Feeling short-staffed is part of startup life. At Bain Capital Ventures, we see early stage founders face the same recurring challenge: too many priorities, too few hands and not enough time.

Along with our colleagues at Bain & Company, we realized that we had a possible solution right in front of us — talented young consultants already making waves at Bain & Company. and who were hungry for more experience. Together, we decided to build a bridge between our two related worlds via an extern program that would connect entrepreneurial Bain consultants with startups that need immediate, high-caliber support.

Externs meet an acute need. During the early days, weeks and months of a startup, things come in fast: product releases, customer feedback, go-to-market pressure and data chaos. An extern can offer a crucial, low-risk and affordable extra hand wherever needed.

Here’s more on how the extern program works and how externs have already benefitted early-stage startups.

Helping a startup make structure from chaos

After raising their series A, the founders of AI-native insurance startup Reserv needed another strategic operator on the team — someone who could think like a chief of staff or a strategy leader. The problem was that Reserv didn’t yet have the budget for a full-time lead, nor the time to manage a very junior hire.

Enter Oscar Truong, Ph.D., a second-year consultant at Bain & Company.

A generalist and whiz with numbers, Oscar was a natural fit, able to tame unwieldy datasets and design sophisticated predictive models. And that’s exactly what the Reserv team needed: a “quant” with exceptional qualitative judgment and natural confidence, someone who could create structure where none existed.

The externship began with a crash course on the Reserv business and the insurance industry. Oscar immersed himself in finance, people operations, data, security and claims operations. Within weeks, he wasn’t just supporting the leadership team, but working like an owner-operator.

During his six-month placement, Oscar built a fully scalable data ontology for the company, unifying more than a dozen databases to create a system for next-generation modeling; he completely overhauled Reserv’s performance management system to scalably maximize signal-to-noise on everything from performance to promotability. Thanks to his efforts, Reserv can now proactively staff based on industry signals and make better decisions overall about hiring, resource allocation and financial planning. Best of all, those frameworks aren’t gathering dust in a folder, they’re used repeatedly and operationally.

David Tyson, a Reserv founding team-member and SVP of Ops, told us later that Oscar was “the perfect match.” Hungry to learn, and early enough in his career to carry no baggage about what it means to be an “advisor,” he arrived ready to think, work and operate like an entrepreneur.

Oscar worked across Reserv’s founding team. Matthew Lu, another Reserv founding team-member and SVP of Strategic Services, said, “We could throw a blind pass to Oscar and know with 100% confidence that the pass would be received and run into the end zone no matter how complex and ambiguous the task and no matter the time crunch.”

Externs = Future entrepreneurs

Vetted several times over, Bain & Company externs spend four to six months embedded with startups. Many are entrepreneurially-minded and have expressed interest in founding their own companies some day. They want to get their hands dirty as chiefs of staff or strategy and operations leaders, and many are eager for go-to-market roles.

For startups that don’t yet have all their seats filled, or aren’t even sure which seats need filling, externs can become indispensable. Their work is often varied and unpredictable, but always foundational. They identify new markets and verticals, refine pricing schemes, build forecasting models, wrangle siloed datasets, design scalable operational processes and parse customer data.

Externs quickly embrace the operational mindset required. Matilde Bustamante, an extern at ShopMy, focused on rapid immersion. “During my first weeks, I scheduled one-on-one conversations with key teammates to understand their roles and key workflows,” she said. This process of active learning and collaboration helped lead directly to impact. “One of my favorite experiences was helping establish a clear lifecycle flow on the creator side. I helped identify opportunities for additional touchpoints and the resources needed to track them, which contributed to a very significant increase in the number of strategic creators added to the platform in November,” Bustamante said.

We match startups with externs based on what founders need and externs’ skillsets. Mostly, founders approach us with a request, but sometimes the matches are serendipitous. Given the extensive training and deep experience Bain & Company externs are required to have in order to be eligible for the program, they tend to adapt skillfully into most startup circumstances that are cross-functional and under-defined. These are the types of roles we recommend for externs, rather than clearly defined positions. In other words, we wouldn’t slot an extern in as a replacement for a full-time IC. “The fact that they don’t have subject matter expertise is a feature, not a bug,” Reserv’s Lu says. “It allows them to think outside of the box, pressure test staid assumptions and break down problems into their constituent parts so that they are approaching every problem from first principles.”

When time is of the essence, we’ve been able to move very quickly. Our record is four days from identification to placement for one real estate tech company in our portfolio.

For Oscar, his experience at Reserv wasn’t just fun — it was transformative. He told us the externship has been the highlight of his career thus far.

What founders say about externs

We know the extern program works for startups because founders keep coming back for more. Reserv is on its fifth placement. Other founders are also queueing up for another round.

Founders tell us they’re blown away by what these young people with only a few years of working experience bring to the table. “10/10 would recommend,” one founder shared with us. “Strengths are positive attitude, high throughput, presentation skills and proactive communication.” Another told us, “Our extern learned everything we threw at him and excelled at it. That’s the hallmark of a really smart player.”

We consistently hear that Bain & Company externs exceed expectations. They integrate into companies like members of the team. Founders work with them as counterparts and thought partners, not just temporary project support.

If your startup is tackling big questions with too few hands or you’re approaching a new phase of growth and need a sharp, energetic operator, an extern might be exactly what propels your business.

Find out how a Bain & Company extern can transform your startup trajectory. Contact Natalie Coletta at ncoletta@baincapital.com to learn more about the Bain Capital Ventures Externship Program.