goes down, so many levels of the business chain are hurting. For example, I used to have servers at Sagonet, and when they had problems, all of my racks there were down. When my racks were down, thousands of websites were shut off from the world. Thousands of websites shut down mean that not only are my clients mad at me, but their clients are mad at them. And those clients may have to use these websites to serve THEIR clients, and so on. The loop can go on forever, and it all comes down to a datacenter hickup.

At that point, there's nothing you can do but wait for the machines to come back online. And once they're online, a shit ton of complain emails are bound to go to the datacenter, the leasers, the resellers, the clients, and even the clients of the clients. Companies like Rackspace who manage both the datacenter and the actually sold services are forced to compensate for lost time, or face terrible press and a huge loss of clientele.

It's particularly frustrating for Rackspace that all of this happened from a stupid truck accident that brough a transformer down. The open letter says that they had to shut some infrastructure down just to get to the accident victim. I'm sure the high level Rackspace clients wouldn't have minded leaving that poor soul to suffer if it meant keeping their websites running.

When I was in the business, problems weren't as terrible, because I targeted small businesses. Many of them wouldn't even notice downtime! Rackspace, on the other hand, serves clients such as Motorola and JC Morgan Chase. And when their services go down, the entire world is bound to know.

I'll give Rackspace credit for doing the right thing. They wrote an open letter to their clients, took responsibility, and promised compensation.

Unfortunate for them, their reputation may be somewhat tarnished from this stupid accident.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

Serverbeach was awesome enough to contact me just an hour after my blog post below. Here's what the community evangelist, Charnell Pugsley wrote to me:

The current situation: All our guys are out there now doing nothing but bringing servers online and the power is stable.

Within the next few days, we will be investigating what's taken place and coming up with a solution to keep it from happening again. We'll be following up with all of our customers in the Virginia data center with an official explanation soon.

... and then provided me my compensation in the form of credit to future invoices. Not bad, considering I didn't have to do anything more than just write this blog post and email her!

In any case, this is way better customer support than most I've seen in the past. When shit hits the fan, it's often difficult to get compensation let alone receive a reply from any company representatives.

Well, cheers to ServerBeach! I'll continue to be a loyal customer :)

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.